The Rush to Graduate School
Everyone's applying. Should you, too?
The bonuses have disappeared. So have the multiple job offers, the offers made long before college graduation, the offers that promised 21-year-olds salaries higher than their parents' combined income. Now job seekers, not corporate recruiters, are the ones accosting people at career fairs. Now employers pick and choose among applicants--and applicants take what they can get.
Although the economy is slowly brightening, the job market has yet to bounce back. The unemployment rate is almost 2 percentage points higher than it was during the heady days of the late 1990s, and more than half of the senior executives surveyed recently by the Business Council, an association representing large companies, said their organizations would cut their workforces this year or, at least, not create and fill new jobs.
It's no wonder, then, that droves of recent college grads and disgruntled or laid-off workers are considering graduate school. One of the first things Christina Wu, 28, did after losing her telecommunications job last November was to sign up for a prep course for the GMAT, the business school entrance exam. "I've always thought about getting an M.B.A.," says the Santa Monica, Calif., resident. "Losing my job gave me time to reflect and think about what career path to take." The number of applicants has jumped at graduate schools everywhere--by 27 percent over last year at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg and 22 percent at the Washington College of Law at American University in Washington, D.C. The Monterey Institute of International Studies in California received close to one-third more applications this year, while the School of Management at Boston University staggered under a whopping 153 percent increase.
Companies that cater to people weighing grad school also are reporting a jump in business. Kaplan Inc., for instance, raked in 24 percent more revenue from its prep courses for the LSAT, the law school admissions test, in 2001 than in 2000 and 26 percent more from its GMAT courses. Only medical school admissions test courses haven't seen a boom in enrollment.
Seeking refuge in grad school in a lackluster labor market is a time-tested strategy. When jobs were scarce in the mid-1980s, graduate applications rose about 7 percent a year. "It's a respectable thing to do," says Susan Krinsky, dean of admissions at the Tulane School of Law in New Orleans, where the number of applicants also is soaring. "It's even a productive thing to do."
But before you sign up for the GMAT or GRE, before you send away for applications, even before you start fantasizing about grassy quads, Gothic libraries, and avuncular professors, it pays to ask yourself whether you should be going to graduate school at all. Too often, people pursue an advanced degree to escape an unsatisfying job instead of figuring out which career best suits them and whether graduate study will help them succeed in the field, says Linda Wiener, who runs a workplace consulting firm in Vancouver, Wash. After graduation they find themselves just as dissatisfied as before--but carrying more debt.
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.
An advanced degree can help career switchers move into new career tracks without starting over in entry-level jobs, says Robert Nachtmann, executive associate dean at the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh. An engineer who is tired of working on computers might go to law school and focus on intellectual property or patents. A musician with a head for business might try an M.B.A. with a concentration in entertainment.
Robert Flynn decided he was ready for a change after 12 years with the Central Intelligence Agency. He first earned a master's in international affairs at Tufts University in Medford, Mass., and, a few years later, polished his resume with an executive M.B.A. from the University of Connecticut's Hartford campus. Now Flynn, 40, is vice president of account management at DirectAdvice, an online financial services start-up in Hartford. "After working in the government for so long, I needed a degree to wave in front of the hiring partners," he says.
A growing number of career switchers heading into elementary or secondary classrooms are taking advantage of "alternative certification" programs. The programs, which often grant master's degrees, are designed to address teacher shortages by letting qualified candidates start teaching almost immediately after an intensive summer boot camp. Once in the classroom, students typically are closely mentored and take their own classes at night or on weekends. Ruby Williams, 53, spent 25 years as a surgical nurse but had always dreamed of becoming an educator. Her master's program at Alverno College in Milwaukee assigned her to Malcolm X Academy, a local middle school, where within six weeks she was teaching science to 30 students. Williams put in two years of weekend classes covering everything from how to manage a classroom to adolescent development and graduated in May 2001.
Whether they're building on existing know-how or making a clean break with the past, people seeking a new line of work can take advantage of a growing array of short specialty master's programs, which offer instruction geared to specific careers. In 1999, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., began a master's in bioinformatics aimed at both scientists and engineers. The program features classes in molecular biology, computer science, and mathematics and produces graduates prepared to mine databases at pharmaceutical firms or genetics labs. Among the other new niche degrees: Texas Tech University in Lubbock launched an M.B.A. program last year for doctors interested in running HMOs, and Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., recently began a joint education and business degree for people interested in management of for-profit schools, among others.
Graduate programs not only teach you new skills but also put an efficient job-hunting machine--the internship program and career placement office--at your disposal. Kitty McGrath, the director of career services at Arizona State University's business school, spends much of her time establishing relationships with businesses so that they will hire graduates. After the recession dried up the flow of on-campus recruiters, she drummed up possible employers for ASU graduates by reaching out to small- and medium-size Phoenix-area businesses that hadn't typically hired M.B.A.'s in the past.
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.
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
This story appears in the April 15, 2002 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.