December is an interesting month for the soon-to-graduate college student. Well-meaning friends try to catch up by asking what you’re planning to do once you get your diploma. Family members subtly hint that they’d rather you don’t come back to live at home. Classmates have been getting their final scores back for the MCAT and the LSAT and the GRE. Even if you hadn’t planned on getting more degrees, there might be a niggling doubt in the back of your mind. In spite of any pressure you may be feeling, however, getting a graduate degree without a strong reason is a bad idea.
I can understand the drive to stay in school as well as anyone else. If I look at the sum of my life, I can’t remember a time before being in school. My first memory is of learning the alphabet in my preschool classroom. There is something comforting about the idea of continuing on with my education. My job has always been to learn. I haven’t necessarily been trained to do anything else. I am not surprised that other students in my position would consider pursuing another degree.
Another added pressure lies in the rising numbers of graduate degree holders in the U.S. Between 2000 and 2018, the number of people over 25 with a master’s degree doubled from 10.4 million to 21 million, and now at least 13 percent of U.S. adults hold an advanced degree. We’ve seen a similar shift with undergraduate degrees. In October 2024, 62.8 percent of recent high school graduates were enrolled in colleges or universities. In 1980, by contrast, only 49 percent of recent high school graduates had enrolled in colleges or universities. This change is also reflected in employer expectations. In 2023, Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce published a report that projects that only 28 percent of jobs in the United States will be open to those with no more than a high school education. This number has changed drastically since 1983, when 68 percent of jobs in the nation were open to those with only high school level schooling. More and more, those with less schooling are experiencing difficulty getting jobs. In this context, college education feels more necessary than it’s ever felt before. I think that part of the push to collect more degrees comes from the fear that, like the high school diploma, a B.A. may not be worth very much in the future job market.
Graduate degrees are also obviously requisite for certain jobs; for the next eight years, there is projected demand for mental health counselors, lawyers, nurses, healthcare workers, and educational administrators. If your dream is to become any kind of doctor, higher level educator, or high level scientific researcher, it would be necessary to pursue more education. However, even if you have known what you’ve wanted since you started as an undergraduate, I’m skeptical that a year away from education would alter that path. I would go so far as to argue that, due to the diminished quality of our Covid-era education, it’s more necessary for the next few class years of students than it has been before.
Going through years of asynchronous schooling due to Covid means that many of us were educated in less-than-ideal circumstances. Post-pandemic, many educators note that students are less engaged in the classroom than they were previously. One of my professors mentioned that the Monday-Wednesday-Friday class schedule were better than Tuesday-Thursdays because students struggled to maintain attention for longer than 50 minutes at a time. A graduate degree requires intrinsic motivation; there will be no consideration of what class schedules work best for students. Students are expected to know how to work best with what’s being put in front of them. COVID-19 may have robbed many of us of the chance to develop those skills. When pandemic-era education has failed to prepare us for the rigor of a graduate program, how can you expect to be able to motivate yourself through years of work to achieve a degree that you don’t really want?
A graduate degree, after all, takes years. A master’s degree runs for two years, a law degree might be three, engineering could be four, and doctoral degrees are anywhere from four to seven years of school followed by an additional three to seven years of residency. Most Oberlin students are between ages 18 and 24, meaning that an investment in a graduate degree could be an investment of around 10 percent of your total years lived up to this point. Especially for the students who have never taken a year off of school, this seems like a blind investment. How can you know that you don’t want to do anything else if you haven’t experienced anything else? For the sake of making an informed decision, it is worth trying something else for a year.
It isn’t that I don’t believe that a graduate degree can help you find yourself. I’ve been considering it for myself for quite some time. This article may just be a means of justifying my decision to put my stock more heavily into other options for a while. I have to admit that I’m disappointed that I probably won’t be spending the next three years in Fairbanks getting an M.F.A. in creative writing. Still, when my advisor asked what it was about the program that interested me, all I could talk about was how badly I wanted to live in Alaska for a while. He gave me a sort of quizzical look, then said I should find a way to get myself to Alaska without committing to three winters of freezing, never-ending darkness. It was a possibility I hadn’t yet considered.
