What to Ask Before Getting a Postgrad: A Parent’s Perspective
My daughter called me on a Tuesday night, halfway through her final year of undergraduate studies. She was sitting on her dorm room floor, she told me, because her roommate’s boyfriends had taken the chairs. Her voice had that particular mix of excitement and panic that comes when you’ve just seen a glossy brochure and thought, maybe this is my future.
“Mom, I found a master’s program in sustainable urban planning. It’s only one year. And they have an open house next month. Do you think I should go?”
I didn’t say no. I didn’t say yes. I said, “Let’s talk about what you actually want from it.”
She sighed, because that’s what parents say. But we talked anyway.
Her reasons were familiar. She didn’t want to enter the job market yet. She felt like she hadn’t done anything meaningful with her degree. She was worried her peers would all have postgrads and she’d fall behind. The concrete details of the program — the courses, the faculty, the job placement rate — were fuzzy. She’d seen a photo of a modern building with a green roof.
This was the first thing I could offer: slow down and separate the wanting from the needing.
I’m not an academic advisor. I’m a high school teacher, which means I’ve had a lot of conversations with seventeen-year-olds about university, and a few with twenty-somethings who came back to visit and tell me they were thinking about a postgrad. The pattern is surprisingly consistent. Some people have a clear career path that requires a specific degree — nursing, law, clinical psychology, social work. Others have no idea what they want to do, and a postgrad feels like a way to delay the question. The second group is where better to dig.
I asked my daughter to write down three sentences: What will this degree let me do that I can’t do now? How will I pay for it, and what will I owe after? And what does my job search look like today — what am I avoiding by not starting it?
She didn’t love that. She said I made it sound like a business transaction. I said maybe grad school should be partly a business transaction, because a lot of programs cost the same as a car, and you wouldn’t buy a car you didn’t know how to drive.
We talked about the people she knew a year ahead of her. A close friend of hers had taken a job as a research assistant at a public policy lab. She’s getting paid 42,000 a year, and she’s learning the same skills that her slightly older coworkers got from a master’s. She’s also getting her tuition reimbursed for a part-time certificate. My daughter’s first reaction was, “But that’s not the same.” I asked why not. She couldn’t quite say.
That’s a common gap. Many graduate programs teach you things you could learn on the job, but they give you the credential and the time. If the credential is essential — fine. If the time is what you’re after — then you have to be honest about that, because a year of classes is a year of experience you’re not stacking in your field. For some careers, that doesn’t matter. For others, it absolutely does.
I also told her about my own postgrad, which was in education. I did it because I wanted to move into a teaching support role and needed the qualification. It made sense. It also meant two summers of evenings in a hot classroom, and a student loan that I paid off after seven years. I don’t regret it, but I never pretend it was a transformation. It was an upgrade. That’s a different thing.
We looked at the program she’d found. The tuition was 34,000 for the year. The website didn’t list average starting salaries for alumni. She couldn’t find a single person on LinkedIn who had done that specific course and worked in the area she was interested in. That was a practical exercise. I proposed she email the program director and ask to speak to two recent alumni. She said that felt awkward. I said yes, but awkward is cheaper than a bad loan.
I also reminded her to talk to her current professors, not just me. She had one lecturer who had advised her on a final-year thesis. I told her to go and ask him, “Should I do a postgrad now or after a few years of real work?” He would give her an answer that wasn’t blind. She hasn’t done it yet, but she said she would.
The other thing we talked about was timing. She’s thinking about this in April. Her last exams are in May. The open house is in two weeks. It’s a fast decision, which is an exact sign that you don’t need to make it. A good postgrad decision can be made in September for the next year. The programs that are worth it don’t usually disappear. The panic to apply now is often more about your stomach than your head.
I didn’t tell her what to decide. But I gave her a checklist she wrote on her phone notes. It looks like this:
– Talk to two people who did the program.
– Talk to two people who work in the field but didn’t do it.
– Calculate total debt including interest.
– Check whether the program is accredited for the profession she wants.
– Find out how many alumni have jobs six months after graduation.
I know this isn’t inspirational. Nobody makes a film about someone sitting down with a calculator and a spreadsheet. But that’s what prevents the bad kind of postgrad debt — the kind where you finish and you’re thirty-four and you have a certificate and no better idea than you had at twenty-three.
My daughter is still thinking. She’s leaning toward taking a year to work as a junior policy assistant somewhere, even if it’s not glamorous. She said, “Maybe I’ll go back for it later. The program will still be there.” I said, “That’s true.” Because it is.
I’m not sure she’ll contact the alumni. I’m not sure she’ll email the program director. But she’s no longer talking about the green roof. That’s progress.
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