Are students in graduate school being set up for success in their fields of study as student loans and the costs of higher learning continue to skyrocket? Signs point to no, and experts say they’d be more likely to get that type of real talk from a Magic 8-Ball than from their college advisors.
Researcher Josh Beach, author of The Myths of Measurement and Meritocracy, joined Newell Normand on WWL Radio to discuss the disparity between grad students’ hopes and dreams and the reality of the job market.
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“It’s a really questionable program that’s going on,” Beach said. “And it’s always been this way.”
Beach said institutions of higher education have never ensured a link between the master’s programs offered and the jobs available in the real world, and that students are getting saddled with loans that they have little hope of paying off.
“Traditionally you had a few degrees, like a law degree, medicine or theology where, after you earned that degree, there was a job waiting for you. There was a well-developed pipeline into the labor market.”
Beach said that’s not the case with other programs and paying off the loans that allow students to earn those degrees can become an impossible task.
“A lot of students are finding that they’re spending a lot of money for a degree, and there’s no job waiting for them,” Beach said.
A recent story in the Wall Street Journal profiled students who graduated from Columbia University’s film program, federal loan recipients who had a median debt of $181,000 but were earning less than $30,000 a year
Columbia ranks eighth in terms of wealth among the nation’s private universities.
Beach said that in most cases, professors at these institutions aren’t warning their students that the earnings to eventually pay off these exorbitant student loans may not materialize.
“Speaking from my own personal experience, speaking from my experience as a researcher,” Beach said, “professors are not generally having that conversation with their students, especially in grad school.”
