April 5, 2000

Who Needs Graduate School?

From the News & Observer, April 5, 2000

Luke Zettlemoyer never doubted the wisdom of attending graduate school. With plans to become a professor one day, the 21-year-old at N.C. State University always assumed that more education was better.

But a roaring economy coupled with a red-hot market in the technical fields forced Zettlemoyer to rethink his beliefs this spring. Education is good, the computer science graduate decided, but a big fat paycheck is even better.

From math and science to history and English majors, this year's job market seems to have a place for just about everyone, according to university job counselors. The market for fresh grads with bachelor's degrees is so good, in fact, that graduate school programs throughout the Triangle and the country are having a hard time attracting U.S. students.

"I have been recruiting graduate students for 15 years, and this is the most difficult it has ever been to enroll U.S. students," said John Gilligan, associate dean of research and graduate programs in the NCSU College of Engineering. "The mix of international students is going up for everyone."

Professional schools and some fields such as social work are somewhat insulated from students' shift away from post-graduate programs, but every school is feeling the pinch in some way.

NCSU and N.C. Central University are seeing more students bypass graduate school entirely. Officials at Duke, where 29 percent of the graduate students are from other countries, say increasing numbers of grad students are deciding not to complete their studies.

At the same time, universities in Europe are working harder to attract students who previously considered only American schools.

"The entire picture has changed in the past decade," Gilligan said.

Only UNC-Chapel Hill reports a steady increase in students going directly from undergraduate to graduate programs - a figure that reached 25 percent this year. Marcia Harris, director of career services at Carolina, said she finds the trend a bit puzzling.

"I think as much as anything it is a perception - or I guess that would be a misconception - among parents that their children need a master's to succeed," Harris said. "But that's not what we are hearing from the employers."

Many employers are happy to hire graduates who come to them with solid grades, some work experience, good communication skills and leadership abilities, Harris said. For some students, deciding to specialize in a given area by earning a master's degree will actually limit their choices.

"If you have a master's in history and you are interviewing for a job in banking, people are going to think that you just couldn't find a job in your major," Harris said. "Without the master's, you can always say you just wanted a good, solid liberal arts education."

Not only does that approach sound good in theory, it also worked in practice for Sean Shelby, who was a history and religious studies major at UNC. Today Shelby is working in Switzerland with the management consulting firm of Deloitte Consulting, which is based in Atlanta.

He was joined last year by drama majors who landed sales jobs and international studies graduates who were hired by banks. But the big money, and the area where graduate programs are having the hardest time attracting students, is in computer science.

Zettlemoyer, for example, turned down offers to attend graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or Carnegie Mellon University in the hope of striking it rich with a start-up company that specializes in artificial intelligence.

"I can go to school for five more years and live on a tight budget, or I can take a chance that I'll be a multimillionaire," said Zettlemoyer, who was named one of the country's top undergraduate researchers last year by the national Computing Research Association.

"I just can't turn down the chance," he said. "If I fail, I will make $50,000 to $60,000 a year, so it's not like failing in the normal sense of the word. If I succeed, I can go back to research without having to worry about money anymore."

Troy Tolle doesn't expect to become a millionaire, but he is looking forward to a big boost in his standard of living. Tolle enrolled in his master's program at NCSU in 1998 partly because he earned a fellowship that covered most of his costs.

The son of a teacher and a sharp student himself, he would be an excellent candidate for a doctorate - except he isn't interested.

Scheduled to complete his master's this spring, he was weighing job offers from SAS Institute and Cisco Systems in Research Triangle Park when he got a call from a company in Asheville called Crosslogic.

It was a good offer, Tolle said. It gave him a chance to both develop programs and teach others at more than three times the wages he would earn as a post-graduate student. When he told Crosslogic he really didn't want to move to Asheville, they offered to drop a computer line into a Raleigh office so he wouldn't have to move.

"The offers from industry are just too enticing," Tolle said. "I can take a job at a place like Crosslogic - or go on to earn a Ph.D. and enter an academic life. That means I would become part of the rat race to be published and my life would depend on earning tenure.

"It's not much of a contest really. I'm going into industry."

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