A Hundred Grand for This?

As seniors face the terrifying prospect of graduation, two basic choices are held before them. They could enter the job market and put their $100,000 degree to work. Or they could apply for graduate school and spend another two years obtaining a master’s degree in their selected field.

In the last 35 years, enrollment in master’s programs nationwide has grown by 150 percent. This growth rate can be partially explained by societal pressures that create a higher undergraduate enrollment and increased job competition. Economic incentives also increase enrollment in master’s programs. As more students take on more debt than they can control, however, the costs of this education temper the benefits.

Societal pressures come from dual directions. First, generalized statistics are misused to tilt approval towards higher education. Second, the subtle bias and prestige that a college degree carries, no matter the major, compounds the pressure on young people to attend college.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, a people who graduated from college in 1992 can expect $600,000 more income than a person of the same age with only a high school diploma. A master's degree adds nearly $200,000 more to lifetime earnings. This type of data portrayal is misleading, however. It implies that a person with a college degree will always make more money than a person without.

This leads to a bias against the trades. Blue-collar jobs are socially snubbed, even though workers can end up making enormous amounts of money. According to Forbes.com, long-haul truck drivers can earn upwards of $100,000 a year, and subway conductors make, on average, more than $62,000 a year. Statistics overlook these career choices and instead instill in their readers a view that only with a college degree can a person become successful.

But the value of a college degree reaches beyond the classes a student has taken. The classes and major a student chooses really don’t seem to matter much at all. A 1997 survey by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics found that, four years after obtaining a bachelor's degree, only 55 percent of graduates were in jobs related to their major field of study.

In an article titled "College at work: Outlook and Earnings for College Graduates," Arlene Dohn wrote that “supervisors often interpret having a college degree as a sign that workers are serious about the job, know how to learn, and can achieve goals. Supervisors considering candidates for promotion may look more favorably upon those who have a college degree than on those who do not have one.” Thus, a college degree carries a subtle and favorable bias that has no relation to the field of study chosen.

The result of this is a dramatic increase in undergraduate enrollment. More than one million students earned their bachelor’s degree in 2000, and that number increases every year.

Because of this influx of bachelor’s degrees, many students feel as though they need to obtain a graduate education to stand out from the masses. Even if a particular job does not require an advanced degree, they may obtain one to boost their desirability in the global job market. Emily Culp, a freshman English major from Middlebury College, for example, believes master's degrees "are indispensable in the increasingly competitive job market”.

Even as a freshman, Culp has already begun to plan both financially and academically for an education beyond her undergraduate. Students who would be satisfied with a bachelor’s degree ten years ago are now planning to advance their education to have a higher marketable value.