The Rush to Graduate School
Everyone's applying. Should you, too?
Extra mile. Some career service centers go even further to help students land jobs. The office at the College of Engineering at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., aims for 100 percent placement for graduate students. If a student is interested in a company that doesn't normally recruit on campus, the office will track down alumni in the company and set up interviews for the student either at the business's headquarters or wherever the company is recruiting. Jared Fry, 23, won't get his master's in engineering management until June. But by last December, the office already had arranged for him to attend an alumni dinner in San Francisco. There he was taken under the wing of an alumnus, who spent a few days introducing him to insiders in the telecommunications industry. A position hasn't materialized yet, but Fry is confident that one will soon: "I've been getting the schmoozing trick down."
Questions about whether to go to graduate school are moot if you can't afford it. But before you balk at the sometimes awesome price tag, consider the following: The lifetime income of those holding master's degrees surpasses those who received only a bachelor's by $333,265, while professional and doctoral graduates earn $889,154 more than the bachelor's holders, according to the Employment Policy Foundation, a Washington, D.C., think tank.
Still, these figures are just averages, warns Philip Gardner, director of the Collegiate Employment Research Institute at Michigan State University in East Lansing. "Graduate school doesn't always pay off." Just ask one of the thousands of deep-in-debt Ph.D.'s barely scraping by with part-time teaching gigs. Researchers further caution that some unknown part of the income differential between those with bachelor's and master's degrees can be attributed to the fact that people who go on to grad school often are more driven, a personality trait that is linked to professional success.
In the current economy, even some students who earn professional degrees find that the immediate financial rewards can be meager. One year after getting his master's in public relations at American University, Frank Strong, 28, is making $15,000 less as a public-relations officer for a professional-services company than he did as an active-duty first lieutenant in the National Guard. Strong is hopeful that his degree will pay off at some point, but for now he's living paycheck to paycheck and avoiding shopping in grocery stores when he's hungry.
Good time. While going back to school is an obvious option for recent grads who are under- or unemployed, experts say that even the fully employed should consider heading off to graduate school if getting an advanced degree is already a long-term goal. "As an investor in your own human capital, it's a good time to do it [because] salaries are slowing, if not going down," explains Bill Coleman, senior vice president of compensation at Salary.com, an Internet company that tracks wage trends.
For those terrified of giving up even a stalled-out salary, John Challenger, chief executive officer of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an outplacement firm, recommends going part time (story, Page 51). "The best way to get a graduate degree, especially in terms of income, is to do it at night. This often means four years of restriction on your personal life," but you get the benefit of maintaining an income while working toward a long-term raise.
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