Don’t try to dodge the recession with grad school.. Many of my friends are considering this sort of move. It’s a sucker bet for a number of reasons that Penelope outlines. My basic argument is her last one.
Graduate school forces you to overinvest: It’s too high risk.
In a world where people did not change careers, grad school made sense. Today, grad school is antiquated. You invest three to six extra years in school in order to get your dream career. But the problem is that not only are the old dream careers deteriorating, but even if you have a dream career, it won’t last. You’ll want to change because you can. Because that’s normal for today’s workplace. People who are in their twenties today will change careers about four times in their life. Which means that grad school is a steep investment for such a short period of time.
You put in many years of avoiding adult life and prolonging adolescence, then commit to a career you have no real idea about. When I thought I might want to be a lawyer, I worked for a law firm and was firmly told by many lawyers that this is the worst job ever. When I thought I wanted to be on the news, I became a news reporter and learned why the news structurally has to be terrible. You learn more by doing.
Of course, that’s coming from a guy who hasn’t gone to graduate school. I still think though, that if you are lost, or unsure, the general best bet is to say yes to lots of opportunities and ditch the ones you hate. You will get somewhere by staying in motion, and learn more things.
But wait, there's more
This work by MattK is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International
i sort of agree that grad school is a waste of time in a practical sense. reason being is that you learn a wide variety of skills most of which you may or may not ever need. but in the point you made above, you are assuming that the grad degree would be applicable in only one out of the 4 careers. But in fact getting a business MBA would likely be beneficial in any industry you chose to pursue afterwards. Also another thing grad school is great at is building a professional network. Personally i came to a conclusion that it would be ideal to pick a grad program apart and learn the applicable stuff.. it’s just more efficient IMO.. http://personalmba.com/
You’re doing a smart thing. The big deal that successful folks emphasize is they learned by doing it and working hard at it. Also, they learned by failing earlier.
One of the big reasons grad school is a sucker’s bet for the uncommitted is that it costs so much. Getting in that much debt and spending that many years to unlock only a few doors doesn’t make sense unless you absolutely want to go in that one direction.
The skills that grad school teaches are probably useful ones. But are they over $100,000 useful? If you can learn them by just reading the required books, that seems like a much better deal.