Why You (probably) Should Not Get A Master’s Degree In 2024

maybe you shouldn't get a master's degree what let me explain meet Frank just graduated from college with his undergraduate with a double major in B chemistry and economics overall Frank is a good student he has a 3. 7 GPA was the president of his photography class and even has some research experience at a B informatics lab now he's super excited to get started on the next chapter of his life but you see he's just had no luck trying to find a job he's been applying to hundreds of jobs and he's not being picky he's applying to full-time jobs part-time jobs big companies small companies pretty much anything that is even tangentially related to his degree but just no luck so now Frank is kind of just thinking to himself like maybe I should just get a master's degree then I would be able to find a job okay so this is when I will say to Frank hold on my friend calm down please think this thoroughly because if you don't you could potentially end up in this position I will either be overqualified for the entry-level positions or underqualified for the midlevel positions and no matter what jobs I apply for I'll get rejected from all of them because nobody wants me and it's so Soul crushing in this video we're going to talk about the actual value of a master's degree as opposed to the narrative that you've been told by schools and the government and society and finally how to actually evaluate if a master's degree is worth it or not as well as some other Alternatives because there are actually lots of different ways that you can advance your career if you're interested in learning and especially self-learning stem subjects I really recommend you check out brilliant br who's the sponsor of this portion of the video is a stem learning platform that specializes in interactive Hands-On learning in fact their courses are so good that top companies like the recruiters themselves recommend their candidates use brilliant in order to learn and brush up on subjects like math and stats coding and data science brilliant makes learning these tough subjects easy to understand and fun by incorporating little quizzes analogies and basically little dopamine hits that helps a lot if you're ever getting bored or discouraged I especially love their llm course if you're interested in Genai it's such a fun overview and you don't even need to know how to code although if you want to do that they also have courses for those too they have Timeless course offerings like math and stats programming with python as well as new course offerings to explore topics like AI neuron networks and Quantum Computing you can join a millions of people who are already learning on brilliant and head over to this link to get started for free also linked in description if you go through my link you'll get 20% off their annual subscription now back to the video if you're considering a master's degree and you're doing some research and looking some school websites you'll likely come across some iteration of this chart a master's degree is worth $20,000 more annual salary and probably accompanied by some line saying that master's degree is going to make you more valuable therefore you have more job opportunities so while that is not necessarily false what they probably wouldn't show you is this graph as you can see since the period of 2017 to 2021 the gap of average salary between a master's and a bachelor's degree is decreasing substantially in other words getting a master's degree doesn't give you as much average salary increase anymore this makes sense simple supply and demand since the 2000s there's been a two times increase in the percentage of adults with master's degrees more people with master's degrees the value of a master's degree decreases we also know that 52% of college graduates are working jobs that don't require college degree so they're underemployed up to one year past graduation I couldn't find exact numbers for a master's degree but it seems like this is a trend that passes on to master's degrees too these people if they have a job are mostly working jobs that do not require a master's degree going to UNI and getting a master's only to work for minimum wage and switch countries every year whoops getting to the end of a hiring process and they offer you basically minimum wage when you have a master's degree and remember with a little rust e and an insane amount of luck you too can look like me and that is of course only if they have a job because the difference in unemployment rate between someone who has a bachelor's degree versus a master's degree is only 0. 2% which is by far the smallest differential between any other jump in degree oh yes Andy kicker a recent robertab study in 2023 shows that 79% of workers and hiring managers said skills experience and past accomplishments are far more valuable than credentials in education so yeah not only do the numbers show that there is a decrease in the value of a master's degree at least in relation to the chances of being hired and increased earning potential the recruiters the people hiring other people are clearly saying that they don't value credentials and education as much as things like skills experience and past accomplishments which by the way most master's degrees do not give you I have a master's degree on network engineer and I am really having a hard time getting a job with little to no experience this doesn't surprise me at all to be honest you're just overqualified but still don't have any actual experience now given that the average cost of a master's degree is $60,000 which of course is not covering uh living expenses your rent campus fees books and health insurance all of that together over 2 years at the very minimum would be above $100,000 if not $120 $150,000 so with that said I hope you're starting to question the value of that master's degree so of course there are master's degrees that are worth getting and later in the video I'll actually go through the framework that I use in order to calculate whether a master's degree is worth it or not but I think it's kind of crazy that a lot of people just assume that in most cases getting master's degree is worth it while it's actually the other way around so I dug into this a little bit more and I realized that this is a narrative that has actually been like carefully crafted and explicitly fed to the public over the past few decades in fact it's a belief that is so deeply ingrained in your brain that there's a strong emotional component now which we need to talk about because even if I tell you all the numbers and you agree with everything I say unless we address this you wouldn't be able to rationally not emotionally like rationally assess really why it is that you want to get a master's degree and whether you actually should or not in the 1960s about one in 10 adults in the United States had a college degree and it was very rare to see someone with a master's degree were higher outside of Academia there had been some education reforms getting more people to graduate high school but generally speaking education and especially higher education was not on people's radar at that time people were more preoccupied with the Vietnam War the Cold War and oil issues but in the May of 1980 there was a small Department that was put together called the US Department of Education whose goal was to get more people educated in the few years in 1983 they published a report called a nation at risk and from this I quote our nation is at risk our once unchallenged preeminence in Commerce industry science and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world if an unfriendly foreign power the Soviets had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today we might as well have viewed it as an act of War as it stands we haven't allowed this to happen to ourselves it was an instant hit over 6 million copies were published and regardless of political ideology everybody was fired up it seems that American Americans hate losing Education Act after act started coming into effect a bunch of school dropout prevention acts funding for ready to learn television programs the No Child Left Behind Act which by the way is the reason why there is so much standardized testing in the United States anyways over time increasing the quality of Education started becoming synonymous with going to college and it all sort of culminated in the college for all act which is a very aggressive push to get young people to attend college students were told that their goal should be to attend college parents were told that if they are a good parent and they cared about their children's future then they should be saving up money to send their kids to college even parents running their family business working in Blue Collar trades and making really good money they were brainwashed into thinking that they should go to college instead that will give them a better life College wasn't just about getting a job afterwards it's an experience where you go there to make lifelong friends find your future spouse and grow up and become independent adults of course this is always true for the upper class but this college for all act also brainwashed middle class and lower class families into thinking that they need to send their kids to college if they cared about their children's future and what kind of parent doesn't care about their kids's future parents save up their money for a college fund for tutoring for volunteering experiences all the other extracurriculars that you need in order to help your child get into a good college and kids as well as well-meaning counselors were always told that they should be aiming to go to college and it worked between the 1960s and today the percentage of adults who have bachelor's degrees more than quadrupled the Department of Education and colleges around the country celebrated and truly there were many people that were able to fulfill their Rags do riches story achieve the American dream through education and hard work the children of immigrant parents children from low-income families changing their computer science degrees into a ticket for generational wealth but after def Fanfare died down a problem started to reveal itself oops you see those inspiring amazing stories of upward Mobility truth be told they were in a minority those were like creme de La Creme but if we look at society as a whole we start looking at the averages not the exceptions we start to realize that maybe not everybody should have attended College there are so many new grads each year who can't find a job after graduating college 12% of people flat out can't find a job and 52% are underemployed there's clearly an over supply of educated people so it really doesn't make sense to get even more educated by getting a master's degree to make matters worse as there are more and more people who have degrees the number of jobs that require these Advanced decrees is diminishing of the 3 million jobs that were created last year only a fraction required a degree most of them are classified as what is called middle scale jobs that required a high schore degree and some level of training and certification but does not require a 4-year degree many of these are what are considered the trades your Carpenters plumbers electricians crane operators and the fastest growing one is solar panel installers what is ironic is that kids were pushed towards getting a college degree so that they can have a higher average salary coming out of school but because there's that over Supply it's pushed down these white collar job salaries substantially while on the other hand there's less and less people going to the trades since there's that decreased demand the wages of people in the trade these middle scill jobs has rocketed past the salaries of these white collar jobs so logically speaking these kids that graduate from college and cannot find a job they should be thinking like oh maybe I can consider these middle skill jobs these trade jobs but they don't why well bluntly put it's because their ego can't handle it and it's not their fault as we talked about earlier that really aggressive push towards getting people to go into college they're painting that picture for both the kid and the parents that this is what you want to do you want to go to college you want that exper experience and you want to secure better future for yourself and of course the flip side to this perhaps not as you know spoken about is the fact that if you don't go to college you're not going to have the opportunity of a better life and even that you're a failure of course this is not a matter of logic because clearly if you're into trades it doesn't mean any of these things and you're actually doing better than people who did go to college this is a matter of self-identity college white collar job equals success not to mention the countless hours the money that your parents spend on your tutting your extracurriculars your AP classes SATs acts applications your actual College tuitions it's very difficult to reconcile just throwing all of that away and going into a trade job that's why most of these unemployed college graduates would rather move back with their parents take on a part-time job at a coffee shop do things like uber lift door Dash while considering doing a master's degree and to hope that will help them finally land a job okay so just to be clear I'm not going to sit here and just tell you that you should not get a master's degree and just go into the trades instead because I understand that it is not as easy as that and on top of that if I said that it would just be as bad as that blanket statement of everybody should go to college then everybody will just go into the trades and they will have the same problem again it's just supply and demand what I'm hoping to do here is simply ask you to re-evaluate some of your beliefs that you may have thought to be the absolute truth like the fact that more degrees equals more opportunities and then I'll like you to try your best to be objective and reass ass your situation to make the correct choice for yourself your specific situation if you can get over the emotional barrier you'll find that there are a lot more doors that are open to you okay so now going back to our friend Frank I want to show you a framework that I would use if I were Frank to evaluate what I should do um in the next step of my career actually the first thing let's evaluate is a master's degree for Frank so quick reminder Frank has a double major in Biochemistry and economics he's a decent student has extracurriculars but just no luck with jobs he's working part-time now at a coffee shop and let's say that if he were to get a master's degree he would have to fund it himself and let's also say he has $30,000 in debt because that is the average amount of debt that a US graduate has all right so given his demographics he may be thinking oh maybe I should get a master's degree in computer science okay so let's say we choose this program the University of Chicago is master's program in computer science so there's four different options there's nine course Masters 12 course joint MBA and the pre-doctoral uh we're probably going to go with this one because don't have any previous experience I probably need to take these introduction computer science courses as well so first let's calculate the price of this degree let's see let's see where's the price all right so per course is 6,852 and then you have these quarterly fees as well I'm just going to use a calculator okay so one course is 6,856 we're going to take 12 so that's going to be $82,000 and then we also have these quarterly fees so it's going to be 2 year 8 qu it's going to be 484 plus 1,639 + 78 holy that's expensive per quarter so it's around $2,200 per quarter and we're going to have 8 quarter so that's 1768 together that is 9,880 okay so this is not actually calculating living expenses let's just quickly look to average cost of living in Chicago so average cost Chicago single estimated is this much so 1,286 and3 and average rent was $1,833 okay so that's around $3,100 per month um and we multiply that by 24 months so that's going to be around $75,000 for living cost so add that together so that's going to be $175,000 uh for your master's degree okay let's keep that number in mind and next let's calculate how much money we expect to make career outcomes okay so this is from 2022 until 2023 okay so I don't really like this report because it doesn't actually tell you what percentage of people get employed it only tells you what the average salaries are and what positions they are and where it is that they're employed so I don't really like that and it kind of makes me feel pretty suspicious because if the numbers were good why would they not put it here anyway though um let's just do this part okay so it looks like people who graduate generally become software Engineers 64% of people do so okay so assuming we become a software engineer making $140,000 uh we can go to this tax calculator I'm going to be conservative because California is the place that has the highest amount of tax so we're just going to go with that uh we put $140,000 and then our take home amount is $96,000 orth so going back to our total the price of those two years which is $175,000 so $175,000 divided by let I say $96,000 so it's 1. 8 years of your salary and this is obviously not including like living cost and just like life and stuff and I'm just going to say like making $96,000 in any major city you don't have get that much money left um so realistically even if we account for the fact that you don't get unemployed you don't get laid off which is happening all over the place right now and the fact that um you would get some promotion I would realistically say it's going to take you at least like four to 5 years to pay off the amount of that master's degree and speaking of layoffs and just going back to the fact that they don't even write what their employment rate is for their graduates um that's pretty sus I would probably call and ask them for these specific numbers um in this case I did cheat a little bit because uh I do know some people who went through this program because it's very similar to the mat's program that I went to and I know for a fact that in the past couple of years especially um the unemployment rate of graduates has been pretty significant so with all these factors combined if I were Frank I would not go for this computer science degree I hope that was a hell for exercise and I hope that you're able to use a similar framework to assess the degrees that you may be looking into of course not all degrees are created equal so you could look at some other degrees as well and depending on what your profession is there are master's degrees that are in fact very worth it this video is already ridiculously long so I'm not going to go through the exact calculations um basically if you're in certain careers like education and teaching law or Healthcare it does make Financial sense a lot of times to go do a master's degree or even a higher degree what I would say is that just please please actually do these calculations and don't just go with that narrative that since you were a child and just go do a master's degree simply because you can't find a job so finally if I were in Frank's position I would go through some of these master's degrees and then I would also consider somebody alternatives to progress my career for example you can consider upskilling and be more specialized in your domain research shows that 83% of Chief Human Resource officers said they more often would hire Talent with specialized skills we are really lucky to be living in an age when there's so much free and lowcost education options like KH Academy corsera certificates and honestly my all-time favorite is just YouTube because seriously you can get your entire master's degree on YouTube these days you can also consider professional development communities for example I run a program called Lonely octopus in which we specialize in helping people learn Ai and data skills that they can apply to working on real company projects and gaining work experience through that there are many other communities like this for different domains there's even programs like course careers that literally take the place of traditional college and master's degrees to help you get a job at a fraction of a price and hey throughout this process you may also find that there are other opportunities outside of your 9 to-5 traditional job we are currently in what is called the gig economy where there are so many opportunities for freelancing and starting your own business you may find that it's even more fulfilling than getting a full-time job all right this is a very long video if you stayed until the end thank you so much for staying I really hope that this helps you make an objective Choice towards where you want to be headed in your career and let me know in the comments what you're thinking about what your next career move is going to be thank you so much for watching and I will see you in the next video or live stream