Should You Go to Graduate School?

Author: Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

So, you’re thinking about going back to school. But you’re wondering: Will it really be worth your time, energy, and money?

The job market continues to be fiercely competitive. And while employers are starting to highlight the importance of critical soft skills—such as emotional intelligence, resilience, and learnability—as determinants of performance, some of the most in-demand jobs and fastest-growing industries still require graduate credentials.

At the same time, the number of people enrolling in college continues to rise, effectively devaluating the undergraduate degree. In America, one-third of adults are college graduates, a figure that was just 4.6% in the 1940s.

In light of these figures, it is easy to understand why more and more of the workforce is considering going to graduate school. In the United States, the number of graduate students has tripled since the 1970s, and according to some estimates, 27% of employers now require master’s degrees for roles in which historically undergraduate degrees sufficed.

What, then, are the motives you should be considering if you are trying to decide whether or not to enroll? How can you determine if the time—and especially the money—required to pursue a graduate education will actually pay off or not? Here are some factors to consider:

Reasons You Should Go to Grad School

• To bump up your salary potential. It’s no secret that people who have graduate school degrees are generally paid more money than those who don’t. While a 25% increase in earnings is the average boost people see, attending the top MBA programs can increase your salary by as much as 60% to 150% (whereas a masters in human services or museum sciences will increase your earnings by a mere 10% to 15%).

• To set a career change in motion. AI and automation are replacing many roles with others and a growing proportion of workers are being pushed to reskill and upskill to remain relevant. There’s no doubt that most of us will have to reinvent ourselves at some point if we want to do the same. If you find yourself in this situation currently, grad school may not be a bad choice. The bigger challenge, however, will be picking what to major in. If you set yourself up to be a strong candidate for jobs that are in high demand, you risk being too late to the game by the time you graduate. For instance, if everyone studies data science in order to fill unfilled vacancies, in a few years there will be a surplus of candidates. A better strategy is to do your research and try to predict what the in-demand roles will be in the future. Further, many graduate programs are starting to teach soft skills, which will prepare you for an uncertain labor market rather than for specific jobs.

• To follow your passion. It’s not uncommon for people to get stuck in the wrong job as a result of poor career guidance or a lack of self-awareness at a young age—failing to know their interests and potential when they began their careers. This leads to low levels of engagement, performance, and productivity, and high levels of burnout, stress, and alienation. Pursuing your passion, therefore, is not a bad criterion for deciding to go to grad school. After all, people perform better and learn more when their studies align with their values. If you can nurture your curiosity and interests by pursuing rigorous learning, your expertise will be more likely to set you apart from other candidates and increase your chances of ending up in a job you love.

Reasons You Should Not Go to Grad School

• You can learn for free (or for much less money). There is a plethora of content—books, videos, podcasts, and more—that are now widely available, at no cost, to the general public. Arguably, much of this free content mirrors (or actually is) the material students are studying in grad school programs. Therefore, if you want a master’s degree simply to gain more knowledge, it’s important to recognize that it is possible to re-create learning experiences without paying thousands of dollars for a class. Consider all the things you can learn just by watching YouTube, assuming you have the discipline and self-control to focus: coding, digital drawing, UX design, video editing, and more. Other platforms, such as Udemy and Coursera can be used to upskill at a more affordable cost than attending a degree program. Essentially, if your goal is to acquire a new skill, and that skill can be taught, it is hard to compete with platforms where experts can crowdsource, teach, and share content.

• You may be wasting your time. Historically, people have learned mostly by doing—and there is a big difference between communicating the theoretical experience of something and actually going through that experience. This is a truth that can’t be changed by a graduate (or undergraduate) education. In fact, most Fortune 500 firms end up investing substantially to reskill and upskill new hires, regardless of their credentials. For instance, employers like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft all pointed out that learnability—having a hungry mind and being a fast and passionate learner—is more important than having acquired certain expertise in college. Along the same lines, many employers complain that even the best- performing graduates will need to learn the most relevant job skills, such as leadership and self-management, after they start their jobs. Oddly, this does not stop employers from paying a premium for college qualifications, including graduate credentials.

• You will probably go into debt. For some grad school programs, the ROI is clear, but there’s a great deal of variability. It can be challenging to find a program that is certain to boost your income in the short run, particularly if you also want to study something you love. For example, an MBA is more likely to increase your earning potential than a master’s in climate change. But if your true passion is climate change, you may end up excelling and having a more lucrative long-term career while you struggle financially in the short term. All of this is to say that if you’re not committed to the subject you’re studying enough to go into debt for a few years, the risk probably isn’t worth the degree.

What is discouraging is that this dilemma would not be a problem at all if:

• Employers started to pay more attention to factors other than a candidate’s college degree or formal credentials

• Universities devoted more time to teaching soft skills (and got better at it)

• Universities focused on nurturing a sense of curiosity, which would be a long-term indicator of people’s career potential, even for jobs they have never done before

The problem is that employers tend to prioritize the qualifications of a graduate degree (the diploma itself) rather than the experience and education one receives while pursuing it. But assuming the recent trend to buy more and more formal education continues, eventually we can assume that graduate credentials won’t be enough for candidates to gain a true competitive advantage. Just like the value of a master’s degree is equivalent to the value of an undergraduate degree 30 years ago, if in 30 years a large proportion of the workforce obtains a master’s, or PhD, employers may finally be forced to look at talent and potential beyond formal qualifications.

It seems, then, that the decision to go or not to go to grad school is as complex as uncertain, for there are no clear-cut arguments in favor of it or against it. To be sure, it is not easy to predict what the ROI of grad school will be, though the factors outlined here may help you assess your own individual circumstances. Like any big decision in life, this one requires a fair amount of courage and risk taking. In the words of Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize–winning psychologist who pioneered the modern study of decision-making under uncertainty, “Courage is willingness to take the risk once you know the odds. Optimistic overconfidence means you are taking the risk because you don’t know the odds. It’s a big difference.”