Should I go to grad school?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Not sure where to put this, so I put it here:

I’m considering making perhaps the biggest mistake of my life: going to grad school.

I’m seeking advice from those of you who are currently doing it, or have done it.

Yes, I know the job market for PhDs sucks. I’m not looking to be a professor after I graduate. Cool if it happened, but it probably won’t - especially because the schools I’m looking at are not prestigious. (And I don’t really care about that.)

I’m looking at schools that teach heterodox economics. (That means non-mainstream.)

There are a few reasons.
One is that I want to learn more about it.
The next is that I’m not particularly happy doing what I’m doing now, and if I don’t make a change soon, well, people only get older, they don’t get younger.
The third is I want to write a book. But I need to learn a lot more before I write the book, and I figure a school is a good place to learn stuff, and that having a PhD won’t hurt in terms of getting it published.
This would be a book, not for other academics, but for general educated public. The working title is “Everything you know about economics is wrong.”

There are a handful of schools that might be a good fit for me. The capital of of the kind of work I’m looking at learning about is at the University of Missouri Kansas City. The problem is that my wife doesn’t want to live there, and I particularly excited about the prospect either.

There’s also a heterodox school at UMass - Amherst. She would be happy, and her family would be thrilled if we moved there. (We’d be much closer to them.) But I don’t think it’d be as good a fit for me, in terms of the specific heterodox theory I want to study.

Then there’s The University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Similar problem as UMass (maybe a little less so). Salt Lake seems like a good place, so far as I can tell, and moving there would be good for her career.

UT Austin has a school of public policy (the LBJ school). Austin is where we live now, so I would have to move anywhere. Not only that, but I could continue to do a little bit of what I’m doing now, and with the stipend, I wouldn’t even experience much of a drop in income. But it’s a schools of public policy, not economics. So I would not have a degree in Economics, if I graduated there. James Galbraith teaches there (the son of the famous one). He is an advocate of the specific type of hetero-economics I’m interested in, but it doesn’t seem he spends much time there. He apparently spends at least half the year in Vermont or somewhere, and when I went to his office, the grad student I met there (I assume she was a grad student) was, if not outright hostile, at least not friendly.

tldr: I’m thinking about going to grad school. Tell me why I should or shouldn’t go.

PS: I’m happy to answer person-ish questions, if it helps.

2

What is your plan B? If you should quit or get forced out, or simply not be able to find work, you need to have another option for income. If you have family or a trust fund that can keep you happy for the rest of your life, then no problem.

3

Go for it if both of the following conditions are met: 1) you want to do it for its own sake (that means EVEN IF you never get that book published, you still want the deeper knowledge of the subject that would come from a grad program); and 2) you get a decent funding package from one of the schools you’re interested in, and / or you have enough personal funds that you can afford to go to grad school as a hobby. Grad school itself isn’t usually the big mistake of anyone’s life, it’s the combination of going into debt and missing out on other career opportunities that is the mistake.

4

Have you looked into what online courses are available in the subject and doing that instead, since it looks like this would not be financially worth it and it would allow your wife to stay in a place to maximize her income and happiness?

5

If you aren’t looking to be a professor afterwards, you need to figure out what it is you want to do now and make sure you pick a program that will get you to that point. Knowing what you’re going to do with the degree means you’ll be selective about the classes you take, the professionals you connect with, and the skills you develop.

I would not go to graduate school to “find oneself”. There’s nothing wrong with graduate school, but if you don’t want it to be a miserable experience that drags on forever, you need to go into it with some key decisions already worked out. Like, it really helps if you’ve already got your dissertation topic when you start. And it also helps to not have to worry about money. Find ways to get the school to waive your tuition, at the very least.

6

My advice is not to go to grad school unless you have or will soon hit a brick wall in your particular career that grad school will help you overcome, and that new opportunity makes it financially worth it. You want to know the exact position it will qualify you for, and you want to know you’ll actual get that position.

And don’t worry about where to go when you don’t know what they are offering you.

7

One of the great fallacies of our generation is that you have to go to a university to learn. If this field of study really interests you, there is nothing preventing you from learning more about it on your own. Email professors at your targeted universities and ask them to send you a copy of their syllabi. Read the material on your own. Or, tell them that you’re really interested in heterodox economics, but cannot pursue a graduate degree at this time, and do they have any reading recommendations?

Research to see if there are lectures, online courses, or conferences on this topic that you can attend without the risk and hassle of uprooting your family and quitting your job.

If writing interests you, realize that you won’t make a living being an author, especially on such an obscure topic. Unless there is a job market for a heterodox economist, don’t take on more debt. A degree won’t put food on your table.

So my advice is very pragmatic: Keep your day job and pursue this passion on the side.

8

Do you think you’ll have a lucrative enough career in heterodox economics (not sure exactly what you could pursue specifically with that- work with the government maybe?) even without publishing the book to justify the cost of going? I am not a grad school expert, but isn’t it expensive even taking grants and stipends into account?

I have no idea how much in debt my friend who got her Master’s in Art History is, but my friend who will be graduating with her MBA this spring told me that she’s going to be around $100,000 in debt. I would imagine that going to school for something other than an MBA is less than $100,000, but I can’t imagine it’s cheap either.

I also think having a clear plan B is important. The friend I mentioned who got her Master’s in Art history was intending to go for her PhD, decided to stop and then realized there were no real career opportunities for her. She’s going for a second Master’s Degree in public policy, but most people are not able to go to grad school twice. She’s very lucky to be able to live with her boyfriend’s parents so she doesn’t have to worry much about a place to live, food, etc. while in school (again).

9

How old are you? You mentioned a wife - are there, or will there be, kids in the picture?

Speaking from experience, trying to do a PhD with a family including small children is a giant fucking mistake.

10

As someone who is finishing grad school… NO! NO! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, DON’T DO IT!

ahem

People get MBAs to get money. People in things like computer science do it for the love of it, as a BA gets you in plenty of doors. I don’t know where Econ is but I’d imagine the latter. Do it if you love the subject matter, want to learn, and aren’t doing it for money. Even if it will increase your future pay, that shouldn’t be your first incentive.

You could turn a dissertation into a book.

Those are all good schools, although in grad school the department’s prestige is more important than the overall schools, IMO, compared to undergrad.

11

Depends on where I go. If I stay here, and I get bored or don’t like it, I can just go back to doing what I’m doing now. If I go somewhere else, there’s more risk, but I could probably set up shop there. Austin is probably one of the most competitive places in the county, in terms of my line of work. Of course, I’d lose all the contacts I have now, so that would be the downside.

12

The economics of getting a professional degree, like an MBA, are totally different from those of getting a PhD in most fields. With the professional degree, it’s assumed that the student will shoulder most of the cost, and that it’s worth it to them because of the increase in salary. A PhD usually functions more like an apprenticeship, where the student agrees to provide cheap labor, in the form of research assistantships or teaching duties, in exchange for free tuition and a small cost-of-living stipend. There may still be out-of-pocket costs to the student (if they run out of funding before finishing the degree, or if the stipend isn’t enough to support them), and there are also opportunity costs if they could be doing something more lucrative, but they shouldn’t be anywhere near $100,000.

13

[QUOTE=Fretful Porpentine ]

The economics of getting a professional degree, like an MBA, are totally different from those of getting a PhD in most fields
[/QUOTE]

Yes, but what about the heterodox economics of getting a professional degree?
I mean really. The OP is asking whether he should go to some second rate PhD program to study some sort of non-traditional fridge branch of econ so he can not be a professor and write some sort of pop-guidebook on the subject? Honestly this sounds like a colossal waste of time and money with little return on investment.

Why not study actual econ so you at least have the hope of being an economist for an investment bank, consulting firm, think tank or some other group that will actually pay you?

Everyone says they don’t care about going to a “prestigious college” or making money until no one will hire them or pay for their lifestyle.

14

True, professional programs expect you to work too, while PhD may even unofficially forbid you to do so. Your decision should depend somewhat on clear definitions of how much the assistantship is and for how long it is guarantees (or implied). IME tuition is reduced, but not always free, and “cost-of-living stipend” sounds like pennies, so not sure what you mean, but these usually pay a living wage, if not much more. The amount usually depends on the area it’s in, too. And in this type of program (e.g. not MBA), if you reach $100,000, it’s mostly your fault.

15

Are you saying that in this economy, you are guaranteed a job even if you leave for 2 years? I don’t know what you do, but I find that very unlikely.

16

Here:

http://100rsns.blogspot.com/

17

I don’t have much in the way of “other career opportunities”. I’ve only done one thing since I graduated from law school - criminal defense - so my resume is short. And while I could maybe get a job somewhere as a public defender or a prosecutor, I suspect I’d like that even less. They mainly hire straight out of law school, and the ones don’t leave don’t seem very happy.

18

I wouldn’t go if they didn’t pay me. And my dissertation would likely be some bastardized - I mean academitized - version of the book. Or some small of it.

Edited to add: I don’t want to find myself. I do want a change.

19

OK, look, what do you really want to do to make a living?
You are not going to make a living by writing one book. Being a writer is a possible profession (though you need a lot of luck and hard work), but that means writing a lot of things on different subjects. Really, an econ PhD will NOT help get a book published, even an econ book.

Being an economics guru is not a job description. I’m honestly not sure how you’re going to make a living with an econ PhD except either being a professor or working in the financial industry (I suspect that’s not really what you want to do either).

Going to graduate school is not a career choice. It’s a step towards a career you do want. But until you know exactly what that career is, going to graduate school is a colossal waste and mistake.

20

There’s no brick wall. I just don’t want to do, what I’m doing now, anymore.