{"id":50833,"date":"2020-01-24T12:26:22","date_gmt":"2020-01-24T20:26:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/world.edu\/?p=50833"},"modified":"2020-01-24T12:26:22","modified_gmt":"2020-01-24T20:26:22","slug":"the-masters-degree-bubble-has-burst","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.edu\/the-masters-degree-bubble-has-burst\/","title":{"rendered":"The Master\u2019s Degree bubble has burst"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

The student loan scam flooded our schools with students when it went into full swing over a decade ago\u2014triggered by the 2008 crash\/recession, when many \u201cno degree required\u201d jobs vanished, never to return. A half dozen or so years later, these students flooded the market with their shiny new degrees.<\/p>\n

These students were told their degrees would be valuable, and before the degrees were awarded, they were, up to a point. Trouble is, much of the value of a degree comes from its scarcity. Most of the degrees, the common ones, were worth nothing in the job marketplace.<\/p>\n

Many of those graduates floundered for a few years before deciding \u201chey, I need a graduate degree to get a good job.\u201d The same vicious admissions officers who suckered people into getting worthless undergraduate degrees simply repeated the game, enrolling far too many people into Master\u2019s degree programs.<\/p>\n

Whenever I look at people with unpayable college debt, invariably the largest numbers come from the poor souls to when back for graduate school, which can easily be twice as expensive as undergraduate, even for a 2 year degree like a Master\u2019s degree.<\/p>\n

In any event, the cohort of students who got creamed by undergraduate loans starting in 2008 are now getting creamed by graduate loans. Word has gotten out that Master\u2019s degrees (particularly in Fine Arts, but in many other fields as well) are basically worthless now, for many of the same reasons undergraduate degrees are of little value.<\/p>\n

In 2014, the 10 year projection for Master\u2019s awarded was well over a million\u2014our schools hugely expanded their graduate program, as the \u201cleaders\u201d running our system lack even rudimentary understanding of what they\u2019re doing.<\/p>\n

In 2019, the 10 year projection is more like 840,000, roughly a 20% drop. As this projection is from the same fools who estimated over a million in 2014, I suspect the drop will be much, much worse.<\/p>\n

Has the Master\u2019s Degree Bubble Burst?<\/a><\/p>\n

Analysis suggests projections of rapid growth in the master\u2019s degree market were vastly overstated.<\/em><\/p>\n

The article I\u2019m reading here phrases the bubble bursting as a question, but this is rubbish. With undergraduate enrollments falling, with widespread information of just how worthless most Master\u2019s degrees are, this is only going to drop.<\/p>\n

\u2026many colleges have overestimated the popularity of new degree programs. They may anticipate awarding hundreds of degrees per year, but the true number is often a single digit\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

The article doesn\u2019t address it, but I would like to highlight the horrific mismanagement here. A college opens up a new program, say, a Master\u2019s degree in Dog Breeding, and then uses adjunct, \u201ctemp\u201d faculty to teach the dozen or so courses. The administration who came up with the idea gets a fat pay raise based on the ridiculously huge growth projections revolving around 10 year old data.<\/p>\n

And then perhaps half a dozen people sign up for the program. Huge money flows into administrative pockets for the loan money even when you have this disaster. But suppose 300 people ended up with a Master\u2019s in Dog Breeding in a couple of years\u2026what lunatic thinks there\u2019s even a minute chance things will go well for more than a handful of the new graduates?<\/p>\n

Many Master\u2019s degrees are based around very specialized topics. There are a few general degrees, and those have their own problems.<\/p>\n

The Master\u2019s in Education is the most common Master\u2019s degree. Teachers have the loosest schedule, are most able to \u201ctake time off\u201d from work to complete a degree program (more accurately, they\u2019ll take most of their coursework over the summer). It\u2019s all well and good, I suppose, but every examination (including my own) of these programs find them to be loaded down with ideology. Granted, \u201ceducation theory\u201d is such proven rubbish, repeatedly shown to harm students, that replacing that false knowledge with the false knowledge of ideology doesn\u2019t sound all that horrible at first glance\u2026but a look at our schools\u2019 steady conversion into indoctrination camps for the ideology quickly reveals the massive extent of horror here. We really should just annihilate the Master\u2019s in Education and instead insist on our teachers having actual degrees in the subjects they\u2019re supposed to teach (instead of what we have now, where teachers all too often morph their subjects into ideological indoctrination).<\/p>\n

Trace Urdan, managing director at Tyton Partners, agrees that the growth in the master\u2019s degree market is a bubble fueled by the \u201cbasically unlimited funding\u201d offered by Grad PLUS loans. But he doesn\u2019t agree that the bubble has burst, at least not yet. Growth could easily pick up if the economy took a downward turn, he said.<\/em><\/p>\n

Seriously, the bubble has burst, despite what the guy above said. I used to never be asked by friends and family (most don\u2019t know me as Professor Doom) about grad school, but now it\u2019s a regular event. I do what I can to steer them away or guide them to what few programs remain which are viable\u2026but years ago, everyone was always just so happy to see their kids go into grad school.<\/p>\n

There are still some good schools, some good plans\u2026but far too many traps are laid out for the unsuspecting, and much like with undergraduate school, far too many were enrolled.<\/p>\n

Now, I concede that if we get the repeatedly predicted massive economic crash, then perhaps we\u2019ll see massive growth in Master\u2019s again\u2026but I assure the gentle reader, this isn\u2019t a good thing, as one reader reinforces:<\/p>\n

We are conferring an astonishing amount of master’s degrees in this country, to the extent that in cities like Boston and DC and San Francisco, they have become the de facto bachelor’s degree.<\/em><\/p>\n

Perhaps it\u2019s wishful thinking on my part that this bubble has burst, but the fact remains: it really should burst. We\u2019re not doing any good churning out these degrees, any more than we were at the undergraduate level.<\/p>\n

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The student loan scam flooded our schools with students when it went into full swing over a decade ago\u2014triggered by the 2008 crash\/recession, when many \u201cno degree required\u201d jobs vanished, never to return. A half dozen or so years later, these students flooded the market with their shiny new degrees. These students were told their […]\n… learn more→<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":50834,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[350681],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-50833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-higher-education","tag-masters-degree"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Master\u2019s Degree bubble has burst - World leading higher education information and services<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/world.edu\/the-masters-degree-bubble-has-burst\/\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Master\u2019s Degree bubble has burst - World leading higher education information and services\" class=\"yoast-seo-meta-tag\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The student loan scam flooded our schools with students when it went into full swing over a decade ago\u2014triggered by the 2008 crash\/recession, when many \u201cno degree required\u201d jobs vanished, never to return. 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