Don't Go to Grad School article

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Don't Go to Grad School

It’s pretty well established that non-science degrees are not necessary for a job. In fact, the degrees cost you too much money, require too long of a commitment, and do not teach you the real-life skills they promise.

Yet, I do tons of radio call-in shows where I say that graduate degrees in the humanities are so useless that they actually set you back in your career in many cases. And then 400 callers dial-in and start screaming at me about how great a graduate degree is.

Here are the six most common arguments they make. And why they are wrong.

1. My parents are paying.

Get them to buy you a company instead. Because what are you going to do when you graduate? You’re right back at square one, looking for a job and not knowing what to do. But if you spent the next three years running a company, even if it failed, you would be more employable than you are now, and you’d have a good sense of where your skill set fits in the workplace. (This is especially true for people thinking about business school.)

2. It’s free.

But you’re spending your time. You will show (on your resume) that you went to grad school. Someone will say, “Why did you go to grad school?” Will you explain that it was free? After all, it’s free to go home every night after work and read on a single topic as well. So in fact, what you are doing is taking an unpaid internship in a company that guarantees that the skills you built in the internship will be useless. (Here’s how to get a great internship.)

3. It’s a time to grow and get to know myself better.

If you’re looking for a life changing, spiritually moving experience, how about therapy? It’s a more honest way of self-examination—no papers and tests. And it’s cheaper. Insurance covers therapy because it’s a proven way to effectively change your personal disposition. There’s a reason insurance doesn’t cover grad school.

4. The degree makes me stand out in my field.

Yes, if you want to stand out as someone who couldn’t get a job. Given the choice between getting paid to learn the ropes on the job and paying for someone to teach you, you look like an underachiever to pick the latter. If nothing else, you get much better coaching in life if you are good enough and smart enough to get mentorship without paying for it.

There are very very few jobs that require a non-science degree in order to get the job. (And really, forget about law school if that’s what you’re thinking.) So if you don’t need the degree in order to get the job, the only possible reason a smart employer would think you got the degree instead of getting a job was because you were too scared to have to apply or you applied and got nothing. Either way, you’re a bad bet going forward.

5. I’m planning on teaching.

Forget it. There are no teaching jobs. In an interview last week, the head of University of Washington’s career center even admitted to a prospective student that getting a degree in humanities in order to get a teaching job—even in a community college—is a long-shot at best. And, the University of Washington career coach confirmed that there is enormous unemployment among people who are qualified to teach college courses but cannot get jobs doing it. This is not just a Washington thing. It’s a welcome-to-reality thing.

6. A degree makes job hunting easier.

It makes it harder. Forget the fact that you don’t need a graduate degree in the humanities to get any job in the business world. The biggest problem is that the degree makes you look unemployable. You look like you didn’t know what to do about having to enter the adult world, so you decided to prolong childhood by continuing to earn grades rather than money even though you were not actually helping yourself to earn money.

Also, you also look like you don’t really aspire to any of the jobs you are applying for. People assume you get a graduate degree because you want to work in that field. People don’t want to hire you in corporate America when it’s clear you didn’t invest all those years in grad school in order to do something like that.

7. I love being in graduate school! Everything in life is not about careers!

Sure, when you’re a kid, everything is not about careers. But when you grow up, everything is about earning enough money for food and shelter. So you need to figure out how to do that in order to make the transition from childhood to adulthood. This is why millionaires have stopped leaving their money to their kids—it undermines their transition to adulthood. But instead of making the transition, you are still in school, pretending things are fine. The problem is that what you do in school is not what you will do in a career. So if you love school, you’ll probably hate the career it’s preparing you for, since your career is not going to school.

When I met my husband one of the first things he told me was that he went to school for genetic biology. But in graduate school his research was in ultrasound technology for pigs. But he missed being with the pigs, which is what he wanted to do for his job. So he left school.

And every time I see the pigs on our farm I think about how he took a risk by dumping a graduate program in order to tend to pigs. I love that.

Don't Go to Grad School | LinkedIn

 

I don't get it. Does she not know that there are more disciplines than science and humanities?

 

Apparently not.

 

She has a point. Most people preach the gospel of getting a graduate degree and pursuing what you enjoy doing in school so this alternative outlook is a good counterbalance.
I think people should get a bachelors in a field they want to enter and then have their company pay for their MBA or other masters degree. That way they aren't spending two years working on a graduate degree while working at a restaurant as a server. They are working in a real job learning real skills and their employer is footing the bill for a work-related education.

 

To my mind this point is HIGHLY debatable. The author wants you to believe that you're better off failing at running a company than succeeding at grad school. Failure is better than success. So you take the thousands of dollars you might use for grad school and sink them into a company, run it into the ground because you don't know what you're doing and then you're left with no company, no money, no grad degree. But you should feel good about it because you've really learned something. Of course, I might need to point out that if you really did learn something then your company probably wouldn't have failed but let's not spoil the moment. So now you're broke, no company, no job, no degree. You go looking for a job and the big plus on your resume is that you failed at running a company? And I'm going to hire you because you failed? C'mon, be serious.

 

Tuition and books for almost every master's degree will cost somewhere between four and a low, or low-mid five figures. Time to completion will start at one year full-time. You'll have living expenses either going to grad school or running a company.

What sort of company does the author expect you can buy and backstop for four to a low-mid five figures?

It would be a very small business, probably pretty much a one-person shop. Kizmet's Scuba Lessons, Sanantone's Health Foods, etc.

Now this sort of work is entirely honorable, could teach you something, could be fulfilling and might even succeed in its own right.

But the underlying premise seems to be that just having managed the kind of company you can buy for the cost of grad school would give a major boost to your subsequent employability elsewhere. I'm not so sure.

 

The Cross Continent MBA from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke, exceptionally expensive for a distance learning master's program, has a nearly all-inclusive cost of 129 900 for tuition, books and materials, lodging and meals at the residential sessions. Add transportation to the six residential sessions.

For a Subway restaurant franchise in the U.S., in a traditional restaurant location – "non-traditional" locations are concessions in places like gas stations and schools – estimated total investment for a "lower cost" location is 115 300, for a "moderate cost" location 187 750. The "higher cost" price point is 258 800. pdf from Subway. These are for new start-up locations. I believe Subway is known among the major restaurant franchises for having relatively low starting price points for entry.

 

I completed my degree for under $11,000 in a little over a year while working full-time. I also only had to by a few books; most of the readings were free. However, I know most programs aren't like this.

But the author neglects the social sciences and applied social sciences such as psychology, counseling, marriage and family therapy, and social work which are most often needed at the graduate level in order to get a good job. You can't become licensed to practice psychology or counseling (with the exception of substance abuse) without a graduate degree and most employers prefer master's-level, social work licensure such as the LMSW and LCSW. Then, there is I/O psychology which is a very high-paying field. A master's degree is most often required by employers, but a PhD is preferred. She probably also doesn't know that the health professions are not sciences and many of them require graduate degrees. I don't know why she tries to lump everyone in to those two categories.

 

Areas in "the business world" where humanities subjects specifically are highly relevant to thousands of real jobs: Technical writing and communication. Marketing creative. International business, i.e. multilingual and cross-cultural.

 

Try to get your current employer to buy you a Subway franchise as opposed to tuition assistance for the MBA program and see which one has a better shot.

 

Experience is the best teacher, however, to get the best experience requires a knowledge base, ergo grad school. I recommend grad school after working or while working. It makes it relevant and you get the idea about commitment and return on investment.