The Rush to Graduate School
Everyone's applying. Should you, too?
Money was a secondary consideration for Saul Andino, who decided two years ago, during the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, to go back to school. "I realized I didn't want to get lost in not knowing what is going on around me," he says. Even though he'd already borrowed $40,000 to pay for his undergraduate education, Andino, 30, will assume an additional $85,000 worth of debt over the next several years. "Money is just money," he says. "Life is more precious. You've got to be able to do what you want to do." He's in his first year of the commercial diplomacy program at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, learning about international trade law, policy, and economics, knowledge that he hopes to apply to the economic woes of Latin America and especially those of his home country, El Salvador.
By all accounts, the choice to attend graduate school shouldn't be made on purely economic grounds. Yes, the job market looks bleaker, especially to folks who've only known boom times. But even companies that have fired hordes of employees are hiring. "Today businesses are cutting and growing at the same time," says Tanya Singer, a senior producer at Yahoo! Careers.
Fun factor. Tim Gorton, a senior at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, can attest to that. Gorton, 21, recently received a job offer from Trilogy, an Austin software company that laid off 340 employees last April. In January, the company flew Gorton and his fellow recruits down to its headquarters for interviews with the chief executive and financial officers. "I was pretty impressed talking to those guys about the company's trajectory," he says.
Not impressed enough to accept the job offer right away, though. Gorton, a computer science major, is strongly tempted to stay at MIT for another year to get a master's in engineering and further explore his undergraduate obsession with educational toys at the school's Media Lab. It's not the economy driving him toward graduate school, he says, but the "fun factor." Not a bad reason at all.
HOW TO ORDER
Rankings in more than 30 disciplines can be found at www.usnews.com or in the 2003 edition of Best Graduate Schools, which is now available on newsstands for $7.95 or can be ordered at (800) 836-6397, Ext. 225. To order reprints of this magazine section and for permission to copy, please call (212) 221-9595, Ext. 323, or E-mail Robyn@parsintl.com.
With Ulrich Boser
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