I have had many long talks with my friends and family about attending graduate school and argued about the pros and cons. This article summarizes what I have gathered from our collective experiences.
Their reasons for choosing graduate school:
- The most common reason for my friends to attend graduate school is that they don’t exactly know what they want in life yet. So they try to delay entering into the “real world” by going to graduate school. In graduate school they have a flexible schedule to think about what they want to do while working on possibly cutting edge projects.
- Then there are a massive group of immigrants who absolutely need to use graduate school just to get into in America. For some of them, graduate school is their livelihood. A lot of my coworkers went to graduate school in the United States in order to have a job here in the US and create a better life for their families. My parents, for example, came to the US through graduate school.
- Next there are those who are practically forced into graduate school, either by their parents, a weak job market, or by the realization that the fun and interesting major they studied in school is not in demand in the job market. Additionally, some professions such as doctor or lawyer require graduate school so it is merely a continuation of education and training for the college graduates pursuing those careers.
- Also, there is a group of people who already have great jobs but want to either advance in their careers or change professions completely. Several of my former classmates turned to medicine or law after working as software or mechanical engineers.
- Finally, there are those idealists who are actually truly passionate about their field, and want to be professors and researchers and possibly change the world with their studies. I know several PhD candidates who are in this category.
My reasons for not going to graduate school:
- One big reason is that I am a woman that wants kids. Going to graduate school would delay the creation of a family. My personal take on kids is that if you want to have them it’s probably better to have them earlier rather than later. Since with inflation, the cost of raising a child heightens as years go by.
- Since I am a woman in engineering, academia is not a very friendly place. One of my best friends said that she felt true sexism for the first time in her first year of her PhD program at MIT . One of her professors pretty much implied that she was slow and didn’t bother to answer her question at office hours, and when a male classmate asked almost the same question, the professor began a very detailed explanation of the problem. As a woman, becoming an engineering professor is also extremely difficult since tenure is decided by an old boys club in most universities. Anyway, I never ever wanted to be a professor in my life.
- Since I don’t want to do a PhD program, what’s left is a masters program. Most master programs are self-funded, so the return on investment isn’t very attractive. At least in computer science, masters program graduates earn a comparable salary as those with a bachelor’s degree and two to three years of experience. The difference is that the person with the bachelor’s degree would have savings instead of debt.
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I don’t really want to change careers now because I have a great job with a lot of responsibilities and very good benefits.
So by process of elimination, I concluded that I should not go to graduate school. If you are thinking about graduate school, it’s probably best to think about what you intend to do after you graduate. Do you want to be an academic or work in industry? Do you want a family? Do you want fame and glory? A PhD program takes up five to six years in science, and up to fifteen years in humanities. Those years of your life can never be recovered. A masters program is quick, but the knowledge you buy might not really be much more than your bachelor’s degree. Also, you’re most likely to take a hit in the pocketbook by pursuing a masters program. It’s probably best to do a personal cost and benefit assessment of your choice to go to graduate school. This is a quick summary of my analysis:
Cost of getting a masters degree in computer science: having children later and sacrificing two years of pay in industry and the masters program tuition.
Benefits: none currently.
Your assessment is probably very different from mine and it’s possible that your perceived benefits is much greater than your perceived costs. It’s possible that one day I will revisit the analysis again, and find that the benefits greatly outweigh the costs, then I will consider graduate school again.
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6 comments ↓
i agreed your opinion. however, many chinese parents think in different way. they consider that getting a graduate degree is a purpose and they did not think it is not a final purpose to get a graduate degree . if we think to get a graduate degree is only a mean for a certain purpose, then, a good analysis is neccesary. good work!
“Those years of your life can never be recovered.” That’s going on my wall of quotes (if I had one). Also, I’m moderately surprised and quite disappointed to hear about your (our?) friend at MIT. Quite frankly I would expect engineers to be a bit more… rational in their human interaction.
Interesting pro vs. con analysis, I just had a comment on one of your cons..
“…with inflation, the cost of raising a child heightens as years go by.”
Inflations raises all costs and wages. Tuition prices are actually increasing faster than inflation, so looking at current trends it would be cheaper to go to school sooner than later. Most child-related costs will increase at rates near inflation, and hopefully your wages would increase at a similar rate as well.
In other words, tuition inflation is likely to hurt you a lot more than child-related inflation.
Other things increasing faster than the official CPI are health insurance, housing, and food. Basically wages aren’t really keeping up.
Thanks for pointing me to this post. I certainly can’t speak to computer science grad degrees. My MBA has paid for itself many times over. My annual income tripled pre-MBA to post-mba, and due to the compound effect of annual raises, bonuses, and $ increases from job changes, continues to increase the ROI I got out of it. MBA’s in tech fields go really far, because there are a million engineers… most of which don’t know anything about running a business. 2 years goes quick. Get pregnant during your 2nd year, or just after graduation!!!
My parents both have MBAs, and I can assure you that their salaries are not triple of mine. Don’t get me wrong, they are paid very well, but they only get paid maybe 20 to 30% more than me and they have 10+ years of experience. I’m pretty sure if I work 10 more years I would be at that level, too. I have thought of getting an MBA, too, but right now I just don’t feel a need for it. Another thing is that I hate managing people. In my last job I had to manage a few engineers from India and it was a pain in the butt. I think engineering fits my personality and schedule pretty well, so I am going to stick with it for now.
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