It is something I may pursue if I get a windfall and am no longer concerned about retirement.
Then you're making a much more educated calculation as far as what you think it might get you, and if you want to go back to school and that.
Just throwing that all on the front end while you're in school seems a bit like gambling.
But doing grad school because you're good at school and don't know what else to do is a trap lots of otherwise smart people fall into.
I suspect that is very much a thing. School is a great system that if you're good at it provides very clear paths to lots of affirmation and ... a good time.
I don't blame anyone for being hesitant to step out of that bubble.... but not doing so can be pretty terrible too.
My concentration for my MS was AI & Computer Networks...which I've never used :) Because of market forces I'm an application developer.
I graduated 11 years ago and between then and now (married, 2 kids) I doubt I would have found the time and motivation to go back to school. It was around the housing crisis and jobs were crappy/not available so that was another motivation to do my MS. I also had the connections to form a startup (which failed) with other peers which has lead me to my current career.
On the one hand, I learned a lot from graduate classes and also used graduate school lifestyle/loans/insurance situation as an excuse/umbrella to explore a startup opportunity (that didn't succeed).
On the other hand, I sometimes regret the opportunity cost of not seeking paid employment sooner, especially given the non-success of that startup attempt versus how much I loved the last employer I interned with in undergrad versus graduating in a major recession I likely couldn't have predicted. The majority of my student loans have been from the graduate semesters and it does often leave me wondering if it was worth even the financial cost.
An M.S. isn't necessarily a risky thing to do, though, since they an be completed relatively quickly, and from a reputable CS or Engineering school, the grads are employable. At state colleges, they tend to be relatively affordable too. Professional degrees at UC schools come with very high surcharges that don't apply to academic degrees, so an MS in CS or engineering at Berkeley is $15k a year (in state tuition) instead vs ~$50k a year for the Law School (tuition is only a little higher for out of state for professional degrees).
An M.S. at Berkeley does make it a easier to get on the radar of a lot of tech companies for recruiting, so that can be an advantage. That's probably not a big factor to you if you're already an undergrad at Berkeley or other well known tech feeder school, but if that's not the case for you, it could help, it's not especially expensive, and you can often do it in a year if you crank the coursework.
Actually, if this was the profile of the typical student debtor, I doubt anyone would care. I read the NYTimes article, and I don't understand how anyone can say a $90k debt for art school with a starting salary of $35k is what was intended here. I mean, wow, they really did feed the beast, didn't they?
A masters degree doesn't pay in dollars, but experience that can set you apart in the future.
Surely "experience that can set you apart in the future" can be captured in calculations of lifetime earnings?
Did my website get me a 6 figure job or my undergrad in engineering?
If you're saying your website is unprofitable but helped you get a 6 figure job then it isn't really "unprofitable" in a broad sense because despite not generating revenue directly it contributed to your lifetime earnings, so I don't think this conflicts with the idea of trying to capture indirect benefits by looking at lifetime earnings.
If you're saying your website is unprofitable and will never help you get a job (even as a conversation starter or indirectly through experience you obtained creating it) but is nonetheless an "experience that will set you apart" like grad school, I would disagree about whether it is really "setting you apart" after all.
Work experience has been valuable in a different way, and lost income is a big concern. Personally I opted for a 15 month, 4 quarter program to minimize the debt and start earning as soon as possible.
There's no benefit, so unless there’s no cost, don’t do it. I got a master’s degree that one of my former employers paid for, about 10 years ago. I enjoyed it, learned a lot, felt like I got out of it, but I have no reason to believe that it’s added even one dollar to my income: I’m certain I’m in exactly the same place, career-wise, that I would have been if I had just stopped with a four year degree (in fact, there are plenty of people who consider a master’s degree in CS an anti-indicator of competence: http://blog.alinelerner.com/how-different-is-a-b-s-in-comput...).