Graduate School...A Waste Of Time (and money)?

Is graduate school worth the investment? That is, the investment in both time and money?

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic asks that very question in a recent issue of the Harvard Business Review. His answer? Maybe. Maybe not. He lists reasons for doing so, including a higher starting salary and learning soft skills that could come in handy on the job. He also lists reasons for not going the graduate school. They include things like going into debt and the fact that potential employers may not care how many degrees you have on your resume, so long as you can do the job they want done.

His conclusion is, alas, that it’s up to you to measure the relative merits of going vs. not going, and then making up your own mind.

Okay, in interests of full disclosure, I should mention that I have three master’s degrees, one in English, and two in history. (I’d have a Ph.D. if I hadn’t gotten kicked out of one program. But I’m not angry. Just terribly, terribly hurt.)

Anyway, my experience is that I never once used my degrees on the job, or to get a job. Of course, they were liberal arts degrees, so that made a difference. But, still, no magazine I ever worked for (and I’ve worked for several) cared that I had an MFA in writing.

So, not a career builder, no.

But on the other hand, I really enjoyed earning the three master’s degree. (I’d have enjoyed the Ph.D., too. Insert much swearing and cursing here.) And, I guess, if I had it to do all over again, I take the same path.

After all, a job’s important...

But it isn’t everything.

Please check out my new book, Padre: To The Island, a meditation on mortality, grief, and joy, based on the lives and deaths of two of the most amazing and unconventional people I ever met, my mother and father.


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Michael Jay Tucker is a writer and journalist who has published material on topics ranging from the Jazz Age to computers. (Among his small claims to fame is that he interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)



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