Master's degrees are the biggest scam in higher education, college

Millennials and Gen Zers have been told that a master's degree is the new bachelor's — meaning the minimum level of education needed to land a prestigious, well-paying job. Although master's students account for only 12% of all college-goers, the higher price tags on their degrees mean they're burdened with 26% of all student debt. The problem is that most grad students aren't getting MDs, JDs, or PhDs. They're getting master's degrees.Sure, people with a master's earn more, on average, than those with just a bachelor's degree — but only by 18%. Cooper did not include student loan debt in his calculations, because the higher price of master's degrees would have skewed the data. "A lot of students don't know that these master's degrees are not going to pay off for them," Cooper told me. He hopes that as studies like his become better known, students will "look at these master's degree programs with a much more skeptical eye." The increasing credentialization of work is another major driver of the "master's degree industrial complex", as University of Michigan professor Charles Davis calls it. Last year, a vice provost at Columbia University responded to a story about a film school student who graduated with $360,000 in debt by arguing that master's degrees "can and should be a revenue source" that subsidize other parts of the university.