The Masters Trap

[sanantone]

I have no sympathy. Just knowing the demographics of these types of schools, most of these students are not from vulnerable populations. They're applying to PhD programs at Ivy Plus schools; these schools didn't go out and find them. I'm sure they are aware of funded PhD programs, and they probably applied to a funded program at University of Chicago. If you can't get into your school of choice, apply somewhere else. They were so desperate to get into one of their dream schools, they took on $60k in debt.

It's not uncommon for rejected PhD applicants to be offered admission to a master's program instead to improve their GPA and give them more research experience. I turned one down years ago.

I am of the opinion that it's stupid to quit your job and live totally off of student loans to earn a master's degree that doesn't lead to a particular career. If they had quit to earn an MSW, which requires an internship, that would make sense. You know what you're going to do with the degree, it leads to a specific job, there are many openings, and you need the degree for the license. Of course, I will add that you should go to the cheapest school possible.

[ss20ts]

Plus, a lot of people here say "don't go for a 2nd/3rd Bachelor's degree, just go get a Master's degree instead". Where's that money coming from? If money is currently tight because my Bachelor's degree doesn't open up local jobs, how am I going to even begin to think about getting a Master's degree?

You can't have it both ways.

I used to say that because so many on here said it to me. Then I researched grad certificates and holy cow $$$$. I was happy when UMPI announced the marketing concentration. I wanted back in at UMPI. I will complete a second bachelor's degree for far less money and much less time than a grad cert. A master's in marketing would take at least a year and cost over $20K. The second bachelor's degree will cost me $2800 and 16 weeks...probably less since It won't take me the full term to complete the classes.

So weird. I've edited this 3 times now and it still keeps leaving off my comment.

[tb81]

There's many factors that cause such situations but a lot of it hinges on 2 aspects. Universities market Masters programs as "opening doors" for potential grad students; that somehow an advanced degree will put you ahead of the pack, allow you to do anything, & fulfill your wildest dreams. Also, potential students believe that with the right degree from the right college, they'll beat the odds and land the career and salary they've always wanted. These expectations are unrealistic as they're divorced from the realities of the job market in both the public & private sector. 
 
There's not much demand for PhDs in the private sector, sans a handful of STEM jobs. Most doctoral programs that have application in the private sector are professional doctorates in medicine, pharmacy, veterinary, or other such sciences. So many times a PhD student's best bet at employment using their degree is getting a position in higher education. (More on that below.) For Master's degree holders, there's a higher chance of securing employment but it's usually in a managerial position, whether public or private sector. If you don't enjoy supervising people and picking up the slack for absentees and empty positions, as well as screening, hiring, and training new hires for those positions (along with all your other normal job duties)...management is going to be a miserable place for you. But again, depending on the employer, a Master's may not even be required.
 
For those who want to remain in academia the landscape is even worse, whether you have a Master's or PhD. Around 75% of university faculty in the US are adjuncts, meaning you're a part-time, temporary instructor who's working on a semester-to-semester basis while being paid $1,500 (community college) to 4,500+ (major private university) per section you teach. (These are the averages for my area of the country, YMMV.) You probably will only get a maximum of 2-3 sections per semester if you're lucky, and you most likely won't be teaching summers. So if you luck out & get 6 sections for the year, you'll bring in anywhere from $9,000 - $27,000....before taxes. Let's split the difference and say you're paid $3,000 per section (Which is good for the US Southeast region). You'll probably have 30+ students in each section, as the schools cram them as full as they can. 
 
So the math on this is: $3,000/30 students = $100 per student   $100/16 weeks = $6.25 per student per week
 
Keep in mind that this is before taxes and you get no benefits/insurance of any kind. Your employer will likely charge you for parking. The average income will also be lower if you have more students in your section as you're not paid per student. If you want to stay in academia using your degree, this is the most probable scenario in which you'll find yourself.
 
Tenure track positions are few and far between while the competition is fierce. Usually the applicant pool is so broad that it exponentially reduces your chance of being noticed for consideration. Non-tenure positions are just as bad, competition-wise. I'm employed by a large (20,000+ student) regional university in the Southeast. My university posted 5 full-time, non-tenured, instructor positions late last year in a broad range of subjects from English to Communication to Biology. There were 250 applicants for those 5 positions. Applicants were not evenly distributed over the vacancies and the STEM positions had fewer candidates. Still, an average of at best a 2% chance at securing a job isn't that great; keep in mind the average was lower for some positions.

Even within academia, you'll now find a large number of people with graduate degrees in staff positions that don't require an advanced degree, and all those people are waiting for some faculty member to leave, die, or retire so they can have a shot at applying for a faculty position. For each position that comes available, there will be dozens, if not hundreds, of applicants both internal & external and the chances of you scoring a job are almost in the same league with lottery odds. 

This is the math that most people applying to graduate school don't consider. Colleges and universities are selling a dream that doesn't exist. There are more graduate degree holders than there is a market for those degrees and skills. But everyone thinks they're the exception & they'll borrow their way into oblivion trying to buy that dream.

[Stanislav]

I have no sympathy. Just knowing the demographics of these types of schools, most of these students are not from vulnerable populations. They're applying to PhD programs at Ivy Plus schools; these schools didn't go out and find them. I'm sure they are aware of funded PhD programs, and they probably applied to a funded program at University of Chicago. If you can't get into your school of choice, apply somewhere else. They were so desperate to get into one of their dream schools, they took on $60k in debt.

I have all the sympathy. These are very anxious young people who spent all their adult life getting good grades in humanities programs. This is a bubble that does not resemble real world, and Masters programs like MAPH prey precisely on that particular mindset. It's just like a for-profit school charging a poor person $30K for Pharmacy Assistant diploma. Despicable.

[sanantone]

I have no sympathy. Just knowing the demographics of these types of schools, most of these students are not from vulnerable populations. They're applying to PhD programs at Ivy Plus schools; these schools didn't go out and find them. I'm sure they are aware of funded PhD programs, and they probably applied to a funded program at University of Chicago. If you can't get into your school of choice, apply somewhere else. They were so desperate to get into one of their dream schools, they took on $60k in debt.

I have all the sympathy. These are very anxious young people who spent all their adult life getting good grades in humanities programs. This is a bubble that does not resemble real world, and Masters programs like MAPH prey precisely on that particular mindset. It's just like a for-profit school charging a poor person $30K for Pharmacy Assistant diploma. Despicable.

I don't think this is comparable to running ads, holding recruiting events, and placing dozens of phone calls to recruit poor, first generation college students who only have a high school diploma or GED and sometimes not even that. It's definitely not comparable to aggressively recruiting disabled veterans. 

These are people who completed bachelor's degrees, most likely had parents with college degrees, they disproportionately come from affluent backgrounds, and they did not enter these programs because of a commercial run during Jerry Springer. 

If they couldn't do anything with their bachelor's degrees in humanities, then wouldn't their high quality undergraduate education prompt them to do research on the job market and value of a master's in humanities? You're applying to PhD programs and want to become a professor, and you didn't research the tenure-track professor job market? You can scour electronic libraries for research articles, but you can't google? I wouldn't admit them to a doctoral program either. 

[ss20ts]

Those who don't understand or comprehend how people end up in serious debt for their education should really hope you never have anything horrible happen in your life.

What does a woman with 5 children do when their 45 father dies of a heart attack? She went back to school to get her master's. Yup her family lived on student loans. The life insurance didn't go very far as she was trying to keep their house.

What a woman whose husband is abusing her and she finally gets the courage to leave and start a better life for her 3 kids? Yup. She too lived on student loans so she could put a roof over her kids head and food in their bellies.

What about a woman who has been self employed for years who all of a sudden is dying and gives up everything to spend 2 years focusing on her health so she can beat a blood disorder that was slowly killer her? She's now in grad school on student loans. She owes tens of thousands from closing her business suddenly.

These 3 women are REAL people I know. I'm the third one! You never know what will happen in life. I certainly didn't expect to end up in the ER twice in 2 days being told I was dying and my body was shutting down. I never imagined I would have permanent brain damage from this whole ordeal either, but I do. Life throws people curveballs all the time. Better hope you're never hit with one up in your ivory towers.

[sanantone]

Those who don't understand or comprehend how people end up in serious debt for their education should really hope you never have anything horrible happen in your life.

What does a woman with 5 children do when their 45 father dies of a heart attack? She went back to school to get her master's. Yup her family lived on student loans. The life insurance didn't go very far as she was trying to keep their house.

What a woman whose husband is abusing her and she finally gets the courage to leave and start a better life for her 3 kids? Yup. She too lived on student loans so she could put a roof over her kids head and food in their bellies.

What about a woman who has been self employed for years who all of a sudden is dying and gives up everything to spend 2 years focusing on her health so she can beat a blood disorder that was slowly killer her? She's now in grad school on student loans. She owes tens of thousands from closing her business suddenly.

These 3 women are REAL people I know. I'm the third one! You never know what will happen in life. I certainly didn't expect to end up in the ER twice in 2 days being told I was dying and my body was shutting down. I never imagined I would have permanent brain damage from this whole ordeal either, but I do. Life throws people curveballs all the time. Better hope you're never hit with one up in your ivory towers.

Sigh. This is not your average master's student at University of Chicago. This is a commonly seen student at non-traditional schools, though. 

This explains the Appeal to Emotion and Ad Hominem fallacies and personal attacks. These are tactics people use when they can't make a logical, factual argument. 

https://web.archive.org/web/201410180148...otion.html

[ss20ts]

towers.

Sigh. This is not your average master's student at University of Chicago. This is a commonly seen student at non-traditional schools, though. 

This explains the Appeal to Emotion and Ad Hominem fallacies and personal attacks. These are tactics people use when they can't make a logical, factual argument. 

https://web.archive.org/web/201410180148...otion.html

Sigh all you want. I said nothing about any particular school. I did provide a factual argument. You just don't like the argument because it doesn't fit into your narrative. Like i said you better hope you're never hit with a curveball.

[ss20ts]

towers.

Sigh. This is not your average master's student at University of Chicago. This is a commonly seen student at non-traditional schools, though. 

This explains the Appeal to Emotion and Ad Hominem fallacies and personal attacks. These are tactics people use when they can't make a logical, factual argument. 

https://web.archive.org/web/201410180148...otion.html

Sigh all you want. I said nothing about any particular school. I did provide a factual argument. You just don't like the argument because it doesn't fit into your narrative. Like i said you better hope you're never hit with a curveball.

You don't know anything about my life, and if you don't stop with the personal attacks, I will report you to the admin. You're wishing bad things on someone who was pointing out poor decisionmaking. That is sick. If karma existed, it would hit you.

You provided anecdotes that were irrelevant to the article and to the poor decisions people were addressing. No one once said they don't know how anyone goes into large amounts of debt. The comments were specifically about the types of students who choose to borrow for expensive graduate programs at Ivy Plus schools, not single moms with five kids.

I didn't say I knew anything about your life. I didn't attack you at all. I did not wish bad things on anyone at all. I said you better hope you're never hit with a curveball. That does not say I hope bad things happen to you. 


I didn't provide anecdotes. I provide real examples of real people and how life can change in an instant. 

University of Chicago isn't even part of Ivy Plus. 

https://www.ivyplusnetwork.com/homepage/...iversities

[sanantone]

towers.

Sigh. This is not your average master's student at University of Chicago. This is a commonly seen student at non-traditional schools, though. 

This explains the Appeal to Emotion and Ad Hominem fallacies and personal attacks. These are tactics people use when they can't make a logical, factual argument. 

https://web.archive.org/web/201410180148...otion.html

Sigh all you want. I said nothing about any particular school. I did provide a factual argument. You just don't like the argument because it doesn't fit into your narrative. Like i said you better hope you're never hit with a curveball.

You don't know anything about my life, and if you don't stop with the personal attacks, I will report you to the admin. You're wishing bad things on someone who was pointing out poor decisionmaking. That is sick. If karma existed, it would hit you.

You provided anecdotes that were irrelevant to the article and to the poor decisions people were addressing. No one once said they don't know how anyone goes into large amounts of debt. The comments were specifically about the types of students who choose to borrow for expensive graduate programs at Ivy Plus schools, not single moms with five kids.

I didn't say I knew anything about your life. I didn't attack you at all. I did not wish bad things on anyone at all. I said you better hope you're never hit with a curveball. That does not say I hope bad things happen to you. 


I didn't provide anecdotes. I provide real examples of real people and how life can change in an instant. 

University of Chicago isn't even part of Ivy Plus. 

https://www.ivyplusnetwork.com/homepage/...iversities

That is the definition of anecdotal evidence. Anecdotal evidence is singular situations that may or may not be representative of the target population because the evidence was not collected in a systematic manner. 

The average debt at University of Chicago is high because the program is expensive, not because the majority of their students were thrown a curveball that caused them to live off loans. They chose not to work, they chose to attend school on campus, and they chose to borrow for an extremely expensive program. 

There is no official definition for Ivy Plus, but it just so happens that University of Chicago is on the list you provided. It would help a lot if you took the time to read things through carefully instead of rushing to take offense and personally attack commenters.