IEEE Spectrum September, 2008 - 15

careers

The Biggest Career Choice
Of All Is When to Start

grad school may cost you more than you think

Y

jan mammey/getty images

ou're a college senior, a few
exams away from that engineering
diploma, and you have to decide
whether to take a job or go to graduate
school. To choose wisely you must
estimate the likely economic return on
your investment.
It's not an easy calculation. The
details will differ from place to
place, school to school, and person
to person. To simplify things, we'll
use average U.S. costs and benefits.
Let's look first at the benefits of a
graduate degree. In 2007, a new master
of science in electrical engineering
graduate earned more than US $66 000,
compared with about $55 000 for
bachelor's degree recipients, according
to the National Association of Colleges
and Employers in Bethlehem, Pa. The
extra bump from a doctorate was
about the same: in 2007 new Ph.D.
salaries averaged almost $76 000.
For those with graduate degrees,
the good news only gets better over
www.spectrum.ieee.org

time, because salaries for those
with grad degrees rise more and
for a longer period. That might
make you believe that getting an
advanced degree is a no-brainer.
Not so. Even the most bare-bones
calculation needs to include three
additional factors-the cost of tuition,
the cost of not working, and the value
of money. Tuition for graduate studies
averages $24 000 a year at a public
university, according to the National
Science Foundation's latest report,
"Science and Engineering Indicators
2008." Not working for a year costs you
on average $55 000 (before taxes). And
a dollar you spend today is worth a lot
more than one you will earn decades
from now, given both inflation and the
real rate of return on investments.
"A doctorate is very expensive for
someone in electrical engineering
because of the earnings they would have
to forgo while in grad school," says Mark
Regets, at the NSF's division of science

resources statistics. When you look back
at four or five years in grad school, you
might assess the final cost at $1 million.
Mercifully, engineering graduate
students do well when it comes
to financial support in the form of
research assistantships, teaching
assistantships, and fellowships. All in
all, engineering and computer science
doctorate recipients were the least likely
to report both debt and high levels of
debt, according to the NSF report.
Some benefits are harder to translate
into dollars and cents. The biggest
return is career flexibility, says Regets.
"You have more choices as to what you
do, you have more choices over your
conditions of employment, you're less
likely to end up on the lower end of
the earnings distribution," he says.
Higher degrees can bring job
security in a shaky economy. In the
shadow of the 2001 dot-com bust, the
job market was toughest for electrical
engineers and computer scientists.
Unemployment for bachelor's degree
holders hovered around 5 percent,
almost twice the rate as for Ph.D.s.
Grad school specialization also
gives you an edge. Fast-paced changes
in technology push companies to
look for skills that cannot be acquired
in a bachelor's program. Texas
Instruments now hires six times as
many engineers with master's degrees
or higher as it did a decade ago.
Whether or not to go to graduate
school is, in the end, a personal choice.
Megan McGinty, who graduated this
summer from Valparaiso University
with a bachelor's in EE, says she had
planned to get a master's degree but
decided to start working full-time. "Of
course, earning a salary is going to be
nice, but I don't think this would have
stopped me from attending grad school,"
she says. She chose work in order to
gain time to think about which area of
specialization she wants to pursue. As
an added bonus, her current employer
will pay for her master's degree.
-Prachi Patel-Predd
september 2008 * Ieee spectrum * NA

21
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum September, 2008
