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Betting on grad school to boost
your economic prospects?
Whenever I found myself in financial
trouble, the first thing I thought was, "Can I solve this problem
with school?"
I learned this behavior early when boys were stealing
my lunch money on the way to school. I started going to school extra
early to do times tables with the teacher until the boys stopped
looking for me.
I continued this behavior into adulthood and used
graduate school as a way to occupy myself during bad economic times.
I am not alone in this technique. The current economic
slide has been met with a dramatic surge of grad school applications.
Grad school is not for everyone, though. Even during
a recession, when you find yourself with the choice of unemployment
or grad school, unemployment might be your best bet. Grad school
is a popular choice for people who are lost and people who are scrappy.
Make sure you're in the latter group or you'll likely lose a lot
of money.
Grad school is pricey. Most programs cost more than
$8,000 a year, and MBA programs can run $100,000. Unless you can
get your parents to pay for school, unlikely if their retirement
funds were in the stock market last year, you risk being stuck with
loans that you can't pay even after the recession.
So you should check out predictions for the job markets
of the future, and get credentials that will prepare you. (Here's
a start: health care worker, good. Musician, bad.)
You should also be honest with yourself about whether
or not you can stomach school. A friend of mine wanted to change
careers, so he considered getting a degree in a new field.
He took one class to test the waters, and the first
day, the professor asked students about their political views. Each
student defined her views in relation to those of her parents. Not
surprising for a bunch of 20-year-olds, but untenable if you're
35, like my friend. No degree program for him. But here's the good
news -- he got a job anyway. And you might be able to do that, too.
So don't be so quick to sign up for more years of schooling.
If you are still gung-ho on more schooling, make a
plan for what that degree will get you after school in terms of
lifestyle and job satisfaction. For example, polls show that lawyers
are typically not happy in their profession and biochemists are
very happy.
Don't neglect the dreaded grad school essay. If you
are having trouble writing about why you want to go to a particular
program, you're probably trying to solve a problem that school can't
solve. My third-grade teacher put it to me this way: It doesn't
help to come back to school when your brother ate your after-school
snack.
A lot of the going-back-to-school game is luck. During
the last recession, I went back to school for English. I thought
I would be an English professor, but I got sidetracked by the computer
science department and wrote my thesis in HTML.
I was lucky that while the idea of teaching English
was delusional (jobs are scarce), the Web was the new big thing,
and no one knew HTML. I turned my generally useless grad school
program into a lucrative job in the high-tech industry.
So think carefully before you go back to school, but
realize that all the planning in the world does not make you a predictor
of the future. Grad school is not a way to play it safe, but it's
a way to play the odds by opening new doors for yourself.
And after all, when it comes to risky bets, who is
better to bet on than yourself?
-- Updated: March 23, 2004
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