Reply to Financially hobbled for life- elite masters degree that don’t pay off

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[quote=Anonymous]There are quite a few cash cow master's programs at the Ivies and other top colleges and even some schools in the UK have masters programs that seemed to have designed specifically for international students paying full freight rather than any intrinsic merit.

I did a master's of city planning at Penn and I only did it because they threw a lot of money in my direction and that along with a resident advisor's position in the undergrad dorms meant I graduated with minimal debt (less than my first year salary). However, there were other students in my program who took out the full debt load and graduated with close to 100k in debt for a two year degree (we graduated 20 years ago). Coming from another Ivy undergrad I wasn't impressed with the overall caliber of my program or quality of instruction, it felt more like a master's degree camp rather than a serious pursuit. I took a number of classes in both the law school and Wharton and they were far more serious and technical.

I know some of my peers are still making sub 50k a year while some of us have HHI in the middle six figures. The high earning ones are the ones who quickly moved into real estate consulting or even other forms of consulting that has nothing to do with city planning. It's a weird world where a master's degree can take people into extremely different directions, and as such, very different lives. And plenty of grads with large loans end up working for graduates of similar programs at local state universities that cost next to nothing. I will refrain from going as far as saying it's unfair because people do make decisions along the way and they must be held accountable for it.

The whole American higher education model is fundamentally broken. The cost of education soared because of cheap and easily available student loans and the originators of the loans won't put in caps on loan amounts or tie it to the value of the degree, so it's leeches leeching off each other. Too many people invested in the model to allow for any meaningful change. The progressives rail against the debt but the universities themselves are utterly dominated by progressives at the same time and won't do anything to reduce the cost of their tuition and who are very happy to hoodwink gullible people into taking out enormous loans and pretending it's no problem. From an ethical perspective, the universities have no business admitting students in the first place that can't afford to attend without enormous loans. How these deans and presidents at Columbia can look at their debt-laden students in the eye with any sense of integrity, I do not know, other than that they are corrupt in a sense. [/quote]

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