This author has received news that many departments in the University of Pittsburgh's School of Arts and Sciences are holding back on accepting Masters' level students. Instead they are selecting the most qualified students for Doctors of Philosophy. Some students who are accepted cannot count on having grants available for their schooling.
This is most likely an attempt to conserve funds in the face of state budget cuts and to keep their graduate programs competitive. In the face of graduate level diploma mills: smaller schools offering, Masters of Social Work, Masters of Organizational Leadership, Masters of Business Administration, Masters of Library Sciences, Masters of Financial Planning, et al. The traditional Academic Masters is losing ground just as the Academic Bachelors did. In classical economics this is diminishing returns, in monetary terms this would be called 'inflation', in the larger scale it is back slide.
“The law of diminishing returns (also law of diminishing marginal returns or law of increasing relative cost) states that in all productive processes, adding more of one factor of production, while holding all others constant, will at some point yield lower per-unit returns. The law of diminishing returns does not imply that adding more of a factor will decrease the total production, a condition known as negative returns, though in fact this is common.”
The graduate level course of study used to be a directed study, under professors noted for their areas of expertise, to further a field of study. This still holds true for the Doctoral level, but used to be true for the Masters. Then came the Masters of Business Administration in the post-WWII era which set in motion the idea of a Masters being nothing more than “undergrad plus.”
"The specific effect of the MBA has been an explosion of enrollments in economics, the prebusiness major. … The prebusiness economics major … is not motivated by love of the science of economics but by love of what it is concerned with. … There is nothing else quite like this perfect coincidence between science and cupidity elsewhere in the university."
-Allan Bloom, the Closing of the American Mind, 1988
In real terms this is the domino effect, employers demand such and such degree, government funds higher education, universities raise their tuition, devalued surplus degrees are the result. The old lie of “a college graduate makes a million dollars more over their life” comes into play, again. This time the net loss can be measured in time, lost opportunities, and additional student debt (equivalent to the whole of their undergraduate 'experience.')
The intelligent thing to do is to opt out and attend community college for a hands on technical program. The student will save a lot of time and money, and be more desirable in the job market.
The graduate studies path will not be a feasible means of success much longer.
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