The seduction of grad school
For a certain cohort of high-performing students at famous colleges, graduate school feels irresistible.
If you’re good at school, the challenge and offer of law school, med school or a famous business school means you get to do more of what you’re good at. You’re offered a high-status badge, a path to a well-paid job and several years of more school instead of the scary freedom of choice of what happens next.
And so, literate and passionate young people talk about their dreams of helping people, running for office, fighting injustice or exploring their passions as entrepreneurs. And grad school is supposed to be the path.
The problem is that these graduate schools aren’t optimized for any of those things.
Leaving medical school with a pile of debt and your twenties mostly gone pushes you to sign up for the doctor track, which is increasingly about systems and forms, not actually engaging with patients. Law students who came in with dreams of social justice often postpone these dreams for decades as they work for big money at big firms for long hours… You get the idea.