Going Grad: Mid-Recession, Students Leave the Workforce for the Classroom

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AS SHE PLUNGES into the Master's in Business Administration program at Yale University, Lydia Gensheimer is facing an English major's worst nightmare.

"I'm taking stats, accounting, microeconomics and Excel modeling," Gensheimer says cheerfully (so are all her cohorts in the two-year program).

It's a sea change for the former journalist, who covered education for Congressional Quarterly after graduating from Dartmouth in 2006. But getting an MBA also flows naturally from her former beat.

"I am one of those people who got so involved in what I was writing about that I decided to go do what I was writing about" — education reform, says Gensheimer, 24.

This fall, in the face of a stubborn recession and a lot of uncertainty in a whole host of fields, thousands of newly minted grad-school students are going back to school, often after years in the work force.

Each student's decision to matriculate now is guided by a range of personal, professional and financial factors. But experts say one thing is for sure.

"If you are only going back to graduate school to earn a degree because you think it will make you more money, that's the wrong reason," says Marsha Egan, a certified professional coach based in Reading, Pa. Through her company, the Egan Group, she consults across the country with people wondering whether grad school might be a ticket to greater security, greater satisfaction, or some combination of the two.

"There can be something motivational" about all the bad news," she says. Unlike a job, "a degree is something no one can ever take away from you."

And, adding a few letters after your name means new skills developed, new interests pursued and new credentials burnished — some of the right reasons to make the graduate-school investment, Egan contends.

"People are re-evaluating what is important to them," says Jung Fitzpatrick, graduate education communications coordinator at Idealist.org, a nonprofit career Web site. (Its Graduate Degree Fair for the Public Good takes place at the Washington Convention Center Sept. 21; see their Web site.) The fairs have seen a significant spike in attendance as prospective students explore new career options.

"A graduate education can be a transition to more meaningful work," Fitzpatrick says.

For Adrienne Feil, it was more of a foregone conclusion. The Fairfax, Va., native "knew I wanted to have a graduate degree by the time I was 30," she says (both of her parents have master's degrees). Working at the Advisory Board Company, a health care consulting firm based in Washington, "I had learned a lot, but I realized health care was not where I wanted to stay."

Feil, 26, spent hours in informational interviews with people working in policy think tanks to suss out what sort of skills and personalities were suited to their work. During that exploratory phase, Feil — who started the MBA program at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business last month — realized before matriculating that marketing was most appealing to her.

So, unless you're willing to do your homework as Feil did, it's best not to spend the time, effort and many thousands of dollars graduate school demands if you don't have a plan for what you hope to derive from it.

"Some people say, ';I don't know what to do with myself, so I guess I'll go to grad school, because it can't hurt me,'" Egan says. "But it's much better to first ask yourself what industries you love and what you want to do."

Trinidad resident Georgina Javor opted for Georgetown's three-year MBA evening program.

"I thought taking myself out of the game [to attend school full time] would make it harder to get back in later," says Javor, programming manager at Strathmore, the performing arts center in North Bethesda.

In her field, "a lot of people get a master's in arts administration, but I wanted to do something more all-encompassing that would let me look at business models as a whole," she says.

"I have a passion for the arts," adds Javor, 28, "but sometimes that isn't enough, especially when you look at how our industry has been hit hard by the economy."

Gensheimer, who moved from Mount Pleasant to New Haven, Conn., earlier this year, insists that the grim worldwide economic picture didn't have a significant effect on her plans. Nor did the fact that her former employer, CQ, was sold in June to Roll Call, or that journalism as a whole is limping along.

"If people were thinking about grad school before the economy got rough, I don't think [the recession] has changed most people's minds on whether to go or not," says Idealist's Fitzpatrick, who says folks attending her organization's career fairs are typically two to five years out of undergrad.

For Eric Prag, graduate school goals are now crystallizing.

Last year, the Capitol Hill resident attended one of Idealist's grad school fairs in D.C., where he found himself drawn to programs in political science, international relations and economics. But when he landed an interesting position working on policy matters at Save the Children, he tabled his research — for a while, anyway.

"Now that I'm 30, I feel like it's now or never for grad school," says Prag, adding that he's redoubling his efforts to pinpoint the right program, possibly for fall 2010.

Gensheimer says that Yale's loan forgiveness program (which helps those committed to non-profit work drastically reduce or erase the costs of graduate school) — and a belief that she is doing the right thing for herself — helped her overcome the mental burden of shouldering about $100,000 in debt.

"You have to let some of those doubts and voices in your head go by," she says. "If you decide you need to go back to graduate school to find the career right for you, then, economically, it will work out in the long run."

Written by Express contributor Amy Rogers Nazarov
Photos by Kris Tripplaar for Express