Should You Do a Postgrad? A Parent’s Honest Guide to Deciding
My daughter called on a Tuesday evening, right as I was scraping burnt garlic butter off a frying pan. The kitchen smelled acrid and smoky, and I had the window thrown open despite the cold. She said, “I’ve been thinking about doing a master’s.” The pan hissed under the tap, and I stood there for a second, not because I was surprised, but because the question landed in a place I recognised. I’d asked myself that exact question about ten years earlier, in another kitchen, with a toddler strapped into a high chair and a stack of overdue library books on the counter.
I didn’t answer her right away. I told her to hold on while I dealt with the pan. But later that evening, after we’d had the usual half-hour talk about flatmates and whether her car was making that noise again, I said, “You know I actually did a master’s when you were little—well, when your brother was little. It nearly broke me.” She asked for details. And I realised I’d never really told her about it.
I did an MA in education policy when my son was two. I was working part-time as a teaching assistant at a primary school, which meant my days were made up of reading corners, glue sticks, and explaining division to a row of staring seven-year-olds. In the evenings, I drove to the university library and sat on the third floor under a strip light that buzzed, reading journal articles about school funding models. The communal printer only worked if you tilted the paper tray a specific way. I remember that printer more clearly than most of the coursework.
The reason I did the degree was honest then and sounds less noble now. I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep teaching primary school forever, and I had this idea that a postgrad would widen my options. A degree in education policy felt like a door. It had a nice, grown-up ring to it. People at dinner parties would stop asking what I planned to do next. I also had a smaller, quieter reason, something about proving to my own father, who had left school at sixteen, that his daughter had gone further. I later found out that old reason never gets satisfied by a certificate. You just carry it around after the graduation photos, still heavy, like an unopened envelope.
My daughter’s reasons for considering a postgrad were vaguer than mine. She said she thought a qualification might help her “go further in her field,” but when I asked the only question that matters, she went quiet. I asked: “What does this degree give you that you don’t already have?” The silence on the other end of the phone was the most honest part of the conversation. She didn’t know. Neither did I, back then.
If I was sitting down with someone today, trying to be useful rather than nostalgic, I’d start there. The first piece of advice for anyone wondering whether to do a postgrad is simple: be able to explain, in one plain sentence, what the degree is for. Not what it will lead to, but what it is for. A good postgrad is meant to narrow you, not broaden you. It’s a training in a specific way of thinking, a specific set of skills. If your sentence is “I want to explore my options,” then you’re going to pay forty thousand dollars to procrastinate in a nicer building than the one you’d hang around in otherwise. I did that. It doesn’t work.
There are other less obvious costs that nobody talks about. The money is the obvious one, but there’s the gap between what you earn while studying and what your peers are earning, a gap that compounds for years. There are the social costs, too. I spent two years in seminar rooms where I was the oldest person by at least six years, which is fine until they’re all going for drinks at nine and you’re checking your watch because the babysitter charges double after midnight. There’s a version of loneliness that comes with studying when everyone else your age is starting to get a career — a new kind of loneliness you can’t put on a funding application.
There is practical advice I wish someone had given me. Don’t choose a program because it has a famous name attached to it. Choose it for the cohort and the supervisors. Forget the brochure. Find an alumni list, look at the recent thesis titles, and message a couple of the graduates. Ask them one thing: do the supervisors actually read your work? I had one professor who wrote the same comment on my entire final dissertation — “Expand” — scrawled in the margin like he was signing a receipt. I was on my own. You want someone who will actually read your chapters, who will fight with you about your argument, who will tell you when it isn’t good enough. That relationship matters more than the ranking.
Another thing I learned: you cannot study at home with small children. You can try. I did. I remember leaning over a laptop while my son watched Blippi on the tablet, and I absorbed approximately nothing. I lost weeks in that fog. What finally worked was a brutal schedule. I outsourced the two-hour evening block to a babysitter or a grandmother who came over, took over bedtime, and stood firm while I sat in a café with earbuds in. I cleaned the kitchen less. The floor was sticky. The thesis got finished.
There’s a friend in the same programme who once told me, when I was deep in misery and about a paragraph from tears, that the degree isn’t an answer—it’s a question you pay to ask. I told my daughter that line. She laughed, but the sort of laugh that means she was thinking. We sat on the phone longer than usual, her somewhere in a rented flat, me in the kitchen with the garlic smell finally fading.
I shared what I’d learned about the decision specifically. Work for a year in whatever field you think you want to enter, I said. Do the boring, entry-level job. Listen to the complaints. If the people around you who are tired complain about the same things you complain about—if their frustrations sound like your own voice—then don’t do the postgrad. Getting a degree won’t change what you hate. It just makes you more indebted while you realise it. But if their complaints sound different, if they’re complaining about things that bore you less, then the degree might be worth the risk.
She hasn’t decided yet. It’s been a few weeks since that phone call. We’ve talked around it once more, briefly, but I’ve learned not to keep asking. Some decisions need to marinate in ordinary time. I sit with her not answering and remember myself at her age, standing in that same kitchen with a toddler, convinced that a certificate would fix something only I could actually fix myself. It was worth doing, that master’s—I don’t regret it. But it changed very little about my life and changed a lot about how I saw myself. I think she knows that already. The truth is, if you have to ask people whether to do a postgrad, part of you already knows the answer. You’re just waiting for the bill to look less scary. Somewhere out there, she’s weighing it up. I’ll keep the garlic butter burnt on the stove if she ever wants to talk about it again.
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