Around Y2K, the mighty American private sector hit a momentous milestone. For the first time on record, frontline managers — supervisors, team leads, foremen, forewomen, etc. — outnumbered back-office managers.
That seemed significant, especially for the working-class folks for whom these noncommissioned-officer-style positions provided a rare path to the upper reaches of the career ladder. As quickly as the milestone was crossed, the trend reversed, according to our analysis of about 37 million responses to the census and American Community Survey from 1950 to 2024.
Once ascendant, supervisory jobs crop up all over our lists of the hardest-hit jobs of Americans’ working lives, even as white-collar management soars to new highs. What happened?
Having been burned by data-collection changes before, our first instinct was to take a long, hard look at how the Census Bureau classifies jobs. Or, more accurately, to spend 15 seconds emailing an extraordinarily talented economist and hoping they’ve already done the work for us.
We were in luck. Utrecht University economist Anna Salomons responded within an hour, even though the hour in question was already a wee one in the Netherlands. For her blockbuster 2024 analysis, Salomons and her collaborators collected and analyzed detailed Census Bureau job descriptions from 1930 to 2018 to figure out how our economy had evolved, mutated and automated.
She first mentioned that the change in occupational definitions around the 2000 Census was “notoriously large” and, like us, wondered if that might cause some of the shift we saw in the numbers.
But two factors argue against that thesis. First, as Salomons suggested, we’re using a system from our friends at IPUMS that carefully adjusts for all those changes in the raw census definitions.
Second, the changes come gradually after the inflection point — if a census definition change was the culprit, you’d expect a sudden swerve. But what if, Salomons suggested, those changes in definition took place outside of the friendly confines of the Census Bureau?
Specifically, she suggested we look at title inflation, which immediately blew the case wide open. Or at least blew it ajar.
It seems quite possible that, over the past few decades, jobs that were once called some variation on “supervisor” were now called some variation on “manager.”
A fancier title (and no change in pay) may, at least temporarily, fool a worker who’d been angling for a raise or promotion. But could it really fool the almighty Census Bureau?
We fear the answer must be “probably.” The American Community Survey’s superpower — that it hears directly from about 2 million U.S. households each year — is also, in this case, its Achilles’ heel. Because it must rely on what those households say.
The census crew does its utmost to elicit clean answers, but even the most carefully designed questions would struggle to distinguish a manager from a “manager.”
The survey asks not just for your occupation but also for your most important work activities or duties. That detail, plus answers to other questions throughout the survey, such as education level, give the clerks at the National Processing Center — and the governmentrobot that handles the easiest cases — as much information as possible when they’re determining which job a respondent really performed.
But not everybody fills out those activities. And not every manager-in-name-only will provide enough information to reclassify them as a supervisor or even as an individual contributor. So, a certain percentage of inflated titles will slip through.
But that would mean census surveys still reflect a real trend toward title inflation. And why are titles inflating? Based on a lifetime of observation, we’d guess some of corporate America’s brightest minds have noticed that a title upgrade allows you to give a worker a “promotion” without a change in responsibility — or in pay.
Particularly crafty economists may even have found a way to measure one narrow instance of this. Salomons points to an analysis forthcoming in the Review of Financial Studies. In it, economists analyzed about 450,000 online job postings with salaries near the cutoff that makes you eligible for management under the Fair Labor Standards Act. (The postings came from 2010 to 2018, when the cutoff was $455 a week. It currently sits at $684.)
The authors — Lauren Cohen at Harvard University, and Umit Gurun and Bugra Ozel at the University of Texas at Dallas — found that jobs paying just above the legal cutoff are about five times more likely to have managerial titles than are similar jobs with pay just below it.
Why? Well, even a dubious title such as calling a barber a “grooming manager” or a front-desk clerk a “director of first impressions” could provide cover for employers looking to claim that person is exempt from overtime pay. The economists estimate such spurious classifications save employers about 13.5 percent on the pay of each “manager.”
To be sure, as Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, told us, the definition for overtime-exempt employees says nothing about titles — it’s purely about job function. Faux-promoting a worker to “manager” shouldn’t change anything. But in reality, she said, bosses often use these titles as a smoke screen.
“Titles can still matter a lot in practice,” Ozel said. “A ‘manager’ label can shape expectations about whether overtime is available and can muddy the record for anyone trying to assess the role from the outside. … Job duties are hard to observe and document without access to internal records and day-to-day work.”
But this dynamic, while suggestive, applies only to a narrow slice of the workforce. In any given year, less than a tenth of the workforce earned enough to put them within fudging distance (20 percent) of the cutoff.
What else might drive this title inflation?
Our best clue came in a call from Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford University management expert who longtime readers may recognize is also a remote-work data impresario.
Bloom pointed out the rise of managers coincides with what he calls the overeducation of the American workforce. College graduates once made up a tiny, elite minority. Now, America’s colleges churn out so many that they outnumber the share of young people who never made it past high school.
As a result, Bloom said, there aren’t enough highfalutin’ positions for all those brand-new baccalaureates. Of course, employers would still love to attract these talented young grads to their unfilled lower-falutin’ positions. But to do so, they’d need to get creative.
“How do you get a college graduate to do a job that’s honestly probably better suited to a noncollege graduate?” Bloom asked. “You just shove the word ‘president’ into the title!”
When we took Bloom’s hint and charted the rise in managers by education, the fallout of his observation became clear. The increase in managers with a bachelor’s degree or higher drowns out any other trend. If we explain that segment, we explain the whole thing.
We started by looking at where all those college-educated managers worked.
As we should have guessed, they’re in the industries with the most-educated workers overall. In almost every major industry, as more educated workers roll in, the number of educated managers rises at the same rate.
Let’s look at an appropriate example: the industry of higher education. In that business, a four-year degree (or something fancier) gave you almost a 5 percent chance of being in management in 2000. By 2024, the share of educated workers in that sector had more than doubled, but your chances of being a manager conditional on having a college degree didn’t really change.
Many industries — banking, real estate, hospitals — follow this pattern. The exception? Computer services, which added more jobs than all but a handful of (mostly low-wage) industries over this time period, also saw your odds of becoming a manager double.
That matches what we heard from Ben Hanowell, an anthropologist who now helps direct ADP Research, the research arm of the outfit that probably processes your paycheck each month. The company’s endless piles of proprietary payrolls allow Hanowell to produce metrics that us mere civilians can’t match.
In his analysis, Hanowell found that U.S. teams got slightly smaller after the pandemic — an average manager went from 7.4 direct reports to about 7.3. But over that time, tech firms have gone from 6.5 workers per manager to about 5.3, with much of the drop coming after the pandemic.
So, while there are some situations where individuals became more likely to be managers, the much more common story is: People with college degrees had the same odds of becoming a manager as they always did, so as we got more people with college degrees, we got more managers.
But are these Potemkin promotions, or do they signal a change in the economy?
It hinges on whether the new boss, the “manager,” is truly the same as the old boss, the “supervisor.” We don’t have enough data right now to compare their actual duties, but we can at least look at their pay.
And sure enough, when we compare managers to similarly paid supervisors since the turn of the millennium, a clean pattern pops out. At every step of pay scale, managers rose, and supervisors fell in roughly equal quantities (after accounting for workforce growth over that time). To us, that looks a lot like replacement.
To be sure, they may not all be simple swaps in which a firm hires a college graduate to be a glorified supervisor with a cool title. We could also be seeing centralization. Perhaps work that once fell to supervisors — say, scheduling or coaching — now shifts to a central, college-educated staff of trainers and human resources professionals.
Around the edges, we expect those trends have been exacerbated by the decline of small businesses, since a megacorp in search of efficiency will centralize more functions. Similarly, the rise of outsourcing and perhaps gig work means jobs that were once done by small teams with supervisors inside the company are now handled by huge outside contractors.
And of course the increasing reliance on gig workers and outsourced workers that such a model implies might also help explain why tech’s managers now seem to manage so few employees — many of the folks they’re managing are now working outside the company.
But experts like Shierholz confirmed our hunch that the dominant force seemed to be the simplest: Job titles are getting a college-friendly makeover even if the jobs themselves don’t change much. Cory Stahle, senior economist at Indeed, agreed this seemed plausible based on his impressions from the online job site’s vast archives of job postings.
“We’re seeing a lot of jobs that have manager in them, but they are doing these more direct manager or direct supervising type of jobs,” Stahle said. “They are managers who are more directly involved in the day-to-day operations rather than a higher-up.”
Hi! The Department of Data’s quest for questions continues. Are rare earth metals actually all that rare? Is poverty really at an all-time low? Are frontline managers more effective than back-office types? Just ask!
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