Major Decisions For College

Opening the Door to Graduate School

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After four years (or more) of college, you’ll be tired of studying. You may already be working at a good job, one that offers stimulating challenges and pays relatively well. More education may be the furthest thing from your mind. But don’t close the door to the classroom forever. You learned a lot in college. However, there is more you can get from additional formal education.

Of course, graduate school isn’t essential to a successful career. Many people achieve great success without advanced education. George Washington is an example. Due to the untimely death of his father, he was unable to study in England, as his older brothers had done.[1] In Washington’s day, studying in Europe was like getting graduate education. His education was conducted mostly at home and in the field, where he was trained as a surveyor (essentially a Vo-Ed program). But Washington’s native intelligence and drive took him where he needed to go in life.

Even today, there are many chief executives of large organizations who do not hold graduate degrees. Nearly all CEOs of Fortune 500 companies have college degrees.[2] Only about two-thirds, though, have graduate degrees.[3]

But think about that statistic. The CEOs without graduate degrees are a relatively small minority, implying that they made it against the odds, succeeding on the basis of talent and effort rather than education. And in some fields, such as law and medicine, there’s no chance of beating the odds: You’ve got to have a graduate degree just to be admitted to practice. The same is true of teaching at a university—you must have a graduate degree, preferably a PhD. Lack of a graduate degree can be, even in business, a liability for those who hope to move into the senior-executive ranks; that’s why so many midlevel managers invest the time and money to get an “executive MBA,” even at the cost of taking classes at night and on weekends. A graduate degree is the price of admission to some fields and a valuable asset in many others.

In addition to earning a valuable or even essential credential, a compelling reason to go to graduate school is to get practice in making high-stakes judgments. In college, you spent much of your time learning facts and figures. It was a rare instructor and course that challenged you to make decisions. In graduate school, by contrast, decision making is the focus of learning. You address the kind of HSJs that you’ll someday encounter as your responsibilities in the world of work grow. It’s true that you can and will acquire most of your HSJ skills later, on the job. But there’s a great advantage to practicing those skills in graduate school with the help of professors and fellow students.

That advantage can be seen in starting-salary statistics. A graduate degree may be worth from 20 to 100 percent more than your bachelor’s degree, depending on the type.[4] In other words, if your bachelor’s degree got you a salary of $50,000 a year, a graduate degree could qualify you for a job paying $60,000 to $100,000. That salary differential reflects a difference in HSJ training.

Now, before going further, we need to discuss a caution about graduate school. It’s not a magic ticket to a higher salary. You can enhance your HSJ skills in graduate school, but you need to bring a high degree of skill and dedication to the process from the beginning. Part of the reason that graduate degree holders make more is undoubtedly that they started with greater skill and dedication than the average person in the first place. If you want to reap the benefits apparent in the salary statistics, that had better be true of you too.

A second caution: Never trust averages when making decisions that involve a large investment of your time and money. That’s particularly important when considering graduate education, because the difference between attending a prestigious program versus a relatively unknown one can be the difference between getting a great financial return on your investment and no return at all. In most fields there are too many low-quality programs, as we’ll see. And even in relatively solid programs, it’s only the top performers who are in demand at graduation; the rest may have fewer attractive options than they expected. Keep those cautions in mind as we explore your graduate education plans.

Graduate Education and HSJs

We’ve been talking so far about graduate school as though all graduate degrees were roughly the same, as is the case with a bachelor’s degree. In fact, graduate programs differ significantly. Some are as short as a year or two, while others, such as a PhD or an MD with specialized training, can take much longer than the four years required for a bachelor’s degree. Teaching styles also differ; in some graduate programs you’re studying mostly alone or with individual supervision by a professor, while in others you’re learning together with other students in large groups.

Yet, although graduate degree programs differ in many respects, most take a problem-solving approach to education; to one degree or another, all provide training in making high-stakes judgments. In law, business, and medicine the HSJs are found in “cases.” Some of the cases are historical. In law school, for example, you and your classmates will spend almost every day studying the way that judges decided past legal cases; you’ll discuss why a judicial decision came down the way it did and whether it should have been made differently.

In business school, the cases will be hypothetical situations in which you are required to make complex decisions about particular businesses. These hypothetical cases are based on real companies, and they come with lots of data for you to analyze.

In medical school you get a combination of historical and hypothetical cases. These cases describe the symptoms of patients and allow you to explore diagnoses and prescriptions. Better still, medical school will allow you to go into hospitals and study the cases of real patients. With this kind of problem-solving focus, you’ll get as much practice making HSJs in a few months of medical or business or law school as you may have done in four years of undergraduate study.

The same is true of graduate programs in the sciences, the liberal arts, and education. In these master’s and doctoral programs, you won’t often study and discuss cases. However, you’ll spend much of your time on research projects. The projects will require rigorous analytical thinking and good judgment about how to pose and test a meaningful research hypothesis.

For example, in a graduate program in economics, you might pose this hypothesis: “A graduate degree increases the earning potential of the average person who gets one.” Given the salary statistics we’ve seen, a casual observer would say, “Of course that’s true.” However, with your analysis skills, you would recognize another possibility, that the people who get graduate degrees are inherently more capable and more motivated than those who don’t. Their earning success could be only partly a function of their advanced education; it may be that they would have done almost as well without it.

To determine how much of a graduate degree holder’s higher salary derives from the education itself, you’d try to find people of equal intelligence and motivation, some who got graduate degrees and others who got only bachelor’s degrees. You’d use statistics to see if the difference in what those people make is significant. If you found that the answer is yes, and if this is the kind of thing you think about in the shower, you’d naturally want to know how much and why graduate education increases earning potential. That would lead you to formulate and test new hypotheses. If this process of asking and answering questions sounds appealing to you, you could be a very successful researcher. Though you might or might not be paid a lot for it, you’d be making high-stakes judgments because many people could rely on your conclusions as they’re deciding whether to attend graduate school or how to improve a particular graduate degree program.

In addition to research, as a graduate student in the sciences, liberal arts, and education, you probably will also do some teaching. Teaching, when done well, is one of the ultimate exercises in high-stakes judgment. A great teacher must be a first-class analyst of students’ learning needs and have outstanding people skills. How do you reach, for instance, the students who have wrongly concluded that they can’t learn? And teachers, more than any other professionals, have power to model moral sense and share it with others; my teachers have had that kind of impact on me. Ironically, a graduate student focused on research projects might see teaching undergraduate courses as a chore, an educational diversion. In fact, from an HSJ perspective, teaching is one of the graduate school activities from which you can learn most.

Master’s Degrees

Having seen the common emphasis of graduate programs on high-stakes judgments, let’s consider the different types of degrees in more detail, to help you decide which one, if any, is right for you. We’ll start with master’s degrees in the sciences, arts, education, and all fields except for business (which is quite different from the others).

A master’s degree is important to rising to the highest ranks in many professions, including accounting, psychological counseling, and public education. It can also be very valuable in engineering and in the physical sciences, such as chemistry, biology, physics, and geology. A typical master’s degree can be worth a salary bump of 20 percent, [5] though, as we discussed, you should check not only the national averages for the particular degree you’re seeking but also salary statistics from the program you plan to attend.

With the exception of education degrees, master’s degree programs typically require a bachelor’s degree in the same field, or at least one closely related. Many of them don’t require full-time work experience for admission, though having some practical background, such as through summer internships, can give you a learning advantage in the classroom and in doing research for a thesis. The thesis is a capstone project that you’ll research, write, and defend in an oral presentation as you finish the master’s degree. Generally it will take you two years to graduate, but it could be more.

Now let’s take a moment to explore master’s degrees in education, which deserve special attention as the most commonly granted master’s degrees.[6] Many people who pursue master’s degrees in education are already schoolteachers. If that’s the case for you, you’re likely to take your classes in the evenings at a university or extension center near where you live. And your research projects may be based on studies you do of your own students. Because you’ll be teaching full-time, it’s likely to take you more than two years to graduate.

Whether you’re currently a teacher or not, your best source of information about a master’s of education degree may be a public school administrator near where you live; he or she will have at least a master’s degree and will have helped many other teachers get one. In fact, regardless of the type of graduate degree you’re seeking, you’ll want to talk to as many holders of that degree as you can. Though each of them will have a unique perspective, collectively they’ll be an invaluable source of insight.

Issues to Double Click On

As you gather information about master’s education, take a hard look at your reasons for wanting the degree and the value you’re likely to get from it. If you’re a teacher in search of an educational master’s degree, this won’t be hard: You’ll know exactly what the degree is worth in terms of extra salary because your teaching contract will specify it. But if you’re not going to use your master’s degree to teach, you’ve got some extra analysis to do before deciding what it is worth to you.

For one thing, do a double click on the field you’ve chosen. For example, beware of adding a master’s degree to a bachelor’s degree that has little market value. If you find yourself saying, “I can’t get a job in my field with just a bachelor’s degree,” be sure that the same thing won’t be true of a master’s degree in that field. Sometimes employers require a master’s degree because a bachelor’s just isn’t enough to make you valuable in the workplace; the master’s degree adds some essential training. That is true in fields such as the natural sciences and engineering. But some majors simply don’t have income-generating potential outside of the academic world, regardless of the amount of education you have. In other words, with some majors, more education isn’t more valuable in the workplace, it’s just more education. You need to make this distinction. Get a master’s degree to supercharge your undergraduate education, not to try to breathe life into it.

You’ll also want to be careful as you choose a school for getting your master’s degree. Master’s programs are relatively easy to create. Once a school has enough PhD faculty members to qualify for university status, it doesn’t take much more investment to start offering master’s degrees. The classroom and laboratory facilities can be the same as those used by the undergraduates. And it may not be necessary to add new faculty; many of the professors teaching undergraduate classes will be qualified enough to provide graduate instruction.

Because master’s programs are easy to create, you’ll find some of substandard quality. These programs may not have the faculty and financial resources to give you a solid graduate education. This means that you could, if you’re not selective, end up getting good grades but still graduating with a master’s degree that isn’t worth a whole lot more than your bachelor’s degree.

Be thoughtful about staying for a master’s degree at the school where you got your bachelor’s degree. Some of your professors might encourage you to do that. Their mentorship could be valuable, especially if they have good connections to topflight PhD programs or organizations that you’d like to work for. And it could be particularly valuable to work closely with these faculty mentors in their research projects. But double click on your undergraduate professors’ offers to make you their star graduate student. Being the star in a small, underfunded, or little-known master’s program could leave you with few attractive options at graduation. Even if you learn a lot, prestige-conscious PhD programs and employers are likely to discount your degree. Staying in the same place for a master’s degree may feel comfortable, and it might turn out to be a good thing. But you wouldn’t want to do so without also exploring the possibility of trading up to a stronger school.

Even a prestigious master’s program, though, requires double clicking. Some of these programs may care less about your education than about the interests of the school and the faculty. They may see you as a source of labor, someone to grade undergraduate student papers and perform only menial tasks in support of their research, such as data gathering and footnote checking. They might also want you for your tuition, which is typically higher than what the undergraduates pay.

You can sort these issues out the same way you did when you were Eager Beaver, the eighteen-year-old college applicant who called the department secretary. Make calls to a lot of graduate programs. Find out how friendly they are. Try to determine why they’re running their programs. Is it mostly to get cheap research and teaching labor or to make a profit on your expensive tuition? You’ll find pretty good answers to those questions in their placement rates: If a significant percentage of their master’s degree graduates aren’t getting good jobs or going on to respected PhD programs, proceed with caution.

PhD Degrees

At some point in your college career, you may have thought at least briefly about becoming a professor. It happened in a class that you loved. The professor was smart and funny. He or she may have been deeply caring, like Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, or handsome and charismatic, like Indiana Jones. Teaching—especially in college—is a great profession. But it takes long years of training, and you need to be sure you can see the process through. “Indy” didn’t become “Dr. Jones” overnight.

A PhD is the highest university degree; it’s sometimes called the “terminal” degree, the one at the end of all your formal schooling. A PhD is essential for long-term employment at a university. It can also be very valuable in doing scientific research for private companies and government agencies.

Holders of PhDs are generally well compensated, depending on the field of study and the quality of the university granting the degree.[7] They may enjoy relative autonomy in their work because their training qualifies them to choose important research topics and to design experiments for testing their research hypotheses. Tenured university professors are especially free to pick their research topics; they also enjoy the significant emotional rewards of mentoring students.

Getting a PhD takes a long time—at least two years after a master’s degree, though most people spend much more than that two additional years. There are formal classes to take, followed by small research projects. The last step in a PhD program is the dissertation, a major piece of research and writing that may take years to complete.

The good news is that a PhD program may be less expensive than a master’s or even a bachelor’s program. You might win a financial stipend that covers your cost of living (assuming that you can live on macaroni and cheese). In return for this stipend, you’ll teach a lot of classes and support faculty members in their research. But your level of responsibility and ability to set your own learning path may be greater than when you were a master’s degree candidate.

Issues to Double Click On

You should commit to getting a PhD only after careful study and deliberation.[8] First of all, you need to recognize that a PhD will train you for research in a relatively narrow academic specialty. You’ll spend years studying the research of others. Then you’ll design a dissertation research project with the hope of advancing the state of knowledge in the specialty. Discovering something truly new will require that your focus be quite narrow; in some fields, nearly all of the big questions have already been answered. You’ll need to be deeply interested in your relatively narrow topic or you’re likely to lose enthusiasm for it.

You’ll also have to be patient. Your research won’t be done until the professors on your dissertation committee say so. The process may take so long that your work is preempted by new research and you have to go back and redo some things; you might even have to start over from the beginning. Sometimes getting your “terminal” degree feels as though it truly will be the last thing you do in life.

Because completing a PhD takes so long (plan for a minimum of four years and most likely six or seven)[9], be sure before you start that you’re in it for the long haul. You’ll meet lots of people who started work on a PhD, and even finished all of the coursework, but stopped without completing their dissertations. (These folks may refer to themselves as PhD-ABD: “All But Dissertation.”) They may in fact have learned much, but members of the scholarly community view them as lacking the most important part of the degree. You want to avoid that fate and should remember this parable when committing to any graduate program, especially a PhD:

“For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it?

“Lest haply, after he hath laid the foundation, and is not able to finish it, all that behold it begin to mock him,

“Saying, This man began to build, and was not able to finish” (Luke 14:28-30).

You also need to be realistic about what might come at the end of the process even if you’re successful. Universities typically graduate more PhD students in a given field than they hire. For example, a history department that produces two PhDs in an average year is unlikely to be hiring more than one for a permanent, full-time position. (In many years they’ll be hiring no one in that category.) That means that the odds of getting a job at a university as prestigious as the one you’ve graduated from are stacked against you. Depending on your field and the hiring conditions at the time you finish, you may not be able to find academic employment at all. There are other good ways to use a PhD, such as doing research for a corporation or governmental agency. But, especially if you plan to use your PhD to work at a university, you’ll want to win admission to the most prestigious program you can; that way, you’ll increase your chances of becoming a professor at a strong university.

Even if you do win a starting position at such a strong university, you still face long odds of getting tenure. For one thing, universities and colleges alike are offering fewer tenure-track positions than they used to, preferring to hire part-time and non-tenure-track faculty.[10] As a newly hired professor you’ll be required to publish—or perish (lose your position at the university). That means doing research that qualifies for publication in the most elite academic journals, which a host of people like you are trying to get their work into. Many will fail. As a result, they won’t get tenure, and they will end up moving to less prestigious schools or maybe leaving the academic world altogether. The lifestyle of a tenured professor can be good, but it isn’t easily won. You need to be well aware of what’s coming before you start down this potentially rewarding but long and risky path.

Medical Degrees

Many of us have thought, at least once in our lives, of becoming doctors. Especially when we’re young, our doctor is someone we hold in awe. We see doctors on TV sacrificing their time, saving lives, and struggling with great ethical dilemmas. We also watch them driving fancy cars to work. It looks like a great career. In fact, it can be. But the path to becoming a doctor is both complex and challenging.

There are lots of different doctorate degrees that educate you to care for the human body. Two of the most common are the MD (Doctor of Medicine) and the DDS (Doctor of Dental Science). But you could choose a more specialized degree, such as one in podiatry (care of the foot) or optometry (vision correction) or psychiatry (treatment of mental disorders).

Each of the dozens of available medical degrees is unique; you need to know the specifics of the one you’re interested in. But they have some things in common. One is that a doctorate degree is required to get a license to practice; in fact, many medical licenses require more formal education even after you get your degree. In other words, you have to get at least an MD or a DDS if you want to be a doctor or a dentist.

Most medical degrees require a bachelor’s degree, though not necessarily in a particular field; you’ll need to have taken some basic science and math classes, but there’s no requirement to major in something like biology or physiology. You’ll be taught those subjects in the first few years of graduate school, which you’ll spend mainly in the classroom.[11] In the years after that (medical and dental degrees typically take four years to complete), you’ll spend more time doing clinical studies, called “rotations” or “clerkships,” which will allow you to interact with patients. The education process continues after graduation, with specialized training and hospital residencies that may take as much time as you spent in medical school, or even more.

A medical degree can lead to a high-paying career; doctors are well compensated for the high-stakes judgments they make. And the need for their services seems to be always growing. People are living longer, and advances in medical technology mean that more can be done by doctors to enhance the quality of our lives.

Issues to Double Click On

You should know, though, that medical and dental schools are hard to get into. There are many more applicants overall than there are spots for students. Most medical schools, for example, receive thousands of applications for fewer than two hundred slots.[12] That’s something that separates these schools from other graduate schools. If you’re looking for a master’s degree in the arts, for example, you’re likely to qualify at least for a program of lower quality. There are lots of those programs, because they are relatively inexpensive for universities to create.

But it costs a lot of money to start a medical or dental school; the equipment is very expensive, and a medical school in particular needs to be affiliated with a hospital. For that reason, there aren’t many medical schools. Many states have just one, and some have none at all.[13] The good news about this scarcity is that you don’t have to worry much about getting a degree of low quality, because only a well-funded university can afford to create a medical school; even the less prestigious ones are pretty good. The bad news, of course, is that you might not get admitted to any school at all.

This means several things for you when you’re an undergraduate. One is that you need to get very good grades, especially in your science courses. The other is that you need a backup plan. For example, you might want to take some business classes, especially if your grades in chemistry and biology aren’t turning out to be so good. Then, if you don’t get admitted to medical or dental school, you’ll have the option of going into a medicine-related business, such as pharmaceuticals or surgical equipment or health-care administration.

Also be aware that a medical or dental education takes a long time to complete. In the addition to the four years required to get the degree itself, you’ll do at least several years more in residency, where you’ll get specialized training as the employee of a hospital or clinic. As a resident you’ll be worked hard and paid little; you might end up working two jobs, sometimes around the clock, to make ends meet. Things will take even longer if you choose to specialize in a field such as heart surgery or orthodontics.

Another thing to know about medicine and dentistry is that it really means a lifetime commitment. By the time you start your own practice you’re likely to have heavy educational debts, probably several hundred thousand dollars’ worth. [14] You may incur more debt to set up practice, which requires office space and medical equipment. It will take you many years of practice to pay off those debts. And your skills won’t be transferable to most other jobs. A doctor, for instance, can’t make nearly as much in most companies as he or she can practicing medicine; the HSJ training of medical school will prepare you to save lives, but not to save a crashing airline or bank. You should think of medical school as doctor school, the education that prepares you for a lifetime of being a doctor.

Finally, you need to double click on your assumption that medicine or dentistry is a great way to get rich. It’s true that doctors and dentists can, on average, do quite well financially. But some make much more than others, usually depending on their specialties. In general, to make a lot of money you have to do extra years of specialization. During those long years of training, you’ll want to have more than just money as your motivation.

Also, remember that being a doctor these days isn’t the job it used to be. On one hand, new technology is making it possible save and improve lives as never before. On the other hand, medicine is becoming more of a business. Doctors have to worry more about billing procedures and malpractice liability. Many feel squeezed by large hospital and insurance companies and by government programs. These “payors” of medical services often dictate what care a doctor can give and how much can be charged for that care. Sometimes it seems that being a doctor is not as much about helping patients anymore. Fortunately, there’s still a lot of opportunity to do good. Your patients will still thank you for your life-saving HSJs and your lifelong devotion to their well-being.

The Law Degree

Almost as long as there has been television, there have been TV shows about lawyers. The big lawyer show when I was in graduate school was L.A. Law. (You could think of that as the old-timers’ version of Ally McBeal or The Practice.) All of the lawyers on L.A. Law were smart and glamorous, and the cases they handled were always interesting. Watching the show made me glad I was in law school.

It wasn’t long, though, before I learned that the practice of law can be different both from what you see on TV and from law school itself. If you’re thinking about law school, here are some things to consider.

First, a law degree (Juris Doctor, or JD for short) is required to become a licensed lawyer in the United States.[15] Law school generally takes three years to complete. After you graduate, you’ll spend most of the following summer studying to take the bar exam, a multi-day test that covers many of the subjects studied in law school.

Unlike medical school, which starts in the classroom and gradually shifts to the clinical environment, all three years of law school are primarily classroom based, though there are opportunities for clerkships with law firms, government agencies, and other law-related organizations during the two summers. In the classroom, you and your classmates will discuss, under the direction of a professor, past judicial cases and legal statutes and regulations—laws created by legislatures and government agencies. You debate these decisions and rules, both in the classroom and in writing. Your professors and classmates push your analysis until it is airtight. Lawyers have to be very good thinkers and communicators.

Licensed lawyers can work in a wide variety of fields. Many of the lawyers you see on TV are litigators, or trial lawyers. But there are also lawyers who specialize in giving “transactional” advice to clients; their work often involves writing contracts and other legal documents. Lawyers of both types can work either in firms of their own or as “in-house counsel” to corporate or government employers. There is also the criminal justice system, where lawyers can work as prosecuting attorneys. And of course all judges are law-school graduates, many of whom practiced law before being elevated to the bench. The law offers many career paths with great potential financial rewards and opportunities to wield influence in society.

Issues to Double Click On

But it’s not all like what you see on TV. Before you commit to getting a law degree, you need to know a few things about the legal profession that aren’t obvious until you see it from the inside—which won’t happen naturally until at least the summer after your first year of law school, when you secure a clerkship.

For example, if you’ve watched much TV lawyering, you probably know that the United States has what is called an adversarial system of law. In this system, each party to a legal proceeding has a lawyer who represents that party’s interests exclusively. That’s different from what happens in some countries, where judges investigate the merits of each side of a case. The sole-representation aspect of the adversarial system serves as a guard against injustice, as even an indigent person or a criminal gets a focused defender of his or her rights.

But the adversarial system’s greater assurance against injustice comes at a cost. In many respects, lawyers do have to treat their counterparts as adversaries. For instance, when asking the other side for documents, including electronic records, they take no chances, asking for everything of potential relevance. The process of making and responding to these interrogatories in pretrial discovery is time-consuming and expensive. So is the often tedious work of deposing witnesses, whom both sides’ lawyers question in the presence of an authorized record keeper or reporter. This pretrial work, along with the making of motions to the court, often takes the bulk of the time spent by the lawyers on a case, particularly if that case is settled before going to trial, as frequently happens.

Needless to say, this gritty work doesn’t make for great television, and so unless you’ve been a party to a lawsuit you’re likely to see little of it until you enter into the practice of law. The same thing is true of the work done by transactional lawyers, most of whom who spend more time carefully researching, writing, and revising memoranda than they do consulting in corporate boardrooms. Television, in other words, portrays a less-than-balanced view of the typical lawyer’s typical day.

A visit to a law school classroom can provide a similarly misleading view. The cases you study as a law student will, for the most part, be quite different from the ones lawyers take on to make a living. In law school you study the big cases. Those include the ones that decided important social questions, such as whether students of different races can be sent to segregated schools. (They can’t, thanks to a 1954 Supreme Court case called Brown v. Board of Education.) You’ll discuss as many as half a dozen of these precedent-setting cases in a single day. As a practicing lawyer, on the other hand, you’ll work many of the cases you’re handling for months or even years. Often the legal rules to be applied in your cases will be quite clear from the beginning; you’re likely to spend more time gathering and arguing facts than pondering theories. Law school is great training for the analytical aspects of legal practice. But it offers little insight into the day-to-day realities of making a living as a lawyer, so you will need to seek that insight outside of class.

Something else that won’t be apparent until you start practicing is that there are a lot of lawyers out there. The United States has more than one million licensed lawyers.[16] And each year the law schools produce more than 40,000 new lawyers, almost two and a half times the number of new doctors.[17] In that kind of crowded marketplace, not everyone who has made the high-priced investment in law school will find high-priced legal work to do. Some will end up performing routine tasks that could be done by less-skilled workers if the law didn’t require a lawyer to do it. Because that kind of work involves little high-stakes judgment, it doesn’t command premium fees.

Given the large number of lawyers pursuing a limited amount of high-paying work, realizing your intellectual and financial expectations will require being among the best trained and the most committed graduates. You need to do several things. One is to get some exposure to legal practice before committing to law school. Go out and talk to the lawyers you know. Find out what they do and whether they like it. Shadow a trial lawyer if you can; sit in a deposition and visit a courtroom. That will help you find out whether the adversarial system is for you. Do the same thing with a business lawyer, to see if you might like giving legal counsel. Decide whether you have the passion for legal practice that will help you rise to the top of a crowded profession.

Be particularly careful about assuming that you’ll go to law school but not end up practicing law. Law school is lawyer school, the place where you prepare for legal practice, just as medical school is doctor school. It’s true that JD holders can find employment opportunities outside of legal practice; some business executives, for example, are law school graduates. It’s also true that legal education can be great preparation for the United States Senate or the Oval Office. But you need to be sure that law school is the right place for you even if you don’t become a corporate CEO or president of the United States. If being a lawyer isn’t your dream, you should consider another type of graduate degree, one that will yield a greater professional return on your educational investment.

Once you know that legal practice is for you, you’ll want to win admission to a prestigious law school and get good grades. Ideally, your grades will qualify you for law review, the legal research publication edited by the school’s top-performing students. This status will open the door to the top law firms and judicial clerkships (in which you help judges research and write decisions). Law is a very prestige-conscious profession; where you go to school and how well you perform there will determine the breadth and quality of your professional options not just at graduation but throughout your career. If you’re hoping to keep your options open, you’ll need to distinguish yourself at each stage of the legal education process.

The MBA Degree

If there are too many lawyers running around, what about all those MBAs? More than 150,000 people in the United States graduate every year with an MBA degree or something similar to it,[18] and still more students earn MBAs overseas. Unlike graduate degrees in medicine and law, which differ from country to country, the American-style MBA is recognized around the world. This increases its value, as an MBA graduate can move from one country to another in search of the best job. But it also means that competition among MBAs is truly global, so graduating from a good program is important.

The MBA degree takes two years to complete. In the first year you are likely to study a common core of courses. You may be assigned to a group with four or five others students. You’ll spend a lot of time with this group, analyzing and discussing cases. As in law school, these cases will be intellectually stimulating and challenging but not necessarily representative of the actual world of work. You’ll be handed the information needed to solve a business problem, rather than having to go out and gather it for yourself.

Still, the case will provide a good learning experience. Your small-group study sessions will prepare you for a classroom discussion led by your professor. You’ll live in anticipation of the moment when you are “cold-called” to introduce the case in that bigger group. The classroom discussion will help you see things you overlooked in your individual and small group preparation.

In the summer between your first and second year you’ll go out and get an internship. You’ll already have at least two years of full-time work experience before you start the MBA program, and this internship will allow you to build on what you learned in that earlier full-time job and in your first-year classes. The internship will help you decide what subjects to emphasize in the second year, when you get to choose your courses. It will also prepare you to get a job at the end of the second year. If things go well, you’ll have the chance to double or even triple the salary you were making before you got the MBA.

Issues to Double Click On

“Hold on,” you say. “You made a big deal about how many lawyers there are in this country and how that creates competition for the good law jobs. With all these MBAs on the loose, isn’t the competition among them even worse? Shouldn’t I stay away from an MBA?”

You’re right: too much supply of something usually means that its price goes down. It’s true that some MBA graduates aren’t making a lot more than they did before they got the degree. There’s an especially great risk of this if they attended a program of poor quality. Like other master’s degree programs, an MBA is relatively easy for a college to deliver if it is already granting a bachelor’s degree; the faculty and facilities can be the same. For that reason, you need to look hard at the quality of your intended school’s faculty and students.

One way to judge the quality of an MBA program is to look at what it expects from you. Beware of schools that will let you in without prior full-time work experience; the best programs require at least two years, knowing that topflight employers expect that much or more. Also, be careful about schools that pitch you on how flexible or easy they are. The best MBA programs will expect you to limit your outside activities and will work you hard, especially in that first year.

In addition, pay attention to degrees that look like an MBA but in fact are different. For example, you can get valuable career preparation from master’s programs in fields such as accounting (MAC), public administration (MPA), health administration (MHA), and information systems management (MISM). But each of these degrees is more specialized than an MBA, which is designed to prepare you to manage all kinds of organizations. The greater specialization can be valuable if, for instance, you want to be an accountant or if you hope to manage a city, a hospital, or a company’s information systems department. However, you should be clear about this distinction. Be especially careful if someone tells you that their master’s degree is “just as marketable as an MBA.” That may be true in specific fields, but the MBA is unique in its breadth of recognition and acceptance.

If you decide that an MBA is for you, don’t scrimp on it. Unless you already have a topflight executive position, it’s probably best to stop working and focus on your education full-time for two years. And trying to save a lot of money on tuition probably isn’t a good idea; good MBA education is expensive relative to an undergraduate degree. You should also go after the most challenging summer internship you can find, regardless of what it pays. And you should develop a clear specialty in the second year (marketing or finance, for example) so that prospective employers will believe you might actually be worth a six-figure salary on the day you graduate.

If you do all of those things, your MBA can open a lot of doors. Almost every organization, if you think about it, has the essential features of a business. Let’s take an art museum, for example. You may have sought the job as director of the museum because you love sponsoring exhibits that inspire and educate people. You weren’t long on the job, though, when you realized what it takes to run a museum.

Even though your museum receives some public funding, it isn’t enough to cover the cost of everything you have to pay for. That includes the salaries and health benefits of the employees, monthly utility bills, and advertising campaigns. As director of the museum, you have to raise money to make up the difference between these expenses and the money you get from the city or county that sponsors you. To do that, you raise money from wealthy individuals and you charge an entrance fee. When you do this, you realize that your donors and visitors become, in a way, your customers.

You’ll have to rely on those customers even more heavily if you want to bring a national exhibit to the museum or do some renovations to your building; that will require lots more fund-raising and probably higher entrance fees, at least for the national exhibit. The longer you’re on the job, the more likely you are to look around and say, “When I finished my MBA I didn’t want to work for a business. But this museum has all the elements of a business: products to design and build, employees to manage, budgets to balance, and customers to satisfy. I’m glad I got that MBA after all.”

Like the museum, most organizations have the characteristics and needs of a business. That’s true of schools, government agencies, charities, and even churches. Even though they aren’t trying to make a profit, they have to be managed effectively to serve their constituents and to survive. That’s why you don’t need to worry too much about the world being awash in MBA graduates. If you get admitted to a good program and work hard, you’ll find opportunities to make high-stakes judgments in a host of fields.

Part-Time and Online Graduate Degrees

Many people don’t get the chance to attend graduate school when they’re young. But, as their careers advance, they recognize the potential value of getting a graduate degree. By this time, though, life’s responsibilities and opportunities can make it hard to go back to school full-time.

The good news is that innovative schools are making it easier to get a graduate education without that full-time commitment. The options are numerous: You can, for example, take evening or weekend classes, study entirely online, or do a combination of both. You may find that your greater life experience and maturity make you a better learner than ever before. Studying while you work full-time may amplify your learning, as you make immediate application of what is being taught.

In addition to the inherent value of the education itself, the degree may give you new career options. Your employer may pay some or even all of your tuition. Getting a graduate degree this way can be a great thing.

Issues to Double Click On

But you can also be disappointed by the experience. The quality of part-time and online programs varies immensely. And you have to be more committed than the ordinary student, the one who has full time to devote to the cause and gets the face-to-face support of professors and other full-time students.

Be very careful as you choose a program. Think of yourself not as Eager Beaver but as the Beav’s mom, June Cleaver. Don’t take anybody’s word for anything. First, find out if the program is accredited and by whom. If you haven’t heard of the accrediting body, try out the name on a university professor in the field. Don’t settle for a program without topflight accreditation unless you have to.

You’ll want to find out who the professors are and what professional credentials they have. Also, ask about the hours of study and classroom work expected of you. If the total is less than what would be required in a full-time program, be sure that you’re not being given an easier path to a less valuable education. In addition, ask if the program offers assistance with career placement; in most cases, you won’t be getting the same support that you would in a full-time program. That’s not a problem if you like your current job, but it will make your degree less valuable as a job-change vehicle.

Finally, explore the way that you’ll interact with your professors and fellow students. You may be tempted to enroll in an online program that allows you to study at your own pace and at any time of the day or night. But you will learn much more if you get to communicate not only with your professors but also with other students who are studying the same things you are. In fact, the most effective way to learn from fellow students is in organized cohorts, where you not only communicate but also work together on shared assignments.

You’ll want to push for all of those things even if your employer is footing the bill. Your time is worth too much to spend it in a program that isn’t designed for effective learning. You’d be better off stopping what you’re doing and going back to school full-time.

What Graduate Schools Are Looking for

Would-be graduate school students often ask what admissions committees are looking for—they wonder what it takes to get admitted to a good school. Let’s talk about this as we conclude our exploration of graduate education.

Graduate schools aren’t all looking for exactly the same things. The PhD programs, for example, want to see research potential, ideally in the form of already published papers. The MBA programs, by contrast, care a lot about whether you’ve shown leadership potential through your full-time work experience. And of course even among graduate programs of the same type, the prestigious programs care about many things that the less prestigious ones don’t.

One thing that may be true of all selective graduate programs is that they’re careful not to put too much weight on mere numbers and labels. Let’s take your GPA and standardized test scores, for example. If those grades and scores are terribly low, you’ve got a problem. But what a graduate admissions committee mainly wants to know is that your GPA and test scores are good enough. They will look at those numbers as a potential warning sign, but not as a guarantee that you’re qualified. Bad scores might rule you out. Therefore, you should invest enough to be sure that your undergraduate grades and standardized test scores represent your best effort; put in the extra hours and retake courses and exams if necessary. But remember that even an astronomically high GPA or test score is unlikely, by itself, to get you into a good school. At most, an admissions committee will take such a score as a sign of excellent analysis skills. They’ll want to see more.

Graduate school admissions committees are also careful in judging letters of recommendation. You might naturally assume that the ideal recommender is someone with a fancy title, such as dean or president or senator. But put yourself in the shoes of an admissions committee member. Wouldn’t you care less about who a candidate knows than what he or she knows and is capable of doing? That is why recommendation forms typically ask recommenders how long and in what context they have known you. The admissions committees who create the forms are concerned about a recommender’s “strength of read,” or his or her basis for judging your ability. If a recommender doesn’t know you intimately, the committee will discount the recommendation, regardless of fancy titles or notoriety. The most you’re likely to get out of a letter from a university president or governor who doesn’t know you well is a bemused nod to your people skills. (“You’ve got to wonder how the applicant pulled that off,” the committee members will say.)

Therefore, you want to find recommenders who can speak firsthand about what you’re capable of. Ideally, they will have supervised you directly in your academic, extracurricular, or professional work. If they’re recognizable figures, so much the better; it can be particularly valuable to get the recommendation of someone whose judgment the committee members know they can trust, such as a person who graduated from the program to which you’re applying or who has recommended successful candidates in the past. But that kind of recommender will be the first to admit if there is a low “strength of read” in your case. So worry first and foremost about finding recommenders who both admire you and can speak from intimate experience. In fact, make it a goal to cultivate relationships with such mentors long before applying to graduate school.

Yet another label that admissions committee members will double click on is the name of the college you graduated from. You might assume that a student from a prestigious institution will have an automatic advantage over one from a little-known place. But admissions committee members know that though the Ivy League schools have more than their share of gifted students, not every Ivy League graduate is a surefire winner. By the same token, they know that even relatively unknown schools can produce standout students. They’ll look beyond the name of your college to find the things they really want to see.

Those things, it won’t surprise you to learn, are the hard-to-measure qualities required to make high-stakes judgments. The people who run topflight graduate schools recognize that the employers who hire their graduates are looking for HSJ capability. They also know that students who bring that capability to the program will share it with one another, supercharging the learning environment. So they try to admit students who have a lot of HSJ skills already.

Because these skills are hard to measure, a good graduate school will put substantial weight on written essays. You’ll be asked to describe your career goals and situations in which you faced challenges successfully. Many schools will also interview each student before admitting him or her. A skillful interviewer can tell quite quickly whether an applicant has the analysis skills, people skills, and moral sense to succeed in graduate school and later in the workplace.

Given that you’ve been cultivating these HSJ skills throughout your time in college, especially through internships and other forms of fieldwork, you’ll be well prepared for these essays and interviews. Your analysis skills will come through in the way you think about the questions you’re asked, regardless of the final conclusion you reach. Your people skills will show in an interview as you make a sincere connection with the interviewer. Your moral sense will be manifest in your honesty and openness to learning; even in a face-to-face interview, you’ll be willing to say, “I never thought about that before,” just at Rex Lee was willing to learn things from a student about a case he’d argued before the Supreme Court. Don’t worry about saying the right things to make an impression. Just let your HSJ skills show.

What to Do If You Don’t Find What You’re Looking For

It may be that after all this effort you won’t win admission to the graduate program of your choice. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as I learned when I didn’t get into Harvard or Stanford. There are lesser-known programs in which you can get an outstanding return on your investment of time, effort, and money.

However, you need to be careful in selecting a graduate school. The need for caution is even greater than it was when you were choosing a college. For one thing, graduate school is more expensive than college, in terms of not only tuition but also opportunity costs. Your time is worth more now than it was before; with your college degree you’re likely making more than you did after high school, and you may have greater financial responsibilities.

You also need to beware of graduate programs that are underfunded or understaffed, as we’ve discussed repeatedly in this chapter. Many schools whose primary emphasis is undergraduate education try to piggyback graduate programs without having the necessary resources. Likewise, there are “for-profit” schools that offer high-priced graduate degrees without holding their students to high standards of effort and performance. For such reasons, there can be a higher risk of stumbling into a disappointing educational experience at the graduate level.

An additional reason to be choosy about your graduate program is that you’ll care more about the credentials of your fellow graduate students and professors than you did in college. Back then, learning was primarily an individual event. The typical class was textbook- and lecture-based. You read the assigned pages from the text in anticipation of a class lecture. During the lecture you took notes along with other listeners in preparation for the exam.

In that environment, the quality of your learning didn’t depend much on how academically qualified your classmates were because you rarely interacted with them in the classroom. It also wasn’t critical that your professor be a recognized subject-matter expert. In fact, you might have been better off at a community college than at a research university, if the community college class was small and the professor had time to get to know you. It wasn’t necessary, in other words, to attend an elite college to get a good education.

Graduate school differs tremendously in that respect. The learning there is highly interactive, whether in case-based classroom discussions, small seminars, or research projects. In addition to personal effort, your learning will depend heavily on the efforts and skills of your fellow students and professors. Getting a good graduate education requires going to a good school.

For all of these reasons—cost, the prevalence of low-quality programs, and dependency on classmates and professors—institutional quality matters more in choosing a graduate school than it did in college. To ensure a good return on your investment, you need to know that your fellow students and professors are highly qualified. That doesn’t require getting into the number-one or number-two program in the country. But it does mean that you can’t settle for a program thinking that you’ll make up for its mediocre quality and reputation with outstanding individual effort.

So, once you have your graduate school acceptances in front of you, it’s time again for the Eager Beaver routine. You don’t want to attend a program in which you’ll incur the kind of debts only a doctor, lawyer, or CEO can afford if that program won’t open one of those career doors for you. In other words, you have to analyze the return you’re likely to get on your educational investment in a given program.

The first step in this analysis is to find out how long getting your degree is likely to take and how much cost you’ll incur, including opportunity cost. The next step is to get detailed placement information—specifically, what percentage of students are placed within a short time after graduation, what kind of work they get, and how much they make. When relevant, you should also check pass rates for professional licensure examinations such as the legal bar or medical board exams.

In forecasting your likely salary, remember that the national statistics on the value of graduate degrees are averages. Pay careful attention to those graduates of your intended program who aren’t finding employment in their desired fields or are working in jobs that don’t necessarily require graduate education. Also, resist the temptation to believe you’ll beat the average for your program. Try a Google search of the word glut with your degree type in front of it (for example, “PhD glut”). If the overall market for your intended degree seems glutted, be especially cautious of attending a little-known program.

With data on the likely financial cost and return, you’ll be able to determine whether the investment in the graduate program to which you’ve been admitted is a good one. Unfortunately, if your college grades were poor, there’s a strong chance that it won’t be. The best graduate schools are unforgiving of late-blooming college students. The same is true for low standardized test scores. If one or both of those deficiencies afflicts you, you’re unlikely to win admission to a program that will allow a high return on your investment. In that case, graduate school may not be the place for you. Instead, you may want to play to other strengths.

The good news for those with low college grades and test scores is that those things don’t matter in the world of work; HSJ capability does. And graduate school isn’t the only place you can develop that capability. In fact, whether you go to graduate school or not, the real key to professional success is to become a lifelong learner. If the door to a good graduate school doesn’t open for you, it may be time to start that lifelong learning process as a working professional. We’ll talk about doing that next.

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[1] James Thomas Flexner, Washington: The Indispensable Man (Back Bay Books, 1994), 5.

[2] The figure in 2005 was 97 percent. Spencer Stuart, Leading CEOs: A Statistical Snapshot of S&P 500 Leaders, February 2006, 6, http://content.spencerstuart.com/sswebsite/pdf/lib/2005_CEO_Study_JS.pdf.

[3] Ibid., 8.

[4] U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, 2008 Annual Social and Economic Supplement, PINC-03 (Education Attainment—People 25 Years Old and Over, by Total Money Earnings in 2007, Work Experience in 2007, Age, Race, Hispanic Origin, and Sex), http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/macro/032008/perinc/new03_001.htm.

[5]Ibid.

[6] M. Planty, W. Hussar, T. Snyder, G. Kena, A. KewalRamani, J. Kemp, K. Bianco,  and R. Dinkes, The Condition of Education 2009 (NCES 2009–081). National Center for Education Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, Washington, D.C., Figure 41–1, 101, http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/2009/pdf/41_2009.pdf .

[7] Ibid.

[8] This essay posted by a department at Purdue University provides a helpful overview of the PhD and the process for getting one: Purdue University Department of Computer Science, Notes on the PhD Degree, http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/dec/essay.phd.html.

[9] Council of Graduate Schools, PhD Completion Project—Program Completion Data, Table 1, 2008, http://www.phdcompletion.org/quantitative/PhDC_Program_Completion_Data.xls.

[10] AFT Higher Education, American Academic, The State of the Higher Education Workforce, 1997–2007, Table 1, 10, http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/higher_ed/AmerAcad_report_97–07.pdf.

[11] For a concise description of medical school, see Association of American Medical Colleges Staff, Medical School Admission Requirements, 2009–2010, 2008, 7–8.

[12] American Association of Medical Colleges, U.S. Medical School Applicants and Matriculants by School, State of Legal Residence, and Sex, 2008, table on website, http://www.aamc.org/data/facts/2008/2008school.htm.

[13] The list of 131 accredited MD-granted medical schools in the U.S. can be found at http://services.aamc.org/memberlistings/index.cfm?fuseaction=home.search&search_type=MS&wildcard_criteria=&state_criteria=CNT%3AUSA&image=Search. There are also 25 accredited schools of osteopathic medicine, which are listed at http://www.aacom.org/people/colleges/Pages/default.aspx.

[14] American Association of Medical Colleges, Medical School Tuition and Young Student Indebtedness (An Update to the 2004 Report) (PDF), Figure 1, October 2007, https://services.aamc.org/publications/index.cfm?fuseaction=Product.displayForm&prd_id=212&prv_id=256.

[15] National Conference of Bar Examiners and American Bar Association Section of Legal Education and Admission to the Bar, Comprehensive Guide to Bar Admission Requirements 2009, vii, http://www.ncbex.org/uploads/user_docrepos/CompGuide_02.pdf.

[16] ABA Market Research Department, American Bar Association, National Lawyer Population by State, 2007, http://www.abanet.org/marketresearch/2007_Natl_Lawyer_FINALonepage.pdf.

[17] American Bar Association, Enrollment and Degrees Awarded, 1963–2008 http://www.abanet.org/legaled/statistics/charts/stats%20-%201.pdf; Association of American Medical Colleges, Total U.S. Medical School Graduates by School and Sex, 2008 (website table), http://www.aamc.org/data/facts/2008/schoolgrads0208.htm.

[18] M. Planty et al., Figure 41–1, 101, http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/2009/pdf/41_2009.pdf.

Opening the Door to Graduate School
After four years (or more) of college, you’ll be tired of studying. You may already be working at a good job, one that offers stimulating challenges and pays relatively well. More education may be the furthest thing from your mind. But don’t close the door to the classroom forever. You learned a lot in college. However, there is more you can get from additional formal education.
Of course, graduate school isn’t essential to a successful career. Many people achieve great success without advanced education. George Washington is an example. Due to the untimely death of his father, he was unable to study in England, as his older brothers had done.1 In Washington’s day, studying in Europe was like getting graduate education. His education was conducted mostly at home and in the field, where he was trained as a surveyor (essentially a Vo-Ed program). But Washington’s native intelligence and drive took him where he needed to go in life.
Even today, there are many chief executives of large organizations who do not hold graduate degrees. Nearly all CEOs of Fortune 500 companies have college degrees.2 Only about two-thirds, though, have graduate degrees.3
But think about that statistic. The CEOs without graduate degrees are a relatively small minority, implying that they made it against the odds, succeeding on the basis of talent and effort rather than education. And in some fields, such as law and medicine, there’s no chance of beating the odds: You’ve got to have a graduate degree just to be admitted to practice. The same is true of teaching at a university—you must have a graduate degree, preferably a PhD. Lack of a graduate degree can be, even in business, a liability for those who hope to move into the senior-executive ranks; that’s why so many
midlevel managers invest the time and money to get an ―executive MBA,‖ even at the cost of taking classes at night and on weekends. A graduate degree is the price of admission to some fields and a valuable asset in many others.
In addition to earning a valuable or even essential credential, a compelling reason to go to graduate school is to get practice in making high-stakes judgments. In college, you spent much of your time learning facts and figures. It was a rare instructor and course that challenged you to make decisions. In graduate school, by contrast, decision making is the focus of learning. You address the kind of HSJs that you’ll someday encounter as your responsibilities in the world of work grow. It’s true that you can and will acquire most of your HSJ skills later, on the job. But there’s a great advantage to practicing those skills in graduate school with the help of professors and fellow students.
That advantage can be seen in starting-salary statistics. A graduate degree may be worth from 20 to 100 percent more than your bachelor’s degree, depending on the type.4 In other words, if your bachelor’s degree got you a salary of $50,000 a year, a graduate degree could qualify you for a job paying $60,000 to $100,000. That salary differential reflects a difference in HSJ training.
Now, before going further, we need to discuss a caution about graduate school. It’s not a magic ticket to a higher salary. You can enhance your HSJ skills in graduate school, but you need to bring a high degree of skill and dedication to the process from the beginning. Part of the reason that graduate degree holders make more is undoubtedly that they started with greater skill and dedication than the average person in the first place. If you want to reap the benefits apparent in the salary statistics, that had better be true of you too.
A second caution: Never trust averages when making decisions that involve a large investment of your time and money. That’s particularly important when considering graduate education, because the difference between attending a prestigious program versus a relatively unknown one can be the difference between getting a great financial return on your investment and no return at all. In most fields there are too many low-quality programs, as we’ll see. And even in relatively solid programs, it’s only the top performers who are in demand at graduation; the rest may have fewer attractive options than they expected. Keep those cautions in mind as we explore your graduate education plans.
Graduate Education and HSJs
We’ve been talking so far about graduate school as though all graduate degrees were roughly the same, as is the case with a bachelor’s degree. In fact, graduate programs differ significantly. Some are as short as a year or two, while others, such as a PhD or an MD with specialized training, can take much longer than the four years required for a bachelor’s degree. Teaching styles also differ; in some graduate programs you’re studying mostly alone or with individual supervision by a professor, while in others you’re learning together with other students in large groups.
Yet, although graduate degree programs differ in many respects, most take a problem-solving approach to education; to one degree or another, all provide training in making high-stakes judgments. In law, business, and medicine the HSJs are found in ―cases.‖ Some of the cases are historical. In law school, for example, you and your classmates will spend almost every day studying the way that judges decided past legal
cases; you’ll discuss why a judicial decision came down the way it did and whether it should have been made differently.
In business school, the cases will be hypothetical situations in which you are required to make complex decisions about particular businesses. These hypothetical cases are based on real companies, and they come with lots of data for you to analyze.
In medical school you get a combination of historical and hypothetical cases. These cases describe the symptoms of patients and allow you to explore diagnoses and prescriptions. Better still, medical school will allow you to go into hospitals and study the cases of real patients. With this kind of problem-solving focus, you’ll get as much practice making HSJs in a few months of medical or business or law school as you may have done in four years of undergraduate study.
The same is true of graduate programs in the sciences, the liberal arts, and education. In these master’s and doctoral programs, you won’t often study and discuss cases. However, you’ll spend much of your time on research projects. The projects will require rigorous analytical thinking and good judgment about how to pose and test a meaningful research hypothesis.
For example, in a graduate program in economics, you might pose this hypothesis: ―A graduate degree increases the earning potential of the average person who gets one.‖ Given the salary statistics we’ve seen, a casual observer would say, ―Of course that’s true.‖ However, with your analysis skills, you would recognize another possibility, that the people who get graduate degrees are inherently more capable and more motivated than those who don’t. Their earning success could be only partly a function of their advanced education; it may be that they would have done almost as well without it.
To determine how much of a graduate degree holder’s higher salary derives from the education itself, you’d try to find people of equal intelligence and motivation, some who got graduate degrees and others who got only bachelor’s degrees. You’d use statistics to see if the difference in what those people make is significant. If you found that the answer is yes, and if this is the kind of thing you think about in the shower, you’d naturally want to know how much and why graduate education increases earning potential. That would lead you to formulate and test new hypotheses. If this process of asking and answering questions sounds appealing to you, you could be a very successful researcher. Though you might or might not be paid a lot for it, you’d be making high-stakes judgments because many people could rely on your conclusions as they’re deciding whether to attend graduate school or how to improve a particular graduate degree program.
In addition to research, as a graduate student in the sciences, liberal arts, and education, you probably will also do some teaching. Teaching, when done well, is one of the ultimate exercises in high-stakes judgment. A great teacher must be a first-class analyst of students’ learning needs and have outstanding people skills. How do you reach, for instance, the students who have wrongly concluded that they can’t learn? And teachers, more than any other professionals, have power to model moral sense and share it with others; my teachers have had that kind of impact on me. Ironically, a graduate student focused on research projects might see teaching undergraduate courses as a chore, an educational diversion. In fact, from an HSJ perspective, teaching is one of the graduate school activities from which you can learn most.
Master’s Degrees
Having seen the common emphasis of graduate programs on high-stakes judgments, let’s consider the different types of degrees in more detail, to help you decide which one, if any, is right for you. We’ll start with master’s degrees in the sciences, arts, education, and all fields except for business (which is quite different from the others).
A master’s degree is important to rising to the highest ranks in many professions, including accounting, psychological counseling, and public education. It can also be very valuable in engineering and in the physical sciences, such as chemistry, biology, physics, and geology. A typical master’s degree can be worth a salary bump of 20 percent, 5 though, as we discussed, you should check not only the national averages for the particular degree you’re seeking but also salary statistics from the program you plan to attend.
With the exception of education degrees, master’s degree programs typically require a bachelor’s degree in the same field, or at least one closely related. Many of them don’t require full-time work experience for admission, though having some practical background, such as through summer internships, can give you a learning advantage in the classroom and in doing research for a thesis. The thesis is a capstone project that you’ll research, write, and defend in an oral presentation as you finish the master’s degree. Generally it will take you two years to graduate, but it could be more.
Now let’s take a moment to explore master’s degrees in education, which deserve special attention as the most commonly granted master’s degrees.6 Many people who pursue master’s degrees in education are already schoolteachers. If that’s the case for you, you’re likely to take your classes in the evenings at a university or extension center
near where you live. And your research projects may be based on studies you do of your own students. Because you’ll be teaching full-time, it’s likely to take you more than two years to graduate.
Whether you’re currently a teacher or not, your best source of information about a master’s of education degree may be a public school administrator near where you live; he or she will have at least a master’s degree and will have helped many other teachers get one. In fact, regardless of the type of graduate degree you’re seeking, you’ll want to talk to as many holders of that degree as you can. Though each of them will have a unique perspective, collectively they’ll be an invaluable source of insight.
Issues to Double Click On
As you gather information about master’s education, take a hard look at your reasons for wanting the degree and the value you’re likely to get from it. If you’re a teacher in search of an educational master’s degree, this won’t be hard: You’ll know exactly what the degree is worth in terms of extra salary because your teaching contract will specify it. But if you’re not going to use your master’s degree to teach, you’ve got some extra analysis to do before deciding what it is worth to you.
For one thing, do a double click on the field you’ve chosen. For example, beware of adding a master’s degree to a bachelor’s degree that has little market value. If you find yourself saying, ―I can’t get a job in my field with just a bachelor’s degree,‖ be sure that the same thing won’t be true of a master’s degree in that field. Sometimes employers require a master’s degree because a bachelor’s just isn’t enough to make you valuable in the workplace; the master’s degree adds some essential training. That is true in fields such as the natural sciences and engineering. But some majors simply don’t have income-
generating potential outside of the academic world, regardless of the amount of education you have. In other words, with some majors, more education isn’t more valuable in the workplace, it’s just more education. You need to make this distinction. Get a master’s degree to supercharge your undergraduate education, not to try to breathe life into it.
You’ll also want to be careful as you choose a school for getting your master’s degree. Master’s programs are relatively easy to create. Once a school has enough PhD faculty members to qualify for university status, it doesn’t take much more investment to start offering master’s degrees. The classroom and laboratory facilities can be the same as those used by the undergraduates. And it may not be necessary to add new faculty; many of the professors teaching undergraduate classes will be qualified enough to provide graduate instruction.
Because master’s programs are easy to create, you’ll find some of substandard quality. These programs may not have the faculty and financial resources to give you a solid graduate education. This means that you could, if you’re not selective, end up getting good grades but still graduating with a master’s degree that isn’t worth a whole lot more than your bachelor’s degree.
Be thoughtful about staying for a master’s degree at the school where you got your bachelor’s degree. Some of your professors might encourage you to do that. Their mentorship could be valuable, especially if they have good connections to topflight PhD programs or organizations that you’d like to work for. And it could be particularly valuable to work closely with these faculty mentors in their research projects. But double click on your undergraduate professors’ offers to make you their star graduate student. Being the star in a small, underfunded, or little-known master’s program could leave you
with few attractive options at graduation. Even if you learn a lot, prestige-conscious PhD programs and employers are likely to discount your degree. Staying in the same place for a master’s degree may feel comfortable, and it might turn out to be a good thing. But you wouldn’t want to do so without also exploring the possibility of trading up to a stronger school.
Even a prestigious master’s program, though, requires double clicking. Some of these programs may care less about your education than about the interests of the school and the faculty. They may see you as a source of labor, someone to grade undergraduate student papers and perform only menial tasks in support of their research, such as data gathering and footnote checking. They might also want you for your tuition, which is typically higher than what the undergraduates pay.
You can sort these issues out the same way you did when you were Eager Beaver, the eighteen-year-old college applicant who called the department secretary. Make calls to a lot of graduate programs. Find out how friendly they are. Try to determine why they’re running their programs. Is it mostly to get cheap research and teaching labor or to make a profit on your expensive tuition? You’ll find pretty good answers to those questions in their placement rates: If a significant percentage of their master’s degree graduates aren’t getting good jobs or going on to respected PhD programs, proceed with caution.
PhD Degrees
At some point in your college career, you may have thought at least briefly about becoming a professor. It happened in a class that you loved. The professor was smart and funny. He or she may have been deeply caring, like Robin Williams in Dead Poets
Society, or handsome and charismatic, like Indiana Jones. Teaching—especially in college—is a great profession. But it takes long years of training, and you need to be sure you can see the process through. ―Indy‖ didn’t become ―Dr. Jones‖ overnight.
A PhD is the highest university degree; it’s sometimes called the ―terminal‖ degree, the one at the end of all your formal schooling. A PhD is essential for long-term employment at a university. It can also be very valuable in doing scientific research for private companies and government agencies.
Holders of PhDs are generally well compensated, depending on the field of study and the quality of the university granting the degree.7 They may enjoy relative autonomy in their work because their training qualifies them to choose important research topics and to design experiments for testing their research hypotheses. Tenured university professors are especially free to pick their research topics; they also enjoy the significant emotional rewards of mentoring students.
Getting a PhD takes a long time—at least two years after a master’s degree, though most people spend much more than that two additional years. There are formal classes to take, followed by small research projects. The last step in a PhD program is the dissertation, a major piece of research and writing that may take years to complete.
The good news is that a PhD program may be less expensive than a master’s or even a bachelor’s program. You might win a financial stipend that covers your cost of living (assuming that you can live on macaroni and cheese). In return for this stipend, you’ll teach a lot of classes and support faculty members in their research. But your level of responsibility and ability to set your own learning path may be greater than when you were a master’s degree candidate.
Issues to Double Click On
You should commit to getting a PhD only after careful study and deliberation.8 First of all, you need to recognize that a PhD will train you for research in a relatively narrow academic specialty. You’ll spend years studying the research of others. Then you’ll design a dissertation research project with the hope of advancing the state of knowledge in the specialty. Discovering something truly new will require that your focus be quite narrow; in some fields, nearly all of the big questions have already been answered. You’ll need to be deeply interested in your relatively narrow topic or you’re likely to lose enthusiasm for it.
You’ll also have to be patient. Your research won’t be done until the professors on your dissertation committee say so. The process may take so long that your work is preempted by new research and you have to go back and redo some things; you might even have to start over from the beginning. Sometimes getting your ―terminal‖ degree feels as though it truly will be the last thing you do in life.
Because completing a PhD takes so long (plan for a minimum of four years and most likely six or seven)9, be sure before you start that you’re in it for the long haul. You’ll meet lots of people who started work on a PhD, and even finished all of the coursework, but stopped without completing their dissertations. (These folks may refer to themselves as PhD-ABD: ―All But Dissertation.‖) They may in fact have learned much, but members of the scholarly community view them as lacking the most important part of the degree. You want to avoid that fate and should remember this parable when committing to any graduate program, especially a PhD:
―For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it?
―Lest haply, after he hath laid the foundation, and is not able to finish it, all that behold it begin to mock him,
―Saying, This man began to build, and was not able to finish‖ (Luke 14:28-30).
You also need to be realistic about what might come at the end of the process even if you’re successful. Universities typically graduate more PhD students in a given field than they hire. For example, a history department that produces two PhDs in an average year is unlikely to be hiring more than one for a permanent, full-time position. (In many years they’ll be hiring no one in that category.) That means that the odds of getting a job at a university as prestigious as the one you’ve graduated from are stacked against you. Depending on your field and the hiring conditions at the time you finish, you may not be able to find academic employment at all. There are other good ways to use a PhD, such as doing research for a corporation or governmental agency. But, especially if you plan to use your PhD to work at a university, you’ll want to win admission to the most prestigious program you can; that way, you’ll increase your chances of becoming a professor at a strong university.
Even if you do win a starting position at such a strong university, you still face long odds of getting tenure. For one thing, universities and colleges alike are offering fewer tenure-track positions than they used to, preferring to hire part-time and non-tenure-track faculty.10 As a newly hired professor you’ll be required to publish—or perish (lose your position at the university). That means doing research that qualifies for publication in the most elite academic journals, which a host of people like you are trying
to get their work into. Many will fail. As a result, they won’t get tenure, and they will end up moving to less prestigious schools or maybe leaving the academic world altogether. The lifestyle of a tenured professor can be good, but it isn’t easily won. You need to be well aware of what’s coming before you start down this potentially rewarding but long and risky path.
Medical Degrees
Many of us have thought, at least once in our lives, of becoming doctors. Especially when we’re young, our doctor is someone we hold in awe. We see doctors on TV sacrificing their time, saving lives, and struggling with great ethical dilemmas. We also watch them driving fancy cars to work. It looks like a great career. In fact, it can be. But the path to becoming a doctor is both complex and challenging.
There are lots of different doctorate degrees that educate you to care for the human body. Two of the most common are the MD (Doctor of Medicine) and the DDS (Doctor of Dental Science). But you could choose a more specialized degree, such as one in podiatry (care of the foot) or optometry (vision correction) or psychiatry (treatment of mental disorders).
Each of the dozens of available medical degrees is unique; you need to know the specifics of the one you’re interested in. But they have some things in common. One is that a doctorate degree is required to get a license to practice; in fact, many medical licenses require more formal education even after you get your degree. In other words, you have to get at least an MD or a DDS if you want to be a doctor or a dentist.
Most medical degrees require a bachelor’s degree, though not necessarily in a particular field; you’ll need to have taken some basic science and math classes, but
there’s no requirement to major in something like biology or physiology. You’ll be taught those subjects in the first few years of graduate school, which you’ll spend mainly in the classroom.11 In the years after that (medical and dental degrees typically take four years to complete), you’ll spend more time doing clinical studies, called ―rotations‖ or ―clerkships,‖ which will allow you to interact with patients. The education process continues after graduation, with specialized training and hospital residencies that may take as much time as you spent in medical school, or even more.
A medical degree can lead to a high-paying career; doctors are well compensated for the high-stakes judgments they make. And the need for their services seems to be always growing. People are living longer, and advances in medical technology mean that more can be done by doctors to enhance the quality of our lives.
Issues to Double Click On
You should know, though, that medical and dental schools are hard to get into. There are many more applicants overall than there are spots for students. Most medical schools, for example, receive thousands of applications for fewer than two hundred slots.12 That’s something that separates these schools from other graduate schools. If you’re looking for a master’s degree in the arts, for example, you’re likely to qualify at least for a program of lower quality. There are lots of those programs, because they are relatively inexpensive for universities to create.
But it costs a lot of money to start a medical or dental school; the equipment is very expensive, and a medical school in particular needs to be affiliated with a hospital. For that reason, there aren’t many medical schools. Many states have just one, and some have none at all.13 The good news about this scarcity is that you don’t have to worry
much about getting a degree of low quality, because only a well-funded university can afford to create a medical school; even the less prestigious ones are pretty good. The bad news, of course, is that you might not get admitted to any school at all.
This means several things for you when you’re an undergraduate. One is that you need to get very good grades, especially in your science courses. The other is that you need a backup plan. For example, you might want to take some business classes, especially if your grades in chemistry and biology aren’t turning out to be so good. Then, if you don’t get admitted to medical or dental school, you’ll have the option of going into a medicine-related business, such as pharmaceuticals or surgical equipment or health-care administration.
Also be aware that a medical or dental education takes a long time to complete. In the addition to the four years required to get the degree itself, you’ll do at least several years more in residency, where you’ll get specialized training as the employee of a hospital or clinic. As a resident you’ll be worked hard and paid little; you might end up working two jobs, sometimes around the clock, to make ends meet. Things will take even longer if you choose to specialize in a field such as heart surgery or orthodontics.
Another thing to know about medicine and dentistry is that it really means a lifetime commitment. By the time you start your own practice you’re likely to have heavy educational debts, probably several hundred thousand dollars’ worth. 14 You may incur more debt to set up practice, which requires office space and medical equipment. It will take you many years of practice to pay off those debts. And your skills won’t be transferable to most other jobs. A doctor, for instance, can’t make nearly as much in most companies as he or she can practicing medicine; the HSJ training of medical school will
prepare you to save lives, but not to save a crashing airline or bank. You should think of medical school as doctor school, the education that prepares you for a lifetime of being a doctor.
Finally, you need to double click on your assumption that medicine or dentistry is a great way to get rich. It’s true that doctors and dentists can, on average, do quite well financially. But some make much more than others, usually depending on their specialties. In general, to make a lot of money you have to do extra years of specialization. During those long years of training, you’ll want to have more than just money as your motivation.
Also, remember that being a doctor these days isn’t the job it used to be. On one hand, new technology is making it possible save and improve lives as never before. On the other hand, medicine is becoming more of a business. Doctors have to worry more about billing procedures and malpractice liability. Many feel squeezed by large hospital and insurance companies and by government programs. These ―payors‖ of medical services often dictate what care a doctor can give and how much can be charged for that care. Sometimes it seems that being a doctor is not as much about helping patients anymore. Fortunately, there’s still a lot of opportunity to do good. Your patients will still thank you for your life-saving HSJs and your lifelong devotion to their well-being.
The Law Degree
Almost as long as there has been television, there have been TV shows about lawyers. The big lawyer show when I was in graduate school was L.A. Law. (You could think of that as the old-timers’ version of Ally McBeal or The Practice.) All of the
lawyers on L.A. Law were smart and glamorous, and the cases they handled were always interesting. Watching the show made me glad I was in law school.
It wasn’t long, though, before I learned that the practice of law can be different both from what you see on TV and from law school itself. If you’re thinking about law school, here are some things to consider.
First, a law degree (Juris Doctor, or JD for short) is required to become a licensed lawyer in the United States.15 Law school generally takes three years to complete. After you graduate, you’ll spend most of the following summer studying to take the bar exam, a multi-day test that covers many of the subjects studied in law school.
Unlike medical school, which starts in the classroom and gradually shifts to the clinical environment, all three years of law school are primarily classroom based, though there are opportunities for clerkships with law firms, government agencies, and other law-related organizations during the two summers. In the classroom, you and your classmates will discuss, under the direction of a professor, past judicial cases and legal statutes and regulations—laws created by legislatures and government agencies. You debate these decisions and rules, both in the classroom and in writing. Your professors and classmates push your analysis until it is airtight. Lawyers have to be very good thinkers and communicators.
Licensed lawyers can work in a wide variety of fields. Many of the lawyers you see on TV are litigators, or trial lawyers. But there are also lawyers who specialize in giving ―transactional‖ advice to clients; their work often involves writing contracts and other legal documents. Lawyers of both types can work either in firms of their own or as ―in-house counsel‖ to corporate or government employers. There is also the criminal
justice system, where lawyers can work as prosecuting attorneys. And of course all judges are law-school graduates, many of whom practiced law before being elevated to the bench. The law offers many career paths with great potential financial rewards and opportunities to wield influence in society.
Issues to Double Click On
But it’s not all like what you see on TV. Before you commit to getting a law degree, you need to know a few things about the legal profession that aren’t obvious until you see it from the inside—which won’t happen naturally until at least the summer after your first year of law school, when you secure a clerkship.
For example, if you’ve watched much TV lawyering, you probably know that the United States has what is called an adversarial system of law. In this system, each party to a legal proceeding has a lawyer who represents that party’s interests exclusively. That’s different from what happens in some countries, where judges investigate the merits of each side of a case. The sole-representation aspect of the adversarial system serves as a guard against injustice, as even an indigent person or a criminal gets a focused defender of his or her rights.
But the adversarial system’s greater assurance against injustice comes at a cost. In many respects, lawyers do have to treat their counterparts as adversaries. For instance, when asking the other side for documents, including electronic records, they take no chances, asking for everything of potential relevance. The process of making and responding to these interrogatories in pretrial discovery is time-consuming and expensive. So is the often tedious work of deposing witnesses, whom both sides’ lawyers question in the presence of an authorized record keeper or reporter. This pretrial work,
along with the making of motions to the court, often takes the bulk of the time spent by the lawyers on a case, particularly if that case is settled before going to trial, as frequently happens.
Needless to say, this gritty work doesn’t make for great television, and so unless you’ve been a party to a lawsuit you’re likely to see little of it until you enter into the practice of law. The same thing is true of the work done by transactional lawyers, most of whom who spend more time carefully researching, writing, and revising memoranda than they do consulting in corporate boardrooms. Television, in other words, portrays a less-than-balanced view of the typical lawyer’s typical day.
A visit to a law school classroom can provide a similarly misleading view. The cases you study as a law student will, for the most part, be quite different from the ones lawyers take on to make a living. In law school you study the big cases. Those include the ones that decided important social questions, such as whether students of different races can be sent to segregated schools. (They can’t, thanks to a 1954 Supreme Court case called Brown v. Board of Education.) You’ll discuss as many as half a dozen of these precedent-setting cases in a single day. As a practicing lawyer, on the other hand, you’ll work many of the cases you’re handling for months or even years. Often the legal rules to be applied in your cases will be quite clear from the beginning; you’re likely to spend more time gathering and arguing facts than pondering theories. Law school is great training for the analytical aspects of legal practice. But it offers little insight into the day-to-day realities of making a living as a lawyer, so you will need to seek that insight outside of class.
Something else that won’t be apparent until you start practicing is that there are a lot of lawyers out there. The United States has more than one million licensed lawyers.16 And each year the law schools produce more than 40,000 new lawyers, almost two and a half times the number of new doctors.17 In that kind of crowded marketplace, not everyone who has made the high-priced investment in law school will find high-priced legal work to do. Some will end up performing routine tasks that could be done by less-skilled workers if the law didn’t require a lawyer to do it. Because that kind of work involves little high-stakes judgment, it doesn’t command premium fees.
Given the large number of lawyers pursuing a limited amount of high-paying work, realizing your intellectual and financial expectations will require being among the best trained and the most committed graduates. You need to do several things. One is to get some exposure to legal practice before committing to law school. Go out and talk to the lawyers you know. Find out what they do and whether they like it. Shadow a trial lawyer if you can; sit in a deposition and visit a courtroom. That will help you find out whether the adversarial system is for you. Do the same thing with a business lawyer, to see if you might like giving legal counsel. Decide whether you have the passion for legal practice that will help you rise to the top of a crowded profession.
Be particularly careful about assuming that you’ll go to law school but not end up practicing law. Law school is lawyer school, the place where you prepare for legal practice, just as medical school is doctor school. It’s true that JD holders can find employment opportunities outside of legal practice; some business executives, for example, are law school graduates. It’s also true that legal education can be great preparation for the United States Senate or the Oval Office. But you need to be sure that
law school is the right place for you even if you don’t become a corporate CEO or president of the United States. If being a lawyer isn’t your dream, you should consider another type of graduate degree, one that will yield a greater professional return on your educational investment.
Once you know that legal practice is for you, you’ll want to win admission to a prestigious law school and get good grades. Ideally, your grades will qualify you for law review, the legal research publication edited by the school’s top-performing students. This status will open the door to the top law firms and judicial clerkships (in which you help judges research and write decisions). Law is a very prestige-conscious profession; where you go to school and how well you perform there will determine the breadth and quality of your professional options not just at graduation but throughout your career. If you’re hoping to keep your options open, you’ll need to distinguish yourself at each stage of the legal education process.
The MBA Degree
If there are too many lawyers running around, what about all those MBAs? More than 150,000 people in the United States graduate every year with an MBA degree or something similar to it,18 and still more students earn MBAs overseas. Unlike graduate degrees in medicine and law, which differ from country to country, the American-style MBA is recognized around the world. This increases its value, as an MBA graduate can move from one country to another in search of the best job. But it also means that competition among MBAs is truly global, so graduating from a good program is important.
The MBA degree takes two years to complete. In the first year you are likely to study a common core of courses. You may be assigned to a group with four or five others students. You’ll spend a lot of time with this group, analyzing and discussing cases. As in law school, these cases will be intellectually stimulating and challenging but not necessarily representative of the actual world of work. You’ll be handed the information needed to solve a business problem, rather than having to go out and gather it for yourself.
Still, the case will provide a good learning experience. Your small-group study sessions will prepare you for a classroom discussion led by your professor. You’ll live in anticipation of the moment when you are ―cold-called‖ to introduce the case in that bigger group. The classroom discussion will help you see things you overlooked in your individual and small group preparation.
In the summer between your first and second year you’ll go out and get an internship. You’ll already have at least two years of full-time work experience before you start the MBA program, and this internship will allow you to build on what you learned in that earlier full-time job and in your first-year classes. The internship will help you decide what subjects to emphasize in the second year, when you get to choose your courses. It will also prepare you to get a job at the end of the second year. If things go well, you’ll have the chance to double or even triple the salary you were making before you got the MBA.
Issues to Double Click On
―Hold on,‖ you say. ―You made a big deal about how many lawyers there are in this country and how that creates competition for the good law jobs. With all these MBAs
on the loose, isn’t the competition among them even worse? Shouldn’t I stay away from an MBA?‖
You’re right: too much supply of something usually means that its price goes down. It’s true that some MBA graduates aren’t making a lot more than they did before they got the degree. There’s an especially great risk of this if they attended a program of poor quality. Like other master’s degree programs, an MBA is relatively easy for a college to deliver if it is already granting a bachelor’s degree; the faculty and facilities can be the same. For that reason, you need to look hard at the quality of your intended school’s faculty and students.
One way to judge the quality of an MBA program is to look at what it expects from you. Beware of schools that will let you in without prior full-time work experience; the best programs require at least two years, knowing that topflight employers expect that much or more. Also, be careful about schools that pitch you on how flexible or easy they are. The best MBA programs will expect you to limit your outside activities and will work you hard, especially in that first year.
In addition, pay attention to degrees that look like an MBA but in fact are different. For example, you can get valuable career preparation from master’s programs in fields such as accounting (MAC), public administration (MPA), health administration (MHA), and information systems management (MISM). But each of these degrees is more specialized than an MBA, which is designed to prepare you to manage all kinds of organizations. The greater specialization can be valuable if, for instance, you want to be an accountant or if you hope to manage a city, a hospital, or a company’s information systems department. However, you should be clear about this distinction. Be especially
careful if someone tells you that their master’s degree is ―just as marketable as an MBA.‖ That may be true in specific fields, but the MBA is unique in its breadth of recognition and acceptance.
If you decide that an MBA is for you, don’t scrimp on it. Unless you already have a topflight executive position, it’s probably best to stop working and focus on your education full-time for two years. And trying to save a lot of money on tuition probably isn’t a good idea; good MBA education is expensive relative to an undergraduate degree. You should also go after the most challenging summer internship you can find, regardless of what it pays. And you should develop a clear specialty in the second year (marketing or finance, for example) so that prospective employers will believe you might actually be worth a six-figure salary on the day you graduate.
If you do all of those things, your MBA can open a lot of doors. Almost every organization, if you think about it, has the essential features of a business. Let’s take an art museum, for example. You may have sought the job as director of the museum because you love sponsoring exhibits that inspire and educate people. You weren’t long on the job, though, when you realized what it takes to run a museum.
Even though your museum receives some public funding, it isn’t enough to cover the cost of everything you have to pay for. That includes the salaries and health benefits of the employees, monthly utility bills, and advertising campaigns. As director of the museum, you have to raise money to make up the difference between these expenses and the money you get from the city or county that sponsors you. To do that, you raise money from wealthy individuals and you charge an entrance fee. When you do this, you realize that your donors and visitors become, in a way, your customers.
You’ll have to rely on those customers even more heavily if you want to bring a national exhibit to the museum or do some renovations to your building; that will require lots more fund-raising and probably higher entrance fees, at least for the national exhibit. The longer you’re on the job, the more likely you are to look around and say, ―When I finished my MBA I didn’t want to work for a business. But this museum has all the elements of a business: products to design and build, employees to manage, budgets to balance, and customers to satisfy. I’m glad I got that MBA after all.‖
Like the museum, most organizations have the characteristics and needs of a business. That’s true of schools, government agencies, charities, and even churches. Even though they aren’t trying to make a profit, they have to be managed effectively to serve their constituents and to survive. That’s why you don’t need to worry too much about the world being awash in MBA graduates. If you get admitted to a good program and work hard, you’ll find opportunities to make high-stakes judgments in a host of fields.
Part-Time and Online Graduate Degrees
Many people don’t get the chance to attend graduate school when they’re young. But, as their careers advance, they recognize the potential value of getting a graduate degree. By this time, though, life’s responsibilities and opportunities can make it hard to go back to school full-time.
The good news is that innovative schools are making it easier to get a graduate education without that full-time commitment. The options are numerous: You can, for example, take evening or weekend classes, study entirely online, or do a combination of both. You may find that your greater life experience and maturity make you a better
learner than ever before. Studying while you work full-time may amplify your learning, as you make immediate application of what is being taught.
In addition to the inherent value of the education itself, the degree may give you new career options. Your employer may pay some or even all of your tuition. Getting a graduate degree this way can be a great thing.
Issues to Double Click On
But you can also be disappointed by the experience. The quality of part-time and online programs varies immensely. And you have to be more committed than the ordinary student, the one who has full time to devote to the cause and gets the face-to-face support of professors and other full-time students.
Be very careful as you choose a program. Think of yourself not as Eager Beaver but as the Beav’s mom, June Cleaver. Don’t take anybody’s word for anything. First, find out if the program is accredited and by whom. If you haven’t heard of the accrediting body, try out the name on a university professor in the field. Don’t settle for a program without topflight accreditation unless you have to.
You’ll want to find out who the professors are and what professional credentials they have. Also, ask about the hours of study and classroom work expected of you. If the total is less than what would be required in a full-time program, be sure that you’re not being given an easier path to a less valuable education. In addition, ask if the program offers assistance with career placement; in most cases, you won’t be getting the same support that you would in a full-time program. That’s not a problem if you like your current job, but it will make your degree less valuable as a job-change vehicle.
Finally, explore the way that you’ll interact with your professors and fellow students. You may be tempted to enroll in an online program that allows you to study at your own pace and at any time of the day or night. But you will learn much more if you get to communicate not only with your professors but also with other students who are studying the same things you are. In fact, the most effective way to learn from fellow students is in organized cohorts, where you not only communicate but also work together on shared assignments.
You’ll want to push for all of those things even if your employer is footing the bill. Your time is worth too much to spend it in a program that isn’t designed for effective learning. You’d be better off stopping what you’re doing and going back to school full-time.
What Graduate Schools Are Looking for
Would-be graduate school students often ask what admissions committees are looking for—they wonder what it takes to get admitted to a good school. Let’s talk about this as we conclude our exploration of graduate education.
Graduate schools aren’t all looking for exactly the same things. The PhD programs, for example, want to see research potential, ideally in the form of already published papers. The MBA programs, by contrast, care a lot about whether you’ve shown leadership potential through your full-time work experience. And of course even among graduate programs of the same type, the prestigious programs care about many things that the less prestigious ones don’t.
One thing that may be true of all selective graduate programs is that they’re careful not to put too much weight on mere numbers and labels. Let’s take your GPA and
standardized test scores, for example. If those grades and scores are terribly low, you’ve got a problem. But what a graduate admissions committee mainly wants to know is that your GPA and test scores are good enough. They will look at those numbers as a potential warning sign, but not as a guarantee that you’re qualified. Bad scores might rule you out. Therefore, you should invest enough to be sure that your undergraduate grades and standardized test scores represent your best effort; put in the extra hours and retake courses and exams if necessary. But remember that even an astronomically high GPA or test score is unlikely, by itself, to get you into a good school. At most, an admissions committee will take such a score as a sign of excellent analysis skills. They’ll want to see more.
Graduate school admissions committees are also careful in judging letters of recommendation. You might naturally assume that the ideal recommender is someone with a fancy title, such as dean or president or senator. But put yourself in the shoes of an admissions committee member. Wouldn’t you care less about who a candidate knows than what he or she knows and is capable of doing? That is why recommendation forms typically ask recommenders how long and in what context they have known you. The admissions committees who create the forms are concerned about a recommender’s ―strength of read,‖ or his or her basis for judging your ability. If a recommender doesn’t know you intimately, the committee will discount the recommendation, regardless of fancy titles or notoriety. The most you’re likely to get out of a letter from a university president or governor who doesn’t know you well is a bemused nod to your people skills. (―You’ve got to wonder how the applicant pulled that off,‖ the committee members will say.)
Therefore, you want to find recommenders who can speak firsthand about what you’re capable of. Ideally, they will have supervised you directly in your academic, extracurricular, or professional work. If they’re recognizable figures, so much the better; it can be particularly valuable to get the recommendation of someone whose judgment the committee members know they can trust, such as a person who graduated from the program to which you’re applying or who has recommended successful candidates in the past. But that kind of recommender will be the first to admit if there is a low ―strength of read‖ in your case. So worry first and foremost about finding recommenders who both admire you and can speak from intimate experience. In fact, make it a goal to cultivate relationships with such mentors long before applying to graduate school.
Yet another label that admissions committee members will double click on is the name of the college you graduated from. You might assume that a student from a prestigious institution will have an automatic advantage over one from a little-known place. But admissions committee members know that though the Ivy League schools have more than their share of gifted students, not every Ivy League graduate is a surefire winner. By the same token, they know that even relatively unknown schools can produce standout students. They’ll look beyond the name of your college to find the things they really want to see.
Those things, it won’t surprise you to learn, are the hard-to-measure qualities required to make high-stakes judgments. The people who run topflight graduate schools recognize that the employers who hire their graduates are looking for HSJ capability. They also know that students who bring that capability to the program will share it with
one another, supercharging the learning environment. So they try to admit students who have a lot of HSJ skills already.
Because these skills are hard to measure, a good graduate school will put substantial weight on written essays. You’ll be asked to describe your career goals and situations in which you faced challenges successfully. Many schools will also interview each student before admitting him or her. A skillful interviewer can tell quite quickly whether an applicant has the analysis skills, people skills, and moral sense to succeed in graduate school and later in the workplace.
Given that you’ve been cultivating these HSJ skills throughout your time in college, especially through internships and other forms of fieldwork, you’ll be well prepared for these essays and interviews. Your analysis skills will come through in the way you think about the questions you’re asked, regardless of the final conclusion you reach. Your people skills will show in an interview as you make a sincere connection with the interviewer. Your moral sense will be manifest in your honesty and openness to learning; even in a face-to-face interview, you’ll be willing to say, ―I never thought about that before,‖ just at Rex Lee was willing to learn things from a student about a case he’d argued before the Supreme Court. Don’t worry about saying the right things to make an impression. Just let your HSJ skills show.
What to Do If You Don’t Find What You’re Looking For
It may be that after all this effort you won’t win admission to the graduate program of your choice. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as I learned when I didn’t get into Harvard or Stanford. There are lesser-known programs in which you can get an outstanding return on your investment of time, effort, and money.
However, you need to be careful in selecting a graduate school. The need for caution is even greater than it was when you were choosing a college. For one thing, graduate school is more expensive than college, in terms of not only tuition but also opportunity costs. Your time is worth more now than it was before; with your college degree you’re likely making more than you did after high school, and you may have greater financial responsibilities.
You also need to beware of graduate programs that are underfunded or understaffed, as we’ve discussed repeatedly in this chapter. Many schools whose primary emphasis is undergraduate education try to piggyback graduate programs without having the necessary resources. Likewise, there are ―for-profit‖ schools that offer high-priced graduate degrees without holding their students to high standards of effort and performance. For such reasons, there can be a higher risk of stumbling into a disappointing educational experience at the graduate level.
An additional reason to be choosy about your graduate program is that you’ll care more about the credentials of your fellow graduate students and professors than you did in college. Back then, learning was primarily an individual event. The typical class was textbook- and lecture-based. You read the assigned pages from the text in anticipation of a class lecture. During the lecture you took notes along with other listeners in preparation for the exam.
In that environment, the quality of your learning didn’t depend much on how academically qualified your classmates were because you rarely interacted with them in the classroom. It also wasn’t critical that your professor be a recognized subject-matter expert. In fact, you might have been better off at a community college than at a research
university, if the community college class was small and the professor had time to get to know you. It wasn’t necessary, in other words, to attend an elite college to get a good education.
Graduate school differs tremendously in that respect. The learning there is highly interactive, whether in case-based classroom discussions, small seminars, or research projects. In addition to personal effort, your learning will depend heavily on the efforts and skills of your fellow students and professors. Getting a good graduate education requires going to a good school.
For all of these reasons—cost, the prevalence of low-quality programs, and dependency on classmates and professors—institutional quality matters more in choosing a graduate school than it did in college. To ensure a good return on your investment, you need to know that your fellow students and professors are highly qualified. That doesn’t require getting into the number-one or number-two program in the country. But it does mean that you can’t settle for a program thinking that you’ll make up for its mediocre quality and reputation with outstanding individual effort.
So, once you have your graduate school acceptances in front of you, it’s time again for the Eager Beaver routine. You don’t want to attend a program in which you’ll incur the kind of debts only a doctor, lawyer, or CEO can afford if that program won’t open one of those career doors for you. In other words, you have to analyze the return you’re likely to get on your educational investment in a given program.
The first step in this analysis is to find out how long getting your degree is likely to take and how much cost you’ll incur, including opportunity cost. The next step is to get detailed placement information—specifically, what percentage of students are placed
within a short time after graduation, what kind of work they get, and how much they make. When relevant, you should also check pass rates for professional licensure examinations such as the legal bar or medical board exams.
In forecasting your likely salary, remember that the national statistics on the value of graduate degrees are averages. Pay careful attention to those graduates of your intended program who aren’t finding employment in their desired fields or are working in jobs that don’t necessarily require graduate education. Also, resist the temptation to believe you’ll beat the average for your program. Try a Google search of the word glut with your degree type in front of it (for example, ―PhD glut‖). If the overall market for your intended degree seems glutted, be especially cautious of attending a little-known program.
With data on the likely financial cost and return, you’ll be able to determine whether the investment in the graduate program to which you’ve been admitted is a good one. Unfortunately, if your college grades were poor, there’s a strong chance that it won’t be. The best graduate schools are unforgiving of late-blooming college students. The same is true for low standardized test scores. If one or both of those deficiencies afflicts you, you’re unlikely to win admission to a program that will allow a high return on your investment. In that case, graduate school may not be the place for you. Instead, you may want to play to other strengths.
The good news for those with low college grades and test scores is that those things don’t matter in the world of work; HSJ capability does. And graduate school isn’t the only place you can develop that capability. In fact, whether you go to graduate school or not, the real key to professional success is to become a lifelong learner. If the door to a
good graduate school doesn’t open for you, it may be time to start that lifelong learning process as a working professional. We’ll talk about doing that next.
1 James Thomas Flexner, Washington: The Indispensable Man (Back Bay Books, 1994), 5.
2 The figure in 2005 was 97 percent. Spencer Stuart, Leading CEOs: A Statistical Snapshot of S&P 500 Leaders, February 2006, 6, http://content.spencerstuart.com/sswebsite/pdf/lib/2005_CEO_Study_JS.pdf.
3 Ibid., 8.
4 U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, 2008 Annual Social and Economic Supplement, PINC-03 (Education Attainment—People 25 Years Old and Over, by Total Money Earnings in 2007, Work Experience in 2007, Age, Race, Hispanic Origin, and Sex), http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/macro/032008/perinc/new03_001.htm.
5Ibid.
6 M. Planty, W. Hussar, T. Snyder, G. Kena, A. KewalRamani, J. Kemp, K. Bianco, and R. Dinkes, The Condition of Education 2009 (NCES 2009–081). National Center for Education Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, Washington, D.C., Figure 41–1, 101, http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/2009/pdf/41_2009.pdf .
7 Ibid.
8 This essay posted by a department at Purdue University provides a helpful overview of the PhD and the process for getting one: Purdue University Department of Computer Science, Notes on the PhD Degree, http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/dec/essay.phd.html.
9 Council of Graduate Schools, PhD Completion Project—Program Completion Data, Table 1, 2008, http://www.phdcompletion.org/quantitative/PhDC_Program_Completion_Data.xls.
10 AFT Higher Education, American Academic, The State of the Higher Education Workforce, 1997–2007, Table 1, 10, http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/higher_ed/AmerAcad_report_97–07.pdf.
11 For a concise description of medical school, see Association of American Medical Colleges Staff, Medical School Admission Requirements, 2009–2010, 2008, 7–8.
12 American Association of Medical Colleges, U.S. Medical School Applicants and Matriculants by School, State of Legal Residence, and Sex, 2008, table on website, http://www.aamc.org/data/facts/2008/2008school.htm.
13 The list of 131 accredited MD-granted medical schools in the U.S. can be found at http://services.aamc.org/memberlistings/index.cfm?fuseaction=home.search&search_type=MS&wildcard_criteria=&state_criteria=CNT%3AUSA&image=Search. There are also 25 accredited schools of osteopathic medicine, which are listed at http://www.aacom.org/people/colleges/Pages/default.aspx.
14 American Association of Medical Colleges, Medical School Tuition and Young Student Indebtedness (An Update to the 2004 Report) (PDF), Figure 1, October 2007, https://services.aamc.org/publications/index.cfm?fuseaction=Product.displayForm&prd_id=212&prv_id=256.
15 National Conference of Bar Examiners and American Bar Association Section of Legal Education and Admission to the Bar, Comprehensive Guide to Bar Admission Requirements 2009, vii, http://www.ncbex.org/uploads/user_docrepos/CompGuide_02.pdf.
16 ABA Market Research Department, American Bar Association, National Lawyer Population by State, 2007, http://www.abanet.org/marketresearch/2007_Natl_Lawyer_FINALonepage.pdf.
17 American Bar Association, Enrollment and Degrees Awarded, 1963–2008 http://www.abanet.org/legaled/statistics/charts/stats%20-%201.pdf; Association of American Medical Colleges, Total U.S. Medical School Graduates by School and Sex, 2008 (website table), http://www.aamc.org/data/facts/2008/schoolgrads0208.htm.
18 M. Planty et al., Figure 41–1, 101, http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/2009/pdf/41_2009.pdf.

Opening the Door to Graduate School

After four years (or more) of college, you’ll be tired of studying. You may already be working at a good job, one that offers stimulating challenges and pays relatively well. More education may be the furthest thing from your mind. But don’t close the door to the classroom forever. You learned a lot in college. However, there is more you can get from additional formal education.

Of course, graduate school isn’t essential to a successful career. Many people achieve great success without advanced education. George Washington is an example. Due to the untimely death of his father, he was unable to study in England, as his older brothers had done.[1] In Washington’s day, studying in Europe was like getting graduate education. His education was conducted mostly at home and in the field, where he was trained as a surveyor (essentially a Vo-Ed program). But Washington’s native intelligence and drive took him where he needed to go in life.

Even today, there are many chief executives of large organizations who do not hold graduate degrees. Nearly all CEOs of Fortune 500 companies have college degrees.[2] Only about two-thirds, though, have graduate degrees.[3]

But think about that statistic. The CEOs without graduate degrees are a relatively small minority, implying that they made it against the odds, succeeding on the basis of talent and effort rather than education. And in some fields, such as law and medicine, there’s no chance of beating the odds: You’ve got to have a graduate degree just to be admitted to practice. The same is true of teaching at a university—you must have a graduate degree, preferably a PhD. Lack of a graduate degree can be, even in business, a liability for those who hope to move into the senior-executive ranks; that’s why so many midlevel managers invest the time and money to get an “executive MBA,” even at the cost of taking classes at night and on weekends. A graduate degree is the price of admission to some fields and a valuable asset in many others.

In addition to earning a valuable or even essential credential, a compelling reason to go to graduate school is to get practice in making high-stakes judgments. In college, you spent much of your time learning facts and figures. It was a rare instructor and course that challenged you to make decisions. In graduate school, by contrast, decision making is the focus of learning. You address the kind of HSJs that you’ll someday encounter as your responsibilities in the world of work grow. It’s true that you can and will acquire most of your HSJ skills later, on the job. But there’s a great advantage to practicing those skills in graduate school with the help of professors and fellow students.

That advantage can be seen in starting-salary statistics. A graduate degree may be worth from 20 to 100 percent more than your bachelor’s degree, depending on the type.[4] In other words, if your bachelor’s degree got you a salary of $50,000 a year, a graduate degree could qualify you for a job paying $60,000 to $100,000. That salary differential reflects a difference in HSJ training.

Now, before going further, we need to discuss a caution about graduate school. It’s not a magic ticket to a higher salary. You can enhance your HSJ skills in graduate school, but you need to bring a high degree of skill and dedication to the process from the beginning. Part of the reason that graduate degree holders make more is undoubtedly that they started with greater skill and dedication than the average person in the first place. If you want to reap the benefits apparent in the salary statistics, that had better be true of you too.

A second caution: Never trust averages when making decisions that involve a large investment of your time and money. That’s particularly important when considering graduate education, because the difference between attending a prestigious program versus a relatively unknown one can be the difference between getting a great financial return on your investment and no return at all. In most fields there are too many low-quality programs, as we’ll see. And even in relatively solid programs, it’s only the top performers who are in demand at graduation; the rest may have fewer attractive options than they expected. Keep those cautions in mind as we explore your graduate education plans.

Graduate Education and HSJs

We’ve been talking so far about graduate school as though all graduate degrees were roughly the same, as is the case with a bachelor’s degree. In fact, graduate programs differ significantly. Some are as short as a year or two, while others, such as a PhD or an MD with specialized training, can take much longer than the four years required for a bachelor’s degree. Teaching styles also differ; in some graduate programs you’re studying mostly alone or with individual supervision by a professor, while in others you’re learning together with other students in large groups.

Yet, although graduate degree programs differ in many respects, most take a problem-solving approach to education; to one degree or another, all provide training in making high-stakes judgments. In law, business, and medicine the HSJs are found in “cases.” Some of the cases are historical. In law school, for example, you and your classmates will spend almost every day studying the way that judges decided past legal cases; you’ll discuss why a judicial decision came down the way it did and whether it should have been made differently.

In business school, the cases will be hypothetical situations in which you are required to make complex decisions about particular businesses. These hypothetical cases are based on real companies, and they come with lots of data for you to analyze.

In medical school you get a combination of historical and hypothetical cases. These cases describe the symptoms of patients and allow you to explore diagnoses and prescriptions. Better still, medical school will allow you to go into hospitals and study the cases of real patients. With this kind of problem-solving focus, you’ll get as much practice making HSJs in a few months of medical or business or law school as you may have done in four years of undergraduate study.

The same is true of graduate programs in the sciences, the liberal arts, and education. In these master’s and doctoral programs, you won’t often study and discuss cases. However, you’ll spend much of your time on research projects. The projects will require rigorous analytical thinking and good judgment about how to pose and test a meaningful research hypothesis.

For example, in a graduate program in economics, you might pose this hypothesis: “A graduate degree increases the earning potential of the average person who gets one.” Given the salary statistics we’ve seen, a casual observer would say, “Of course that’s true.” However, with your analysis skills, you would recognize another possibility, that the people who get graduate degrees are inherently more capable and more motivated than those who don’t. Their earning success could be only partly a function of their advanced education; it may be that they would have done almost as well without it.

To determine how much of a graduate degree holder’s higher salary derives from the education itself, you’d try to find people of equal intelligence and motivation, some who got graduate degrees and others who got only bachelor’s degrees. You’d use statistics to see if the difference in what those people make is significant. If you found that the answer is yes, and if this is the kind of thing you think about in the shower, you’d naturally want to know how much and why graduate education increases earning potential. That would lead you to formulate and test new hypotheses. If this process of asking and answering questions sounds appealing to you, you could be a very successful researcher. Though you might or might not be paid a lot for it, you’d be making high-stakes judgments because many people could rely on your conclusions as they’re deciding whether to attend graduate school or how to improve a particular graduate degree program.

In addition to research, as a graduate student in the sciences, liberal arts, and education, you probably will also do some teaching. Teaching, when done well, is one of the ultimate exercises in high-stakes judgment. A great teacher must be a first-class analyst of students’ learning needs and have outstanding people skills. How do you reach, for instance, the students who have wrongly concluded that they can’t learn? And teachers, more than any other professionals, have power to model moral sense and share it with others; my teachers have had that kind of impact on me. Ironically, a graduate student focused on research projects might see teaching undergraduate courses as a chore, an educational diversion. In fact, from an HSJ perspective, teaching is one of the graduate school activities from which you can learn most.

Master’s Degrees

Having seen the common emphasis of graduate programs on high-stakes judgments, let’s consider the different types of degrees in more detail, to help you decide which one, if any, is right for you. We’ll start with master’s degrees in the sciences, arts, education, and all fields except for business (which is quite different from the others).

A master’s degree is important to rising to the highest ranks in many professions, including accounting, psychological counseling, and public education. It can also be very valuable in engineering and in the physical sciences, such as chemistry, biology, physics, and geology. A typical master’s degree can be worth a salary bump of 20 percent, [5] though, as we discussed, you should check not only the national averages for the particular degree you’re seeking but also salary statistics from the program you plan to attend.

With the exception of education degrees, master’s degree programs typically require a bachelor’s degree in the same field, or at least one closely related. Many of them don’t require full-time work experience for admission, though having some practical background, such as through summer internships, can give you a learning advantage in the classroom and in doing research for a thesis. The thesis is a capstone project that you’ll research, write, and defend in an oral presentation as you finish the master’s degree. Generally it will take you two years to graduate, but it could be more.

Now let’s take a moment to explore master’s degrees in education, which deserve special attention as the most commonly granted master’s degrees.[6] Many people who pursue master’s degrees in education are already schoolteachers. If that’s the case for you, you’re likely to take your classes in the evenings at a university or extension center near where you live. And your research projects may be based on studies you do of your own students. Because you’ll be teaching full-time, it’s likely to take you more than two years to graduate.

Whether you’re currently a teacher or not, your best source of information about a master’s of education degree may be a public school administrator near where you live; he or she will have at least a master’s degree and will have helped many other teachers get one. In fact, regardless of the type of graduate degree you’re seeking, you’ll want to talk to as many holders of that degree as you can. Though each of them will have a unique perspective, collectively they’ll be an invaluable source of insight.

Issues to Double Click On

As you gather information about master’s education, take a hard look at your reasons for wanting the degree and the value you’re likely to get from it. If you’re a teacher in search of an educational master’s degree, this won’t be hard: You’ll know exactly what the degree is worth in terms of extra salary because your teaching contract will specify it. But if you’re not going to use your master’s degree to teach, you’ve got some extra analysis to do before deciding what it is worth to you.

For one thing, do a double click on the field you’ve chosen. For example, beware of adding a master’s degree to a bachelor’s degree that has little market value. If you find yourself saying, “I can’t get a job in my field with just a bachelor’s degree,” be sure that the same thing won’t be true of a master’s degree in that field. Sometimes employers require a master’s degree because a bachelor’s just isn’t enough to make you valuable in the workplace; the master’s degree adds some essential training. That is true in fields such as the natural sciences and engineering. But some majors simply don’t have income-generating potential outside of the academic world, regardless of the amount of education you have. In other words, with some majors, more education isn’t more valuable in the workplace, it’s just more education. You need to make this distinction. Get a master’s degree to supercharge your undergraduate education, not to try to breathe life into it.

You’ll also want to be careful as you choose a school for getting your master’s degree. Master’s programs are relatively easy to create. Once a school has enough PhD faculty members to qualify for university status, it doesn’t take much more investment to start offering master’s degrees. The classroom and laboratory facilities can be the same as those used by the undergraduates. And it may not be necessary to add new faculty; many of the professors teaching undergraduate classes will be qualified enough to provide graduate instruction.

Because master’s programs are easy to create, you’ll find some of substandard quality. These programs may not have the faculty and financial resources to give you a solid graduate education. This means that you could, if you’re not selective, end up getting good grades but still graduating with a master’s degree that isn’t worth a whole lot more than your bachelor’s degree.

Be thoughtful about staying for a master’s degree at the school where you got your bachelor’s degree. Some of your professors might encourage you to do that. Their mentorship could be valuable, especially if they have good connections to topflight PhD programs or organizations that you’d like to work for. And it could be particularly valuable to work closely with these faculty mentors in their research projects. But double click on your undergraduate professors’ offers to make you their star graduate student. Being the star in a small, underfunded, or little-known master’s program could leave you with few attractive options at graduation. Even if you learn a lot, prestige-conscious PhD programs and employers are likely to discount your degree. Staying in the same place for a master’s degree may feel comfortable, and it might turn out to be a good thing. But you wouldn’t want to do so without also exploring the possibility of trading up to a stronger school.

Even a prestigious master’s program, though, requires double clicking. Some of these programs may care less about your education than about the interests of the school and the faculty. They may see you as a source of labor, someone to grade undergraduate student papers and perform only menial tasks in support of their research, such as data gathering and footnote checking. They might also want you for your tuition, which is typically higher than what the undergraduates pay.

You can sort these issues out the same way you did when you were Eager Beaver, the eighteen-year-old college applicant who called the department secretary. Make calls to a lot of graduate programs. Find out how friendly they are. Try to determine why they’re running their programs. Is it mostly to get cheap research and teaching labor or to make a profit on your expensive tuition? You’ll find pretty good answers to those questions in their placement rates: If a significant percentage of their master’s degree graduates aren’t getting good jobs or going on to respected PhD programs, proceed with caution.

PhD Degrees

At some point in your college career, you may have thought at least briefly about becoming a professor. It happened in a class that you loved. The professor was smart and funny. He or she may have been deeply caring, like Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, or handsome and charismatic, like Indiana Jones. Teaching—especially in college—is a great profession. But it takes long years of training, and you need to be sure you can see the process through. “Indy” didn’t become “Dr. Jones” overnight.

A PhD is the highest university degree; it’s sometimes called the “terminal” degree, the one at the end of all your formal schooling. A PhD is essential for long-term employment at a university. It can also be very valuable in doing scientific research for private companies and government agencies.

Holders of PhDs are generally well compensated, depending on the field of study and the quality of the university granting the degree.[7] They may enjoy relative autonomy in their work because their training qualifies them to choose important research topics and to design experiments for testing their research hypotheses. Tenured university professors are especially free to pick their research topics; they also enjoy the significant emotional rewards of mentoring students.

Getting a PhD takes a long time—at least two years after a master’s degree, though most people spend much more than that two additional years. There are formal classes to take, followed by small research projects. The last step in a PhD program is the dissertation, a major piece of research and writing that may take years to complete.

The good news is that a PhD program may be less expensive than a master’s or even a bachelor’s program. You might win a financial stipend that covers your cost of living (assuming that you can live on macaroni and cheese). In return for this stipend, you’ll teach a lot of classes and support faculty members in their research. But your level of responsibility and ability to set your own learning path may be greater than when you were a master’s degree candidate.

Issues to Double Click On

You should commit to getting a PhD only after careful study and deliberation.[8] First of all, you need to recognize that a PhD will train you for research in a relatively narrow academic specialty. You’ll spend years studying the research of others. Then you’ll design a dissertation research project with the hope of advancing the state of knowledge in the specialty. Discovering something truly new will require that your focus be quite narrow; in some fields, nearly all of the big questions have already been answered. You’ll need to be deeply interested in your relatively narrow topic or you’re likely to lose enthusiasm for it.

You’ll also have to be patient. Your research won’t be done until the professors on your dissertation committee say so. The process may take so long that your work is preempted by new research and you have to go back and redo some things; you might even have to start over from the beginning. Sometimes getting your “terminal” degree feels as though it truly will be the last thing you do in life.

Because completing a PhD takes so long (plan for a minimum of four years and most likely six or seven)[9], be sure before you start that you’re in it for the long haul. You’ll meet lots of people who started work on a PhD, and even finished all of the coursework, but stopped without completing their dissertations. (These folks may refer to themselves as PhD-ABD: “All But Dissertation.”) They may in fact have learned much, but members of the scholarly community view them as lacking the most important part of the degree. You want to avoid that fate and should remember this parable when committing to any graduate program, especially a PhD:

“For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it?

“Lest haply, after he hath laid the foundation, and is not able to finish it, all that behold it begin to mock him,

“Saying, This man began to build, and was not able to finish” (Luke 14:28-30).

You also need to be realistic about what might come at the end of the process even if you’re successful. Universities typically graduate more PhD students in a given field than they hire. For example, a history department that produces two PhDs in an average year is unlikely to be hiring more than one for a permanent, full-time position. (In many years they’ll be hiring no one in that category.) That means that the odds of getting a job at a university as prestigious as the one you’ve graduated from are stacked against you. Depending on your field and the hiring conditions at the time you finish, you may not be able to find academic employment at all. There are other good ways to use a PhD, such as doing research for a corporation or governmental agency. But, especially if you plan to use your PhD to work at a university, you’ll want to win admission to the most prestigious program you can; that way, you’ll increase your chances of becoming a professor at a strong university.

Even if you do win a starting position at such a strong university, you still face long odds of getting tenure. For one thing, universities and colleges alike are offering fewer tenure-track positions than they used to, preferring to hire part-time and non-tenure-track faculty.[10] As a newly hired professor you’ll be required to publish—or perish (lose your position at the university). That means doing research that qualifies for publication in the most elite academic journals, which a host of people like you are trying to get their work into. Many will fail. As a result, they won’t get tenure, and they will end up moving to less prestigious schools or maybe leaving the academic world altogether. The lifestyle of a tenured professor can be good, but it isn’t easily won. You need to be well aware of what’s coming before you start down this potentially rewarding but long and risky path.

Medical Degrees

Many of us have thought, at least once in our lives, of becoming doctors. Especially when we’re young, our doctor is someone we hold in awe. We see doctors on TV sacrificing their time, saving lives, and struggling with great ethical dilemmas. We also watch them driving fancy cars to work. It looks like a great career. In fact, it can be. But the path to becoming a doctor is both complex and challenging.

There are lots of different doctorate degrees that educate you to care for the human body. Two of the most common are the MD (Doctor of Medicine) and the DDS (Doctor of Dental Science). But you could choose a more specialized degree, such as one in podiatry (care of the foot) or optometry (vision correction) or psychiatry (treatment of mental disorders).

Each of the dozens of available medical degrees is unique; you need to know the specifics of the one you’re interested in. But they have some things in common. One is that a doctorate degree is required to get a license to practice; in fact, many medical licenses require more formal education even after you get your degree. In other words, you have to get at least an MD or a DDS if you want to be a doctor or a dentist.

Most medical degrees require a bachelor’s degree, though not necessarily in a particular field; you’ll need to have taken some basic science and math classes, but there’s no requirement to major in something like biology or physiology. You’ll be taught those subjects in the first few years of graduate school, which you’ll spend mainly in the classroom.[11] In the years after that (medical and dental degrees typically take four years to complete), you’ll spend more time doing clinical studies, called “rotations” or “clerkships,” which will allow you to interact with patients. The education process continues after graduation, with specialized training and hospital residencies that may take as much time as you spent in medical school, or even more.

A medical degree can lead to a high-paying career; doctors are well compensated for the high-stakes judgments they make. And the need for their services seems to be always growing. People are living longer, and advances in medical technology mean that more can be done by doctors to enhance the quality of our lives.

Issues to Double Click On

You should know, though, that medical and dental schools are hard to get into. There are many more applicants overall than there are spots for students. Most medical schools, for example, receive thousands of applications for fewer than two hundred slots.[12] That’s something that separates these schools from other graduate schools. If you’re looking for a master’s degree in the arts, for example, you’re likely to qualify at least for a program of lower quality. There are lots of those programs, because they are relatively inexpensive for universities to create.

But it costs a lot of money to start a medical or dental school; the equipment is very expensive, and a medical school in particular needs to be affiliated with a hospital. For that reason, there aren’t many medical schools. Many states have just one, and some have none at all.[13] The good news about this scarcity is that you don’t have to worry much about getting a degree of low quality, because only a well-funded university can afford to create a medical school; even the less prestigious ones are pretty good. The bad news, of course, is that you might not get admitted to any school at all.

This means several things for you when you’re an undergraduate. One is that you need to get very good grades, especially in your science courses. The other is that you need a backup plan. For example, you might want to take some business classes, especially if your grades in chemistry and biology aren’t turning out to be so good. Then, if you don’t get admitted to medical or dental school, you’ll have the option of going into a medicine-related business, such as pharmaceuticals or surgical equipment or health-care administration.

Also be aware that a medical or dental education takes a long time to complete. In the addition to the four years required to get the degree itself, you’ll do at least several years more in residency, where you’ll get specialized training as the employee of a hospital or clinic. As a resident you’ll be worked hard and paid little; you might end up working two jobs, sometimes around the clock, to make ends meet. Things will take even longer if you choose to specialize in a field such as heart surgery or orthodontics.

Another thing to know about medicine and dentistry is that it really means a lifetime commitment. By the time you start your own practice you’re likely to have heavy educational debts, probably several hundred thousand dollars’ worth. [14] You may incur more debt to set up practice, which requires office space and medical equipment. It will take you many years of practice to pay off those debts. And your skills won’t be transferable to most other jobs. A doctor, for instance, can’t make nearly as much in most companies as he or she can practicing medicine; the HSJ training of medical school will prepare you to save lives, but not to save a crashing airline or bank. You should think of medical school as doctor school, the education that prepares you for a lifetime of being a doctor.

Finally, you need to double click on your assumption that medicine or dentistry is a great way to get rich. It’s true that doctors and dentists can, on average, do quite well financially. But some make much more than others, usually depending on their specialties. In general, to make a lot of money you have to do extra years of specialization. During those long years of training, you’ll want to have more than just money as your motivation.

Also, remember that being a doctor these days isn’t the job it used to be. On one hand, new technology is making it possible save and improve lives as never before. On the other hand, medicine is becoming more of a business. Doctors have to worry more about billing procedures and malpractice liability. Many feel squeezed by large hospital and insurance companies and by government programs. These “payors” of medical services often dictate what care a doctor can give and how much can be charged for that care. Sometimes it seems that being a doctor is not as much about helping patients anymore. Fortunately, there’s still a lot of opportunity to do good. Your patients will still thank you for your life-saving HSJs and your lifelong devotion to their well-being.

The Law Degree

Almost as long as there has been television, there have been TV shows about lawyers. The big lawyer show when I was in graduate school was L.A. Law. (You could think of that as the old-timers’ version of Ally McBeal or The Practice.) All of the lawyers on L.A. Law were smart and glamorous, and the cases they handled were always interesting. Watching the show made me glad I was in law school.

It wasn’t long, though, before I learned that the practice of law can be different both from what you see on TV and from law school itself. If you’re thinking about law school, here are some things to consider.

First, a law degree (Juris Doctor, or JD for short) is required to become a licensed lawyer in the United States.[15] Law school generally takes three years to complete. After you graduate, you’ll spend most of the following summer studying to take the bar exam, a multi-day test that covers many of the subjects studied in law school.

Unlike medical school, which starts in the classroom and gradually shifts to the clinical environment, all three years of law school are primarily classroom based, though there are opportunities for clerkships with law firms, government agencies, and other law-related organizations during the two summers. In the classroom, you and your classmates will discuss, under the direction of a professor, past judicial cases and legal statutes and regulations—laws created by legislatures and government agencies. You debate these decisions and rules, both in the classroom and in writing. Your professors and classmates push your analysis until it is airtight. Lawyers have to be very good thinkers and communicators.

Licensed lawyers can work in a wide variety of fields. Many of the lawyers you see on TV are litigators, or trial lawyers. But there are also lawyers who specialize in giving “transactional” advice to clients; their work often involves writing contracts and other legal documents. Lawyers of both types can work either in firms of their own or as “in-house counsel” to corporate or government employers. There is also the criminal justice system, where lawyers can work as prosecuting attorneys. And of course all judges are law-school graduates, many of whom practiced law before being elevated to the bench. The law offers many career paths with great potential financial rewards and opportunities to wield influence in society.

Issues to Double Click On

But it’s not all like what you see on TV. Before you commit to getting a law degree, you need to know a few things about the legal profession that aren’t obvious until you see it from the inside—which won’t happen naturally until at least the summer after your first year of law school, when you secure a clerkship.

For example, if you’ve watched much TV lawyering, you probably know that the United States has what is called an adversarial system of law. In this system, each party to a legal proceeding has a lawyer who represents that party’s interests exclusively. That’s different from what happens in some countries, where judges investigate the merits of each side of a case. The sole-representation aspect of the adversarial system serves as a guard against injustice, as even an indigent person or a criminal gets a focused defender of his or her rights.

But the adversarial system’s greater assurance against injustice comes at a cost. In many respects, lawyers do have to treat their counterparts as adversaries. For instance, when asking the other side for documents, including electronic records, they take no chances, asking for everything of potential relevance. The process of making and responding to these interrogatories in pretrial discovery is time-consuming and expensive. So is the often tedious work of deposing witnesses, whom both sides’ lawyers question in the presence of an authorized record keeper or reporter. This pretrial work, along with the making of motions to the court, often takes the bulk of the time spent by the lawyers on a case, particularly if that case is settled before going to trial, as frequently happens.

Needless to say, this gritty work doesn’t make for great television, and so unless you’ve been a party to a lawsuit you’re likely to see little of it until you enter into the practice of law. The same thing is true of the work done by transactional lawyers, most of whom who spend more time carefully researching, writing, and revising memoranda than they do consulting in corporate boardrooms. Television, in other words, portrays a less-than-balanced view of the typical lawyer’s typical day.

A visit to a law school classroom can provide a similarly misleading view. The cases you study as a law student will, for the most part, be quite different from the ones lawyers take on to make a living. In law school you study the big cases. Those include the ones that decided important social questions, such as whether students of different races can be sent to segregated schools. (They can’t, thanks to a 1954 Supreme Court case called Brown v. Board of Education.) You’ll discuss as many as half a dozen of these precedent-setting cases in a single day. As a practicing lawyer, on the other hand, you’ll work many of the cases you’re handling for months or even years. Often the legal rules to be applied in your cases will be quite clear from the beginning; you’re likely to spend more time gathering and arguing facts than pondering theories. Law school is great training for the analytical aspects of legal practice. But it offers little insight into the day-to-day realities of making a living as a lawyer, so you will need to seek that insight outside of class.

Something else that won’t be apparent until you start practicing is that there are a lot of lawyers out there. The United States has more than one million licensed lawyers.[16] And each year the law schools produce more than 40,000 new lawyers, almost two and a half times the number of new doctors.[17] In that kind of crowded marketplace, not everyone who has made the high-priced investment in law school will find high-priced legal work to do. Some will end up performing routine tasks that could be done by less-skilled workers if the law didn’t require a lawyer to do it. Because that kind of work involves little high-stakes judgment, it doesn’t command premium fees.

Given the large number of lawyers pursuing a limited amount of high-paying work, realizing your intellectual and financial expectations will require being among the best trained and the most committed graduates. You need to do several things. One is to get some exposure to legal practice before committing to law school. Go out and talk to the lawyers you know. Find out what they do and whether they like it. Shadow a trial lawyer if you can; sit in a deposition and visit a courtroom. That will help you find out whether the adversarial system is for you. Do the same thing with a business lawyer, to see if you might like giving legal counsel. Decide whether you have the passion for legal practice that will help you rise to the top of a crowded profession.

Be particularly careful about assuming that you’ll go to law school but not end up practicing law. Law school is lawyer school, the place where you prepare for legal practice, just as medical school is doctor school. It’s true that JD holders can find employment opportunities outside of legal practice; some business executives, for example, are law school graduates. It’s also true that legal education can be great preparation for the United States Senate or the Oval Office. But you need to be sure that law school is the right place for you even if you don’t become a corporate CEO or president of the United States. If being a lawyer isn’t your dream, you should consider another type of graduate degree, one that will yield a greater professional return on your educational investment.

Once you know that legal practice is for you, you’ll want to win admission to a prestigious law school and get good grades. Ideally, your grades will qualify you for law review, the legal research publication edited by the school’s top-performing students. This status will open the door to the top law firms and judicial clerkships (in which you help judges research and write decisions). Law is a very prestige-conscious profession; where you go to school and how well you perform there will determine the breadth and quality of your professional options not just at graduation but throughout your career. If you’re hoping to keep your options open, you’ll need to distinguish yourself at each stage of the legal education process.

The MBA Degree

If there are too many lawyers running around, what about all those MBAs? More than 150,000 people in the United States graduate every year with an MBA degree or something similar to it,[18] and still more students earn MBAs overseas. Unlike graduate degrees in medicine and law, which differ from country to country, the American-style MBA is recognized around the world. This increases its value, as an MBA graduate can move from one country to another in search of the best job. But it also means that competition among MBAs is truly global, so graduating from a good program is important.

The MBA degree takes two years to complete. In the first year you are likely to study a common core of courses. You may be assigned to a group with four or five others students. You’ll spend a lot of time with this group, analyzing and discussing cases. As in law school, these cases will be intellectually stimulating and challenging but not necessarily representative of the actual world of work. You’ll be handed the information needed to solve a business problem, rather than having to go out and gather it for yourself.

Still, the case will provide a good learning experience. Your small-group study sessions will prepare you for a classroom discussion led by your professor. You’ll live in anticipation of the moment when you are “cold-called” to introduce the case in that bigger group. The classroom discussion will help you see things you overlooked in your individual and small group preparation.

In the summer between your first and second year you’ll go out and get an internship. You’ll already have at least two years of full-time work experience before you start the MBA program, and this internship will allow you to build on what you learned in that earlier full-time job and in your first-year classes. The internship will help you decide what subjects to emphasize in the second year, when you get to choose your courses. It will also prepare you to get a job at the end of the second year. If things go well, you’ll have the chance to double or even triple the salary you were making before you got the MBA.

Issues to Double Click On

“Hold on,” you say. “You made a big deal about how many lawyers there are in this country and how that creates competition for the good law jobs. With all these MBAs on the loose, isn’t the competition among them even worse? Shouldn’t I stay away from an MBA?”

You’re right: too much supply of something usually means that its price goes down. It’s true that some MBA graduates aren’t making a lot more than they did before they got the degree. There’s an especially great risk of this if they attended a program of poor quality. Like other master’s degree programs, an MBA is relatively easy for a college to deliver if it is already granting a bachelor’s degree; the faculty and facilities can be the same. For that reason, you need to look hard at the quality of your intended school’s faculty and students.

One way to judge the quality of an MBA program is to look at what it expects from you. Beware of schools that will let you in without prior full-time work experience; the best programs require at least two years, knowing that topflight employers expect that much or more. Also, be careful about schools that pitch you on how flexible or easy they are. The best MBA programs will expect you to limit your outside activities and will work you hard, especially in that first year.

In addition, pay attention to degrees that look like an MBA but in fact are different. For example, you can get valuable career preparation from master’s programs in fields such as accounting (MAC), public administration (MPA), health administration (MHA), and information systems management (MISM). But each of these degrees is more specialized than an MBA, which is designed to prepare you to manage all kinds of organizations. The greater specialization can be valuable if, for instance, you want to be an accountant or if you hope to manage a city, a hospital, or a company’s information systems department. However, you should be clear about this distinction. Be especially careful if someone tells you that their master’s degree is “just as marketable as an MBA.” That may be true in specific fields, but the MBA is unique in its breadth of recognition and acceptance.

If you decide that an MBA is for you, don’t scrimp on it. Unless you already have a topflight executive position, it’s probably best to stop working and focus on your education full-time for two years. And trying to save a lot of money on tuition probably isn’t a good idea; good MBA education is expensive relative to an undergraduate degree. You should also go after the most challenging summer internship you can find, regardless of what it pays. And you should develop a clear specialty in the second year (marketing or finance, for example) so that prospective employers will believe you might actually be worth a six-figure salary on the day you graduate.

If you do all of those things, your MBA can open a lot of doors. Almost every organization, if you think about it, has the essential features of a business. Let’s take an art museum, for example. You may have sought the job as director of the museum because you love sponsoring exhibits that inspire and educate people. You weren’t long on the job, though, when you realized what it takes to run a museum.

Even though your museum receives some public funding, it isn’t enough to cover the cost of everything you have to pay for. That includes the salaries and health benefits of the employees, monthly utility bills, and advertising campaigns. As director of the museum, you have to raise money to make up the difference between these expenses and the money you get from the city or county that sponsors you. To do that, you raise money from wealthy individuals and you charge an entrance fee. When you do this, you realize that your donors and visitors become, in a way, your customers.

You’ll have to rely on those customers even more heavily if you want to bring a national exhibit to the museum or do some renovations to your building; that will require lots more fund-raising and probably higher entrance fees, at least for the national exhibit. The longer you’re on the job, the more likely you are to look around and say, “When I finished my MBA I didn’t want to work for a business. But this museum has all the elements of a business: products to design and build, employees to manage, budgets to balance, and customers to satisfy. I’m glad I got that MBA after all.”

Like the museum, most organizations have the characteristics and needs of a business. That’s true of schools, government agencies, charities, and even churches. Even though they aren’t trying to make a profit, they have to be managed effectively to serve their constituents and to survive. That’s why you don’t need to worry too much about the world being awash in MBA graduates. If you get admitted to a good program and work hard, you’ll find opportunities to make high-stakes judgments in a host of fields.

Part-Time and Online Graduate Degrees

Many people don’t get the chance to attend graduate school when they’re young. But, as their careers advance, they recognize the potential value of getting a graduate degree. By this time, though, life’s responsibilities and opportunities can make it hard to go back to school full-time.

The good news is that innovative schools are making it easier to get a graduate education without that full-time commitment. The options are numerous: You can, for example, take evening or weekend classes, study entirely online, or do a combination of both. You may find that your greater life experience and maturity make you a better learner than ever before. Studying while you work full-time may amplify your learning, as you make immediate application of what is being taught.

In addition to the inherent value of the education itself, the degree may give you new career options. Your employer may pay some or even all of your tuition. Getting a graduate degree this way can be a great thing.

Issues to Double Click On

But you can also be disappointed by the experience. The quality of part-time and online programs varies immensely. And you have to be more committed than the ordinary student, the one who has full time to devote to the cause and gets the face-to-face support of professors and other full-time students.

Be very careful as you choose a program. Think of yourself not as Eager Beaver but as the Beav’s mom, June Cleaver. Don’t take anybody’s word for anything. First, find out if the program is accredited and by whom. If you haven’t heard of the accrediting body, try out the name on a university professor in the field. Don’t settle for a program without topflight accreditation unless you have to.

You’ll want to find out who the professors are and what professional credentials they have. Also, ask about the hours of study and classroom work expected of you. If the total is less than what would be required in a full-time program, be sure that you’re not being given an easier path to a less valuable education. In addition, ask if the program offers assistance with career placement; in most cases, you won’t be getting the same support that you would in a full-time program. That’s not a problem if you like your current job, but it will make your degree less valuable as a job-change vehicle.

Finally, explore the way that you’ll interact with your professors and fellow students. You may be tempted to enroll in an online program that allows you to study at your own pace and at any time of the day or night. But you will learn much more if you get to communicate not only with your professors but also with other students who are studying the same things you are. In fact, the most effective way to learn from fellow students is in organized cohorts, where you not only communicate but also work together on shared assignments.

You’ll want to push for all of those things even if your employer is footing the bill. Your time is worth too much to spend it in a program that isn’t designed for effective learning. You’d be better off stopping what you’re doing and going back to school full-time.

What Graduate Schools Are Looking for

Would-be graduate school students often ask what admissions committees are looking for—they wonder what it takes to get admitted to a good school. Let’s talk about this as we conclude our exploration of graduate education.

Graduate schools aren’t all looking for exactly the same things. The PhD programs, for example, want to see research potential, ideally in the form of already published papers. The MBA programs, by contrast, care a lot about whether you’ve shown leadership potential through your full-time work experience. And of course even among graduate programs of the same type, the prestigious programs care about many things that the less prestigious ones don’t.

One thing that may be true of all selective graduate programs is that they’re careful not to put too much weight on mere numbers and labels. Let’s take your GPA and standardized test scores, for example. If those grades and scores are terribly low, you’ve got a problem. But what a graduate admissions committee mainly wants to know is that your GPA and test scores are good enough. They will look at those numbers as a potential warning sign, but not as a guarantee that you’re qualified. Bad scores might rule you out. Therefore, you should invest enough to be sure that your undergraduate grades and standardized test scores represent your best effort; put in the extra hours and retake courses and exams if necessary. But remember that even an astronomically high GPA or test score is unlikely, by itself, to get you into a good school. At most, an admissions committee will take such a score as a sign of excellent analysis skills. They’ll want to see more.

Graduate school admissions committees are also careful in judging letters of recommendation. You might naturally assume that the ideal recommender is someone with a fancy title, such as dean or president or senator. But put yourself in the shoes of an admissions committee member. Wouldn’t you care less about who a candidate knows than what he or she knows and is capable of doing? That is why recommendation forms typically ask recommenders how long and in what context they have known you. The admissions committees who create the forms are concerned about a recommender’s “strength of read,” or his or her basis for judging your ability. If a recommender doesn’t know you intimately, the committee will discount the recommendation, regardless of fancy titles or notoriety. The most you’re likely to get out of a letter from a university president or governor who doesn’t know you well is a bemused nod to your people skills. (“You’ve got to wonder how the applicant pulled that off,” the committee members will say.)

Therefore, you want to find recommenders who can speak firsthand about what you’re capable of. Ideally, they will have supervised you directly in your academic, extracurricular, or professional work. If they’re recognizable figures, so much the better; it can be particularly valuable to get the recommendation of someone whose judgment the committee members know they can trust, such as a person who graduated from the program to which you’re applying or who has recommended successful candidates in the past. But that kind of recommender will be the first to admit if there is a low “strength of read” in your case. So worry first and foremost about finding recommenders who both admire you and can speak from intimate experience. In fact, make it a goal to cultivate relationships with such mentors long before applying to graduate school.

Yet another label that admissions committee members will double click on is the name of the college you graduated from. You might assume that a student from a prestigious institution will have an automatic advantage over one from a little-known place. But admissions committee members know that though the Ivy League schools have more than their share of gifted students, not every Ivy League graduate is a surefire winner. By the same token, they know that even relatively unknown schools can produce standout students. They’ll look beyond the name of your college to find the things they really want to see.

Those things, it won’t surprise you to learn, are the hard-to-measure qualities required to make high-stakes judgments. The people who run topflight graduate schools recognize that the employers who hire their graduates are looking for HSJ capability. They also know that students who bring that capability to the program will share it with one another, supercharging the learning environment. So they try to admit students who have a lot of HSJ skills already.

Because these skills are hard to measure, a good graduate school will put substantial weight on written essays. You’ll be asked to describe your career goals and situations in which you faced challenges successfully. Many schools will also interview each student before admitting him or her. A skillful interviewer can tell quite quickly whether an applicant has the analysis skills, people skills, and moral sense to succeed in graduate school and later in the workplace.

Given that you’ve been cultivating these HSJ skills throughout your time in college, especially through internships and other forms of fieldwork, you’ll be well prepared for these essays and interviews. Your analysis skills will come through in the way you think about the questions you’re asked, regardless of the final conclusion you reach. Your people skills will show in an interview as you make a sincere connection with the interviewer. Your moral sense will be manifest in your honesty and openness to learning; even in a face-to-face interview, you’ll be willing to say, “I never thought about that before,” just at Rex Lee was willing to learn things from a student about a case he’d argued before the Supreme Court. Don’t worry about saying the right things to make an impression. Just let your HSJ skills show.

What to Do If You Don’t Find What You’re Looking For

It may be that after all this effort you won’t win admission to the graduate program of your choice. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as I learned when I didn’t get into Harvard or Stanford. There are lesser-known programs in which you can get an outstanding return on your investment of time, effort, and money.

However, you need to be careful in selecting a graduate school. The need for caution is even greater than it was when you were choosing a college. For one thing, graduate school is more expensive than college, in terms of not only tuition but also opportunity costs. Your time is worth more now than it was before; with your college degree you’re likely making more than you did after high school, and you may have greater financial responsibilities.

You also need to beware of graduate programs that are underfunded or understaffed, as we’ve discussed repeatedly in this chapter. Many schools whose primary emphasis is undergraduate education try to piggyback graduate programs without having the necessary resources. Likewise, there are “for-profit” schools that offer high-priced graduate degrees without holding their students to high standards of effort and performance. For such reasons, there can be a higher risk of stumbling into a disappointing educational experience at the graduate level.

An additional reason to be choosy about your graduate program is that you’ll care more about the credentials of your fellow graduate students and professors than you did in college. Back then, learning was primarily an individual event. The typical class was textbook- and lecture-based. You read the assigned pages from the text in anticipation of a class lecture. During the lecture you took notes along with other listeners in preparation for the exam.

In that environment, the quality of your learning didn’t depend much on how academically qualified your classmates were because you rarely interacted with them in the classroom. It also wasn’t critical that your professor be a recognized subject-matter expert. In fact, you might have been better off at a community college than at a research university, if the community college class was small and the professor had time to get to know you. It wasn’t necessary, in other words, to attend an elite college to get a good education.

Graduate school differs tremendously in that respect. The learning there is highly interactive, whether in case-based classroom discussions, small seminars, or research projects. In addition to personal effort, your learning will depend heavily on the efforts and skills of your fellow students and professors. Getting a good graduate education requires going to a good school.

For all of these reasons—cost, the prevalence of low-quality programs, and dependency on classmates and professors—institutional quality matters more in choosing a graduate school than it did in college. To ensure a good return on your investment, you need to know that your fellow students and professors are highly qualified. That doesn’t require getting into the number-one or number-two program in the country. But it does mean that you can’t settle for a program thinking that you’ll make up for its mediocre quality and reputation with outstanding individual effort.

So, once you have your graduate school acceptances in front of you, it’s time again for the Eager Beaver routine. You don’t want to attend a program in which you’ll incur the kind of debts only a doctor, lawyer, or CEO can afford if that program won’t open one of those career doors for you. In other words, you have to analyze the return you’re likely to get on your educational investment in a given program.

The first step in this analysis is to find out how long getting your degree is likely to take and how much cost you’ll incur, including opportunity cost. The next step is to get detailed placement information—specifically, what percentage of students are placed within a short time after graduation, what kind of work they get, and how much they make. When relevant, you should also check pass rates for professional licensure examinations such as the legal bar or medical board exams.

In forecasting your likely salary, remember that the national statistics on the value of graduate degrees are averages. Pay careful attention to those graduates of your intended program who aren’t finding employment in their desired fields or are working in jobs that don’t necessarily require graduate education. Also, resist the temptation to believe you’ll beat the average for your program. Try a Google search of the word glut with your degree type in front of it (for example, “PhD glut”). If the overall market for your intended degree seems glutted, be especially cautious of attending a little-known program.

With data on the likely financial cost and return, you’ll be able to determine whether the investment in the graduate program to which you’ve been admitted is a good one. Unfortunately, if your college grades were poor, there’s a strong chance that it won’t be. The best graduate schools are unforgiving of late-blooming college students. The same is true for low standardized test scores. If one or both of those deficiencies afflicts you, you’re unlikely to win admission to a program that will allow a high return on your investment. In that case, graduate school may not be the place for you. Instead, you may want to play to other strengths.

The good news for those with low college grades and test scores is that those things don’t matter in the world of work; HSJ capability does. And graduate school isn’t the only place you can develop that capability. In fact, whether you go to graduate school or not, the real key to professional success is to become a lifelong learner. If the door to a good graduate school doesn’t open for you, it may be time to start that lifelong learning process as a working professional. We’ll talk about doing that next.

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[1] James Thomas Flexner, Washington: The Indispensable Man (Back Bay Books, 1994), 5.

[2] The figure in 2005 was 97 percent. Spencer Stuart, Leading CEOs: A Statistical Snapshot of S&P 500 Leaders, February 2006, 6, http://content.spencerstuart.com/sswebsite/pdf/lib/2005_CEO_Study_JS.pdf.

[3] Ibid., 8.

[4] U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, 2008 Annual Social and Economic Supplement, PINC-03 (Education Attainment—People 25 Years Old and Over, by Total Money Earnings in 2007, Work Experience in 2007, Age, Race, Hispanic Origin, and Sex), http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/macro/032008/perinc/new03_001.htm.

[5]Ibid.

[6] M. Planty, W. Hussar, T. Snyder, G. Kena, A. KewalRamani, J. Kemp, K. Bianco,  and R. Dinkes, The Condition of Education 2009 (NCES 2009–081). National Center for Education Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, Washington, D.C., Figure 41–1, 101, http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/2009/pdf/41_2009.pdf .

[7] Ibid.

[8] This essay posted by a department at Purdue University provides a helpful overview of the PhD and the process for getting one: Purdue University Department of Computer Science, Notes on the PhD Degree, http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/dec/essay.phd.html.

[9] Council of Graduate Schools, PhD Completion Project—Program Completion Data, Table 1, 2008, http://www.phdcompletion.org/quantitative/PhDC_Program_Completion_Data.xls.

[10] AFT Higher Education, American Academic, The State of the Higher Education Workforce, 1997–2007, Table 1, 10, http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/higher_ed/AmerAcad_report_97–07.pdf.

[11] For a concise description of medical school, see Association of American Medical Colleges Staff, Medical School Admission Requirements, 2009–2010, 2008, 7–8.

[12] American Association of Medical Colleges, U.S. Medical School Applicants and Matriculants by School, State of Legal Residence, and Sex, 2008, table on website, http://www.aamc.org/data/facts/2008/2008school.htm.

[13] The list of 131 accredited MD-granted medical schools in the U.S. can be found at http://services.aamc.org/memberlistings/index.cfm?fuseaction=home.search&search_type=MS&wildcard_criteria=&state_criteria=CNT%3AUSA&image=Search. There are also 25 accredited schools of osteopathic medicine, which are listed at http://www.aacom.org/people/colleges/Pages/default.aspx.

[14] American Association of Medical Colleges, Medical School Tuition and Young Student Indebtedness (An Update to the 2004 Report) (PDF), Figure 1, October 2007, https://services.aamc.org/publications/index.cfm?fuseaction=Product.displayForm&prd_id=212&prv_id=256.

[15] National Conference of Bar Examiners and American Bar Association Section of Legal Education and Admission to the Bar, Comprehensive Guide to Bar Admission Requirements 2009, vii, http://www.ncbex.org/uploads/user_docrepos/CompGuide_02.pdf.

[16] ABA Market Research Department, American Bar Association, National Lawyer Population by State, 2007, http://www.abanet.org/marketresearch/2007_Natl_Lawyer_FINALonepage.pdf.

[17] American Bar Association, Enrollment and Degrees Awarded, 1963–2008 http://www.abanet.org/legaled/statistics/charts/stats%20-%201.pdf; Association of American Medical Colleges, Total U.S. Medical School Graduates by School and Sex, 2008 (website table), http://www.aamc.org/data/facts/2008/schoolgrads0208.htm.

[18] M. Planty et al., Figure 41–1, 101, http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/2009/pdf/41_2009.pdf.