Should you go to graduate school in a recession?
marginalrevolution.com
marginalrevolution.com
http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/02/03/dont-try-to-dodge-t...
And the overall bullet points:
1. Grad school pointlessly delays adulthood.
2. PhD programs are pyramid schemes
3. Business school is not going to help 90% of the people who go.
4. Law school is a factory for depressives.
5. The medical school model assumes that health care spending is not a mess.
6. Going to grad school is like going into the military.
7. Most jobs are better than they seem: You can learn from any job.
>1. Grad school pointlessly delays adulthood.
Maybe it delays adulthood a bit, in some respect, but I certainly wouldn't call it pointless. I've learned a huge amount in the last six months (which is how long I've been a grad student).
>6. Going to grad school is like going into the military.
The justification for this: Applications to the military increase in a bad economy in a disturbingly similar way that applications to graduate school do. For the most part, both alternatives are bad. They limit your future in ways you can’t even imagine, and they are not likely to open the kind of doors you really want. Military is the terrible escape hatch for poor kids, and grad school is the terrible escape hatch for rich kids.
That's a horrible argument. Just because more people go to the army at the same time more people go to grad school doesn't mean the experience is at all similar (for one, I'm pretty sure most soldiers get more sleep than I do). I was going to say that I can't imagine how a master's could limit my future, but that would actually be consistent with the author's claim, so I'll instead say that without justification I don't accept that a master's will limit my future. And the whole rich kids/poor kids thing at the end is just...I mean...I don't know many rich grad students, I'll put it that way.
I think the article oversimplifies things to a degree, so it's also a reflection of the author's viewpoint and in that sense almost comes across as rationalization. But that doesn't mean the points aren't correct - I had a unique job right out of college that gave me a lot of firsthand experience with a top notch phd program and allowed me to witness the grad student lifestyle w/o having to go myself. I was a web developer for the biology department of my college and worked out of a research building, separate from all the other admin staff, which was great because I got to hang out with people my own age, all the grad students (and even some of the younger associate profs) near my office. And seeing them go through the phd program definitely gave me the strong impression that the ones that survived (at least in a mentally stable way) were the ones that loved research and academia, or at least could make themselves love it over long periods of time.
It's not to say you're locked into academia as a career if you get a phd - one of my good friends went on to join a bio startup, there's a lot of those in San Diego - it's just that it's the default path and most of the above bullet points are still true, especially the pyramid scheme part. They're basically slave labor for whichever prof heads up their lab.
It's worth noting that you can and should apply #7 - Most jobs are better than they seem: You can learn from any job - to grad school as well and treat it as a job with a long term contract, one that you need to mine for all kinds of interesting things that you didn't think you'd learn. For example, I bet a lot of people (understandably) go into a top neuroscience or cell biology program thinking they'll learn a lot about biology and research, and they do, but the ones that did really well learned things like how to manage your time well, motivate yourself on an independent schedule, network in a loose non-corporate environment and blow off steam with non-contact sports.
Very good point. I'm learning a lot about CS, but I'm also learning my limits in terms of how much work I can do in general, and how to handle being overwhelmed. I'm making excellent contacts. I'm learning to organize myself better (and actually use a calendar). Even without the CS, I will leave grad school better prepared for the workplace than I came in.
I learned useful information about my area of interest as well as myself during grad school. I also supported myself the entire time. That is part of what adults need to do.
Plus, grad school finally got me to stop playing WoW - I suspect that if I'd gotten a job right out of undergrad I would still be playing.
Not everything has to be computed in dollars/euros. Remember, there is a human aspect to your life that cannot be bought. You can't spend $15m to be 24 again, even if we DO find a way to live forever.
In the median case, grad school is probably a waste, certainly most PhD's in the humanities are. But with a PhD in economics you can get a job working for all of those interesting sounding NGOs that advertise in the back of The Economist. An MD or PhD in biochemistry/subset is required to do serious medical research.
An MBA from a top tier business school (the more technical the better, personally I'd rather get an MBA from MIT than Penn) dramatically increases salary compared to people without an MBA. Could you have done better laddering up in the corporate world? Maybe, but it's a lot riskier, and the author forgets that pointlessly delaying adulthood is fun! Perhaps the author has forgotten that.
A professional graduate degree also provides you with a risk-free way of transitioning careers. Did you do an undergrad in business? Do you want to program now? Get a master's degree in software engineering.
And the comparison to joining the military is just insulting.
This rests on the assumption that learning is only valuable insofar as it helps the learner attain greater financial reward. You may define knowledge as a commodity which has value defined by national monetary systems, but those who pursue PhDs in the humanities wager the knowledge they gain in their pursuit of the degree has value in relation to their context greater than the value reflected in its commodification.
After a layoff is a great time to reassess what you are doing in your career. My wife is an associate attorney, many of whom are getting laid off right now. If she got laid off she's not sure she'd go back in to law. I was an engineer who wasn't sure I wanted to write code for the rest of my life so I got an MBA.
Grad school is a great way to get a "second" chance at what you want to do, particularly if you've spent a couple of years working and found that the reality of your career doesn't match the vision you had in college.
In fact, regardless of being laid off, I'd recommend taking a couple of years off between undergrad and grad school working before starting a graduate program.
1. You can often earn a higher starting salary when finished (assuming of course that the recession has passed by the time you're finished)
2. Access to educational loans and grants
3. Access to school resources (e.g. library, equipment, other students, mentors, etc.). Just last week I downloaded about $50,000 of market research through my school's subscription to eMarketer, Gartner, Factiva, etc.
4. Access to student pricing on software and hardware (e.g. MSDNAA, Adobe, Apple discounts)
5. Access to student camps competitions
6. Better access to internships
Now, am I doing grad school? Nope. It didn't really seem to make any sense for what I wanted to do for a career. But, I do see some merit.
If trust in the government and its goals can be restored, then a belief that the Armed Forces are an honorable and worthwhile avenue of service will also be restored.
As far as the recessions goes, in the sciences and engineering, I would be slightly concerned about funding for students, even once you get admitted. Even before the current recession I knew too many grad students who had to TA or switch groups, etc. due to funding problems. Not something I would have imagined before I spent time in grad school.
I, along with most of the others I knew in science/engineering grad school, didn't really think that funding would ever be an issue, but I saw far to many cases in which it was.
I was under the impression that schools didn't want to accept someone who was going to drop out because of finances.
So basically if they thought you would not be able to pay, you wouldn't get in.
That said, I knew that funding would probably include things TAing, and that RA's were usually one of the better sources.
NSF said that from 93-96, only half of newly minted engineering phds graduated with debt, so the percent is a little higher than I thought.
NSF 96 debt info: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/issuebrf/sib98318.htm
The key here is the distinction between practical and impractical knowledge. The author seems to operate under the assumption that only practical knowledge is good. In her experience, she has been able to gain practical knowledge at least as efficiently outside of the graduate educational system. I agree with her point here, but I don't think you can discount the value of impractical knowledge - which I would define as knowledge that does not have any immediate real world application.
The value in impractical knowledge is twofold: 1) it can (and often is) able to called on later and 2) it can serve as an introduction to other practical knowledge. For instance, even the lawyer that the author has argued has wasted his/her education by transferring to a different career field may immeasurably benefit from some theoretical aspect of his graduate experience. More likely, an experience in graduate school may introduce a person to a subject area or conceptual idea that has a practical application they would never have been exposed to outside of that environment.
Some may argue that both of the above benefits can also be obtained through real world work experience, which leads to the question of knowledge for its own sake. I personally am a believer in learning for learnings sake, although I'm not sure I can articulate that argument in a comment length...
Your chances of success are probably better with startups.
Also, keep in mind that the vast majority of research done in CS is about improved implementation -- not new applications. The main exception here is HCI + MIT Media Lab, which are more open to new apps.
Of course, if you do get accepted into a top 4 university in the US, then you might want to think about it. That's an impressive accomplishment, especially for international students.