In short, the cost of getting a Master’s degree is $$$. The cost of getting a Ph.D. is time.
Increasingly, universities have come to rely on the Master’s level degree as a cash cow. This has always been true for MBA or JD degrees but the idea of the Master’s level degree as a money making tool has caught on and spread to virtually every discipline. Every Associate Dean across the country (USA) has realized that they can justify their position and raise money for the school by creating a Master’s degree program even when that degree has no obvious application or demand in the marketplace. The result is one sees offerings for Master’s degrees in history, chemistry, sociology, American studies, Hispanic studies, or other ethnic studies. Have you ever seen a job advertisement that required these (often newly created) master's degrees? For all practical purposes such degrees are useless (unless one is applying for a job at a university which would be folly since higher education is, with few exceptions, already a saturated market).
This degree can take one or two years, but there is very little financial aid for the Master’s degree seeker. I advise my undergraduate protégés to do a 5 year BA/MA degree if one is offered in their school/department. This gets it over quickly and avoids the risk of taking a break between degrees (which often leads to trouble). In addition, any financial aid you get as an undergraduate student can often be taken with you if you extend your course of study at the same school to include a 5 year BA/MA/MS option.
While scholarship and grant funding for a master’s level degree is scarce there is almost always funding for the person who wants to get a Ph.D. But here, too, one needs to exercise caution. In many fields the Ph.D. market is saturated. Landing a job may not be foremost in your mind when you begin a Ph.D program but the realities of the employment market will hit you if you manage to finish the degree. And this brings me to the real hurdle: half of all people who begin a doctoral degree never finish. Most people who hear this statistic dismiss it and think to themselves “that won’t be me.” They are often wrong.
Similarly, a Ph.D. program is often toxic to relationships. Everyone who was married/with a partner when they began the doctorate in my department had broken up by the time they finished (if they finished). This was often the case in other departments as well.
Every Spring friends (or friends with a college age child) will complain to me that s/he didn’t get into the college/degree program they applied to. They want to know why? Were they discriminated against? Is it due to affirmative action, etc.? Diversity is the name of the game when it comes to admissions but that word means a lot more than most people think it does. Let’s say, for example, your child, John, lives in California and applies to Stanford University. His high school friend, Jane, (who may or may not be a minority) was admitted to Stanford, but John didn’t get in. Why?
In addition to race and gender, we also look for geographic diversity. If we wanted to, we could fill the entire incoming class at Stanford with students from California—but we don’t want to do that. We want students from every state in the union as well as students from abroad. The truth is, once Jane was admitted, we may have met our California quota (for lack of a better term) and it is highly unlikely that we were going to admit any more students from California. Jane submitted her application five days before John so she was reviewed first. She got in and he was rejected or placed on the waiting list.
This same sort of things happens in graduate admissions. It’s the luck of the draw and there is little you can do about it. There are a few things you can do to boost your chances of admission but that is a subject for another day…
