How to decide on a postgraduate degree: what I wish we’d thought about earlier
The conversation started the way most important ones do in our house—midway through making dinner, with both of us half paying attention to the vegetables on the stove. My daughter, Alice, was in her last year of an English literature degree. She had just come back from a meeting with her academic advisor, and she was telling me, with what I can only describe as forced enthusiasm, that she was thinking seriously about applying for a master’s program in creative writing.
I was surprised. Not because she wasn’t capable—she was. But Alice had spent the last three years doing something familiar to many students: alternating between loving her course and quietly doubting what it was for. She’d worked in a bookshop the previous summer and loved it. She’d also worked in an office for two weeks and hated everything about it. Now, with graduation approaching, she seemed to have decided that the next logical step was to stay in education. I asked her why, and she shrugged.
“Because I don’t know what else to do,” she said.
That, more than anything else, was the moment I realised we were not having a conversation about postgraduate study. We were having a conversation about uncertainty. And it would be a lot easier if everyone just said that out loud.
Over the next few weeks, I listened to her reason through it. She had fine grades, mostly, but not the kind of starched, flawless record that feels like a golden ticket. She was drawn to the idea of a writing degree because she enjoyed writing, but when I asked her what she would write, or what she hoped to do with it, her answers were vague. She mentioned teaching. She mentioned publishing. She mentioned “seeing where it takes me.” None of those are bad responses. But none of them are reasons to take out another loan either.
I know that in some circles the advice is simple: if you want to do postgraduate study, just do it. You can always change your mind. The problem is that changing your mind is expensive. And while Alice was lucky enough not to have huge undergraduate debt, the cost of a master’s degree is significant. Tuition, living costs for a year or more, not to mention the income she wouldn’t be earning. That was the part I felt we had to sit with. Not to scare her, but to make sure she wasn’t drifting into it out of convenience.
We started talking to people. That was the most useful thing we did, and I wish we had done it earlier. Not just her, but me as well. The people we spoke to weren’t careers advisors or academics. They were ordinary friends and former colleagues who had done postgraduate study in a wide range of fields—history, social work, business, biology. I asked each of them one question: was the degree worth it? One man, who did an MBA in his mid-twenties, said yes, mostly because it opened doors in a way his first degree hadn’t. Another friend, who did a so-called prestigious master’s in humanities right after university, said no. She described it as “a year of reading that I could have done myself for free, except I was poorer at the end of it.” Another friend, a teacher, explained that in education, schools often value a postgraduate certificate more than a full master’s, especially at first.
Alice found these conversations uncomfortable. I think she had expected a clear answer, and instead she got a swarm of qualified ones. But that was the point, I told her. There is no universal answer. So she had to start from what she actually wanted, not from what she thought a degree would make her become.
Those weeks of conversation led her to a fairly practical step. She decided to apply for jobs for the following year, while also starting to research postgraduate applications. It wasn’t a contradiction. She told me she wanted to see whether the working world felt like something she could step into, or like a wall she was trying to get past. Her father thought this was sensible. I did too, although I was aware that it made for an exhausting year. She spent December and January in a strange, tense state, writing cover letters and also checking course deadlines.
What I noticed, watching her go through this, is that there is a big difference between wanting to study because you want the knowledge, and wanting to study because you want to delay a decision. I used to be firmly on the side of learning for its own sake. I still am, in a way. But I think the honest version of learning for its own sake is one where you’re willing to sit with the discomfort of being uncertain, not one where you keep signing up for classes so you can postpone thinking about the future.
There were, however, certain practical things that made the decision clearer for Alice. She went to the library and looked at course modules not just for the program she was interested in, but for several other programs in related fields. Her undergraduate tutor had told her to read the reading lists. It sounds simple, but it was a revelation to her. Some of the graduate-level books were ones she had already read. Some were so specific and narrow that she could picture herself spending an entire term on one obscure novel and felt her morale sink. That, more than any statistic about employment outcomes, told her which course she really had a feeling for.
I also reminded her to look at the actual cost of living, not just the advertised fees. The fees looked manageable on the surface, but when we factored in rent, travel, food, and the fact that university stipends, if any, are rarely generous, the total figure made her pause. I didn’t press the point. But it was important that she saw it with her own eyes. No one should make a major decision like that without counting what it actually costs, in the most boring possible way.
In the end, something shifted around March. Alice found a job. It wasn’t in publishing, and it wasn’t in writing. It was a clerical role in the local council’s finance team. It was not, by any stretch of the imagination, her dream job. But when she finally received the offer, she told me that she was certain about one thing: she did not want to be in that office in two years. So she applied for her master’s that same week. It suddenly made sense to her—not as a way to avoid the working world, but as a way to move toward something specific.
She got in. I won’t pretend it was a perfectly neat resolution. She now works part-time while studying, and there are weeks when she’s exhausted and wonders what she’s doing. But she is genuinely engaged with the writing workshops, and she has started collaborating with two people in her cohort. That alone has been worth a lot. She is learning how to be a writer in the company of others, which is something she couldn’t have done on her own.
If I were to give any advice to other parents or students facing the same question, it would be this: don’t treat the postgraduate application as the main event. Spend more time than you think you need on what happens after the degree. Talk to people who did it, not just people who teach it. Look at actual modules, actual reading lists, actual costs. And if you’re not sure why you’re applying, that’s okay—but keep asking the question until you have an answer, even an imperfect one.
Alice is now in her second term, and she still doesn’t know what she’ll do next. She talks about teaching sometimes. She also talks about editing. She might walk out of her degree and straight into an unrelated field. I’ve stopped trying to predict it. What I know is that this time, she chose it with her eyes open. That might be the only real difference that matters.
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