Higher Education

It's all so very 2009, save my Blogger account which was "the hottest thing ever" circa 2003. I have been having a dialog with a devoted reader via blogs. Sometimes she responds to my post, not in the comments section (like a normal person does), but with a post of her own and provokes me to do the same. Credit her with the Dog Rebuttal and the following post that I'm about to scribble down.

"What will you do if/when you lose your job?" -Nana/Aunt Peggy/Mom/Dad/every person that has been reading the ink being spilled in the papers/every individual that I meet at the bar and confess my career.
"I don't know." Then I continue on, "I'd probably have to leave the city (and despite all of the city bashing in this blog, there really is no great luster that beckons me to suburban Connecticut)."
Then, typically, the questioner will offer sage advice, "Have you thought about going back to business school?"

I have thought about business school. I have concluded, at this point in my life, it would not really benefit my career as much as it might have in the past. While I'm all for increasing one's human capital via higher education, I'm baffled by those that look to graduate school as a panacea. They look at it like a shelter from the harsh realities of a declining global economy.

There are a handful of reasons that I will not be going back to graduate school. One, I'm currently debt free, and I'm convinced that graduate school for business is really only worthwhile on Wall Street if you could get into a top-tier b-school, which will put me in debt of roughly $200K (not even considering the loss of my salary: opportunity cost). Two, over the past 35+ years we, as a collective country, have been manufacturing and exporting MBAs, so there is clearly a glutton of supply. I believe in the merits of graduate school for those in the medical profession or even law, where you go to graduate school to fine-tune a trade. Another deterrent, is the changing landscape of financial services jobs and the impending shift in compensation (read: the Money Tree on Wall Street is currently being chopped down), so upon graduating I'll have assumed a significant amount of debt and be earning a salary + bonus that just does not justify the exorbitant costs of business school. I currently work in "equity research" and am a product of a non-Ivy league school. What I'm trying to say is, people go back to graduate school to get a job that I currently have. It just seems unnecessarily redundant to incur the debt and land back at my current job or sign my life away to gain exposure to investment banking. Education is generally a positive, but the current costs are prohibitive for an individual with Wall Street ambitions, especially in an economy that we have not seen since the 1930s.