Success
in business is about hard work and plenty of common sense which I find most
graduates lack along with a good dose of lateral thinking not text book thinking.
I have read all the business books I care to read and now know what is taught
at some of the main business schools here in London and the US. I was intrigued
to find out what my fresh hires had learnt and why they thought they could
demand higher entry salaried then someone with just a undergraduate degree. Do
you own research and make you mind up and see if you feel the content of what
you learn justifies the cost.

This
is based on my broad experience as a MD of a well known financial firm based in
London.

Many
younger graduates who I’ve asked why they chose to follow a particular path
both academically and commercially often seemed to have been blinded by perceived
prestige. It is very concerning that intelligent young and even experienced people
end up getting into debt to get a piece of paper that seems prestigious. It
should also be noted that many of the financial institution are well connected
to business schools and as such effectively saying you need to go and pay a lot
of money to get that qualification so that we would offer you a position as a
low level employee of our bank. Why would anyone want to do that? Well they are
sold on the fact the bank is prestigious and hence they need to obtain a
prestigious degree from a prestigious University. It is all very silly but this
is the way things have gone and more so explains a lot about the state of the
world we live in today. I am so glad I be retiring in a few years. Here is a
quote from Paul Graham.  

“Prestige
is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people
waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige.

“The
reason the young care so much about prestige is that the people they want to
impress are not very discerning”

I am going to graduate school after taking two years to work and figure out what I'm doing. I found that the only job I really wanted to do required graduate school.

Education is never a waste of time.

We need a more educated society, not less.

If you read this, can you please delete my comment above? (and this one). There are too many mistakes in it. Thank you in advance…

Ps. A 5 minutes regret/editing function on comments would be a great feature. Some blogs or forums* have that; so comments can be edited up to 5 minutes** after being posted, and then not any more.

*don't remember where I have seen it
**just an example – it may be 3 or 10 minutes

Notwithstanding the question about the usefulness of a higher degree for employability: the in-depth concentration and discipline demanded by a university degree does have value in itself, on a human level.

I've had subjects that forced me to change the way I think and thereby changed my life (for example Cultural Sociology, Statistics, and Organisation) – and subjects that enable me to better understand the way the world works much better (e.g. economics, organisation and international business).

Even if never using the degree in a suitable role, I think the educational level of citizens does matter for a society. Many aspects of the world appears to be counter-intuitive at first (like statistical models) and in order to understand them it is necessary to disconnect from the world for a while and focus intensively on changing perspective – that won't happen with a 9-5 job. People impact their surroundings through their decisions and interaction with other people, relationships and parenthood, so an education is not just an investment in one person.

Now when I come to think, in my home country you can't even buy a farm without having a farming degree. Or spray the fields with pesticides (you need a spraying certificate to do that… which is part of the farming degree).

Thanks for a good blog, by the way… it is very entertaining and useful.

If you don't actually use your graduate degree, you look unemployable.

and:

No employer likes to hire from the reject pile, and no employer wants to be second choice.

I've got a masters degree in business/marketing not out of interest but because I thought that a generalist business degree would make me employable in any industry. Coming from a country where the state sponsors all higher education plus living costs for students*, my debt is far below $80,000 and would have been zero had I not studied abroad.

However, I think it is right that a degree can be a risk in itself, particularly in countries where a high education is not standard. I went to university at 35+ to break out of being stuck in low level menial jobs which paid bad, were insecure and uninteresting and heavily infested with social intrigues and politics (probably most workplaces are, except for the ones without people;-) and I have good intellectual abilities, so why not.

So I did a BA in business. The master (abroad), also in business, was partly a way to obtain visa and eventually secure permanent residency in the lovely country where we now live. Business/commerce/marketing seemed the safest ~ most employable line of study. There were also many more scholarships available for business studies abroad than any other field of study, due to my home country's great appetite for global competitiveness.

However, as for employability: experience, sociability, connections, initiative and personality match drive employability… if there are shortcomings on those points, then a degree won't help.

Worse yet: The combination of a high degree and a big gap in the resume looks particularly bad, because it doesn't make sense to invest in an education and then not use it… except if the person is unemployable.

Plus, while the degree won't give access to a higher level job without relevant experience, it can block the access to entry level positions… because a high degree signals high ambition, and just like Penelope said: employers don't like to be second choice.

*Courtesy of the Scandinavian welfare model and its tax payers.