Things you didn’t know about graduate school.

1.  A Ph.D. takes four to six years to earn, a Masters takes 1-2 years to earn.

2.  A Masters degree provides you with further technical skills, that provide additional opportunities in business or government.

3.  A Masters degree in economics requires tons of math.  A PhD in economics requires mega-tons of math.  Most PhD programs require you to have two semesters of calculus. Three semesters is better and your classmates are likely to have also taken mathematical statistics, linear algebra, and some course in set theory like topology or real analysis.

4.  Many students enroll in PhD programs after having first earned their masters degree from another school.

5.  Courses in the first two years of grad school mostly go deeper than broader.  For example a typical first semester would include grad macro I, grad micro I, math for econ, and stats for econ.  The second semester includes grad macro II, grad micro II, and econometrics.

6. You can get money to go to grad school.  Masters and PhD programs typically provide students with stipends of about $6,000 a semester for helping professors do research work or teaching principles courses.

7.  You will have little time to do anything else.  Although you will take only 9 to 12 hours of courses a semester, there is much more work per course than in undergraduate school and you have to do your research assistant or teaching assistant work as well.  Being a TA means spending time grading, going to the prof’s lectures, writing quizzes or exams, having office hours, and preparing and delivering lectures.

8.  With a PhD and an academic career you have little choice of where to locate.  When you go on the job market it is likely that there will be maybe forty or fifty academic openings for which you qualify.  It is possible that none of these will be in a region you want to locate. 

9.  To get into one of the top twenty PhD programs requires a truly outstanding record and perfect or near perfect scores on entrance exams.  Even if you get in to one of these programs there is no guarantee that you will finish as some of these programs admit students without aid.  Every year over 900 students earn their PhDs in economics.  This means that probably over 1500 students apply.  Most of these will have been at the top of their class and a number of them will be from very good schools.  The competition is tough.

10.  In PhD programs it is not uncommon for 30% or more of the first year class to quit.

11.  Starting salary for PhD academic economists is about $60,000.  If you go to a liberal arts college you can expect to start $10,000 to $15,000 lower.  At a good PhD program you would start $10,000 to $15,000 higher.

12.  If you graduate and get a job, you have to work for tenure.  This means that in the first five or six years of your academic career you must publish four to five papers (better schools may require more and expect publications in better journals) in academic journals.

13.  You have no idea how tight the job market is going to be.  It takes you 4-6 years to graduate and between business cycles and cycles in the popularity of economics, it is impossible to predict the employment situation with any accuracy.

14.  If you intend to go to grad school you must be in the department’s quantitative emphasis.

15.  You will need to take an entrance exam known as the GRE in the fall of your senior year, and send out applications prior to the spring of your senior year.

16.  There are alternatives to graduate economics.   You can pursue an MBA, which is a more general and less mathematical option.  However, many MBA programs are now designed for people with work experience.