Back to school. You haven’t even graduated yet
and already these three words may loom as an
index to your next several years. For others,
the words represent a future strategy tucked
away somewhere in long-term career plans, a
safety valve to get you out of a dead-end job, a
ticket to a New! Improved! field of choice. From here on in,
any formal, degree-oriented education you pursue will
likely be a means to an end.
And while you’re contemplating when you'd next like
to set foot on a college campus, academic, business and
industry professionals are still undecided on the precise
long-term benefits of graduate education. “Academicians
don’t like to have me say this," comments Elliot Estes,
retired President of General Motors Cor
poration, “but I think graduate school
is absolutely wrong for someone right
after undergraduate school.”
Of course, Estes is not
talking about those fields
where an advanced degree is a
necessary next step; there’s no
getting around medical or law school
if you plan on being a doctor or lawyer.
"But other than that,” he says, “par
ticularly in my line
engineering,
manufacturing,
business-they
ought to work at
least two or three
years between undergraduate and
graduate school. To
go right through and
get a Ph.D. with
out any work
experience can
be fatal, in my
opinion. Unless
you want to be an
academic, unless
you want to be a
professor, it’s just crazy.”
Thomas Linney, of the Council of Graduate Schools in
the United States, paints a different picture: “It used to be
that the only people who would continue in graduate study
were people who were going to work in the academic
field,” he says. “We are seeing increasingly that the cor
porate world has those same values.”
Right away, we see in Linney and Estes widely different
opinions on the merits of higher education, and no doubt
you've already listened to arguments from both sides of
the fence. Here’s another one, from the third side of the
fence, so to speak, that gets us off to a good start: Karen
Dowd, director of placement, University of Virginia's
Darden School of Business-"First you have to define your
own career goals, then you have to determine if going to
graduate school is going to help you attain those career
goals." Sounds simple enough.
FACT: Enrollment in the nation's graduate and profes
sional schools Is declining. Last year, enrollment in the
country's 127 medical schools dropped for the first time
since World War II; our 173 accredited law schools saw a
decline that bucked the burgeoning trend of recent years.
Business school, long the traditional resting place for
students unsure of their professional futures, is also
losing some of its lure; enrollment numbers there
are down after a steady increase. Over the past ten
y•ars, the number of graduating seniors pro
ceeding into graduate programs of all types has
declined by as much as 50 percent. “Work •*
perience is becoming increasingly more impor
tant than a diploma,’’ notes Maryann Donato, a
recruiter for Chemical Bank’s World Banking
Qroup.
A graduate education will often pay
great dividends, but it’s almost always at
great cost; the expense of time and
money can likely as not exceed the
value of the pursued degree.
In this installment of The Real Life Planner, we’ll help you
decide if you’ll ever again be a student in any formal, insti
tutionalized way. And, if you decide that one degree and
four years are more than enough, thank you, we'll get you
thinking about the many ways to continue your education
on an informal basis, through independent projects, adult
extension courses and on-the-job training.
GOING BACK
TO GET AHEAD,
STAYING IN
TO STAY PUT.
Sometimes it must seem the safest
place is right where you are, and to
many students the prospects of
another extended tour of campus duty
toward a graduate degree hold greater
certainty than a career in any field Those
of you, and your numbers are many, will
seek to extend the safe haven of academia,
applying to law schools with no intention
of practicing law, business schools with no
plans to enter the business world, educa
tion programs with no hopes of a career in
teaching This is not a good thing
Sure, graduate school for many of you
holds answers to the most nagging ques
tions about your future There's no question
that to be a doctor you need an MD , to
be a lawyer you need ari LL B or J D , to be
a dentist a D D S or D.M.D., and so on But
there is an argument to be waged in the
gray areas of graduate education—commu
nications, fine arts, journalism, political
science, theology, computer sciences,
history-and it is an argument you should
at least consider before returning to the
books and final exams yet again
"If I were looking to go to graduate
school now, there are a tew things I would
absolutely do," says the Council of Graduate
School's Linney "You have to have a sys
tematic idea of what it is you want to study
and who is doing interesting work in that
field Then it's also important to figure out
where that field is going Is the field
expanding? Is it contracting? Is there
research support to any substantial degree,
and is it likely to stay there?
By far the most popular graduate path
is the road to business school Last year t
there was a future MBA candidate for every
would-be doctor, lawyer, dentist, biological
scientist and physical scientist combined
Put the tuition dollars of every graduate
student currently in a business, manage
ment or accounting program into one bank
account and you’d displace at least a lew
Fortune 500 families Is it worth the effort,
not to mention the cost?
"Business school Is certainly not nec
essary m all cases," asserts the University
of Virginia s Dowd "It makes sense lor cer
i tain industries, and each individual in
assessing his or her own career path has to
find out how important an MBA is to suc
cess in that field And the way they can find
that out is by looking at the profiles of the
individuals who are in power in that field "
Dowd suggests that an MBA will be
useful to a career in investment and com
mercial banking consumer goods com
panies will look favorably on the degree,
as will the country's top consulting firms
An MBA though, is not necessary in sales
in real estate development, nor in the
high technology fields, Dowd says profes
sionals in those areas look to new hires
with experience more than they seek
those with business school degrees
"It's hard to generalize," she says "It
requires you to determine what your own
career goals are. and to do a complete
analysis about what experience is neces
sary to attain your career goals Call the
recruiters in the companies you're inter
ested in and ask if an MBA would be valua
ble. recruiters, for the most part, are very
willing to give honest advice
One such recruiter is Chemical Bank's
Donato, and her advice for
work experience under your bell before
you consider graduate school ' That's
where we re leaning," she says "Once
you're in a company, it's definitely possible
to climb as high without an MBA as it is with
an MBA Now, I'm not discounting the impor
tance of an MBA from Harvard, but most
people applying for jobs don't have MBAs
from Harvard, and for everyone else work
experience is crucial The top business
schools are recognizing this too They’re
requiring some work experience before
they'll let you in "
Estes, the retired president of General
Motors, takes Donato’s advice one step, or
one decade, further "In the first ten years
of your career," he says, "you don't need
an MBA or any other graduate degree If
an engineer needs an MBA in business,
he doesn't need it for a while Let him find
out for sure what it's all about first, and
why he needs the MBA before he goes out
and gets it It's absolutely true that in hiring
and especially in promoting, companies
will look at the person, his ability and his
experience, a lot more closely than they'll
look at the degree Today, being a people
person is three times more important, in
my opinion, and a degree won't make you
a people-person
"Now I'm not saying you can come out
of high school today and get to be the pres
ident of Chemical Bank Let's not be ridicu
lous about the role that education plays,
but let's also not over-emphasize it All I
say is that you don't need the MBA. you
don't need the masters, for the first years
of your career anyway So why not put it off
and get a little work experience behind you.
develop some characteristics that will be
important later on. and then go back and
get your graduate degree later on
Career Aptitude Testing President
Barry Gale, author of the book Discover
What You're Best At, offers his thoughts on
the merits of higher education
"The problem with most formal education."
he says, "is that students go through the
answers to pass the test, to get the piece
of paper, the degree On a graduate level,
though, you tend to find more highly moti
vated students, better professors, a better
environment to deal specifically with your
particular area of interest "
It seems to Gale that graduate pro
grams as a rule won't make you less quali
fied for the job of your dreams "At best it's
a positive career move, at worst a neutral
one," he says "If you're going to the world's
worst graduate school, then you might lose
more than you gain So you've got to look
at where you're going, where you can afford
to go, and where you can get in. before you
make any decisions "
"Generally, an MBA from Podunk Uni
versity is not going to help your career,”
agrees Dowd
Whether you go to graduate school or
not, you should never stifle the quest to
know more, about your field or about the
world around you "To me, continuing edu
cation is not the best term,” Dowd notes
"I'd rather call it professional development
I really believe that young workers should
do such things as take executive training
programs at the local university, or take
seminars offered by their professional
organization Education should never stop"
HOW TO BEAT THE
HIGH COST OF
GRADUATE
SCHOOL
Graduate school ain’t cheap, and
there's no getting around that sim
ple fact. Tuition, in most cases, will
be equal to undergraduate charges, and
many of you already carry the ball and chain