The Masters Trap

[Stanislav]

What makes a graduate program predatory?
The Master's Trap - by Anne Helen Petersen - Culture Study (substack.com)

The simple answer to the question "What makes a graduate program predatory?" is one who charges more than the student can expect to recoup as a result of finishing the program.  

The central example in the article we are discussing, MAPH at Chicago, recruits students with implicit and explicit promise of access to elite funded PhD programs. It recruits a class that seems larger than the total number of spots at such programs, and, oh yeah, charges $65K for the privilege (tuition plus a "Hogwarts scarf"). Verdict: predatory.

One can be of a privileged background and still fall for an affinity con game. This is what Chicago, NYU, and Columbia are running here.

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I'm about 10 to 15 years older than those students, and I had access to the Internet in the 2000s. No one in my family had a degree at that time, and I grew up dirt poor. I had no mentors for guidance, so I started doing my own research after being falling for a for-profit school as a teenager. By the time I finished a bachelor's degree, I knew better, so it's hard to have sympathy for college-educated, middle class and upper-middle class students who can't google in the 2010s and 2020s. When you attend Ivy Plus schools and other traditional universities on campus, you are privy to be in an environment where you learn about there being graduate assistants and doctoral teaching and research assistants.

These students are surrounded by authority figures who successfully got good tenure-track jobs 30+ years ago. Who are used to be above-average, and yes, do not understand statistics. They are falling for programs designed specifically to ensnare this exact population. If they thought in terms of ROI they'd all be majoring in Finance and work at hedge funds (running different kind of predatory scams, perhaps?).

I was not born in this country and got into a fully-funded PhD program. Also have a sister who, as an international student, got a full-ride NCAA Div. I athletic scholarship before turning 16; our parents at the time made under $300 a month in salary at crumbling post-Communist public institution. None of this makes me think playing disadvantage Olympics is any kind of argument.