Gradschool ROI

One of our assignments is to do a cost-benefit analysis of grad school and to calculate an ROI. The thing is, the ROI depends on what you study and if you get your degree. So for my analysis, I will assume the degree is completed. I've tried to assign weights based on the following criteria: magnitude, importance, frequency of occurrence, strength of connection to grad school.

Since I expect most students in the class will analyze the M.Ed program, I decided to do mine on a Ph.D. (in mathematics) instead, so that there's a bit more variety in our results. I'll try to list cost and benefits related to a mathematics Ph.D. in general, not necessarily my personal costs and benefits.The rating is indicated by *'s. The use of 'grad school' below will always refer to getting a doctorate mathematics.

Costs

1. Financial (*): They pay you a stipend for teaching and wave tuition. Sometimes there's university supported housing as well. It's not a lot, but it's definitely enough to live on and you don't take on debt.
2. Time (****): Graduate school is at least a 4 (usually 5) year fulltime commitment. We were expected to do at least 56 hours a week. During your first year and during qualifying exams it could often be more. However, it was fairly flexible as to when and where that time was spent.
3. Opportunity Costs (**): While you're in grad school, you're not working at a job getting money and rank. You've also limited your other options (travel, major hobbies, etc.)
4. Commitment (**): Once you get over a year in, you really have to see it through in order to see much return. It's a major commitment and needs to supersede a lot of other commitments. (This partly overlaps with time and opportunity costs.)
   
5. Mindshare(*): You spend a lot of time thinking about your work and it takes up a lot of mindspace.
6. Miscellaneous (*): Being consider overqualified for some jobs, hyperspecilization, spam from the university, stress, etc.
   

Total Costs: 11

Benefits

1. Employment Opportunities (****): There are many jobs that are only open to you if you have a Ph.D.
2. Salary Increase (***): Having a Ph.D. tends to start you off with a higher salary and the available jobs often pay more as well.
3. Status (**): Having "Dr." in front of your name does mean something to some people.
   
4. New Skills and Information (***): You've learned a lot, particularly with regards to research (and perhaps teaching).
5. Confidence (*): Having completed a doctoral thesis can be a confidence builder.
6. Networking (*): You meet a lot of people in your field and have many networking opportunities.
7. Resources, Publications & Seminars (*): You acquire a lot of texts and notes that are good resources for your field. You have the opportunity (and expectation) to publish your work and give talks on it. This provides long term benefits in your field.
8. Miscellaneous (*): You don't have to decided what you want to do with your life, you avoid the real world, etc.
   

Total Benefits: 16

ROI =16/11=45%

Personally, I feel this ROI calculation is a little silly, because it is so volatile and subjective. At first I didn't have a miscellaneous costs category and had the skills benefit at 4. This gave me a 17/10=70% ROI. Very slight changes totally skew this number. It might be okay for a personal assessment on if gradschool might be personally worth it to me (and giving very personal ratings to everything), but for anything else I think you can get the number to be nearly anything you want.

Collaborative Learning

In class this week we are discussing collaborative learning and creating learning communities, with a specific focus to on-line learning.

When I was in high school, I hated group projects. It seemed like I always ended up doing most of the work. In hindsight, I realize that part of that was because I'm a bit of an overachiever and (especially in high school) tended to go overboard on projects. However, it often seemed like there was one person in the group who's plan was just to skim off the others and that pissed me off.

I did my undergraduate at the University of Chicago and I don't remember any group work what-so-ever. While part of that may be because I was a math major, the U of C requires nearly 2 years of core classes (i.e. general liberal arts curriculum). Many of those classes created fairly good learning communities. Classes were often discussion based, at least for the humanities, social science, and civilization (a.k.a history) requirements. Yet there was never any group work, just reading and writing papers. For some of the hum courses, we'd have an editing partner but that was the extent of it. I eventually became part of a learning community in mathematics, but that tended to take place outside the classroom. The "study groups" really did add a lot to the experience though.

As far as my doctorate is concerned, there was definitely a learning community formed in grad school. It was a good experience to be part of. There was no official group work, but we often worked collaboratively or help each other in the courses. My year studied together for our qualifying exams. We each took one semester of one of the classes and led a review session on it. I think it helped -- ours was the only year to have everyone completely pass their quals on the first try. I find it interesting how people worked together collaboratively and formed a community, yet none of the courses or teachers made it an objective for that to happen. The department encouraged group work and we all had a large office (holding cell) together, but never was any group work assigned.

Working towards my masters in education has been a very different experience. Teacher explicitly try to create learning communities. Collaborative work is often assigned. Yet at the same time, there's not really (to me) any sense of community. Part of this likely stems from on lin courses and being part-time students. I've worked with some really great groups, some groups that didn't feel like a group, and a group where one person contributed nothing (except excuses) and seem to think that was okay. All the attempts at fostering a learning community make it seem more forced and awkward to me.

Hmm... Until I wrote this, I hadn't realized just how great of a community I had when I did my ph.d....