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Comment by tbrownaw | Hacker News Reader

> shows that 40% of masters programs in the U.S. have no positive return.

> "If you take in the cost of attending and the time spent not working, what you get out of that master's degree doesn't even pay for itself,"

Calling that a "scam" runs contrary to that other claim I hear, that universities aren't supposed to be vocational education but more about research and personal enrichment.

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Spending upwards of $100k or more on personal enrichment seems a bit extravagant. Unfortunately, the majority of people are coerced to go into debt when the return on the "investment" is very limited.

In a lot of fields (not all) it is highly unusual to pay for your masters/phd

What fields? Honest question, not trying to flame you.

I've known people who got scholarships but can't say I'm aware of any field in which paying for your own graduate degree is rare.

I'm not sure now but something like all top 30 CS programs (for students on the PhD track who are US citizens)

Econ PhDs are funded

I’ve never heard of a student paying for their engineering, math or science degree.

If you do get an offer to study, but without sponsorship, it’s a signal they don’t really want you.

I know that's the case for doctoral degrees, but are terminal masters degrees usually fully funded in those fields?

You're thinking of STEM fields. No one pays for a PhD in STEM. But not all masters programs have guaranteed funding. This is going to vary dramatically across schools and very much so across programs. That said, the only person I know in CS that paid for a masters at my uni chose to (and only did so for one term). Outside of that, people I know in the English department, Philosophy, and others, they are paying.

In the humanities (at least ~10 years ago), it was unheard of both to pay for your own PhD and for a terminal masters to be funded. MA students paid full tuition, which provided a lot of the funding for PhD students.

After the 2008 economic crash, a lot of US colleges and universities experienced a drastic realignment of their entire core mission and method to focus on career outcomes and ROI. Even without this, graduate programs are one of the biggest money makers in an institution's budget.

If I have it right, undergraduate tuitions generally cover operational costs, while graduate programs and donations are where institutions makes their non-profitty millions.

Both can be true. I've mostly encountered employers using formal education as a filter on applicants. But plenty of research is done on campus as well.

>that universities aren't supposed to be vocational education but more about research and personal enrichment.

Where do you hear that?

Not the commenter. I don’t hear people saying that (as a matter of fact I think it’s a problem that it’s not being said enough) but I think so too, solely from deduction. If universities were supposed to perform the same function as trade schools, then why do universities offer experiences and facilities way beyond what trade schools offer? One has to ask oneself at some point what is supposed to be the differentiation.

It’s a carry-over from the era when a college education was a Veblen good for the wealthy and connected who would have gotten a job without it anyway. Not a serious policy prescription.

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