Instapundit links to a CNN Money article titled “My master’s wasn’t worth it” in which a handful of master’s degree recipients tell their stories about how they allowed themselves to get ripped off by pursuing the middle child of college degrees.
In my experience as an esteemed MA holder, the only thing the degree (one not from an upper-tier institution) is good for is impressing the type of people who don’t know that a master’s is generally worthless. So, basically, my co-workers and people who watch lots of reality TV and people who come from an era or from families in which degrees of any kind were scarce think that it’s crazy-insane-wow that I have a master’s degree. And when they come to know that I’m a waiter (or, for my co-workers, that I have a master’s) they are flabbergasted and then they get scared because if I have a master’s and am waiting tables then what’s going to happen to them? I have to admit it is kind of entertaining to watch this thought travel through people’s minds when they learn this fact. It’s like “oh wow, cool, wait, what?, oh shit!”
One guy wrote to CNN:
Now it’s been more than two years, and I’m competing against fresh grads for entry-level positions and leadership training programs. A career counselor told me I missed the boat on getting a solid return on investment for my master’s.
I have three part-time jobs. I am an unpaid volunteer in a local hospital’s HR department, I’m a content manager for a video game website, and I clean typewriters… yes, typewriters.
I’m stuck with a large amount of debt, I have this fancy master’s no one cares about, and I can’t get the experience I need. I’m really at a loss of what to do.
I feel the same. I doubt that the master’s on my resume (because that’s all it is at this point – just a spot on my resume) has any value. I was named employee of the month at my company back in ’07, and I bet that is worth more than my master’s degree. It would be cool if there was some tool that could analyze lines on the resume to see which ones hold the most value for an applicant. I know that there are professional resume builders who know what is valuable and what isn’t, and I’d be interested to see their take on master’s degrees, especially in relation to non-credential qualifications.
I came out of a finance degree and didn’t have anything lined up. I can’t say I was pounding the pavement looking for positions, but I made a mistake by not pressing for internships during my undergrad years. That seems to be the only ‘in’ nowadays. I had top grades among Finance students but just didn’t think or know and hadn’t been told how important internships were. So I just focused only on school work because that’s what I was best at. So I graduated and didn’t immediately find a job so I decided to enroll in a master’s econ program. Again, I just assumed that opportunities would flow to me because that’s pretty much what you’re led to believe when you’re in the diploma mill bubble. Everyone in that world has convinced themselves that everything will work out fine because if they hadn’t convinced themselves of it they wouldn’t be in the bubble in the first place, and I was dumb enough to go along.
I started the master’s and then did actually get a job in the industry but then quit that in order to complete the master’s because I still believed that what I’d set out to achieve was worth the high sticker price. Another degree holder at CNN:
I thought this wide array of experience would at least get me interviews. After hundreds of applications over the past four years, I have had less than five interviews.
Even though the recession has been tough, I too have had only two interviews. Both of them were set-up by people I knew who knew HR people. So I’ve literally not had one single interview with a company that found my resume and thought that based upon it I’d be a good fit for their company.
I hope this doesn’t sound like a complaint. When it comes down to blaming individuals, I’m the only one to blame. Beyond that there’s just been this massive structural overvaluation of the master’s (and bachelor’s and J.D.) that is a function of many other things that can’t be pinned on any one person. Schools and the government and society and employers and the media and popular myth advertised to us all that a master’s degree and other degrees were sure things. That’s been proven wrong. If I’m a sucker, and I believe I am to some extent, I can take solace in the fact that I (we) am (are) among the first wave of suckers. It’s better to be one of the first suckers rather than one of the last.
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On the first wave thing, my advisor told me grad school was a con in 1992.
That guy in Rhode Island looks like he’s got more problems than a worthless degree. You’d think he’d have enough sense to give them a picture where he’s not two days into a bender.
There has been a drift in who staffs admin positions in larger corporate offices (receptionst, and what was once called secretary). Before my day, this used to be where you saw lots of pretty young girls, many of prolish background, combined with competent matronly older women. Over the past decade-plus, they have been almost entirely replaced by middle-aged black women; my guess probably for companies to achieve racial staffing compliance. The pretty young girls of yesteryear now have useful college degrees and largely work either in entry-level professional positions, or in high-skill support like business development/PR.
But over the past few months, I started noticing something very strange. This may be a fluke, or possibly a beginning longer-term trend: very obviously intellignet, professional looking, college-grad and even late-thirty-something white men getting into temp-to-perm admin positions, incuding receptionist. From what I’ve been seeing, these guys are dead-serious about getting their proverbial foot in the door (or even just to get back in the game after a layoff somewhere else) — and they bring a whole new level of professionalism to the game.
As an addendum to the above: a similar thign I saw at the most recent office parties is that among caterer staff, who have “always” been Hispanic or some unknown brown ethnicity – possibly east African, you now see young white guys who look like they went to college.
I occasionally have to interview people at the Master’s degree level with little experience. The thing I usually look for is any work experience and if they learned any thing in school. A Master’s degree can help you with both especially if you wrote a thesis that shows some useful skills. I work in a technical field so I don’t know how economics is different.
The problem is that if you never leave the university, you’re experience will be very similar to a lot of other people.
I have a PhD in a technical field and that is a very different experience.
PA, in my office the receptionists (and the HR departments to which they are promoted to) are all 70% young women with college degrees in stuff like communications, public adminstration, etc. Its a good example of credentialism creep and also why more women going to college isn’t that big a deal in the end (go to school to do the exact same job people used to do without a degree).
The exception is government and government-funded activities. Teachers and nurses get more money, automatically, if they have a Masters degree, EVEN IF said degree has nothing to do with their work domain.
The new reality is that some JUCO degrees pay more than masters because the job skills are in demand. You need to work the process in reverse and see where the job opportunities are and will be over your working years. 2-2.5 years nursing study at a local JUCO qualifies you to test for an RN which is a good paying career, way better than spending 6 years getting a white bread MBA. CAT scan/MRI techs and asst physical therapist offer similar paybacks on 2-2.5 years at a low tuition JUCO. Physical therapy has dropped the BS with masters degrees and grants a doctorate after 5-6 years FT study.Get a PT associates at a low cost JUCO, get some experience and then go for a doctorate. For any adventurous guys you can get your nurse education at a low tuition english language college in the Philippines – and be treated like a prince by a plethora of Filipina cuties, you might never want to graduate!
Many/most finance degrees have vaporized, the choices are intense number crunching with a CPA (only bachelors required), writing programming code or selling insurance.Pick you poison.
Who you know is more important than your degree and grades.
Finance is a reasonably in demand degree. Though perhaps its too long since you gradated.
There has been a drift in who staffs admin positions in larger corporate offices (receptionst, and what was once called secretary). Before my day, this used to be where you saw lots of pretty young girls, many of prolish background, combined with competent matronly older women. Over the past decade-plus, they have been almost entirely replaced by middle-aged black women; my guess probably for companies to achieve racial staffing compliance. The pretty young girls of yesteryear now have useful college degrees and largely work either in entry-level professional positions, or in high-skill support like business development/PR.
This is true of where I work as well. We still have the older matronly types, but they are now pretty much all approaching retirement and will be done in 5 years or so. Below them are mostly middle-aged black women. The younger white girls are generally in higher skilled positions now, entry or director-level positions, or high-skill support, as you say, like paralegals, analysts and so on.
Having said that, degrees are oversaturated. I don’t know much about the utility of a master’s degree — the only folks with it I have worked much with are MBAs, and it has only a bit of marginal utility there, from what I can tell. As for the JD, that’s a waste of time for anyone unless you are (1) in a top 10 law school and (2) in the top 10-20% of the class at that law school. Otherwise it’s an expensive waste of time.
At my first job in the DC area in the 1990s, all the new hires had MAs. It was basically the new BA. They wouldn’t even look at you if you didn’t have one. Partly, of course, this was because so many people had one. The employer didn’t much care where the MA came from or what subject it was in, either — just so long as you have it and the box is checked.
Most of those people in the story make the classic lament — “after I got my degree I found out it was impossible to get a job in that field.” Ooops. It’s not like the career prospects in any field are a secret, though to be sure no grad school will HELP you find out that their degrees are worthless. Hey folks why not investigate this issue BEFORE you spend $100,000 on a degree?
I agree pretty much with the thoughts and advice expressed in the post and the comments; exceptions might exist for more technical degrees, as some noted.
I too have a fairly inconsequential M.A., in a humanities field, but it was from a top-shelf university.
But unlike Chuck and others here, I haven’t had too much trouble with opportunities; I got one job oiut of post-M.A. internship and that credential led to everything else in those direct and peripherally related fields.
And when I got into the education field, which was only several years ago, again opps were abundant.
Straight up: In my current field, there is no problem getting opportunities, and, yes, this has everything to do with AA politics; I have to admit, both when even applying for my M.A. program and in getting job opps since —— but more specifically in my administrative education profession of the last few years —— the form and level of courtship extended to me was comically extreme;(the bottom line is this: I work in a public education district that is over 65% minority but is less than 10% minority at the administrative level and is only slightly less racially lopsided at even the teaching level). I had university administrators personally call me and half-beg that I accept a position in their departments (forget about ‘applying’); they also ran down very nice fellowships that I would be eligible for, doing some of the bureaucratic research and busywork for me.
Overall, my work in media, local and national, was pretty much merit-based, though that is a very person-oriented and ‘insider-ish’ industry, compared to my scholastic and current public education career, in which A.A. politics were heavily in play.
I look at like, that’s all beyond my power and my credentials and ability alone are enough to get me in; and the A.A. standards even bear that out: the fact is, there are so, so few minorities who have a master’s degree from the caliber of university that I attended, that that alone is enough to highly distinguish you.
I can see how angry many whites can be from A.A., but in some ways it serves a living testament to the economics principle of ‘scarcity’: the rarer the commodity in a given environment, the more value it will hold. I mean, let’s say you’re looking at a hypothetical graduating class of Harvard JD’s; among it are, say, 30 Jewish graduates, 30 Goy graduates, 50 female graduates; and 2 black graduates. Now, perhaps dependent on the firm’s specialty and some other factors, there could be a practical reason for those two black JD’s to be that marginally more valuable to a particular firm, whether that be its own personal values as a company or some specific task it specializes in that might behoove them to have non-white lawyers, etc. (.e.g, ‘criminal defense priority).
I’ll also admit this; among race discussion with white friends of mine, no other issue gets them more annoyed than this one; but I know that my experience is common among blacks who’ve gone to good schools and did well there; a close friend of mine who lives in New York and works in national media had even more personal and preferential treatment in his scholastic and professional career.
It is what it is, absurdities and all —– all I can do is personally work hard and know that I know my shit when I walk into the room. That’s on me, but nothing else.
All college is a con game today. Do you know what a PhD is? Basically – a long research project, a 200 page paper. That is it. The coursework is easier than undergrad.
Affirmative action and other anti-white male policies will increase in the future. And I applaud it.
If you are so inclined – only go to white doctors, white teachers, white mechanics, etc. A black person can ask for a negro doctor no problem. We can do the same.
There is no saving this thing now. Worse is better. I want young white men to get hungry and to get angry. It’s good for the motivation.
In my current field, there is no problem getting opportunities, and, yes, this has everything to do with AA politics
Which makes me wonder what’s up with the black guy in the CNN article. Granted his degrees are from nowhere schools, but the dude must be looking for work in all the wrong places. He needs to go apply for some administrative gig in education or government. In education, the nice white ladies in charge will jump all over him. In Fed government he’s got a big advantage, and even more so in local government. Ironically, he’d be worse off going to some all-black local government, like Atlanta or Montgomery, because there it’s all inside baseball and cronyism and they won’t want a brother from another hood. But a big, white run but vibrant city like New York or San Francisco or Boston surely has a suitable cubicle for the gentleman where he can be propped up as a nice black guy in a suit, especially if he’s well spoken.
Chuck,
Your obvious career path is to own a restaurant or bar. Initially, you will need to work 12 -16 hours a day so you might have to quit blogging but you are obviously smart enough and a good enough judge of human behavior to run the joint. Remember, right now it is a buyer’s market for labor. You can hire a chef and waiters (no offence) for a song. The real expense you will shoulder is the risk but if you want it bad enough you will do it. I would gladly patronize any establishment you owned. Make that your mission and it will happen.
Prof.,
I just don’t have a passion for it though I may have opportunities to move up through the company I’m with right now. Writing and blogging is my passion so that is part of the equation here too. But thank you for the encouragement. Perhaps I’ll move down that path at some point.
Writing and blogging is my passion so that is part of the equation here too
It’s clear that this is what you are working on. However, being unconnected (see Half Sigma’s excellent points about elite parentage of most young mainstream journalists) and non-Ivy is a huge disadvantage but online journalism/blogs open opportunities that would not have existed twenty years ago.
Here, your MA is a differentiator — a somewhat rarifying credential like that gives separates you form the average asshole with an opinion. And your work as a waiter gives you another differentiator in terms of self-marketing — and “angle” that makes you a memorable personality. It also gives you the practical experience form which your intelligence allows you to draw material and bigger-picture inferences. Together, those two things give you a good “high-low” kind of branding.
PA,
What you say about elite parentage and being connected is something I think about quite often now. Some of my thoughts about big cities have been with that topic in mind. It was assumed that the internet would allow people from anywhere and all over to plug in to the Hive and make money and contribute and have a voice. But where it matters – where news and stories and opinions and memes are generated – you still have to live in one of the imperial cities and still be connected in some way. There was that one article a while back where a chick wrote about how to be able to work an unpaid internship you basically had to have rich parents. That idea stuck with me. And it fits in also with some things written in the alt right about how these people in their bubbles castigate people who write about the drawbacks of diversity or interactions with other races. They’ve never really had to deal with it, yet for all intents and purposes they are our eyes, ears, and voice.
The gold standard of the alt-right is Steve Sailer, and even he writes for 3rd-tier publications (NRO averages 5x as much traffic as Takimag, Vdare and isteve.blogspot.com COMBINED) and spends way too much time trolling Kevin Drum for free. I don’t get the idea that Sailer’s writing career has gotten any more promising in the years since he left corporate life to live the dream.
He has a family. I wonder what they think of him staying up until 3 a.m., battling away in the Mother Jones comments section?
Make money first, then worry about being influential. Lion of the Blogosphere has the right idea.
GLPiggy, another thing about the company you work at it that it’s mature, not in growth mode. A lot of the guys I know who make it up the ladder do so because they work at companies that are aggressively expanding and too hungry to take for granted those who do the productive work that makes them grow. At a mature company, promotion is going to be 90% politics. Exhibit A: Congress, whose head count has essentially been unchanged for a century.
@PA –
I was one of those guys (educated white guy working as a receptionist) for several years.
I have a prestigious but impractical libarts BA; when I was first looking for work out of college, the sudden realization that the only thing I was qualified to do was secretarial work might have been the most emasculating moment of my life. I landed on my feet eventually, thanks to being good with tech, but I could have spared myself a lot of humiliation by sticking with a more practical major.
@ATC –
Precisely. In retrospect I wish I’d taken the Mencius Moldbug path: make bank in Silicon Valley, then retire young.
@Chuck –
If you know what to look for (schools, neighborhoods etc.), it’s easy to see how the “indie culture” SWPLrati nearly all come from elite backgrounds. Lena Dunham, the daughter of two connected NYC art-world types, is the obvious example, as is Miranda July (barf). And re: liberal journalism, I’ve gotta pimp my own long comment from a while back about some Brahmins going to report on striving Vaisyas.
Derp, there are unnecessary double-quotes at the end of both of my links.
See Peter Schiff’s 5-minute video in which he interviews bar workers on Bourbon Street. They all have BAs (at a minimum) and at least five grand in student loans. The most popular major? Business.
haha, “is there anybody here with a college degree?” “yeah.” “get me another beer.”
i hear you brother. i’ve moved on too. it is what it is.
I did my MBA at the University of FL at very low cost while on a paid sabbatical from my employer, graduating from the full-time 2-year program in ’00. A couple of lay offs and missed opportunities and a second Masters in Risk Management over the subsequent thirteen years has left me with the exact same salary as I was making in 1998 before staring the MBA. While the MBA has not led to riches or even a higher salary, it has opened up career opportunities in other industries and functions, and seems to get me some respect at work.
However, on occasion, I have felt the need to leave one or the other or both Masters degrees off the resume when I thought that would make it look like I was not over-qualified (over-educated) for whatever position I was applying for.
True, lower-level and clerical staff and blue collar acquaintances seem to be impressed with Masters degrees!
Your Employee of the Month award indicates the character traits important for most jobs, more than your graduate degree does. It would show me you can get along well with others, show up on time, are honest, take responsibility, etc. I’ve never been employee of the month. I know I’d have to work hard for a while for that.
PA:It’s clear that this is what you are working on. However, being unconnected (see Half Sigma’s excellent points about elite parentage of most young mainstream journalists) and non-Ivy is a huge
OK, I don’t remember what blog or when, but there was a whole post about the backgrounds of some of the prominent Times columnists and how most of them came from wealthy, educated families. I’ve wanted to get hold of it again but don’t know where to look. (Google searches just yield a mess, even restricting the domain doesn’t really work. So shamless beg here, links please?
CR-
I love your blog, had no idea you had a masters degree. Shit, you have two “good” subject degrees. Are you basically happy with what you do now? (Writing and having a job with money that’s good enough to support yourself and your writing)
Surely you could apply+network+cold call etc. and land a pretty decent corporate finance job?
RE: Sailer
The man is a saint.
@Georgia Boy: Half Sigma is now blogging at http://lionoftheblogosphere.wordpress.com/. Here’s one of the unauthorized biography posts: http://www.halfsigma.com/2011/06/the-new-york-times-unauthorized-biography-series.html
Sal 01/27/2013 at 10:15 pm
RE: Sailer
The man is a saint.
More Monk than Saint. Despite the wife and three kids.
It depends on the masters for exams puic relations is a golden key because it is so useful and rare
I came within a few points of maxing the SAT’s and was offered a free ride at an Ivy- this was 35 years ago- and decided I wanted to be a paratrooper instead.
That four years of discipline and privation was worth more to me than a degree from Princeton.
Since the time I left service I vowed never to work for anyone ever agin and have had a fantastic life because of it, financially, spiritually, intellectually, etc. Everything I have ever wanted to do or to be I have accomplished because I set the course of my life instead of relying on someone else to provide me with the security of a job/career and that includes going to college- although I am frequently a speaker at them today.
The common thread I read in these comments are based on the Liberty/Security angle- do we “work for” someone/corp/gov’t or do we create a life for ourselves?
I don’t think that this course of action is for everyone. You have to have an unusually high degree of self motivation and discipline and the only safety net is the one you create for yourself, but aside from the five to ten years I spent in penury and want, there’s been no cap on my earnings or my prospects since then. I support a large and loving family, I enjoy every moment of my day and I am deeply satisfied by the life I have earned. I may not have a degree of any kind, but that has never kept me from pursuing my education and learning about whatever interests me at any given time.
For the record, I read about a dozen websites, usually after chores in the morning with my coffee just to keep up with the pulse of the times and this is one of them- I think the topics, the writing and insights and most importantly the comments you attract are of a high quality and thought provoking- I would encourage you to keep with your writing as you clearly have a passion for it and a future in it.
Degrees aren’t worth the paper they are printed on.
Thanks cinch!
“I came out of a finance degree and didn’t have anything lined up. I can’t say I was pounding the pavement looking for positions, but I made a mistake by not pressing for internships during my undergrad years.”
This is basically the big lie of meritocracy. Fundamentally, economic success is tied to networking and not credentials. Meritocracy says that as long as you’re the best at something, someone will hire you for it. This is true in some instances (mostly mid- to lower-level bureaucracies in both government and corporations). Most of the time, though, getting a job is a function of either knowing someone or seeking work where the main qualification is having a pulse and not being brain-dead. Getting a job is not primarily about, and has never primarily been about, what you know. Rather, getting a job has been primarily about who you know.
To go meta, human beings seek to connect with other human beings. Shared interests encourage this, of course, but the biggest keys to connecting with someone else are a) wanting to connect with someone else and b) putting yourself in a connection where you can connect with someone else. Shared interests are tertiary at best.
Meritocracy, then, fails because it was a theory generated and promoted by autists who view human connections as more of a means than an end. To meritocratics, what matters most is how well someone completes a specific action or set of actions. It never occurs to them that most people would at least want to know if they would actually be able to get along with a potential employee or coworker.
Of course, being able to do a job is partially contingent on social skills, a fact that is often lost on the proponents of meritocracy. No job exists in isolation. Even the self-employed must, at the very least, engage with customers. Even on the production line, workers must be able to work cooperatively. There simply is not a single job where some form of social ability is not required. As such, being good at networking is necessary to some degree for any given job. Sure, competence and actual ability can help you get and land a job, but the absence of competence and ability doesn’t actually preclude from getting a job, or even from getting fired. Thus, the idea that one should focus primarily (or, worse yet, exclusively) on acquiring skills is nothing but a lie. It is far better to work on your networking abilities.
Bonus point for Game: Perhaps this explains why social proofing works with women. A socially dominant male, by virtue of his social dominance proves that, if nothing else, he can at least network, which generally translates into his ability to acquire resources.
You might find the “100 reasons NOT to go to grad school” blog interesting:
http://100rsns.blogspot.com/
Reason #83 mentions that there are 33,000 people with doctorates on food stamps.
Reason #43 features some depressingly funny videos.
You’re not the only person who got hoodwinked into grad school.
You gave me something to think about with the nursing school idea in the Phillapines. I’m ready for more world travel.
farmer,
Tell us more about yourself. Your story is the most interesting ITT.
I read a statistic somewhere that approximately 300 people per year start online businesses due to unemployment in the job market.
Because of the poor economy and the recession, we’re now forced to take control of our finances and to become entrepreneurs.
There really is no better time than right now to get started. We have tools like the internet, blogging platforms like WordPress and social media sites to help connect us with the people we need to get our business off the ground and increase our exposure.
Gone are the days of opening a brick and mortar business, paying rent and other outgoings to maintain your business.
I currently have my own blog i’ve been running for 10 months now and i’m due to make my first sale of my $17 dollar ebook this month.
This was all a direct result of being asked to leave 3 jobs after being told ‘i wasn’t a good fit in their company’. Thinking i was a failure at the time, it’s not until now that i’ve realized that they all did me a huge favour. Nothing is a coincidence.
If you want something bad enough, you’ll get it in time.