Many Master's Programs Leave Grads Short on Earnings to Pay Off Loans
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Here's your Money Briefing for Friday, July 9th. I'm J.R. Whelan for The Wall Street Journal. For many students, acceptance into a graduate program at an Ivy League or top-flight school can inspire hopes of realizing the American dream. But in many cases, the amount of student debt they have to take on far outweighs what they'll be earning once they enter the workforce.
So at some of these schools, their tuition is very high. They're in big, expensive cities. So the amount of money you need to just participate in that program is very high. And you can borrow every single dollar of it. And there's no consequence to the schools if these master's graduates don't pay off the debt.
So how are grad students finding themselves in this situation? And what can be done about it? Coming up, we'll talk with our higher education reporter, Melissa Korn. That's after the break.
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What problem does the WSJ analysis reveal about master's graduates and loan repayment?
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We've talked on the show before about the weight that debt can put on college students, but that burden is especially heavy for students in graduate programs. Universities in recent years have awarded thousands of master's degrees that don't provide graduates enough early career earnings to begin paying down their federal student loans. Our reporter Melissa Korn and the WSJ's higher education team have poured through education department data on this, and she's with us to talk about it. Melissa, thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. So Melissa, tell us about the Wall Street Journal's analysis of this data. How bad is it that we're talking about? And what were the key findings?
So overall, for many programs or many students in many master's programs, the situation is pretty bad. We looked at debt loads at graduation and earnings two years after graduation, as well as repayment rates. So who's actually making progress on paying down their loans two years out? for master's programs around the country. And we were pretty surprised to find that these programs at very prestigious universities, very wealthy, elite universities, where the schools really bend over backwards to provide financial support for their undergraduate students. But once it comes to graduate students, they're just kind of pointed in the direction of federal loans. So we saw that graduate students at a number of master's programs at Ivy League schools, at USC, at Northwestern, other really top schools were really struggling under the weight of the debt that they had taken on to pursue these degrees.
Now, what kind of dollar figures are we talking about that these graduate students are racking up?
The most egregious example we came across is Columbia's film program. So they have a Master of Fine Arts and also a Master of Arts in Film and Media Studies. And the numbers for both of those are combined in the education department data. And their recent graduates who borrowed federal loans borrowed median $181,000. And two years after graduation, they were earning
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