‘master’s degree is the fastest-growing college credential’

Master’s degrees are “as common now as bachelor’s degrees were in the 1960s”.

More than 16 million people in the US — about 8 percent of the population — now have a master’s, a 43 percent increase since 2002.

 

Forty years ago education was far and away the most popular major for a master’s degree, but today business has taken that spot.

  

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Are graduate programs exacerbating the student debt problem?

… The typical total debt for a borrower with an undergraduate and graduate degree is now more than $57,000, up from $40,200 in 2004. (This includes medical and law degrees.)

40% of all student debt comes from graduate degree programs,“even though graduate borrowers make up only 17 percent of all borrowers”.

Expanded loan forgiveness programs are “tailor-made for graduate students”.

Students who took out big loans for graduate school and those with higher incomes stand the most to gain financially under President Obama’s expansion of the federal government’s loan forgiveness program.

Lawyers, doctors and other highly trained professionals who utilized federal loans throughout their post-high school education could walk away with most or all of their graduate school debt forgiven by the federal government under the program, say experts.

Graduate students usually get their money’s worth.

… Almost regardless of undergraduate major, a graduate degree boosts earning power even further, according to the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce.

But does this proliferation of master’s degrees produce wasteful ‘credential inflation’?

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Libby Nelson, “Master’s degrees are as common now as bachelor’s degrees were in the ’60s”, Vox, February 7, 2015.

Susan Ferrecho, “The surprising winners of Obama’s student-loan program”, Washington Examiner, June 12, 2014.