TheLoop21.com

By: Raechal Leone (Add to your loop)
Thu, 04/09/2009 - 00:00

Getting more education might not be the best idea right now.

It's a very personal decision.

But as the economy continues to tank, I'm hearing more people talk about going back to school. Many of them are nervous about the unemployment rate, at 8.5 percent and climbing, and the nonstop news reports of layoffs and the lingering recession.

It's understandable. We've been taught that more education means more money and presumably, more success. If we hadn't learned it by the time we were in middle school or high school, those charts on our school counselor's wall — the ones that showed income rising with education level — forever sealed the concept in our minds.

And sure enough, when bad times bust up a booming economy, grad school applications surge. Schools as diverse as Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, George Washington University in Washington, D.C. and the University of Illinois in Champaign, are reporting larger numbers of applicants.

Test prep companies that work with students trying to get into these schools also say they're busier these days. "Whenever the economy suffers a decline, we see a rise in the number of people going to graduate school, and conversely taking our courses to prepare for their entrance exams," Harriet Brand, of the Princeton Review, told LSU's Tigerweekly.

Still, spending a lot of time and money on a degree doesn't mean you'll end up rich or even any richer than you are without it.

People who give career advice for a living, like Penelope Trunk, author of the Brazen Careerist book and blog, often advise against it, especially for people who are going into it as a way to escape a bad job market. "Military is the terrible escape hatch for poor kids, and grad school is the terrible escape hatch for rich kids," Trunk wrote in a post called "Don't try to dodge the recession with grad school."

That pretty much says it all. While Trunk suggested people without a bachelor's degree return to school for that, she said workers who already have a bachelor's degree to strengthen their resumes through their own learning path.

Career coach Marty Nemko seconded that advice. Working with a mentor, participating in conferences, and reading, reading and reading more about your industry are all experiences just as valuable as grad school, he wrote.

Despite this, more education continues to generally mean more money. Numbers from the Department of Education show the median income for blacks, ages 25 to 34, with a high school diploma was $25,000 in 2006. It was $37,000 for blacks with a bachelor's degree and $50,000 for blacks with a master's degree. For whites, median income for a high school grad was $30,000, compared to $45,000 for white college grads and $50,000 for whites with a master's degree.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has also crunched the numbers to find out which occupations had high and low "earnings premiums," based on 2006 data.

The top five jobs they listed with high earnings premiums, or the biggest difference in media salary for someone with a bachelor's degree and someone with a master's degree, include:

1. Financial analysts: $74,760, bachelor's degree; $109,983, master's degree
2. Tax preparers: $41,997; $59,909
3. Financial managers: $68,986; $97,885
4. Education administrators: $48,064; $68,000
5. Counselors: $32,035; $45,091

The occupations with low earnings premiums for getting a master's degree is sad news for myself and other journalists who went to graduate school, although most of us knew what we were up against and somehow entered the field anyway.

Five occupations with low earnings premiums for grad school degrees:

1. Editors: $50,045; $49,931
2. Writers and authors: $48,967; $50,015
3. Architects, except naval: $60,005; $62,032
4. Occupational therapists: $53,052; $55,984
5. Archivists, curators, and museum technicians: $37,902; $40,038

These numbers of course are just that, numbers.

They don't include all the costs and benefits you can't quantify — for me, costs like the amount my 401(k) would have grown had I continued contributing while in school full-time, and benefits like internships and mentors I never would have been able to access otherwise.

Still, it's good to have a sense of the return you can expect going into graduate school. Especially at a time when no degree ensures we'll always have a job, it's smart to remember what another of those posters in the counselor's office used to say, this one usually with a picture of a lightbulb or a superhero of some sort: "Knowledge is power."

Raechal Leone is TheLoop21.com's senior editor and writes the Inside the Loop blog.

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