The degree you get in graduate school: MD (More Debt)

In my classes, I often tell students, who are awake, that they should not assume there is a direct relationship between their undergraduate majors and their careers after graduation.  In fact, I go one step more and caution them from assuming that there is even any kind of a relationship anymore between college degrees and employment.

If after all that they come to talk to me about going to graduate school, especially for a master's degree, I make sure they understand the huge risk they take, and I am usually ready to even use that "P" word--ponzi! A Google search for this wonderful description of graduate school will bring up a post from my blog in the top results.  I have no idea how the Google algorithm works, but sometimes visitors to my blog land up here because they seem to be worried about graduate school.

They ought to be worried about graduate school.

All of us ought to be panicking about graduate school.

Because, we have simultaneously inflated the credentialing requirements and watered down the quality of undergraduate programs that now graduate schooling is the new two-year BA degree!  In the process of suffering through more years of education, students do not end up amassing knowledge but more debt.

As I noted in a post a long time ago, it now is a requirement to have a graduate degree to teach fifth-graders!  At this rate, we will have post-docs teaching in high school!


It may have taken a while, but even the Economist eventually came around to using the "P" word.

To add to my collections, here is a latest report linking graduate degrees and student debt:

lost in the debate over the nation's student loan debt topping the $1 trillion mark is that graduate students account for a third of that sum -- and that their indebtedness is likely about to grow much worse. ...
Master's degrees account for about $200 billion in outstanding student loan debt, according to FinAid.org, while other advanced degrees make up another $100 billion. This year, roughly 830,000 advanced-degree recipients are expected to graduate with debt averaging roughly $43,500, up 10% from five years ago. Since the fall of 2007, roughly 56% or 3.6 million graduate-degree recipients incurred loans

But, the education-industrial complex wouldn't care and will continue to market graduate school until they have sucked every possible dollar from indebted students and families.

CNN Money profiles a few who have come to realize, after getting into a whole lot of debt, that a master's wasn't worth it.  I simply cannot understand how society allows such a ponzi scheme to continue to operate so openly.  And even more puzzling is how society even goes one step further and encourages and supports more and more and more higher education for all. But, surely, this cannot go on forever, can it?