Is Graduate School Worth It?

[ruelle]

More and more graduate students are forced through post-doc after post-doc because of the lack of enough opportunity in academia and industry. It didn't use to be like this.

Academic inflation is outrageous and it leads most every other measure of inflation.

The value of an education is becoming questionable, in this age where a B.S. is yesterday's equivalent of a highschool diploma - and almost as unemployable. Regardless, you're paying much more for it today than ever before.

Jobs in key industries are being offshored. This used to be true only of manufacturing jobs, but it is now true also of R&D, as major corporations have begun to establish major R&D centers in cheaper countries, like China and India.

In addition, for those jobs within our borders, you have to compete with the many foreign graduate students who come to study in the U.S., and who are granted citizenship upon completion of a Ph.D. The result is even greater difficulty securing a job at the Ph.D. and M.S. level, and a dilution of your compensation at that level.

Growing up, the only thing we ever heard was that we needed to go to college. They showed us cute images and videos of the space shuttle, atom colliders, nano-materials, lasers, and told us that we'd get to work with cool technologies like those by going to college. And in the middle of it, it was very implicit that you'd be living more comfortably than the kid next to you who didn't go to college.

Oh, the irony of it all. Being at the end of this education trainwreck, it's become clear that I'm unemployable, that I will never get the chance to work with anything that's remotely cool, and that I will probably never even get to own a home because I sank myself into a debt that will follow me for all my life - my education debt.

Somwhere along the lines, our educational system failed us, and I'm deeply convinced that education simply does not make sense anymore. Academia has become a mere cashcow for university officials who build their careers on the backs of graduate students - who do the teaching for introductory courses, and who do the actual lab work that provides the basis for their publications, so they can further their careers. The higher university officials get corporate-style fat-cat compensation packages that hover around $1million/year, and continue to focus more on making the campus look cute by building outragesouly expensive buildings than in improving the actual quality of education.

...and that is not even getting into the obvious fact that the best researchers make the worst teachers. But universities only want the best researchers - leaving students out in the rain when it comes to actual learning. In many cases, these researchers can't even speak english, and discourage students from even bothering to ask questions. It's so much easier to just change to a non-science field where professors still speak a little bit of english.

In all this, the educational lending industry benefits; the textbook publishing industry benefits; academia benefits - all by virtue of the higher revenues that arbitrarily incereasing student enrollments provides. And industry benefits because the supply/demand balance of college graduates gets so tilted, their worth is watered down. Welcome to the world of "new worker deflation" - probably the only thing in this country losing value year after year.

And in the end what do they do? They try to save their skin by telling you that the real value of college is "gaining knowledge for knowledge sake". Yeah, but it doesn't have to cost me 100K to gain that knowledge. If it's "knowledge for knowledge sake", how come *they* keep charging you more and more and more? Clearly they can't wait to get their hands in your pockets - but somehow you have to be a good neutered little boy and agree that it's ok, because you're "gaining knowledge".

1. I can learn on my own
2. I'm as unemployable with an M.S. in Engineering as I was without any education
3. I'm deeply in debt
4. I'm 7 years short of time that I could have spent learning a real trade

Is graduate school worth it?

Thank you, college.

[ern]

College has become big business. You will study your *** off to do a boring job 40-50 hours a week and the compensation isn't even that great. 100k is crap money compared to what all those "entertainers" make.


My Dad is a retired engineer and was moderately wealthy but never a rich man. You need to understand the reality of the situation and accept it.

Life is too short to be pissed off.

You know how I got back at my college? I stole all of my textbooks from the university bookstore, like $4000 worth of books over the course of 4 years. And I don't feel bad at all.

Yeah $4000 is nothing to really hurt them but it was enough to buy me the motorcycle I wanted : )

[achimelech51]

Some fields require a graduate degree, whether you like it or not. If you're trying to apply for a job that requires an MS in Engineering (to use your example) you're NOT just as unemployable with one as without one -- you're COMPLETELY unemployable in that field without that degree. In that case, something else would be preventing you from getting the job.

I agree that we shouldn't be pushing people to go to college, that not everyone can or should get a college education, and that credential inflation is more harmful than helpful in the long run. But like it or not, some jobs DO require a graduate degree, and if you want a chance of a job in those fields at all, you better get the graduate degree. And no, teaching yourself at the library is not a replacement for the degree in the eyes of the vast majority of employers.