Is grad school worth the investment? Our exclusive data shows some surprising answers

When Amir Nijem got into graduate school, he knew he’d have to take out loans. Such degrees cost $20,000 a year on average at private institutions, and his particular program – a master's in public policy at the University of Chicago condensed into evenings over the course of 15 months – struck him as especially pricey. At roughly $50,000, his estimated cost of attendance wasn’t much less than his annual salary working in communications for the city.

What Nijem didn’t know was the exact breakdown of that cost – nor that he could appeal the amount of aid the university offered him. He wasn't given a clear sense of how the degree would alter his income and job prospects, either.

Half of graduate students use loans to pursue their advanced studies, nearly twice the rate of undergraduates. Such debt is so prevalent among current and former graduate students that it now accounts for nearly half of the country’s student loan portfolio. Given the cost of these programs, and the fact that earning more money is a major motivation for most graduate students, the debt levels aren’t surprising.

But new research by the centrist think tank Third Way reveals that the experience of applying to, paying for and moving on from graduate school is full of surprises. The survey data, collected last summer and shared exclusively with USA TODAY on Thursday, reveals major fissures in the information that influence graduate students’ decisions. These are especially high-stakes decisions, sometimes costing those students tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars and several years of paused or reduced employment.

Only half of the survey’s participants said they felt certain the advanced schooling was “worth it,” and a majority said they would need more time than they had expected to pay off their student debt. A plurality said the total amount they owe is more than they'd thought they'd have to pay.

“It’s an outlandish amount of money … and it was really rather opaque,” said Nijem, who did not participate in the survey. “It’s still too early for me to tell whether it was worth it.”

Is graduate school worth the debt?

There’s a widespread belief that graduate school is a surefire path to a better professional life. And generally speaking, program participants are happy with that choice. Most of the Third Way survey’s 1,000 participants said their graduate studies met or exceeded their expectations and thought highly of the programs’ quality.

Yet despite the financial burdens these students take on, the programs don’t always lead to the jobs and incomes those students envision when deciding to enroll. One in 4 participants gave their program a negative mark for overall worth.

Though some students pursue graduate education to expand their knowledge or because they’re unsure of what they want to do next, most do so primarily with practical goals in mind: They want a better job with better pay, to advance in their field.

But roughly a third of the survey’s participants said they hadn’t fulfilled those objectives: 30% of recent completers have not been consistently employed in the field they studied, and 35% earn less than they had expected.

“These two measures – career advancement and higher income – are where we see the largest gaps between what recent graduates are hoping to get out of their grad school experience vs. how well their school actually delivered for them,” the researchers note in a slide deck shared with USA TODAY.

In fact, separate research published last year showed many graduate programs producing students who are worse off financially than they would have been had they not pursued those advanced studies. Students are often left with unmanageable levels of debt and jobs whose salaries are not enough to pay it off.

The survey results, published Thursday, confirm these trends: One in 10 respondents said they don’t think they will ever be able to pay off their student debt.

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Nijem's motivations for grad school extended beyond the financial benefits.

“I’ve always liked to bill myself as a lifelong learner,” said Nijem, a 33-year-old father of three, the youngest of whom was born two days before he began his program. “I had this vision of going to grad school – finding the right one at the right time was what I was stuck at. I just knew it was going to happen sometime.”

Nijem, who had majored in public relations and advertising as an undergraduate and tended to shy away from math, was drawn to the data analysis emphasis of the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy Evening Master’s Program. “It really took me out of my traditional skill wheelhouse,” he said.

Still, as the sole provider for his kids and a first-generation American, he didn’t just want to expand his knowledge base. He wanted to make himself competitive in an evolving workforce. A lot of the jobs he had eyed listed a master’s as a preferred qualification. “I saw this as a way to make myself more marketable,” he said.

Graduate education is an especially diverse sector. Some programs, such as those in health fields, are seen as the default option for the respective profession – and in many cases are a prerequisite for those careers. Some are treated as a means of leveling up in salary. For example, educators who hold master’s degrees often have higher starting salaries than their counterparts with bachelor’s degrees.

“There's such a wide spread of the programs they’re attending; there are so many different outcomes based on that; and students are going to graduate school in so many different points in their professional careers, in their journeys,” said Ben Cecil, a senior education policy adviser at Third Way.

Survey participants’ take on grad school is informed by how they’re faring now that they’ve completed their programs. Of those who are employed full time, 56% said their education was "definitely" worth it. Fewer than one-third (32%) of those who are unemployed or only partially employed said the same.

“Employment is really shaping how students feel in terms of whether their program was even worth attending to begin with,” said Chazz Robinson, an education policy adviser at Third Way.

Nijem remains in the job he had when he started the program and doesn’t have any active plans to make a switch. He’s still “fresh” in the role and getting his “bearings." Even with the embellished resume, all his personal responsibilities make a professional change difficult at the moment. Plus, his position with the city of Chicago is eligible for Public Service Loan Forgiveness, a federal program that after a decade of payments relieves the student debt for people who work in government jobs and similar positions.

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Students: Not enough reliable information about grad school

One major takeaway from the Third Way findings: Graduate programs ought to be clearer and more transparent about cost and outcomes, a belief held by people across the political spectrum.

“There was resounding support for transparency,” Cecil said, including on graduation and employment rates and on income and borrowing amounts. Even when presented with compelling arguments against greater transparency – such as the cost to institutions and administrative burdens – survey participants said they supported it.

Though significant progress has been made on cost and outcome information for undergraduate programs as well as career-training ones, according to Cecil, “graduate education has kind of been like the Wild West.”

One reason could be assumptions about graduate students. Before he enrolled in his master’s program, Nijem tracked down data on how much it cost per quarter, but that was pretty much it. He didn’t know how that money would be divvied up, for example, information he later realized was necessary for him to apply for tuition reimbursements through his job.

That kind of nuanced information, he later learned, also could have been used to negotiate a larger aid package than the one he originally received. Eventually, after consulting with an admissions officer, he was able to get $4,000 a semester from the university, up from the $2,000 initially offered.

“It seemed like a lot of the onus was on me” to figure out the cost, he said. “I guess at the graduate level, they're expecting that you might have a skill set to acquire scholarships and things of that sort.”

Cecil said frustrating experiences like this are common. Fewer than 2 in 5 of the Third Way respondents reported having “a lot” of information about their programs’ recent employment rates and income data, and fewer than a quarter said they had “a lot” of information about how graduates’ incomes compared with the amount of debt they had taken out.

“The conventional wisdom has always been graduate students are more educated, so therefore they're more able to find information that's going to help them make the best decision about enrolling in graduate school,” he said. “But what we really found here is that it's hard to be an informed consumer when you have very little information going in and even more limited information about what you can expect on the other side of a graduate degree.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Student loans for grad school: Are they worth it? A look at the data