I’ve met a lot of college students who assume that they must slog their way through graduate school to enjoy a successful and lucrative career.

What is troubling, however, is how little information young adults know about what is involved in earning a graduate degree that can be expensive and a huge time commitment. No one should pursue a graduate degree without a lot of research and soul searching.

Here are some of the things you should know about grad school before you forge ahead:

1. Don’t be in a hurry.

There’s rarely a good reason to go to grad school immediately after earning a bachelor’s degree, observes Andrew Roberts, an associate professor of political science at Northwestern University and the author of a fabulous book, The Thinking Student’s Guide to College: 75 Tips for Getting a Better Education. The book is primarily focused on undergrads, but it does contain advice on graduate school issues. (I highly recommend getting this book for high school seniors after they are done with the admission process.)

Roberts says that it’s hard for students to know if grad school is the best option until they’ve been in the workforce for a while.

2. Don’t make grad school your default move.

Students often enter grad schools without knowing much about the eventual careers to which a graduate degree could lead. The worst thing young adults can do is go to graduate school because they aren’t sure what else to do or they can’t find jobs. Grad school, after all, is often an extremely long commitment. A Ph.D., for example, can take six years or more. Less than 50% of students who begin a PhD program leave with a degree.

3. Don’t expect to get a job as a professor.

Even if you do survive grad school, the job market for Ph.D.’s in academia is lousy. You can find out the realities of grad school by downloading a book,  Grad Skool Rulz: Everything You Need to Know About Academia From Admissions to Tenure, (just $2!) that was written by Fabio Rojas, an associate professor of sociology at Indiana University. Rojas also sums up the challenges grad students face in blog posts that he’s written about graduate school life over the years at orgtheory.net.

Here’s one of Rojas’ observations:

The job search process is harrowing for academics…there is little guarantee that persons completing their terminal degree will land a job teaching and doing research in their area. At a top medical school, the question is if you will get the residency of your choice. At a top graduate program, it’s often doubtful that someone will be offered a job at all.

4. Life in the Ivory Tower can be a grind.

Grad programs are hard work and require much more challenging coursework. Roberts notes in his book that “the course material now becomes, to a considerable extent, technical, insider reading—that is, dense, abtruse, jargon-filled works polished in academic journals and by university presses. …You will not be tempted to recommend your reading lists to friends outside your field.”

Fabio warns about “toxic” grad programs where departments provide no support for students and seem happy to pit students against each other. He describes the most common grad program as one guilty of “benign neglect.” A few good students get support from professors, but most don’t.

5. Ask intelligent questions.

If none of this dissuades you, here are some questions that William Pannapacker, an associate English professor at Hope College, in a column in The Chronicle of Higher Education, suggested would-be graduate students ask before selecting a program:

1. What kind of financial support can a student expect to receive during the entire course of the program?
2. How much educational debt do graduates leave with?
3. How many discussion sections and courses are graduate students required to teach in order to receive a stipend each year?
4. What is the average annual teaching load for graduate students?
5. How many years does it typically take to graduate?
6. How long are graduates on the academic job market?
7. Where is every graduate employed in academe and in what positions: tenure track, visiting, adjunct?
8. Where are graduates working, if not in academe?
9. Does the program lead to appealing career paths outside of academe?
10. What percentage of students earn doctorates?
11. How many earn master’s degrees?
12. What reason do students drop out?

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of Shrinking the Cost of College, a workbook available on her website. She also writes a college blog for CBSMoneyWatch. Follow her on Twitter @CollegeBlog and on Facebook. 

Read More:

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8 Reasons Not to Get a Business Degree

Parents Take a Chill Pill

I received an email over the weekend from a mom who is stressing about whether her accomplished daughter would be better off attending a liberal arts college or a journalism school.

I happen to be a graduate of the the nation’s oldest journalism school at the University of Missouri (see photo) and I’ll share some thoughts after the mom’s note. If you’d like to weigh in,  please use the box at the bottom of this  post.

Regina’s Note:

Hi Lynn,

I enjoy your college blog and I have learned volumes about how to evaluate colleges/universities.

My daughter is a junior, very bright and driven. She has a 3.94 GPA and she attends a very academically competitive Christian school. She’s a varsity level athlete in volleyball and track and field. She hasn’t take the SAT or ACT yet but from the PSAT and PLAN test she scored pretty well. Swarthmore, Reed, and Rensselaer, Dartmouth, Brown and a swarm of other universities have been writing and sending her mailers since her PLAN test in sophomore year.

She is highly involved in athletics and her father and all (4) of her uncles played college football so she has high level of appreciation for the sacrifice and discipline that comes with maintaining top academics and being a high performing athlete.  She thrives in highly charged academic environments. She wouldn’t mind the opportunity to play college level volleyball, but she would only play at a school that benefits her overall plan.

Some Possible Journalism Schools

Based on the research I have conducted from the sources you provide, I believe she would best be served at a liberal arts college since she is a very cerebral and engaging student. I think the opportunity for her to be taught by professors would serve her best overall for her future.

She has a passion, however, to have a career in sports communications/broadcasting/public relations in the industry of professional athletics.  So she had identified Syracuse University and the SI Newhouse School of Communications or UPenn and the Annenberg School for Communication.  We have discussed between the totally different approaches between these two schools. Additionally, they are world’s apart regarding providing for financial need. We are definitely in the category of a family who needs financial assistance. I am a recent widowed mother of two.

What is your advice in this situation? How can an education at a liberal arts college meet the needs of someone determined to make a career in the field of communications/public relations? Does it even matter as an undergraduate? She does plan to get a master’s in mass communication and I know that more students from liberal arts college have success with admission and graduation with higher degrees.

Oh yes, she also does not want to stay in the West. She is determined to go East Coast or  Midwest or New England area but nothing on the West Coast.

Any advice you can give is greatly appreciated. I have been studying the Carnegie Classifications and the College Results online but I’m sure any word from you will help to make the information from these sights more meaningful.

Thanks.

 My Response:

Regina covers a lot of ground here, so I’m just going to number my thoughts.

1. Obviously as a high-achieving student, your daughter enjoys a tremendous amount of options. Only your daughter can answer what type of school she should attend. She sounds like the kind of teenager who would excel wherever she lands. I think the most obvious solution would be to continue to explore both liberal arts colleges and journalism schools. Preferably you can visit and whether or not that is possible, email/talk with professors and students at those schools.

I wrote a post two years ago about this issue when my nephew, Tommy O’Shaughnessy, was debating whether to go to Missouri’s School of Journalism or Truman State University, a public liberal arts college. He is now a sophomore attending Mizzou and he’s hoping to get admitted into the J School. Here is that post:

Which Is Better: A Liberal Arts College or University?

2. I appreciate your daughter’s interest in a liberal arts college which comes with smaller classes and often far more interaction with professors. A student can make the experience at many universities more like a smaller school by qualifying for its honors college.  For instance, the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism encourages top students to apply for the MU Honors College.

3. If she attends a journalism school, ideally your daughter would be in smaller classes once she actually starts taking classes in her major. This is something she should inquire about when talking with students and professors.

4. You don’t need to attend a journalism school to obtain a job in communications. I can’t think of anyone that I work with over at my CBS MoneyWatch gig that attended a journalism school. That said, a plugged-in journalism school can help students find that first job. If you go that route, I would recommend narrowing your search to schools that enjoy tons of ties to the industry and can help with internships and jobs.

5. I question whether your daughter would need a master’s degree in communications. I’m wondering how she would benefit if she already knows how to write and communicate well? (My husband’s got a master’s in journalism degree from Columbia University as a way to get the heck out of Alaska and his dad picked up the tap.)  You might want to think hard about this, particularly with money tight.

6. Just because schools are sending your daughter literature doesn’t mean she would get accepted no matter how accomplished she is. To find out why, read this post that I wrote in September:

Should You Be Flattered By a College’s Red Carpet Treatment?

7. This is obviously a side issue, but your daughter’s chances of playing sports will improve at a smaller school. At Division I universities, student athletes can essentially become employees of the institution. They have little time for anything else and they can be limited to the major they choose because of the sports time commitment. Division III can be a superior choice for a scholarly teenager.

Here is a post that I wrote for US News & World Report on athletic scholarships:

7 Things You Need to Know About Sports Scholarships

9. Use a net price calculator. With money a concern, be sure to use a net price calculator to get a personalized estimate of what each school on your daughter’s list will cost! Here is one of my posts on these calculators:

College Cost Calculators: Getting Wildly Different Answers

8. I flew back to my alma mater in December 2010 after I was asked to be the commencement speaker at Mizzou’s J School. It was a tremendous honor and I’ll never forget it. For all you would-be journalism majors out there, you might be interested in what I had to say:

School of Journalism’s Commencement Speech

Good luck! Anybody else have any suggestions?

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution, an Amazon bestseller, and she also writes a college blog for  CBSMoneyWatch and US News. Follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

During my college workshop at the University of California, San Diego, on Saturday, I asked the parents in attendance this question:

What percentage of high school seniors do you think got accepted into their No. 1 college last year?

One dad blurted out, “Six percent.” From the other side of the room, a mom provided this answer: “Two percent?”

I was surprised by the low-ball answers, but it certainly illustrates something that is not surprising at all — families are stressed about college.  I had no idea, however, that some parents are that pessimistic about their teenagers getting into good schools.

The actual percentage of students who manage to get into their top choice is actually quite high at 76%. The number of students who received acceptance letters from their first choice school did decline from 78.9% in 2010, but it’s still represents great odds.

These figures come from the latest annual study from UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute that has been surveying college freshmen, who attend four-year institutions, since 1966. UCLA surveys more than 204,000 freshmen, which when adjusted statistically reflects the responses of 1.5 million full-time freshman.

 College Freshman Facts

I thought I’d share with you some of the fascinating facts about this year’s college freshmen.

 Freshmen are self confident.

While American teenagers perform poorly on math and other standardized tests compared with students from plenty of other countries, the Yanks excel in self confidence and that comes through in the latest survey. Nearly half of freshman believe they are either in the top 10% or above average in their academic ability.

It’s understandable that so many teenagers think they are hot stuff academically because of the number who graduate from high school with inflated grade points averages! Here are the UCLA stats:

Interestingly enough, 25% of college freshman thought they would need tutoring or remedial work in math.

Students seem to be taking high school a bit more seriously.

High school seniors spent less time partying, more time studying and tackled more Advanced Placement courses.

Freshman stay within two hours away from home.

Freshmen continue to stay close to home for college. While there are plenty of  students who don’t have the maturity or the money to attend a distant school, far more should be considering this alternative. The number of students attending school 500 or more miles away actually dropped this year from 15.5% to 14%.

Here are some blog posts that I’ve written in the past about the admission advantage you can capture by casting a wider net when looking at colleges:

Where Most Students End Up Attending College

Where Are the Freshman Coming From?

University Reveals the Secrets of Winning Merit Scholarships

 Teenagers aren’t applying to as many schools as you may think.

Twenty one percent of last year’s high school seniors applied to seven or more schools, but an equal number applied to only one or two.

 Freshman are becoming increasingly liberal on social issues.

An unprecedented 71.3% of freshmen indicated that same-sex couples should have the right to marry, which is a 6.4 percentage point increase over the response that freshmen gave in 2009. Support for same-sex marriage was 99.3% among liberal, but even many conservatives (42.8%) approve.

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution and She also writes a college blog for  CBSMoneyWatch and US News. Follow her on Twitter.

What schools produce the most undergraduates who end up heading off to graduate school?

The subject came up yesterday because a friend of mine was telling me about a brilliant teenager who wants to eventually get a PhD in physics. The student lives in California, but the mom wants him to apply to schools in the Midwest where she grew up.

I asked my friend if the teenager had checked out Lawrence University.

“Huh?”

I realize that might be your reaction, but here’s the thing – many of the schools that are feeder institutions for the nation’s PhD programs are liberal arts colleges. While most liberal arts colleges are not well-known among families with teenagers, these institutions — and their reputations — are very well known to graduate schools. Lawrence University, a liberal arts college Appleton, WI, for instance, happens to be 10th on the list among all four-year colleges and universities that produce, per capita, the most physics PhDs. (See chart below.)

PhD Feeder Schools

I bet most families assume that attending a public flagship university or a nationally-known private research university is the best ticket to graduate school. If you look at the following lists of the most successful PhD feeder schools for different majors, you will see a somewhat different story. Not a single public university makes any of the lists. The entire Cal State system, however, is considered the No. 1 producer of humanities PhD’s.

I thought you’d be interested in the list of undergraduate institutions that, per capita, produce the most PhD’s. I pulled the names off the website of  Reed College, a liberal arts college in Portland, OR, that is understandably proud of its impressive record of turning out undergrads who end up earning PhD’s. The statistics cover the years 1997 to 2006 and come from the National Science Foundation and the federal government’s education database.

On the list of schools that have the most undergrads who ultimately earn a PhD  in all disciplines, Reed comes in No. 3 behind Cal Tech and Harvey Mudd College.

As you’ll see in the first column below, seven of the 10 schools, whose graduates earn the most PhD’s by the percentage of students are liberal arts colleges.

Bottom Line:

Students can increase their odds of being accepted to graduate school if they earn their bachelor’s degree at a liberal arts college. On a per capita basis, for instance, liberal arts colleges produce twice as many students who earn a PhD in science than other institutions. That makes sense since students have more opportunities to work closely with their professors, they can actually learn more due to small classes and receive glowing recommendations from their teachers, many of which, graduated from prestigious graduate programs.

What’s even more remarkable about the prominence of liberal arts colleges on the science lists is this: many students major in other disciplines at liberal colleges while students who attend schools like Cal Tech and MIT overwhelmingly expect to pursue careers in the sciences and engineering.

I’ve attached a lengthy essay by Thomas R. Cech, a Grinnell College grad, Nobel Laureate and chemistry professor at the University of Colorado, who wrote a fascinating essay contrasting the science experience for undergrads at colleges versus universities. Cech believes science majors at liberal arts colleges enjoy an advantage over undergrads who attend universities. Here are Cech’s thoughts:  Science at Liberal Arts Colleges: A Better Education?

Read more on The College Solution:

50 Schools That Produce the Most Science and Engineering PhDs

The Shocking Truth About Graduation Rates

Getting Bad News From Johns Hopkins

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution, an Amazon bestseller, and a workbook, Shrinking the Cost of College. Follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

My Upcoming College Workshop:

I will be holding my next two college workshops at the University of California, San Diego on Jan. 28 and Feb. 4. At the workshops — you can sign up for one or both – I aim to share with you ways to help you make smart decisions about picking colleges and making them more affordable. You can learn more here and sign up for the workshops here. Lynn O’Shaughnessy

With crazy amounts of psychic energy being spent on getting teenagers into college, too many students and their parents think getting admitted is the hard part of the college process.  Actually, it’s not. Squeezing as much value out of the college experience once you’re a student is far more important.

Unfortunately, however,  many students are graduating from college without learning much. From a parent’s perspective that’s a lot of wasted money. And, of course, there are serious ramifications for students who have spent their college years living in a Bud Lite commercial.

Here are a pair of  college blog posts that I’ve written in the past about this problem:

Do Undergrads Learn Much in College?

Expecting More Out of College Students

Today I’m  sharing with you a professor’s thoughtful column in The Chronicle of Higher Education that attempts to explain why so many college students seem impervious to learning. While professors should certainly take some of the blame for student underachievement, William Pannapacker, an associate English professor at Hope College in Michigan, explains the harsh realities of educating undergrads in the 21st century.  You can read his column here:

A Perfect Storm in Undergraduate Education, Part I

I am sharing just three of Pannapacker’s observations:

1. Many students are poorly prepared academically when they arrive in college. With rampant grade inflation, earning “A’s” in high school doesn’t guarantee success in college.

2. Untenured professors don’t want to grade too hard or challenge students too much because they might receive poor students evaluations which could hurt their prospects for tenure. Here is an excerpt of what Pannapacker said:

The common wisdom, for the untenured, at least—whether it is true or not—is to find ways to keep the students happy: Expect little, smile a lot, gesture freely, show movies, praise them constantly, give high marks, bring cookies on evaluation day.

3. Demoralized professors. Professors believe they are unappreciated by non-academics and they are discouraged that they make far less than Americans with comparable educations.

What I found curious is that Pannapacker didn’t blame higher ed’s obsession with research as part of this widespread problem.  I wrote about this reality for my college blog for CBS MoneyWatch a year ago:

Why Don’t Professors Like To Teach?

My Son’s Experience

Make sure that your high school students are truly prepared for college. I’d suggest that if your child’s GPA is far higher than his or her standardized tests, there is a problem. Consider tutoring or possibly community college classes  if the “A’s” your child are getting  are simply because the high school classes are too easy.

Our family followed that advice. My son’s high school — High Tech High — was philosophically opposed to AP classes, which was fine. The charter school, however, required all the students to take the same math courses. Students who were struggling with math along with those who hoped to eventually major in engineering and math all took the same classes, which had to be watered down. Ben was getting easy “A’s,” but under the circumstances the grades were meaningless.

My husband, son and I considered this arrangement a disaster so Ben trotted off in the evenings to take community college math classes for five semesters. My son could not have hacked advanced math in college without these extra classes. Ben, a college sophomore at Beloit College, recently declared himself to be a math and art major with a physics minor.

Read more:

25 Colleges With the Best Professors

25 Colleges With the Worst Professors

College Where Professors Are Easy Graders

Searching for the True Price of a University

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of a workBook, Shrinking the Cost of College.  Follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

What is the best way to ace your final exams?

This is a timely question as millions of high school and college students are taking their final exams.

You might assume that reading textbooks and notes over and over again is the best way to study, but researchers from Purdue and Washington University insist that it’s not the best approach.

Listen Up Test Takers

Here’s a better way to improve test scores:

You should practice retrieving as much information as you can from memory just as you would have to do on test day. You can do this by writing down what you absorbed — without consulting your notes or book — or you can review what you know out loud. And you should do this several times.

Even if you think you know it, the research shows retrieving it about three or four more times can achieve big gains in learning.

What the Experts Say

In contrast, simply reviewing your notes or textbook can provide you a false sense of confidence. In an interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education, here’s what one of the researchers, Jeffrey D. Karpicke, an assistant professor of psychology at Purdue, had to say about this phenomenon:

“When you’ve got your chemistry book in front of you, everything’s right there on the page, it’s all very familiar and fluent,” says Jeffrey D. Karpicke, an assistant professor of psychology at Purdue University and lead author of a paper in the May issue of Memory about students’ faulty intuitions about effective study habits.

“So you could say to yourself, ‘Yeah, I know this. Sure, this is all very familiar,’” Mr. Karpicke continues. “But of course, when you go in to take a classroom test, or in real life when you need to reconstruct your knowledge, the book’s not there. In our experiments, when students repeatedly read something, it falsely inflates their sense of their own learning.”

Learn More Here

To learn more, here is a press release from the Purdue study about the research on performing better on tests and here is the final exam article from The Chronicle.

Who ever thought that hitting the books might not always be the best strategy to acing your finals?

I also found some great advice from a professor writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education on how to take an exam after the studying is complete:

How to Take a Final Exam (Part 1)

How to Take a Final Exam (Part 2)

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution, an Amazon bestseller and a workbook, Shrinking the Cost of College: Great Ways to Cut the Cost of a Bachelor’s Degree. Follow her on Twitter.

Learn more: