How do parents get their children into grad school?

G.P.Burdell
Fri, 20 Feb 2009 13:37:20 +0000

Grad school does NOT look like it easy so I can’t believe people would use it to get out of real life but clearly you must think this is done.



It depends on how you define “easy”. The benefit of many jobs (obviously there are many, many examples where this is not the case) is that you work 40 hours a week and that’s it. You don’t really have to think about work when you leave home, on the weekends you can spend time with the kids, etc. It’s a nice life. With school, you obviously work harder, there’s homework, there’s research, there’s a concrete measure of comparison to your peers that signal to the world how hard you’re working, etc. So from that perspective, I agree that grad school is harder than working.

But, many undergrads are afraid of the “real world”. They’ve never had to deal with car insurance, or buying a home, or having to move on their own to a distance city where they know no one. Their food was provided by on-campus dining halls, their money came from their parents or scholarships or loans, their activities were organized by the campus or department, and there was a very clear expectation of what they needed to do (i.e. Take this class. Then take this class. Then take this class. Now you get a degree) and how they were judged (grades, tests, etc.) Life outside of college is much more complicated, ambiguous, and requires dealing with adversary. In college, things are pretty deterministic (study these things, and you should do well on a test). In life, things are often very stochastic (do you know the right people? Did you get lucky and make the right career choice? etc.) From that perspective, if you fear uncertainty and change, just continuing to grad school is easier.

So if someone fears change, uncertainty, and complexity, grad school seems like the easier decision. Of course, those shouldn’t be the criteria by which someone decides to go to grad school, and hence, the problem.