How to Help Your Child Decide Whether a Postgraduate Degree Is Actually Worth It
My daughter called me on a Tuesday evening, her voice flat in that way that tells you she has been thinking too long about something. She had just started her final year of university, and suddenly everyone in her cohort was talking about master’s programs, GRE scores, application deadlines, and the phrase “what are you doing after graduation?” like it was a threat. She said, “I don’t even know if I want one. But I feel like I should.” There was a long pause. “What did you do?”
I remember what I did. I got a master’s degree for no particular reason, mostly because I was good at school and afraid of leaving it. The program was fine. I learned some useful things, and I spent two years reading and writing about topics that interested me. But the degree did not lead to a specific job. It did not open a door so much as keep one open that was already ajar. I took a job that did not require it, and eventually I went back for a different professional certification. All in all, the master’s was a detour, not a destination. When I told her this, she laughed, but not entirely.
That conversation made me think about the kind of advice parents and teachers actually give around postgraduate study. Most of it falls into two camps. One camp says “go, because education is always good and you’ll figure it out along the way.” The other says “don’t go until you know exactly what you want to do, or you’ll waste your money.” Both are unhelpful because they ignore the real question, which is not whether to get a postgrad but what you want the next two or three years to do for you.
We sat with that for a while. I asked my daughter to write down a few answers to a simple prompt: “If I get this degree, what changes about my week?” Not my career, not my future—my week. Would she be in a lab, in a seminar room, in front of a screen? Would she be reading, coding, writing, or teaching? Who would she be working with? She said she had never thought about it that way. That is the first thing I would recommend to any parent or teacher helping a young person with this decision. Do not ask them about their dreams. Ask them about the daily routine of the program and the job they imagine after it. If they cannot describe either in concrete detail, they are not ready to apply—not because they lack ambition but because they are working from a vague picture of graduate life that admission brochures reinforce.
The second thing we did was look at actual programs, not rankings. My daughter picked three master’s in public policy because that was a vague area she had mentioned. We opened the course lists, the faculty pages, the syllabi that some programs publish publicly, and the profiles of recent graduates on LinkedIn. She noticed that many alumni were working in state government or nonprofit organizations—not in fancy think tanks. That shifted her thinking. She realized she knew very little about what public policy people actually do at work. So I suggested a low-stakes experiment: find three people in that field and ask if she could talk with them for twenty minutes about their week. Just informational interviews, no pressure. She called a friend of a friend who works for the city, and the conversation changed everything. Not because the job sounded amazing, but because the person said, “Honestly, you can do this job with any degree. The masters only helps for the first year, and then it’s all your work experience.” That realistic, unglamorous answer was worth more than any brochure.
The money conversation is always hard, and we are still having it. Postgraduate degrees in the U.S. can cost anywhere from nearly nothing to the price of a house, depending on the field and the program. I did not want to tell my daughter what to do, but I did want her to understand the mechanics of tuition, assistantships, loans, and opportunity cost. We made a simple spreadsheet together. On one side, the total cost of the program including lost wages for two years. On the other side, the difference between her current earning potential and the earning potential she expected after the degree. The numbers were sobering. For the programs she was considering, the pay bump would take at least seven years to break even. That did not mean it was not worth it—you cannot measure everything in dollars, and some degrees lead to jobs that do not pay well but are deeply satisfying. But it did mean she had to be honest with herself about what she was buying.
We also talked about timing. She felt enormous pressure to apply in her final year of university because that is what everyone does. But there is absolutely no rule that says you have to go straight from undergrad to postgrad. Plenty of people work for a year or two, figure out what they do not want to do, and then go back with a much clearer sense of purpose. My husband did this. He worked as a research assistant for two years after college, realized he hated sitting alone in a lab, and then went to a professional program in environmental management. He says the postgrad made sense only because he knew exactly what he was escaping. That is a valid approach. I told my daughter that taking a job as a barista while volunteering or interning part-time in a field of interest is not “falling behind.” It is gathering information.
By the end of that Tuesday evening, she had not decided anything. She still had the spreadsheet open, and she was scrolling through course listings with a less glazed look. I did not push her to apply or not apply. I did tell her one more thing, which I think is the most useful piece of advice I ever received about postgrad: treat it like buying a car, not like marrying into a family. You are not making a lifelong commitment to an identity. You are choosing a tool for the next few years. You can change your mind halfway through, and you can leave and do something entirely different with the degree or without it. The process of applying is not a test of worth. It is just an application.
She is still deciding. As I write this, she has applied to one program, but she has also applied for a job at a nonprofit that would start next fall. She is waiting to hear back from both. In the meantime, she has started going to campus office hours for professors in two different departments, just to ask them questions about their work and their students’ lives. She says it feels less overwhelming now that she has a way to compare concrete things. I think that is the real answer to anyone asking about obtaining a postgrad. It is not about having the perfect rationale or being certain about a lifelong path. It is about gathering enough messy, specific, everyday detail to make one small decision at a time. We are still gathering.
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