This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, July 20th, 2021. I'm Caleb Brown.

Graduate school is expensive and in many cases even at top universities those expensive graduate degrees do not enhance earnings

down the road.

So why do students get them?

Neil McCluskey discusses the considerations that students seem to ignore when making those big debt-laden choices.

We always hear that a college degree is worth some X number of dollars over and above, not having a college degree over the lifetime

of somebody who's out in the workforce what do we know about grad school generally?

So if you look at the aggregate data, it is true that if you have

a graduate degree or the average person I say, with a graduate degree,

it's gonna learn, earn more than somebody

with just a bachelor's degree,

who's gonna earn more than somebody

whose education ended in high school.

It's about a, I know, it's about a two and a half million dollar lifetime

earnings premium if you have a graduate degree versus just having gone to high

school.

It's about a $1.5 million premium

over somebody who just got a bachelor's degree.

But it's absolutely crucial to remember

that's in the aggregate. Those are averages and what we know is a lot of

people take on a lot of debt to go into programs including graduate programs that simply do not justify the debt they take out,

which the Wall Street Journal recently highlighted people leaving programs, for instance,

...