Grad School Is a Gate for Some Careers and a Tax for Others

Whether a graduate degree pays off depends entirely on the career you are walking toward. For some roles it is the only door in. For others it is a bill you pay for permission you already had.

A friend asked me last month whether she should do a master's, and before I could answer she had already listed the reasons she felt she had to: the people ahead of her at work all had one, the job posting she wanted listed it under preferred qualifications, and she had reached the age where the absence of a postgraduate line on the résumé had started to feel like a confession. None of those three reasons had anything to do with the work she wanted to do, and all three of them are the reasons most people give when they decide to spend two years and a great deal of money on a credential that the career they are chasing may never ask them to produce. The honest answer to whether graduate school is worth it is that the question is poorly formed, because a graduate degree is not one thing that