Should You Go to Graduate School?
The number of people enrolling in university continues to rise — effectively devaluating the undergraduate degree — and a growing number of employers are beginning to require master’s degrees for competitive roles. What, then, are the motives you should be considering if you are deciding whether or not to enroll in a graduate program? Firstly, people who have graduate school degrees are generally paid more money than those who don’t. But while some programs have a clear ROI, there’s a great deal of variability. Consider if the field you’re interested in really requires a master’s to boost your earning potential. The second reason you might consider grad school is to make a career transition. If you find yourself wanting to shift paths (either to keep up with the changing job landscape, or to follow your passion) grad school may not be a bad idea. But if you are simply looking to learn a couple of new skills, you might consider using cheaper online resources like Udemy and Coursera — or even YouTube to learn for free.
Although the rich world is enjoying a long spell of unprecedented job growth and low unemployment, competition for the most competitive roles remains fierce. Tech companies like Google and Microsoft reportedly receive two million applications per year, and banks like Goldman Sachs attract in the thousands.
While these employers, among a growing number of others, are unanimously highlighting the importance of critical soft skills — such as emotional intelligence, resilience, and learnability — as determinants of performance, the most in-demand jobs require graduate credentials, to the point of surpassing current levels of supply. Consider, for example, that there are around 500,000 open IT jobs, but only 50,000 new IT graduates each year.
At the same time, the number of people enrolling in university continues to rise, effectively devaluating the undergraduate degree. In America, one-third of adults are college graduates, a figure that was just 4.6% in the 1940s. Globally, UNESCO reports that the number of students earning a university degree has more than doubled in the past 20 years.
In light of these figures, it is easy to understand why more and more of the workforce is considering going to graduate school. In the U.S., the number of graduate students has tripled since the 1970s, and according to some estimates, 27% of employers now require master’s degrees for roles in which historically undergraduate degrees sufficed.
What, then, are the motives you should be considering if you are trying to decide whether or not to enroll? How can you determine if the time — and especially the money — required to pursue a graduate education will actually pay off or not? Here are some factors to consider:
1. To bump up your salary potential.
It’s no secret that people who have graduate school degrees are generally paid more money than those who don’t. While a 25% increase in earnings is the average boost people see, attending the top MBA programs can increase your salary by as much as 60-150% (whereas a masters in Human Services or Museum Sciences will increase your earnings by a mere 10-15%).
2. To set a career change in motion.
AI and automation are replacing many roles with others and a growing proportion of workers are being pushed to reskill and upskill to remain relevant. There’s no doubt that most of us will have to reinvent ourselves at some point if we want to do the same. If you find yourself in this situation currently, grad school may not be a bad choice. The bigger challenge, however, will be picking what to major in. If you set yourself up to be a strong candidate for jobs that are in high demand, you risk being too late to the game by the time you graduate. For instance, if everyone studies data science in order to fill unfilled vacancies, in a few years there will be a surplus of candidates. A better strategy is do your research and try to predict what the in-demand roles will be in the future. Universities can actually help you here. Increasingly, formal study qualifications are being indexed according to the foundational, or soft skills, they require. This means that more graduate programs are starting to teach soft skills, in addition to knowledge, and prepare students for an uncertain labor market rather than for specific jobs.
3. To follow your passion.
It’s not uncommon for people to get stuck in the wrong job as a result of poor career guidance or a lack of self-awareness at a young age — i.e. failing to know their interests and potential when they began their careers. This leads to low levels of engagement, performance, and productivity, and high levels of burnout, stress, and alienation. Pursuing your passion, therefore, is not a bad criterion for deciding to go to grad school. After all, people perform better and learn more when their studies align with their values. If you can nurture your curiosity and interests by pursuing rigorous learning, your expertise will be more likely to set you apart from other candidates, and increase the chances of ending up in a job you love. Note that even robots and AI are being programmed to emulate this free-floating aspect of human curiosity in order to match human’s capacity for autonomous and self-directed learning.
1. You can learn for free (or for much less money). There is a plethora of content — books, videos, podcasts, and more — that are now widely available, at no cost, to the general public. Arguably, much of this free content mirrors (or actually is) the material students are studying in grad school programs. Therefore, if you want a master’s degree simply to gain more knowledge, it’s important to recognize that it is possible to recreate learning experiences without paying thousands of dollars for a class. Consider all the things you can learn just by watching YouTube, assuming you have the discipline and self-control to focus: coding, digital drawing, UX design, video editing, and more. Other platforms, such as Udemy and Coursera can be used to upskill at a more affordable cost than attending a degree program. Essentially, if your goal is to acquire a new skill, and that skill can be taught, it is hard to compete with platforms where experts can crowdsource, teach, and share content.
2. You may be wasting your time. Historically, people have mostly learned by doing — and there is a big difference between communicating the theoretical experience of something and actually going through that experience. This is a truth that can’t be changed by a graduate (or undergraduate) education. In fact, most Fortune 500 firms end up investing substantially to reskill and upskill new hires, regardless of their credentials. For instance, employers like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft all pointed out that learnability — having a hungry mind and being a fast and passionate learner — is more important than having acquired certain expertise in college. Along the same lines, many employers complain that even the best performing graduates will need to learn the most relevant job skills, such as leadership and self-management, after they start their jobs. Oddly, this does not stop employers from paying a premium for college qualifications, including graduate credentials.
3. You will probably go into debt. For some grad school programs the ROI is clear, but there’s a great deal of variability. It can be challenging to find a program that is certain to boost your income in the short run, particularly if you also want to study something you love. For example, an MBA, which remains the most popular choice of grad school program in the U.S., is more likely to increase your earning potential than a master’s in climate change. But if your true passion is climate change, you may end up excelling and having a more lucrative long-term career, but struggle financially in the short term. All this to say, if you’re not committed to the subject you’re studying enough to go into debt for a few years, the risk probably isn’t worth the degree.
What is discouraging is that this dilemma would not be a problem at all if:
The problem is that most people would probably prefer the qualifications of a graduate degree without the underlying experience and education, to the actual experience and education without the formal qualifications that follow. What is actually valued are the consequences of having a degree, rather than the degree itself. Assuming the recent trend to buy more and more formal education continues, eventually we can assume that graduate credentials won’t be enough for candidates to gain a true competitive advantage. Just like the value of a master’s degree is equivalent to the value of an undergraduate degree 30 years ago, if in 30 years a large proportion of the workforce obtains a master’s, or PhD, employers may finally be forced to look at talent and potential beyond formal qualifications.
It seems, then, that the decision to go or not to go to grad school is as complex as uncertain, for there are no clear-cut arguments in favor of it or against it. To be sure, it is not easy to predict what the ROI of grad school will be, though the factors outlined here may help you assess your own individual circumstances. Like any big decision in life, this one requires a fair amount of courage and risk taking. In the words of Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist who pioneered the modern study of decision making under uncertainty: “Courage is willingness to take the risk once you know the odds. Optimistic overconfidence means you are taking the risk because you don’t know the odds. It’s a big difference.”
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is the Chief Talent Scientist at ManpowerGroup, a professor of business psychology at University College London and at Columbia University, and an associate at Harvard’s Entrepreneurial Finance Lab. He is the author of Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? (and How to Fix It), upon which his TEDx talk was based. Find him on Twitter: @drtcp or at www.drtomas.com.
Should You Go to Graduate School?
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