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Thinking of taking those big brains to grad school? Depending on your field of choice, it may not stretch your career prospects or future earnings — just your own wallet.
According to a study recently released by the Postsecondary Education & Economics Center at American University, which was originally based on research from the Yale Tobin Center for Economic Policy, degrees in social work, psychology, and curriculum and instruction have the potential to yield a zero to negative return on investment, considering the full cost that goes into earning the degree.
“A graduate degree can benefit you financially in some circumstances, but it is a very risky proposition,” Preston Cooper, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told the Washington Post. “You want to make sure you are working with all the information.”
The release of the report — in which the authors used data on approximately 800,000 students over three decades at Texas public universities to calculate just how much a graduate degree would boost a professional’s lifetime earnings while making adjustments for additional factors (including total cost of attendance and how much their salary may have increased anyway) — coincides with the Trump administration urging potential students to weigh the cost of grad programs before signing up.
This is especially the case for those who would need to take on student loans.
On the other hand, those looking to pursue graduate degrees in medicine, law and pharmacy can breathe easier, as the study showed that these degrees have the highest return on investment. Researchers found that salaries nearly tripled for those with medical doctorate degrees and shot up by over two-thirds for those who earned a doctorate in pharmacy.
“The message is that we need to provide better information to students,” Joseph Altonji, a Yale University economist and one author of the report, told The Washington Post, when referring to sussing out which grad programs are worth the time and cost.
The report also found that in general, grad programs provide a larger lift to women, full-time students and those who earned lower-salary undergraduate degrees.
While some prospective grad students tend to solely look at the earnings of graduates for a program they are considering attending, Zhengren Zhu, a co-author of the report, said this was a “bad idea” adding that these reported students may have had higher salaries before they even started grad school.
“At the very least, you should compare what they earned before grad school and what they earned after,” Zhu, who serves as an assistant professor of economics at Vassar College, told The Washington Post.
