The Rush to Graduate School
Everyone's applying. Should you, too?
Goal oriented. If you are still casting about for your life's goals, graduate school probably isn't the right place for you. "A graduate degree should be a means to [a professional] end," says Trent Anderson, the vice president of graduate programs at Kaplan. Degrees in medieval history, nursing, or engineering prepare you for the same thing--a career, whether it's as a history professor, a nurse, or an engineer. Of course, exploring a specific intellectual passion--say, for philosophy or comparative literature--also is a worthy motivation for going back to school. But those still hoping to find themselves should delay further schooling, says Gordon Folger, director of the career center at Meredith College in Raleigh, N.C.: "There's no substitute for getting out there and trying something."
That's the approach Jon Frieda took. After he graduated last year from Washington University in St. Louis, Frieda, 23, thought about going to law school, but he also considered returning to a job he knew well: selling car stereos. Since he was 15 he had sold sound equipment, and the trunk of his Volvo was packed with a huge sound system powered by an extra car battery. So before making the three-year, multithousand-dollar commitment to law school, he took a job as a legal assistant at a small civil litigation firm in Fort Worth. The experience convinced him that law would be the more satisfying career. He was just accepted to the University of Tulsa College of Law and is waiting to hear from three other schools.
If your field-to-be isn't law or medicine or academia, you may want to talk with academic advisers or industry insiders to determine whether you actually need an advanced degree. After film industry experts told Christina Wu that connections mattered more than an M.B.A., she reconsidered her first impulse to flee to business school and now is trying to network her way into a studio job. Tony Filipovitch, dean of the college of graduate studies and research at Minnesota State University-Mankato, recently told an undergraduate interested in jobs in city management or state administration that he didn't need a Ph.D. because few of those positions required the research degree. "The five years he spent on the doctorate could be spent advancing his career," explains Filipovitch, who consults in urban studies.
Experts point out that while young professionals don't need an advanced degree to get launched in every industry, having one may help them get hired and command respect. In fact, many large companies hire only M.B.A.'s for management-track positions. Joseph Merola, acting dean of the graduate school at Virginia Tech, says that many fields, especially in the sciences and engineering, have experienced "degree inflation," with master's degrees replacing bachelor's degrees as the required entry-level credential for industry jobs. For instance, pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer now hire more junior scientists with master's degrees because they have considerably more lab experience than candidates with only bachelor's degrees.
Keeping up. In fields that advance quickly, such as molecular biology, or that incorporate cutting-edge technology, such as manufacturing, midcareer professionals may need a graduate education just to keep up. At the College of Business at Arizona State University in Tempe, for example, people who work in purchasing can get an M.B.A. in supply chain management, a fast-developing field that uses technology and logistics to help businesses provide goods and services quickly and cost-effectively. The days following September 11--when planes were stuck on runways and businesses had to figure out where shipments were and how to get them to their destinations--underscored to many company managers the continual need for such specialists.
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