Kelly Lyons

For The Pitt News

Like many seniors this year, Brittany Robertson is in the… Kelly Lyons

For The Pitt News

Like many seniors this year, Brittany Robertson is in the process of applying for graduate school.

“I think it’s gotten a lot more competitive,” the urban studies and psychology double major said.

Robertson, who wants to become a counselor or a therapist, finds herself in the same predicament as other graduate school applicants deciding whether or not grad school is financially worth the gamble. She hopes to receive some sort of scholarship or financial aid. Robertson is planning on earning her graduate degree in Psychology from either Pitt, University of Maryland, Drexel, NYU or Temple.

“A lot of people are staying in school longer,” Roberston said, citing the economy’s downturn as a major reason for her observation..

The impact a graduate school degree has on a person’s resume remains up for debate. While enrollment and costs remain on the rise, the number of graduate students employed after graduation from Pitt’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs has declined in the past year.

The GSPIA’s Associate Director of Career Services, Jessica Hatherill, said she believes that despite numbers GSPIA offers helpful professional experience.

Hatherill said GSPIA holds various career-building events, including mock interviews, resume-building and speed networking, along with a speaker series in which “alumni [speak of] what they wish they would have known when they were in grad school.” This is meant to help students pick a focus for graduate school.

Despite Hatherill’s description of the career-oriented events the graduate school provides, the statistics she provided are not as hopeful.

In 2010, 69.7 percent of recent GSPIA graduates were unemployed six months after graduation, up from 50 percent the last year, Hatherill said.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average unemployment rate for doctoral degree holders in 2009 was 2.5 percent. Those with Ph.D.s have an unemployment rate of 2.3 percent.

More students have come to Pitt for school, as well. The number of graduate school students at Pitt increased from 9,535 in 2005 to 10,452 in 2010. Of last year’s graduates from Pitt’s undergraduate schools, 34 percent have gone on to graduate school.

Ryan Sweeny, the assistant director in the Career Development Office, said that not only has the number of graduate students increased over the years, but the costs have, too.

“Graduate school costs have risen in a similar fashion to overall higher education costs,” which Pitt students have certainly seen the ugly side of, Sweeny said in an email.

For Pitt’s Graduate School of Public Health, tuition for in-state students is $22,012 per term for this year. This is an increase from 2006, when tuition for one term was $16,384 for in-state students.

This trend applies to every Pitt graduate school’s tuition, which have all jumped more than $3,000 since 2006.

These rates are on par with the national rate. According to the Council of Graduate Schools, a national organization, the cost of graduate school has surged in the past decade, increasing by 60 percent.

The increasing price of these schools might not be worth it for some students, Sweeny said. He said many students apply to graduate school for the wrong reasons.

“If a student is still undecided about a career path and they are using graduate school as a way of extending their education to have more time to pick a career, this is a poor reason to attend graduate school [because] graduate school is usually much more narrowly focused than one’s undergraduate program and offers little to no opportunities to explore other areas of study,” Sweeny said.

He said that it is important to attend graduate school if it’s necessary for a career in a field like law, medicine or counseling, or if a graduate degree makes the student more competitive.

Sweeny said that a graduate degree is important if students need it for a specific career field, but otherwise professional experience can be just as valuable.

He said that “professional experience is more important than a graduate degree. If a graduate degree helps a person increase their professional experience, then it can help them land a job.”

Madalina Veres, a Pitt graduate student from Romania working toward her Ph.D. in history, said she feels that her experience in graduate school helped her gain professional experience.

Veres had a fellowship her first year, followed by a position as a teaching assistant for two years. She said in an email that she is currently in Vienna doing research as part of her fellowship from the School of Arts and Sciences.

Veres’ post-graduate plans are to teach in a college or high school setting, depending upon “how the job market looks … when I finish.”

Sweeny is careful to warn prospective graduate school applicants, “If your profession does not require a graduate degree, then generally it is not financially worth the extra education and expense.”