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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/education/edlife/edl-24masters-t.html
The Master�s as the New Bachelor�s
By LAURA PAPPANO
New York Times
July 22, 2011

William Klein�a story may sound familiar to his fellow graduates. After earning his bachelor�s in history from the College at Brockport, he found himself living in his parents� Buffalo home, working the same $7.25-an-hour waiter job he had in high school.

It wasn�t that there weren�t other jobs out there. It�s that they all seemed to want more education. Even tutoring at a for-profit learning center or leading tours at a historic site required a master�s. �It�s pretty apparent that with the degree I have right now, there are not too many jobs I would want to commit to,� Mr. Klein says.

So this fall, he will sharpen his marketability at Rutgers� new master�s program in Jewish studies (think teaching, museums and fund-raising in the Jewish community). Jewish studies may not be the first thing that comes to mind as being the road to career advancement, and Mr. Klein is not sure exactly where the degree will lead him (he�d like to work for the Central Intelligence Agency in the Middle East). But he is sure of this: he needs a master�s. Browse professional job listings and it�s �bachelor�s required, master�s preferred.�

Call it credentials inflation. Once derided as the consolation prize for failing to finish a Ph.D. or just a way to kill time waiting out economic downturns, the master�s is now the fastest-growing degree. The number awarded, about 657,000 in 2009, has more than doubled since the 1980s, and the rate of increase has quickened substantially in the last couple of years, says Debra W. Stewart, president of the Council of Graduate Schools. Nearly 2 in 25 people age 25 and over have a master�s, about the same proportion that had a bachelor�s or higher in 1960.

...

So what�s going on here? Have jobs, as Dr. Stewart puts it, �skilled up�? Or have we lost the ability to figure things out without a syllabus? Or perhaps all this amped-up degree-getting just represents job market �signaling� � the economist A. Michael Spence�s Nobel-worthy notion that degrees are less valuable for what you learn than for broadcasting your go-get-�em qualities.

�There is definitely some devaluing of the college degree going on,� says Eric A. Hanushek, an education economist at the Hoover Institution, and that gives the master�s extra signaling power. �We are going deeper into the pool of high school graduates for college attendance,� making a bachelor�s no longer an adequate screening measure of achievement for employers.

Colleges are turning out more graduates than the market can bear, and a master�s is essential for job seekers to stand out � that, or a diploma from an elite undergraduate college, says Richard K. Vedder, professor of economics at Ohio University and director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity.

Not only are we developing �the overeducated American,� he says, but the cost is borne by the students getting those degrees. �The beneficiaries are the colleges and the employers,� he says. Employers get employees with more training (that they don�t pay for), and universities fill seats. In his own department, he says, a master�s in financial economics can be a �cash cow� because it draws on existing faculty (�we give them a little extra money to do an overload�) and they charge higher tuition than for undergraduate work. �We have incentives to want to do this,� he says. He calls the proliferation of master�s degrees evidence of �credentialing gone amok.� He says, �In 20 years, you�ll need a Ph.D. to be a janitor.�

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This is a frightening trend. The U.S. educational system is already too slow and expensive.

You do have several trends and phenomena converging here. There's the fact that folks in their 20s usually don't make much money, education or no education, because employers value experience. A combination of education and experience helps boost increasingly in your 30s, 40s, and 50s.

There's the recession.

And then there are the trends in education that the article discusses. Much more information in this Pew Report:

http://pewsocialtrends.org/files/2011/05/Is-College-Worth-It.pdf

I think everyone in college knows this and thinks it sucks. Everyone wants to go to college now and the professors are getting a lot of kids who can't even read or write well at all.

My dad (an accountant) talks about how a degree doesn't seem to mean anything anymore when it comes to figuring out if a new hire is going to be any good or not. Apparently, they get all the way through college and still aren't good at reading, writing, or picking up on new things.

LOL.

A history degree?

What if he had earned a degree in Engineering or an Accounting Degree or Computer Science or got a full Cisco Certification?

And he is going back for a Masters in History?

He is an idiot!!!

He could then make a good living and read history on the side.


He is not educated at all. He is a functional illiterate in a highly technical society where 95% of the jobs he cannot do. He cannot run a lathe, weld, do construction, diagnose or treat disease, work in a lab, or work with computers. He is functionally illiterate.


Its far worse than that. Check out this graph for higher education. Its a huge bubble waiting to burst.

http://blog.american.com/2011/07/chart-of-the-day-the-higher-education-bubble/

I think your comments are a bit strong. I have known history graduates who made a successful transition to the business world.

I will encourage my children to pursue STEM majors for career reasons, but the decision has to be theirs. (And if everyone graduated with a STEM degree, the wages for such graduates would fall.) I respect the subjects of history and international relations, and they can be "relevant". For example, currently a big issue for financial markets is whether countries such as Greece, Ireland, Portugual, Spain, and (in the long run) even Italy can keep the Euro as a currency. It is as much a political and cultural question as an economic one. NYT columnist Tom Friedman recently wrote a column "Can Greeks Become Germans?". To analyze the prospects of the Euro currency and European government debt, a deep knowledge of European history would be helpful.

Regarding history as a career, tenure track history professor jobs are much scarcer than the supply of history PhDs, but many gifted people love knowledge for its own sake. Weighing intellectual interests vs. financial prospects is hard and depends on one's values (which evolve over time).

Oh I COMPLETELY agree. It seems to me that there are two disastrous trends converging. On the one hand, we have anti-intellectualism which ridicules and treats with disdain anything that can not be packaged or sold. On the other hand we have a sense of privilege, which has led students and families to pressure high schools to provide high grades for inadequate (and sometimes plagarized) work. The end result is that we are sending to college, students who are probably plenty intelligent, but who are ill-prepared to actually study and work hard. I would imagine that it may be less a matter of grade inflation in colleges than it is a lowering of expectations--in response to large populations of students who treat colleges and universities as a purchased product (which should therefore adjust to meet the needs of the student/family consumers) rather than an institutions of learning.

Understood and I have liberal arts grads and music majors working for me and they do quite well. But, it takes 1-2 years to train them on the technical stuff that technical graduates already have internalized.



Except Ireland, the elites in those nations are already German as they have bought into the German statist ideology.

Ireland has little in common with Greece, Italy, or Spain in the structure of its debt or its culture or its economy. Its debt crisis is similar to the USA's in most respects as its real estate rather than public service debt.


Its better to make history than study it!!

... and the history major walks out of the room shaking her head...

One of my most successful classmates was a history and philosophy major who taught himself computer programming as a kid and honed his skills doing graphics programming for defense contractors. I think it is a mistake to major in something academic and expect to pick up job skills doing the tasks on the syllabus. Truth is, most employers are not the least bit interested in your major or what classes you took. They want to know what you can do!

Is it? Some of the people who have made history have made our world worse, not better. In general, I would say having an electorate that has focused its attention only making money/preparing for a specific career is not to our benefit--especially in times such as these in which politicians, talking heads and radio hosts regularly misrepresent our history and distort scientific evidence in order to manipulate public opinion.

Marketable skills are certainly important, but I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the value of a quality liberal arts education--or for that matter the similarly unprofitable fine arts degrees. One thing is certain: my kids would be a lot happier in school if they were able to immerse themselves in topics of interest to them instead of spending so much time "acquiring skills for the future".