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Each member of a research group visited either the Virgin Islands or Hawaii...
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by Rachel Hartigan Shea
When software engineer David Domyancic, 23, began looking for a job in the spring of 2000, he and his classmates were perched on top of the strongest labor market since World War II. Hiring managers at Hewlett-Packard's Roseville, Calif., office offered Domyancic a choice of three positions, and he eagerly signed on. Then last summer, the California State University-Sacramento computer science graduate heard that the company was laying off 6,000 employees. "I thought, 'I have one year of experience. I think I'm screwed,' " he says. He was. After losing his job, it took him five months to find another one.
The bonuses have disappeared. So have the multiple job offers, the offers made long before college graduation, the offers that promised salaries higher than your parents' combined income. Now job seekers, not company recruiters, are the ones desperately accosting people at career fairs. Now employers pick and choose among applicants--and applicants take what they can get. Many college grads receive no offers at all, and some of those who do find the offers deferred for several months or even rescinded.
With the number of jobs available for college graduates down by as much as 13 percent over the past academic year, many recent grads are facing a big decision: Should they continue hammering away at the doors of inhospitable employers or retreat to the relative safety of graduate school?
The droves of people applying to graduate programs this year might lead you to conclude that going back to school is the only sensible course. The number of applicants to graduate programs has jumped just about everywhere--by 13 percent over last year in all programs at Minnesota State University-Mankato and by 27 percent at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. The Washington College of Law at American University in Washington, D.C., reports 22 percent more applications this year than last, while the School of Management at Boston University staggered under a whopping 153 percent increase. Companies that cater to people weighing grad school also are reporting a jump in business. Kaplan Inc., for instance, raked in 24 percent more revenue from its LSAT preparation courses in 2001 than in 2000 and 26 percent more from its GMAT courses.
To be sure, waiting out a recession in grad school is a time-tested strategy. During the lackluster labor market of the mid-1980s, graduate applications rose about 7 percent a year. "It's a respectable thing to do," says Susan Krinsky, dean of admissions at the Tulane School of Law in New Orleans. "It's even a productive thing to do."
But before you sign up for the GMAT or GRE, before you send away for applications, even before you start fantasizing about grassy quads, gothic libraries, and avuncular professors, it pays to ask yourself whether you should be going to graduate school at all. Will an advanced degree really help you get or keep a job during future economic downturns? For that matter, do you know what you want to do with your life? And do you need graduate credentials and graduate skills to accomplish it?
If you are still casting about for your life's goals, graduate school probably isn't the right place for you."A graduate degree should be a means to [a professional] end," says Trent Anderson, the vice president of graduate programs at Kaplan. Degrees in medieval history, nursing, or engineering prepare you for the same thing--a career, whether it's as a history professor, a nurse, or an engineer. Of course, exploring a specific intellectual passion--say, for philosophy or comparative literature--is another worthy motivation for going back to school. But for those still hoping to find themselves, Gordon Folger, director of the career center at Meredith College in Raleigh, N.C., recommends delaying further schooling: "There's no substitute for getting out there and trying something."
That's the path Jon Frieda took. After he graduated last year from Washington University in St. Louis, Frieda, 23, thought about going to law school, but he also considered returning to a job he knew well, selling car stereos. Since he was 15 he'd sold sound equipment, and the trunk of his Volvo was packed with a huge sound system powered by an extra car battery. "I used to say to customers, 'You want to buy that stereo? Come out to my car, and I'll show it to you,' " he says.
Before making a three-year, multithousand-dollar commitment to law school, he found a job as a legal assistant at a small civil litigation firm in Fort Worth. Frieda's experience doing legal research and dealing with clients convinced him that law was the career for him. Last winter, he applied to fourlaw schools.
Consult the pros.
If your field isn't law or medicine or academia, determining whether you actually need an advanced degree can take some effort. Talking with academic advisers or industry insiders will often clear up the confusion. Tony Filipovitch, dean of the college of graduate studies and research at Minnesota State-Mankato, recently told an undergraduate interested in city management or state administration that he didn't need a Ph.D. in urban studies because few of those positions required the research degree. "The five years he spent on the doctorate could be spent advancing his career," explains Filipovitch, who has consulted in urban studies.
Christina Wu, 28, found out through conversations with people in the film industry that she wouldn't need an M.B.A. to be successful in that business. What she needed instead were connections. That discovery sent the Santa Monica, Calif., resident, who was laid off last November from her telecommunications job, into an agony of indecision about whether to work her limited network for a rare film position or to defer her Hollywood dreams for business school and a more traditional job in finance. While the skills she would learn getting her M.B.A. would undoubtedly be useful no matter what field she enters, she's afraid that she'll leave B-school just as undecided about her career trajectory as she is now, except with a debt of $100,000.
Experts point out that even if young professionals don't need an advanced degree to do well in their industry, having one may help them get hired--and command respect. Wu is factoring the M.B.A.'s power to impress into her decision about grad school. "Women and minorities need to have so much more to prove themselves," asserts Wu. "The M.B.A. would help me prove to people that I have a brain and the ability to do the job."
Many large companies, in fact, hire only M.B.A.s for management-track positions. The M.B.A., as well as other advanced degrees, including the master's in engineering or computer science, assures employers that job applicants have a strong set of specific skills. Joseph Merola, acting dean of the graduate school at Virginia Tech, says that some fields, including many in the sciences, have experienced "degree inflation," with master's degrees replacing bachelor's degrees as the required entry-level credential for industry jobs. For instance, pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer now hire more junior scientists with master's degrees because they have considerably more lab experience than candidates with only bachelor's degrees. Similarly, defense giant Northrop Grumman increasingly seeks out engineers with cross-disciplinary master's degrees in engineering and business because they have more sophisticated business skills than recent college grads.
In fields that advance quickly, such as molecular biology or electrical engineering, or that increasingly incorporate the latest technology, such as manufacturing, a graduate education may be necessary to keep up. At the College of Business at Arizona State University in Tempe, for example, people who work in purchasing can get an M.B.A. in the fast-developing field of supply chain management, which uses technology and logistics to help businesses provide goods and services quickly and cost-effectively. The days following September 11--when planes were stuck on runways and businesses had to figure out where shipments were and how to get them to their destinations--underscored to many company managers the continual need for such specialists.
New interdisciplinary programs can help you expand the reach of your current job--making you more marketable and possibly more indispensable during economic hard times. Companies preparing to lay off employees "retain the skill sets they need," says Philip Gardner, director of the Collegiate Employment Research Institute at Michigan State University in East Lansing. "That plays to the benefit of people that have better skill sets." The University of Texas-Austin's master's in science and technology commercialization gives scientists a strong background in business, which prepares them to move into management jobs developing and marketing new technologies.
Good job hunting.
Graduate programs can not only teach you new skills but they put an efficient job-hunting machine--the internship program and career placement office--at your disposal. Kitty McGrath, the director of career services at Arizona State University's business school, spends much of her time establishing relationships with businesses so that they will hire her students. Since the recession dried up the flow of on-campus recruiters, she has been drumming up possible employers for ASU graduates by reaching out to small- and medium-sized Phoenix-area businesses that didn't typically hire M.B.A.s in the past.
Some career service centers go even further. The office at the College of Engineering at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., aims for 100 percent job placement for graduate students. If a student is interested in a company that doesn't normally recruit on campus, the office will track down alumni in the company and set up interviews for the student either at the business's headquarters or wherever the company is recruiting. Jared Fry, 23, won't get his master's in engineering management until June. But by last December, the office already had arranged for him to attend an alumni dinner in San Francisco. There he was taken under the wing of an alumnus, who spent a few days introducing him to insiders in the telecommunications industry. A position hasn't materialized yet, but Fry is confident that one will soon: "I've been getting the schmoozing trick down."
Questions about whether to go to graduate school are moot if you can't afford it. But before you balk at the sometimes awesome price tag, consider the following: The lifetime income of those holding master's degrees surpasses those who received only a bachelor's by $333,265, while professional and doctoral graduates earn $889,154 more than the bachelor's holders, according to the Employment Policy Foundation, a Washington, D.C., think tank.
These figures are just averages, warns Michigan State's Gardner. "Graduate school doesn't always pay off." Just ask one of the thousands of deep-in-debt Ph.D.s barely scraping by with part-time teaching gigs. Researchers further caution that some unknown part of the income differential between those with bachelor's and master's degrees can be attributed to the fact that people who go on to grad school often are more driven, a personality trait that is linked to professional success.
In the current economy, even some students who earn professional degrees find that the immediate financial rewards can be meager. One year after getting his master's in public relations at American University, Frank Strong, 28, is making $15,000 less as a public-relations officer for a professional-services company than he did as an active-duty first lieutenant in the National Guard. Strong is hopeful that his degree will pay off after the economy revives, but for now he's living paycheck to paycheck and avoiding shopping in grocery stores when he's hungry.
While going back to school is an obvious option for recent grads who are under- or unemployed, experts say that even the fully employed should consider heading off to graduate school if getting an advanced degree is already a long-term goal. "As an investor in your own human capital, it's a good time to do it [because] salaries are slowing, if not going down," explains Bill Coleman, senior vice president of compensation at Salary.com, an Internet company that tracks wage trends.
For those terrified of giving up even a recession-stalled salary, John Challenger, chief executive officer of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an outplacement firm, recommends going part time (story, Page 31). "The best way to get a graduate degree, especially in terms of income, is to do it at night. It often means four years of restriction on your personal life," but you get the benefit of maintaining an income while working toward a long-term raise.
Money was a secondary consideration for Saul Andino, who decided two years ago, during the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, to go back to school. "I realized I didn't want to get lost in not knowing what is going on around me," he says. Even though he'd already borrowed $40,000 to pay for his undergraduate education, Andino, 30, will assume an additional $85,000 worth of debt over the next several years. "Money is just money," he says. "Life is more precious. You've got to be able to do what you want to do." He's in his first year of the commercial diplomacy program at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, learning about international trade law, policy, and economics, knowledge that he hopes to apply to the economic woes of Latin America, and especially his home country, El Salvador.
More than money.
By all accounts, the choice to attend graduate school shouldn't be reduced to purely economic grounds. Yes, the job market looks bad, especially to folks who've only known boom times. But roughly 94 percent of the people who want jobs have them, points out Richard DeKaser, chief economist at National City Corp., a Midwestern bank, and an expert on employment and wages. Unemployment is still near a 30-year low. And even companies that have fired hordes of employees are hiring. "Today businesses are cutting and growing at the same time," says Tanya Singer, a senior producer at Yahoo! Careers.
Tim Gorton, a senior at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, can attest to that. Gorton, 21, recently received a job offer from Trilogy, an Austin, software company that laid off 340 employees last April. In January, the company flew Gorton and his fellow recruits down to its headquarters for interviews with the chief executive and financial officers. "I was pretty impressed talking to those guys about the company's trajectory," he says.
Not impressed enough to accept the job offer right away, though. Gorton, a computer science major, is strongly tempted to stay at MIT for another year to get a master's in engineering and further explore his undergraduate obsession with educational toys at the school's Media Lab. It's not the economy driving him toward graduate school, he says, but the "fun factor." Not a bad reason at all.
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Copyright © 2004 U.S. News & World Report, L.P. Used under license. All rights reserved.
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