Will Grad School Students Create Value?

As a current graduate student, I am anxiously watching my personal balance sheet shift: the loans side keeps increasing and the savings/investment side keeps decreasing. It’s stressful to be accumulating debt while watching the economy in New York and across the country collapse, but perhaps less stressful than searching for full-time employment at the moment.

Unemployment in the U.S. keeps creeping up, with the Bureau for Labor Statistics placing it at 8.5 percent in its most recently released survey. What are the unemployed to do? Many are joining me in the shelter of graduate school.

The final enrollment numbers are not in yet, but university and local newspapers across the country are starting to note the increase in applications. (See the Daily Illini, GW Hatchet and The (Arkansas) Morning News, to name a few.)

A bad economy translating into a spike in graduate school applications is not a new or surprising trend, as this 2002 New York Times attests:

The sagging economy has created a bonanza of applicants for the nation’s schools of business, law, journalism, education and many other graduate programs as laid-off workers and college seniors are deciding to wait out the recession by honing their skills.

via Many Ride Out the Recession In a Graduate School Harbor – The New York Times.

The question is what kind of graduate education students are seeking out.

During his appearance on the Jay Leno Show, President Obama said:

[A] smart kid coming out of school, instead of wanting to be an investment banker, we need them to decide they want to be an engineer, they want to be a scientist, they want to be a doctor or a teacher. And if we’re rewarding those kinds of things that actually contribute to making things and making people’s lives better, that’s going to put our economy on solid footing. We won’t have this kind of bubble-and-bust economy that we’ve gotten so caught up in for the last several years.

via Obama On Tonight Show With Jay Leno: FULL TRANSCRIPT, VIDEO.

Are all of these students heading back to school “actually contributing to making things?” (i.e.,  Are they studying engineering or hieroglyphics?) Hopefully, this wave of grad students will emerge in coming years with lots of “value” — equipped with the skills and training needed to get the American economy back on track– and not just graduate with master’s degrees in debt.

Economy gives University’s graduate programs a boost in applicants [Daily Illini]
Grad school applications up 16 percent [GW Hatchet]
Graduate School Applications Rise As Economy Falters [The (Arkansas) Morning News]
Grad School Enrollment Going Up [WBAL TV]