|Peter Boettke|
When it became apparent to Dr. Sennholz that I was an enthusiastic student of economics in my sophomore year at Grove City College, he told me I should consider becoming a professor. He told me that you only had to work 12 hours a week at the college and the rest of the time you were free to work on your own projects -- whether that be writing or consulting. That 12 hours was lecture time.
That started me thinking. I had already visited FEE, but Sennholz encouraged me to visit FEE again, and he even arranged for me to get a summer internship at FEE, which unfortunately I had to turn down because I had already taken a summer job working at a tennis camp. When I told Sennholz that I couldn't take the FEE internship, he just shook his head and I think registered that I wasn't the serious student he thought I would be. Nevertheless, in my junior year I was invited to join his 'graduate seminar' in economics. Sennholz continued to encourage me to go to graduate school upon graduation, and he got the other professors at Grove City College to start encouraging me to follow that path. The twist was that Sennholz recommended Law School as the path, not graduate school in economics. Well, a bit more complicated -- he wanted me to attend graduate school in economics with him at GCC through the International University (a correspondence school where he was a tutor) and then Law School. Law School he told me was only 3 years and didn't require a dissertation, and more importantly would enable me to avoid studying Keynesianism and studying mathematics.
When I talked to Sennholz about going to traditional graduate school in economics, he told me simply "you will become a Keynesian". Anyway, I graduated from GCC and took a job as a tennis professional at a club in NJ rather than head to Law School or graduate school in economics. But during that summer I realized I couldn't help but go to graduate school. I actually spent my breaks reading economics books at the pool and even thought about economics when I was trying to teach tennis to kids and their moms. I had to go to graduate school because I couldn't imagine otherwise. And I didn't think twice about what it meant in terms of financial returns to my investment in human capital. All I thought about was that I wanted to study these ideas in depth and I couldn't imagine a future of hitting tennis balls to little kids and middle aged women rather than studying Mises and Rothbard. So I headed off to GMU to get a PhD and never looked back. At one point when I was at the end of my time at NYU, I had an offer to go into investment banking focusing on emerging market economies --- I responded to the offer by saying that "I am myopically academic" --- the would-be employer told me "I know a lot of academic who say that until they hear our salary offer." It was impressive.
So when students ask me about going to graduate school, I tell them don't go to graduate school unless you cannot help it. Instead, work, make money, and get subscriptions to The Economist, the TLS, and the New York Review of Books. Unless you cannot envision yourself doing anything in your life but playing with ideas 24/7. The thought experiment I give them is imagine you had a choice --- working in the back of a bank doing loan applications for $75k or teaching economics to kids many of whom are falling a sleep and will never care about what you are trying to teach for $50K, if you don't choose teaching then don't go to graduate school. If, however, you would choose teaching, then go to graduate school and work your butt off to make sure that you do better than that scenario, but be happy as you can be if you end up with the teaching job at $50K.
It is a life-style choice. Sennholz was right, academia even with a 4-4 teaching load, provides you with an amazing amount of freedom to pursue your passions --- whether they be academic in nature or elsewhere. Put it this way, if I had decided to stay a competitive tennis player competing in USTA tournaments, etc. whatever profession other than being a tennis professional would have afforded me the time for off-court training and on-court practice time than being a professor? For the past two decades, I have combined being a professor with being a basketball coach at various levels from middle school to high school to elite level AAU. The time commitment was not trivial, but I was able to consume a part of my leisure time afforded me by my academic profession to pursue my original career aspiration of coaching HS basketball without sacrificing my chosen career of being an economics professor. How fortunate is that?! This, btw, was made possible by (a) a very supportive wife and life partner that allowed me to coach at nights and on weekends, (b) advances in my academic career that led to less teaching and employers (both in teaching and in coaching) that accommodated my schedule requests, and (c) a capacity to sleep little and successfully multi-task. No doubt there have been trade-offs (personal health and appearance probably being one of them :( ), but I made those choices good and bad. But the academic life made trying to pursue a dual profession much easier than a career working as an investment banker would have, or more realistic in my case a pipe-fitter and eventually running construction sites in NJ.
Anyway, there are some recent studies questioning the decision of smart young people to go to graduate school or even to law school. They are based on the important issues of time to get a degree and the opportunity cost of earnings during that time, the financial prospects upon graduation, and the working conditions of the jobs attained. All very important factors to consider when making the decision.
But for those who care passionately about ideas and have curiosity about the world, there is nothing better than going to the right graduate school in economics and political economy. You will see this in the decision to write early and often, the joy exhibited when teaching basic economics classes, and the sparkle in the eyes when discussing new ideas or the latest journal article that captures the imagination. Graduate school when you are in the right place and at the right time in your life should be the greatest intellectual adventure of your life and set you on the right path for a lifetime of continuous learning and discovery. Education can be transformative --- give you the opportunity to be the person you want to be. But not all are so fortunate. They struggle with classes because they think graduate school is supposed to be like undergraduate school just harder, they cannot find their voice to write, they worry about gaming the system rather than just pursuing their passion, and they find teaching to drudgery rather than their true calling in life. To those souls, the information provided in these studies is indispensable for making the calculation of a lifetime. But to those souls for whom academia is a calling, remember value is subjective and choice weighs more than just monetary returns. True happiness can be found teaching those kids falling asleep and struggling with understanding the difference between quantity demanded and demand -- all it takes is one of them to have their eyes light up and see the world for the first time through the economic way of thinking.
Nice post, Pete.
During the first day of my fall classes I ask my intermediate students a simple question: "So, tell me, what have you read over the summer."
I hear this and that. Might as well be vampire novels.
"Yes, but any economics???"
They laugh. Every time.
It shows you those students who are largely not serious about nor have a passion for economics. It doesn't, however, show you who is serious. The serious and passionate often remain quiet, not wanting to expose themselves as economics nerds to the rest of the class.
Posted by: Dave Prychitko | January 08, 2010 at 11:35 AM
Pete,
Wonderful and nostalgic post, with some very good advice. As an aside, my 16 year old son had a high school economics class that he described as dreadfully awful. As an experiment, I gave him The Economic Way of Thinking and asked him to read a little. After the first few pages of reading about freeway traffic, he was hooked and couldn't put it down. It has generated wonderful discussion and additional reading. He is now seeing spontaneous order everywhere. It is always exciting to see the lights come on.
Posted by: K Sralla | January 08, 2010 at 12:39 PM
Peter,
Great post! I am just about to finish my master an the University of Economics in Prague. During my studies I have found your work very inspiring and helpful and I intend to continue studying at the PhD level here in Prague. What tempts me, however, is to participate in a research programme overseas in which case GMU is one of the most challenging options.
I am now putting together my application documents. Would you mind if I sent you my project for doctorate studies in order to see whether there is a possible match?
Posted by: Pavel Kuchar | January 08, 2010 at 01:09 PM
Yes, Pavel, please send your proposal to me and to Virgil Storr at [email protected].
University of Economics in Prague is one of my favorite places for economic education --- so you got good training I bet.
Pete
Posted by: Peter Boettke | January 08, 2010 at 01:36 PM
What has amazed me is how graduate education can change people. Someone in my Department said that students often enter a Ph.D. program with the idea that they can learn economics and then help make the world a better place. They quickly give that up at many "good" schools. Then they just seek to make their careers better by courting the top brass. It takes steely determination to resist this. Some do.
Posted by: Mario Rizzo | January 08, 2010 at 01:41 PM
Outstanding post.
I took my introductory classes at a community college and although found economics fascinating and transferred to GMU as an undergraduate because of the classes, I did not begin reading more books on economics until I arrived at GMU beginning with the intermediate classes. Most of the professors are so excited by the subject that it was hard not to write a book down that they spoke about and go read it later(until the lists grew so long couldn't read them all).
That said, my undergraduates was spent not caring for my grades and reading what books I considered important to read. It is hard not to be excited by economics, especially since once your bitten by the economics bug everything you see involves economic thought.
Unless given the right book to read as K Sralla points out, the students need the passionate teacher to really help enlighten their way. I was fortunate to get that from all the professors and graduate students from Mason, but if they can't get a professor, hopefully students will find that good book to inspire them such as Caplan's inspiration from Atlas Shrugged. Of course, we now have blogs which have been a great help, at least for me.
Posted by: Ian Dunois | January 08, 2010 at 02:09 PM
Thanks Pete. Your posts on grad school are always excellent.
Posted by: Michael Wiebe | January 08, 2010 at 02:23 PM
It was books that got me hooked - and blogs and online resources after that - and my first few undergraduate economics courses if anything disinspired me somewhat (at a state university out west), especially the intermediate macro course in which we read Mankiw and learned all these absurd models that I could not help but pick apart in class, to the great chagrin of my professor.
A quick reminder: one can still get a PhD even if uninterested in teaching -- it can be used in the think-tank world, the academic seminar world and its cousins (IHS, FEE, Independent Institute, Mises Institute, etc), the policy world (e.g., transitioning former communist countries, development work, etc, if not government itself), to add credibility as an author, and even in private business ventures.
If you love theory and want to write a dissertation out of pure lust for it, but do not want to go into academia, it still might be worth the 5 years. Like a law degree, a PhD can be a great thing to have on your resume.
Posted by: liberty | January 08, 2010 at 02:30 PM
True enough. That's why I have my Ph.D. in the humanities when I could have gotten a degree in something far more practical (I have an undergrad degree in recombinant gene technology and dropped out of a grad program in molecular biology due to boredom) and have a job by now, but I'm too obsessed with humanities scholarship (like working on spontaneous orders theory) and creative literary production.
Posted by: Troy Camplin, Ph.D. | January 08, 2010 at 03:45 PM
Thanks!
Posted by: Brandon | January 08, 2010 at 04:34 PM
An excellent post. For those with whom this resonated, I strongly recommend this piece of advice from Tyler:
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2006/07/tylers_advice_t/comments/page/2/
Speaking, I hope, as a member of the #3 club, it's important that would be students coldly appraise their prospects and what graduate education likely has in store for them.
Posted by: Michael Makowsky | January 08, 2010 at 11:15 PM
Great post.
I definitely think the comparison between 50K teaching and 75K processing mortgages is a good one. Far too many people enter grad school having no clue what it actually means.
Posted by: Lucas M. Engelhardt | January 09, 2010 at 12:07 AM
Allow me to add a note of concurrence from a different discipline. I teach philosophy, and the choice set is a little different (Wall St. banks seem less interested in philosophy PhDs for some reason!). Still the same essential contrast is there. Lots of kids like playing with the ideas in philosophy (for obvious reasons), but lack the sense for the opportunity costs and the competition for the few jobs there are. I tell them that grad school (at least PhD programs) are probably not for them unless they cannot imagine living their lives any other way than doing philosophy. For me, that discovery took me a few years doing something else. But that's the level of commitment it requires.
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