The Price of a Degree and the Value of an Education

The Price of a Degree and the Value of an Education

Allysia Finley's Wall Street Journal column, “The Ph.D. Job Crisis Is a Needed Market Correction,” describes universities reducing doctoral admissions as the costs of graduate education rise and academic jobs become harder to obtain. She argues that institutions have produced too many doctorates for the opportunities available, particularly in parts of the humanities and social sciences. The cuts deserve attention, but waiting for institutional budget adjustments may not be the most effective way for a family to evaluate the potential return on a degree. Financial planning should force that question before the tuition is paid and the years are committed. [5]

Parents who save for college usually imagine they are buying their children an advantage. The money is meant to purchase an education, access to opportunity, and the capacity to support an independent life. Yet the language surrounding higher education encourages an expensive confusion: a degree does not automatically translate into economic value or career advancement. A family that devotes years of savings to a credential without asking what it teaches and what doors it opens has made a large financial decision without doing the financial planning.

My objection is not to learning for its own sake. I studied Russian literature at UCLA, have a thriving Estate and Income  Tax and Life Insurance Practice, teach MBA-level business ethics, and wrote a doctoral dissertation examining professional standards in financial advising. Literature can teach a person to read attentively, recognize an argument, and understand human motives; sociology can illuminate institutions; serious scholarship on race can expose real failures of law or practice. These subjects must still survive intellectual scrutiny, and the decision to finance a degree in them must survive economic scrutiny. Calling an interest important does not make every program rigorous, every credential necessary, or every tuition bill wise.

Consider the invitation I recently received from Antioch University, where I earned my PhD in Leadership and Change. It opens with Wayne Dyer's injunction to change the way one looks at things, then promises “positive change,” “discovery and influence,” and a contribution to the “common good.” It stresses that the program accommodates working professionals and offers $500 toward tuition for attending an information session. I know from experience that serious dissertation research is possible in that program; my work required sustained inquiry and argument. But the invitation gives a prospective student almost no basis for deciding how much more competent the degree will make them, whether that competence requires a doctorate, or whether the anticipated benefits justify the full cost. An attractive account of one's future self is a poor substitute for an investment case.

This problem is not peculiar to Antioch or to doctorates. “Leadership,” “change,” “justice,” and “impact” name possible aspirations. They are not, without a demanding curriculum and external standards, descriptions of demonstrable competence. A PhD in biology can be useful for a research career because it trains a person to frame testable questions, conduct experiments, evaluate results, and contribute new knowledge. It is not automatically a good financial investment either: its value depends on funding, time to completion, the student's goals, and actual opportunities afterward. The relevant distinction is between what a particular program equips a particular student to do and what it costs that student to acquire that ability.

What the doctoral figures actually show

The National Science Foundation's 2024 Survey of Earned Doctorates counts research doctorates awarded by U.S. institutions. The table below reports women as a share of all recipients in each field. Its racial and ethnic percentages have a different denominator: U.S. citizens and permanent residents in that field, excluding temporary visa holders. “Hispanic” is an ethnicity; the White, Asian, and Black columns are the survey's non-Hispanic racial categories. The four racial and ethnic columns do not total 100% because the survey also reports American Indian or Alaska Native recipients, multiracial recipients, other or unreported race, and unreported ethnicity. Percentages are calculated from NSF counts and rounded to one decimal place. They do not show race within each gender. [1][2]

These are counts of degrees awarded, not measures of intelligence, research quality, employability, or the worth of their recipients. Biology is the NSF category “biological and biomedical sciences”; it refers to research doctorates and does not include the professional MD degree. The leadership row is a national category, not a count of Antioch graduates. “Critical race theory” is an approach used across several disciplines, not a separately reported doctoral field in these tables. It would be dishonest to attach a race or gender percentage to “CRT PhDs” by treating all ethnic studies graduates as if they studied the same theory. [1][2][3]

The figures do reveal different patterns of participation. They do not explain why those patterns exist. In particular, they cannot establish a claim that humanities or identity-related fields were created to make doctoral totals appear more equal across racial groups. Such a claim would require evidence about the history and purpose of particular programs, their founding decisions, and the counterfactual distribution of degrees. A percentage table cannot supply that evidence. It would be just as careless to infer a field's quality from the race or sex of its graduates. I criticize programs for weak methods, vague outcomes, and bad financial propositions, not for who enrolls in them.

What a market correction can and cannot tell us

Finley cites suspended admissions at institutions including the University of Chicago and Brown, and quotes a Brown faculty committee estimating total institutional support at $700,000 to $1 million per doctoral student. That is a warning about the university's cost structure; it is not the price charged to every student, and it is not a calculation of each graduate's personal return. Her column also attacks fields she regards as politically narrow. A reader may share some of those criticisms while still asking for evidence that a particular program produces weak scholarship or poor employment results. A budget cut identifies an institutional decision under financial pressure. It does not rank the intrinsic worth of every subject the university cuts. [5]

The correction matters because universities, students, and families make decisions under different incentives. An institution may have used graduate students to teach classes or sustain a department. A student may want a research career, an existing professional may seek a credential, and parents may assume that more schooling always creates more security. When the supply of academic positions contracts, the institution can suspend admissions. The graduate who borrowed money or left work for years cannot recover that time. Finley's column describes a supply problem; the family's problem is deciding whether this particular degree, at this particular cost, is worth pursuing at all.

The degrees that deserve the hardest questions

A universal ranking of the “most useless degrees” is impossible because the same discipline can serve different purposes at different prices. A fully funded doctorate preparing a gifted scholar for a well-defined career is a different proposition from a tuition-funded doctorate undertaken for status. Still, certain offerings deserve especially close examination when sold to families or working adults as an investment: broadly defined degrees in leadership or organizational change; narrowly branded degrees in advocacy whose methods discourage serious disagreement; graduate programs in creative writing or literary studies pursued primarily in expectation of a scarce faculty job; and any expensive doctorate marketed around inspiration while leaving its measurable benefits obscure. These are categories for investigation, not a finding that every scholar in them is unserious.

The danger is magnified when a discipline treats conviction as a substitute for proof. A program in gender studies, ethnic studies, sociology, or education can ask difficult questions and produce valuable research. It can also train students to repeat a favored explanation without testing rival accounts. The same standard must apply to economics and biology: elegant models that fail empirical scrutiny and experiments that cannot be reproduced do not become sound because they carry a more prestigious field label. A parent should examine a program's faculty work, research methods, curriculum, placement record, and willingness to let students challenge its premises. That is a better test of intellectual seriousness than either admiration for a fashionable cause or contempt for its title.

The financial test is equally concrete. Add tuition and fees, living expenses above what the student would otherwise spend, interest on debt, and the earnings and career experience forgone during study. Subtract reliable grants, stipends, and employer support. Then ask what incremental earnings, opportunities, or independently valued knowledge the program is likely to produce. A published average for college graduates cannot settle this calculation for one student, one institution, and one degree level. Federal Reserve Bank of New York researchers estimate that, under their baseline assumptions, college produced only a 2.6% return for graduates at the 25th percentile in 2024; they also find substantial variation by major. Their analysis concerns college returns, primarily bachelor's degrees, and should not be misrepresented as a measured return for any doctoral field in the NSF table. It does show why the assumption that any degree pays for itself is unsound. [4]

For a family, the best educational gift is more demanding than a blank check. Children should learn mathematics, writing, history, science, and the habit of distinguishing a claim from its evidence. They should also learn what debt costs, what an entry-level job pays, how credentials are used in an occupation, and why a cheaper path can sometimes teach the same skill. College savings can support an apprenticeship, a practical undergraduate course of study, or a graduate degree with a credible purpose. The account should serve the student's development; the existence of the account should not become a reason to buy the most expensive credential available.

I would ask my own children to apply that scrutiny to my doctorate. I gained something from completing it, and I take responsibility for the scholarship it produced. Those facts do not exempt its marketing, cost, or career claims from examination. An education expands a person's powers of judgment. A degree merely records that an institution conferred one. Financial planning begins when we stop confusing the two.

Sources and calculation notes

1. National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, Survey of Earned Doctorates 2024, table 3-2: detailed field and sex. Women’s percentages are published by NCSES; the total counts include recipients of all citizenship statuses.

2. NCSES, Survey of Earned Doctorates 2024, table 3-3: detailed field, citizenship, ethnicity, and race. Each displayed race or ethnicity percentage equals that category’s count divided by the number of U.S. citizens and permanent residents in that row, multiplied by 100. The ethnic studies row is included within the larger area, ethnic, cultural, gender and group studies row and must not be added to it.

3. NCSES, Survey of Earned Doctorates 2024 tables and methodology; see also research-doctorate eligibility.

4. Jaison R. Abel and Richard Deitz, “When College Might Not Be Worth It,” Federal Reserve Bank of New York, April 16, 2025.

5. Allysia Finley, “The Ph.D. Job Crisis Is a Needed Market Correction,”The Wall Street Journal, September 2026. The descriptions of university admissions decisions and Brown's cost estimate are attributed to Finley's column; they are not independently measured student expenses.

The Antioch passage analyzes the admissions email provided to the author, which advertises information sessions in October 2026. Statements about the author's education and dissertation are his own account.