Why Graduate Degrees Are a Rip Off: Crunching the Numbers
This one should fire you up one way or the other. I’ve been in many a heated debate about this very topic before. So let’s have some fun with it. I’m going to come out and say it – I HATE GRADUATE DEGREES. My hatred for them can be boiled down into three main reasons:
- I hate how much they cost.
- I hate the implicit pressure that comes from corporate America for people to slave away to earn that piece of paper if they want to get promoted and have a future career in management (even though those with further hands on experience typically excel in comparison).
- I hate that I have seen those in management positions with an MBA perform at levels far below their much less numerous sub-MBA peers. Seemingly, that extra education did absolutely nothing for their real world skills – and actually probably added a little bit of complacency and entitlement in a lot of cases.
This is coming from someone who had a glorious undergrad experience, excelled academically to the tune of a 3.96/4.0 GPA from a major university, and appreciates the doors that my bachelor degree opened for me (above and beyond what a high school diploma ever could have).
With my work experience and educational background, I am fairly confident that I could get into a top 10 MBA program. But I have ZERO desire to because of the above reasons.
Before you cave in to rat race pressure, you’re going to want to crunch some numbers yourself and do some background research. I’ve decided to crunch some numbers here as a guideline for you. I fully admit that these numbers are not applicable to everyone, but I have not gone out of my way to skew them to favor my argument. Feel free to run your own and share them in the comments.
Crunching the Numbers on an MBA – Will it Pay Off?
Let’s make these assumptions:
According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, the average salary of a full-time worker with a bachelor’s degree is $50,900. Those with a master’s degree averaged $61,300.
If I were to go to business school, I personally would be looking to get an MBA at a top 10 business school – which would cost me about $95,000 in tuition alone, according to Investopedia.
Then there’s the opportunity cost of an MBA: In other words. The lost income during the two plus years you are going to school full time. Let’s just take the average annual bachelor’s degree salary and double that, which would equate to $101,800 (for me, it’s more than that) – but I’m trying to be conservative here.
Oh, but let’s not forget books, room and board, and other peripheral costs. Those could add up to another $50K fairly quickly.
The final math would look like this:
Tuition ($98K ) + Opportunity cost of lost wages ($102K) + Room/board/tuition/other ($50K) = $250K
$250K?? That’s crazy!! Yes, but it’s even crazier when you factor in the cost of the student loans, if you were to use them. Here’s what that mess might look like.
Loan Balance: $98,000.00
Adjusted Loan Balance: $98,000.00
Loan Interest Rate: 6.80%
Loan Fees: 0.00%
Loan Term: 25 years
Minimum Payment: $50.00
Monthly Loan Payment: $680.19
Number of Payments: 300
Cumulative Payments: $204,057.52
Total Interest Paid: $106,057.52
How Long Would it Take to Make your Money Back on a Graduate Degree?
Well, if we’re going by the WSJ averages above, we’re looking at an average annual salary increase of $10,400 with the grad degree. At these numbers, it would take you nearly 25 years to make your money back on your initial investment (I’ll be kind and leave out the cost of the loans). And that is IF you find a job right away upon graduation AND they are willing to pay you a premium for that piece of paper.
What age would that put you at? Well, considering the average grad student starts at 28 and takes two years to finish, on average, grad students wouldn’t make back their investment until age 55 (again, factoring in zero in loan cost). Factoring in the cost of the loans? Well… yeah, you’d be able to apply for social security in retirement.
I don’t know about you, but I hope to be retired long before then on my measly bachelor’s degree wages.
Grad School Discussion:
- Have you gone? Can you speak to the numbers I ran in this article?
- Did you run your own numbers? What did you come up with?
- Still excited about grad school after reading this? Tell me why I’m an idiot.
- Take the poll!
Loading ...Don’t Miss Out on Free 20SomethingFinance Content Updates!
You May Also Find the Following Articles of Interest:
Harvard’s Huge Endowment Fund Hoard
Student Loan Rate Cut Opportunities
8 Financial Mistakes that Lead to the Post Grad Blues
Spoken like a true person who didn’t get a graduate degree or MBA. Just be warned to keep your disdain to yourself at work, b/c if you have managers or senior colleagues who do have their MBA’s, they will ear mark you and be biased against you.
I got my MBA part-time, and my work footed the $80,000 in tuition over 3 years. It was an excellent experience with great learning, meeting new friends, studying abroad in Brazil and China, and tapping into an enormous network.
If you are satisfied with where you are (position/pay), and your job is full of managers who don’t have their grad degree, you definitely shouldn’t bother.
I just feel that I can’t get enough education. And if it’s free, than all the better. The MBA opens different doors, and it is the $250-500K dime a dozen jobs which you can get that gets many people excited.
Surely you would still need a place to live and food to eat while working? So unless there’s a big difference in cost of living where you work and where you attend school, that should net to zero.
I think you’ve taken the average ‘graduate degree’ salary and coupled it with the cost of a top 10 MBA program. The first year total compensation numbers of the top 10 MBA programs looks more like $130k per year, with the foundation to grow to much larger numbers…
It sounds like you don’t see the value in a ‘graduate degree’ which you really mean as an ‘MBA’ and that’s okay. It isn’t for everyone. The MBA won’t be valued by all – if you can start your own company and create value/wealth where there was none, then you are absolutely right, you didn’t need the degree. Go for it, and best of luck!
It depends on your preferences and utility curve.
I gave some thought to grad school (more accurately, adding a fifth year and picking up a masters in doing so), and if I had chosen to do it, it wouldn’t have been for the money. It would have been for the opportunity to be in an environment I loved, learning interesting things and tackling difficult problems, around many of my friends from the previous four years. I ended up deciding that while the rest of the package would have been great, academic yak-shaving (writing papers with the endless goal of being published, no matter how much or little of importance you had learned) did not appeal to me, so I forewent a fifth year and a masters and entered the workforce. My options in the “real world” may have lacked some of these plusses, but others (better salary, possibly more free time, an essentially perfect job, earlier entry to workforce to take advantage of compounding, more flexibility/wherewithal to travel if desired, and probably numerous others) balanced them out. I miss some of the things I would have experienced in grad school, but you can’t have everything. I’m more than happy with what I have now even considering opportunities I passed up.
Looking at it from the other point of view, the one I didn’t end up choosing, I suspect the majority of my classmates who are in grad school now are not there for financial reasons but rather for pedagogical ones. (It probably makes a huge difference that I went to a top-tier school filled with self-motivated people with a love of learning and knowledge. Your mileage may vary at “lesser” schools.) I suspect you’ll find a much larger contingent of commenters here posting from my point of view here than from the other (and I probably lean further toward the grad school option than most of them!), so I wouldn’t make too much of any results here as being representative, instructive, or incisive.
(not that I think anyone commenting or reading is likely to mistake feedback here for being representative or authoritative, just saying what I think because I think it’s an observation worth highlighting)
I think you need to change the title to “why MBAs are a rip off.”
My fiance is in graduate school. They are paying her, its not great money but its fairly average for a recent college graduation, and she is getting PAID to go to school.
Ina a few years she leaves with a PHD and an earning potential in the $150k range, starting. So in some cases, graduate school clearly is not a rip off.
My graduate degrees are in education. I have four including a Ph.D. The degrees either got me a better job or put me on a higher pay scale. My first masters degree paid for itself in about a year. My Ph.D. was completed in 2007 and will pay for itself next year by the increase in pay. Actually, it may have already paid for itself because of the additional income for college courses I now teach.
In the field of education you are required to re-license every five years (VA). That means taking a college course. So, it might as well be a graduate course progressing toward a graduate degree.
My dissertation was about the benefits of credentials. There is no denying that a bachelors degree has tremendous effects on income potential. The potential income for graduate degrees depends on the area. I know that in education and health care graduate degrees increase pay significantly. You are probably right that an MBA in business may not pay out.
I’m currently working on my PhD in gerontology full time and my MBA part time. For the PhD, I receive tuition, health insurance, and a stipend. I’m paying for my MBA through an education line of credit. Overall, I think it’ll cost about $40,000. The MBA is likely to improve my chances of getting the job I want following graduation, but I entered the MBA program with the intent of improving my dissertation. So for me, it’s worth much more than any increased compensation I could receive – although that’s nice too. I think the value of a graduate education rarely, if ever, can be calculated based solely on increased income, but I understand that you’re trying to compare apples to apples (er, dollars to dollars) here.
I think this is more like a worse case scenario for grad school. In most cases I think that people who are getting their grad degree work full time and take classes part-time, usually at night. Therefore they don’t really lose their source of income. Also in many cases a company will flip the bill (or at least a portion of it) for a grad degree. Not to mention that if you’re going to a top 10 grad school, I would expect that person to be paid significantly more upon graduating. All in all, I think there is a lot of truth in what you said about experience vs. education but experience + education is really the best combination.
There are a lot of reasons to get a graduate degree, not all of them related to making big bucks in management.
I’m almost done with a master’s of science. A master’s degree has been on my personal goals list for years. This is a terminal degree in my program, so as early as next year I can teach at the graduate level if I want to. It’s immersion in a field that I am immensely interested in and has given me unbelievable access to important people in my industry. It’s made me more valuable at my job and resulted in one big promotion and raise already. My company is paying for about half of it, and my classes are held three blocks from my office. My total out of pocket cost will be around $20,000, but my raise (which I don’t think I would have gotten so soon if not for school) will cover that. So it’s a net win for me.
Now, that’s not the same as an MBA, obviously, but I’m really unclear from your post whether you’re against graduate school (which is everything post-undergrad, including medical school, law school, business school, MS, MA, MFA and PhD) or against MBAs. There are a lot of other assumptions in your post that I don’t think are true for people who go to graduate school or who get their MBAs. A lot of people go part-time and go locally or online. A lot of people get stipends, scholarships, grants, and other tuition assistance. A lot of people get promotions and raises at their jobs while in school demonstrating that their work is being recognized. A lot of people make industry contacts that simply can’t be obtained in the working world. And people who get degrees from second or third tier schools can pay a lot less money and still get all the rewards of those who went to first tier schools.
You know what they call the person who graduated with the lowest passing grade from a no-name medical school? Doctor.
As someone who works in higher ed with student finances you are right on the money. The cost and potential risk from loss of income and massive (in addition to possible undergrad debt) makes grad school in general a poor decision especially when you look at the fact that for all graduate degrees the annual wages are only about $7,000 higher a year.
However, there are many ways to cut down on the cost of grad school dramatically. For example, many companies will do tuition reimbursement for employees to get MBA, most college have tuition remission programs for employees, and they may offer assistantships or teaching/research fellowships as well. When you take into account little or no tuition costs (plus receiving a livable wage and not forgoing earnings) the benefits of graduate school are well worth it.
In addition, my personal experience is that employers are going to look most favorably on someone with recent work experience and a degree versus someone who just has degrees or someone who just has work experience. Why pick one or the other? Colleges require a wide variety of employee fields such as real estate, counseling, PR, graphic design, etc that may be in your career field. Next time you are looking at grad school or jobs, see if they offer any tuition reimbursement or if the grad school has any ways to waive or reduce tuition!
Having an MBA most likely should help you earn a higher salary but I have no interest in going back to grad school right now. I don’t know if it is worth the investment and money and my industry is too new.
My MA in creative writing and my PhD in rhetoric were both worth it to me in terms of the people I was able to surround myself with and the way my worldview changed as a result of what I learned. I knew that neither of these degrees would supercharge my earning power, but some things are more important than money.
I completely agree with this. When I got my MBA, my income got a $10K bump automatically at my employer, but I haven’t seen anything other than that (and the higher expectations that come with it). The numbers will be different for everyone, as GE states, so there are definitely cases where grad school might pay off if your employer covers it AND continues paying you in the meantime. But for most of us, that simply doesn’t happen.
My work pays for my degree and I only take one class at a time and continue to work full time. I was originally just going to take some continuing education courses, but if I can get a degree at the same time why not? MBAs I don’t really get personally, but I am in more of a technical field so I have to keep up with it or I would be doomed
Are people being serious when people say they got or are getting a masters for the experience. If you are reading articles on a personal finance website stop lying to yourself, you did it to increase your salary. I guess if you are the type of person to blow money on a masters for the opportunity to be in an environment you love then you really should be reading more articles on this website to get your finances in order. You are entitled to your opinion, but at least try to back it up with concrete evidence of why a masters is a good idea instead of just saying you like hanging out with friends in the program. Let’s see some numbers in favor of a masters.
To the comment about “lesser” schools let me give you a nice piece of information. I went to a “lesser” school, paid less for my tuition, and make more than the average college grad. It might be hard for someone like you who went to a top tier school to understand, but maybe you should have run the math before you went there. Maybe you would have realized it might not be a terrible idea to go to a “lesser” school where us folks ain’t as edumacated. (we are not as educated, in case you needed the translation)
The average starting salary for a PhD in my field is $45K. I definitely went to grad school for the experience, not the personal finance aspect.
C’mon, Joe, could you have read my comment any more antagonistically?
I put “lesser” in quotes because while, by rankings, it might have been better, a US News rating doesn’t amount to a hill of beans compared to what you learned, the connections you made, your experiences there, and how well you were able to prepare for whatever your eventual career. If I were trying to be condescending, I wouldn’t have used quotes to modify its meaning! The only real measure of a school is the one you use personally, and what’s great for one person may be exactly the opposite for another, and vice versa. I take it your measure corresponded directly and exclusively to the financial numbers and tradeoffs. My utility curve includes a couple other factors, that’s all.
Frankly, I don’t care how much or little education someone gets, as long as he pulls his own weight in life (which does make me rather more skeptical of liberal arts degrees than of other grad-school degrees, to be sure). Performing tasks requiring some type of skill, and performing them well — whatever the job, be it nuclear physicist or elementary school teacher or football quarterback, and whatever the task, be it one requiring acute mental dexterity or one requiring prodigious physical effort or one so “mundane” (those quotes imply I don’t actually think the task mundane) as intuitively knowing how to mix spices into meals to make one-of-a-kind entrees at five-star restaurants — is what I admire.
By the way, my finances are in comfortable shape, and I suspect the same of classmates who did choose grad school, even if odds are they’re somewhat less financially secure at the moment for the decision.
I went to grad school and was paid a stipend to do so, on top of not having to pay any tuition. This is sort of the norm for a lot of the physical sciences (I’m a geologist/astronomer), so in this field it’s definitely not a rip off to go to grad school. Plus on top of your stipend you can apply for lots of grants to supplement your income.
Wow, a wide range of comments here, so I’d love to address a few recurring themes:
1. Grad school does pay off for some. It is true, the post itself is polarizing, but as I suggest, crunch the numbers for yourself. Everyone will have a slightly different situation. If your employer is footing the bill and you are able to continue working and get paid in the meantime – grad school might actually be an incredibly smart decision financially. Definitely worth exploring if that option is available to you. I have seen people I work with do this. But realize that you will have no personal life for the years that you are balancing both and you won’t get the same experience and networking benefits as someone who is attending full time.
2. Benefits of Grad School
There are some, for sure. Education is great (although I’d argue hands on is much more relevant in many professions). Additionally, a lot of top notch grad programs are offering their coursework online for free. Essentially, you can get the education aspect of the class for free, if that’s what you’re after. The Internet has completely changed the value proposition that secondary education offers – because you can simply get everything for free online.
The other big benefit raised by some of you was that of building a network and friends. Building a network is great (again, hands on probably counts for more unless you go to a top 5 business school full time). This is a personal finance blog, so I am a little more focused on the actual return on investment payoff that comes with a grad degree than I am about the potential other benefits which I strongly believe I can get for free in other ways.
3. Grad school vs. MBA
Admittedly, this post blurred the lines between the two. I focused on MBA’s because that would be the option for me and I was most interested in crunching those numbers – but I would still argue, but I don’t think the argument changes much if you focus on all grad school degrees as a whole. For a decent non-MBA grad degree you’re still going to shell out $50K plus for anything of value, have the opportunity cost, and room/board/book/peripherals expenses as well. The numbers quoted by the WSJ include MBA’s (which are a ‘grad school’ degree) in them – and MBA’s are certainly one of (if not the most) popular grad school degree out there. To compensate I was a little conservative with some of the other numbers. To Steven’s situation, I have seen it time and time again. People think that by getting a high priced MBA, it’s their ticket to riches. That’s often not the case. Getting an MBA guarantees nothing and actually may limit the number of jobs that you might be rightly qualified for.
Thanks for all the great comments, everyone!
Not only will an MBA cost more than it is worth to get the value (better income) you will cut your geographical selection.
GE, I have to respectfully disagree and say that you have no idea what you are talking about on point number 3 there…
“For a decent non-MBA grad degree you’re still going to shell out $50K plus for anything of value, have the opportunity cost, and room/board/book/peripherals expenses as well…” This is ridiculous! How do you know? Have you every been to grad school?
I am currently in grad school for my PhD and have everything (tuition, health insurance, stipend, supplies) paid for and once graduated will have to opportunity to earn more than I ever could with just my BS degree.
Also, my wife just got her MA degree and it cost $8500 across two years. She got bumped in the payscale by $5000 after receiving it so it is paid off after 1.5 years. To top that off, if she continues with this job, it will be an extra $5000 for the next 20 years. So that’s an extra $100,000 for $8500…you do the math.
Most places it doesn’t matter where you get your MBA. Sure some programs are better, but MOST employers aren’t going to care if you didn’t go to “Harvard” or a “top 10″ school. To top it all off, I think most people want an MBA for their egos.
You also don’t speak to the fact that over 75% of people who get MBAs are self-identified career switchers. They need to get the MBA to have a way into their “new” career. For me, it’s going to be a transition from the military to the business world.
According to forbes, the Harvard class of 2004 avg pre-mba compensation was $82K, while their 2008 salary (4 years after graduation) was $215K on avg. If you re-did your numbers with slightly more realistic MBA numbers, I think they’d be vastly different.
Forbes says most MBAs pay themselves off in less than 5 years here: http://www.forbes.com/2009/08/05/best-business-schools-09-leadership-careers-intro.html
-brent (class of 2014 hopeful)
@ Brian – I couldn’t find specifics anywhere, other than this from Kiplinger in a 2006 post (and costs have gone up since then): “A year of graduate school costs, on average, a total of $28,375 for a master’s degree at a public school and $38,665 at a private school (most master’s programs take one to two years).”
http://www.kiplinger.com/magazine/archives/2006/01/gradschool.html
If you can find averages from a more reliable source other that the school you and your wife went to (which you didn’t list) – please share.
I got a Master’s Degree in School Counseling for about 12,000 back in late 90’s. It was well worth it and is still paying dividends for me. I commuted back and forth, went to evening classes. It’s all about the options you choose. Traveling somewhere else and establishing housing can be more expensive. Grad degrees pay if you 1) Enjoy the subject your studying; and 2) are committed to getting a career in that field. I think the pros outweight the cons and there are less expensive options.
@GE
So I went and looked at the article. I take some major beef with it. You can’t just sling numbers around like that without any facts to back it up. Here’s some things they don’t include about there numbers:
1) What universities are they using in the averages
2) If they even use a couple of more expensive schools in their average it will skew it towards higher amounts.
3) What “costs” are they putting into their average, (tuition, housing, wages?)
My point is that averages do not tell the entire tale. Did you know that some schools (like mine) have graduate tuition tiers and charge more or less based on the programs you are studying? By limiting your analysis to only a few schools with high tuition of course you are going to come up with expensive numbers. I actually get paid more in my stipend than I would if I was just working in my field. My wife actually kept working her full-time job the entire time she was getting her Masters so our income was never affective. Basically, what I am saying is that your cost analysis is very limited to a specific set of circumstances and shouldn’t be generalized to everyone’s situation.
@ Brian
You’re doing the exact same thing. You got your degree for cheap so you’re generalizing that to everyone. GE states in the post multiple times that you should run your own numbers because everyone is going to have a different situation. What more do you want than that? Averages are better to go off of than your specific situation. Maybe he should have included a snippet about ‘Brian’s situation’ in the post for you.
The real issue with all of this is that going to graduate school is like buying a house: it is *sort of* a personal finance decision because it costs a huge amount of money. However, the vast, vast majority of the time, both grad school and buying a house are horrible financial decisions in that they will not make/save you money over the long run (once you factor in the outright costs and the lost opportunity costs).
It *is* possible to make/save money by obtaining a graduate degree/buying a house – if you do it very, very strategically. However, probably less than 1% of people ruthlessly employ the type of strategy that is necessary to make/save money by doing these things. Instead, they use the urban myths – “A graduate degree will increase my earning power” – “Buying a home is an investment” – to justify their own purely EMOTIONAL reasons for making the decision to engage in these activities. Urban myths that are, let’s be honest, simply not true as blanket statements (and probably not true for the majority of people because they use the blanket statements as justification to engage in the activity at all and excuses not to be strategic about ANY OTHER ASPECT of the decision). A sort of “in for a penny, in for a pound” reasoning.
The fact that my boyfriend and I have a total of over $200K in educational debt between us probably means that we will never be in a position to buy a home. However, while we realize now that we didn’t use as much strategy in attending to graduate school as we thought we did at the time, that’s fine, because we each participated in the activity that meant the most to us, and got an amount of satisfaction out of earning the degrees that can’t be measured in dollars.
In many ways I totally agree with this post. It doesn’t seem like a good idea to me to rack up more school debt when I’m still working to pay off my undergraduate education. But, from what a lot of people are saying, it really depends on the field you currently work in or want to work in after you complete your degree.
I agree with this post also. The sad part of it all is that I can see the costs involved going up during the next few years.
I haven’t seen this question answered, but maybe I just didn’t read everything. Here goes:
My company pays 100% of graduate school expenses. People in my company regularly get their MBA from NYU and continue to work full time here. So….would you say, given that the MBA will cost me $0, I have any reason to not peruse it?
I haven’t seen this question answered, but maybe I just didn’t read everything. Here goes:
My company pays 100% of graduate school expenses. People in my company regularly get their MBA from NYU and continue to work full time here. So….would you say, given that the MBA will cost me $0, I have any reason to not pursue it?
“Tuition ($98K ) + Opportunity cost of lost wages ($102K) + Room/board/tuition/other ($50K) = $250K”
Geez, 98k for an MBA? Are you going to Oxford? More education is NEVER a bad idea. Those with graduate degrees are unemployed less often, find jobs more quickly than those without graduate degrees, make more money (though not always substantially more) than their counterparts, and they get to go to graduate school, which is incredibly enlightening and entertaining academically. It’s hard work, but it’s worth it in more ways than one.
@ Ken
I think you make a great point with number 2: it really only makes sense to pursue a master’s degree if you are committed to working in that field and if the degree will allow you to do so. This seems obvious, but I think a lot of people (especially business students) actually attend grad school for the opposite reason–they don’t know what else to do and they think that more school might help them figure it out. Or, as several people have mentioned, they just really like the academic environment and the people they are surrounded by. Again, I think this is especially true for business students pursuing an MBA or anyone with a liberal arts degree who doesn’t eventually want to teach. Now, if you already work in your field of study and your employer is paying for your degree, then this is obviously not the case.
I know that I very nearly went to grad school for the wrong reasons, and for someone like me it would have been a huge mistake, financially. I would have finished school with loads of debt and likely would have no clear idea of what I wanted to do next. As it happens, I have very little direction career-wise, but at least I have no debt.
Finally, @ GE, I think you make light of the distinction between an MBA an nearly any other graduate degree. I think most graduate degrees, especially those in the sciences, represent a huge accomplishment and a significant advancement in knowledge of the field. But I am not convinced that an MBA delivers the same value. One major factor in my decision to forego an MBA degree was the advice of a professor who told me I would be taking essentially the same classes I took in undergrad.
As most others have already said, the decision depends highly on personal preferences. At any rate, one alternative to going to a “top 10 business school” is to get a degree abroad. I recommend getting a bachelors in the states to pretty much everyone, but many foreign universities (particularly in Europe but also for example the American University of Beirut) offer good quality masters programs taught in English. They are also (1) often tuition-free or incredibly cheap by US standards (eg, all universities in Germany are free or 1500EUR/semester depending on which state you’re in) and (2) a great chance to learn (I mean really learn) a foreign language. That’s not to mention the networking (I don’t agree at all with G.E.’s statement that this is negligible unless at a top 5 ranked school), the many many experiences to blog about while abroad…
Another point against the top 10 is that scholarships and fellowships are more likely to be available and big at
lessernormal schools. Many departments are given funds with which to offer sizable scholarships to very good grad students who would otherwise just make the cut at a top ranked program (though this seems to a apply more to economics than to MBA degrees).@ Julie – From a financial perspective, no, it sounds like a great deal. From a quality of life, time commitment standpoint… that’s up to you.
I take issue with your biased analysis. Your numbers for tuition and living are quite inflated, even if you do attend a top university. You don’t account for any fellowships or financial aid of any kind. Also, it is possible to attend a state school for a much cheaper price.
For example, I plan to pursue a Master’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering at UW-Madison, which for me would be around $10,000 a year because I live in state. To me, that is a terrific price, and it doesn’t even account for any financial aid or fellowships I may get.
So yes, maybe to attend to top university, not get any aid or scholarships, it would not be worth it, but the options available make it worth it.
My husband went to a top business school part time. The great thing about this is that his company offered tuition assistance so they paid a small chunk of it. In addition, he also got a scholarship that paid for a portion of it so he only had to pay about $15-20k a year. It’s still a lot of money but it was well worth it in the end.
Shortly after he graduated, he was laid off but found a job in consulting within a month. With the new job, he got a pay raise, it was much more challenging and rewarding. He later learned that if he did not have his MBA he would not have even gotten an interview with them. So having that MBA does increase your odds of getting hired and moving up the ladder.
I agree with Matt. The numbers for tuition are seriously inflated. If you’re going to a university that costs that much, you’re probably going to make a boatload once you’ve graduated and it will make up for it eventually. According to your analysis, studying for a medical degree isn’t worth it either because of the high cost and long residency.
Knowledge is the key to every door and decision in the hallways of opportunity.
The piece of paper is merely acknowledging that you have exceeded other’s knowledge bases, but it will not guarantee you anything. No matter your stance to the cost question, knowledge is earned and you will not be able to avoid shifting your priorities to acquire it. At the end of the day, I would be surprised to hear someone tell me that increasing knowledge was a huge mistake, since it influences the numerator of your life’s earning potential. You alluded to this, but I will reiterate it for you…the numerator has no limit.
Regards and best wishes
I disagree with your assessment here. I deal in the national defense industry and most companies who are looking for graduate degrees don’t care as much as to where you got the degree — just that you have the degree from an accredited school.
I had several options for places to obtain my graduate degree. These schools ranged from $15K to $60K+. Choosing an online approach, I was able to obtain my degree while still working and kept my costs to approximately $18K. Doing so changed my salary from $55K/yr to $80K/yr within the first two years. I’m pretty sure it’s safe to say that I made my investment back and will be appreciating the payoffs for quite some time.
Guess my point is, you don’t have to go to an overpriced school to obtain a ROI. Sure, it might help with some companies; but most won’t care.
^What Derek said is true for many of the sciences as well. Where you went to get your Ph.D. isn’t as important as the fact that you got one. Your publication record and who you worked with matters a lot more than if you went to Harvard and didn’t publish anything.
I’d rather open up my own business and learn from first-hand experience instead of spending the time to get an MBA degree. But if you don’t plan on starting your own company, then an MBA can help.
I wasted two years of my life pursuing a graduate degree, which I don’t believe helped me get my job in public administration. All it did was postpone the date of my hiring, and thus the date of my retirement. I could have been receiving a full pension at this time had I started working after receiving my B.A., but instead I’ll have to work for 2 more years and receive a reduced pension.
Leave a comment!
Free Content Updates!
20SomethingFinance Reviews
Recent Posts
Disclaimer…
Posts By Month
Topic Categories
Reader Poll
Blogroll
Recent Comments
Top Commentators in 2010
Twitter Updates...
Posting tweet...