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R.O.I.
By CECILIA CAPUZZI SIMON
Graduate school has long been a recession hideout, a place to add new skills and credentials that, presumably, increase job opportunities and salary in a market recovered by graduation. A year after 2008’s economic meltdown, applications to graduate school rose more than 8 percent. Last year, as the country hobbled toward recovery (or not), 27 percent of college seniors said they planned to attend immediately after graduation, up from 21 percent in 2007, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers.
Students will invest, typically, two or more years in advanced study and thousands of dollars in tuition and expenses. A little more than half of students working toward a master’s will borrow an average $31,000, on top of any undergraduate debt they may already have.
So as a strictly financial calculation, does the investment pay off?
Some academics balk at the return-on-investment question. “Universities don’t sit around and say, ‘We will only have graduate schools in which the starting salary is higher than the tuition,’ ” says Nicholas Lemann, dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Journalists, like others who are pursuing a passion, he says, “do not think of their lives in pure R.O.I. terms.”
Indeed, when it comes to gauging the value of education, considering only payback is seldom sound, especially for programs steeped in traditions of “knowledge for knowledge’s sake.” But if schools of applied learning aren’t asking the tough questions about the financials of a degree, potential students should, says Anthony P.