LIVERPOOL: Let’s face it, we all have that friend, or a friend of a friend, or a frenemy that collects qualifications like Pokemon.
Their LinkedIn profile is a plethora of brand-name institutes and fancy-sounding short courses. It seems that the more prestige logos one can gain, the better (the Pokemon analogy and gym badges also work really well here).
In my first few years at the University of Liverpool, I was gently convinced (or as Singaporeans like to say, “arrowed”) to be my department’s Director of Postgraduate Teaching, which is a fancy way of saying I was in charge of the master’s degrees.
In that role, I was responsible for administrating three master’s programmes, which included outreach efforts like Open Days where I would meet prospective applicants.
Some were interested in a career in academia, some were looking to swap over from another discipline, and others were seeking to “upgrade” their CV.
All these are valid and worthwhile endeavours, but a recent article in the Economist noted how many master’s degrees were apparently not worth the cost of tuition fees. Graduate earnings and outcomes barely budged for many disciplines (compared to individuals without a master’s), and in some cases even worsened.
The article itself admitted there was more to doing a master’s than just career improvement, but the overall argument came across as a bit Machiavellian. However, it did strike a chord among many readers, especially because there is a tendency to want to believe that more qualifications would mean better life chances, and people want some kind of concrete return-on-investment for ever increasing tuition fees.
