elmo_says

I think this is potentially a good resource, especially to highlight some schools that don't get as much play on these boards but are known to be generous. But I wouldn't suggest people use it to rule out applying to schools that are supposedly stingy, because you really never know. I got funding offers from six schools I believe, and there was surprisingly little correlation between the prestige / reputation of the program and how much money I was offered. The program I ultimately attended (which offered me a big scholarship) is not known for being generous. Meanwhile, a much lower-ranked school initially offered me nothing, despite my having similar stats to someone I knew who had gotten a full ride a few years earlier. I was able to get a little money out of them after I showed what other schools had offered me, but it barely a quarter of tuition in the end.

Honestly, the IR universe could use more people with highly specialized, technical skillsets. But it's a tough sell, because people with those degrees can get much higher salaries elsewhere.

The entire point of my post a few months ago was to warn people against being cavalier about taking out debt for these programs, because most of them over-promise and under-deliver what they can do for your career. A lot of naive 20-somethings who've never worked in DC get suckered by the marketing and end up pretty unhappy on the other side. Their massive loan payments come due and they realize their jobs aren't "fulfilling" enough to counterbalance that, or they find they have to compromise what kind of jobs they pursue in the first place just to service the loans. I know you took issue with a comment I made about "rich international types"...But the fact is -- it's a lot easier to make it in this town if you come from money (whatever your national origin), because a lot of the early years of the more prestigious career paths here involve low pay and long hours, and require significant education. Personally, after moving to DC, I've been surprised by how many 20- and 30-somethings in this town still receive significant financial support from their parents. Of course some people are willing to make the sacrifices to work low-paid but interesting jobs without any outside help, but it's hard, and I think a lot of applicants underestimate that. In any case, I agree that if you don't get any funding from these programs, it's probably a good sign not to go. But unless things have dramatically changed since I was applying earlier this decade - most of them don't give fellowships/scholarships to even half their students. And even the competitive scholarships like the one I got can still leave you with a lofty bill after you factor in living expenses etc. I do think the fellowship thing can be gamed, so if you're really set on this career, it's worth trying to tweak your application and see if you can get lucky with some serious funding. A lot of schools post starting salary ranges for recent grads - you should ask them for those materials (though keep in mind - their stats are based on voluntary graduate surveys, so may not include people too ashamed to respond). If you're trying to pursue one of the more interesting or altruistic jobs in the IR / policy world, it will take a while to get there, from what I've seen. But if you go private sector, or work for certain government contractors, you can get into that range in a few years. My staring salary as a policy analyst was in the high 60s. Now a few years out, I'm making in the low 90s (after a few raises and a job change). Even so, my relatively reasonable loan payments still feel like a burden, and as I've mentioned ad nauseum on this forum, I'm doing very different work than I had imagined when starting my master's - though after a recent job change I'm actually starting to enjoy my work life. But I agree with @ExponentialDecay that if your only goal is to get ahead or increase your income, this is not the right path, and neither would be an MBA from a non-elite school. I think once you define your goal, perhaps you should reach out to people who have achieved whatever you're after and try to figure out how they got from point A to point B.

Surprised to see @ExponentialDecay being so critical of these programs, given the flak they gave me for saying something similar on a different thread. They even parroted a reference I made to Dunder Mifflin! How times have changed. Anyhow, I agree with the majority of these comments - I can't imagine a circumstance in which 100k in loans is worth it to get an IR master's or MPP. If you're actually determined to "make it" in the public or non-profit sectors, these degrees end up hobbling you, or putting you down a very dark financial path that might not seem like a big deal when you're 25 and single and happy to live with roommates...but may seem altogether different when you're 35 or 45 and still paying off these loans. @gelatinskeleton's comments about the unexpected expenses that crop up in adulthood and the limits of PSLF are spot on. A few years out of my program, probably 80% of my friends who "work for the government" are actually working for contractors --- this means no PSLF, despite their often middling salaries. And the hiring environment and security clearance process is so fucked right now, that even some friends of mine who got Presidential Management Fellowships never got placed or just gave up on the process all together to do a private sector job. A few who are really committed to becoming feds are having to work other random jobs while waiting more than a year for security clearances... These programs are just ludicrously overpriced, there's no two ways about it. They do open some doors though, so for those who can't seem to break into this field without the degree, the best thing to do is work as hard as possible to get some fellowship money. From my research when applying 5+ years ago, only 20-40% of students typically get scholarships from any of these schools aside from WWS (I called a bunch of them to ask...). Then some additional percentage of people get outside scholarships like Pickering / Rangel or sometimes national scholarships from European or Asian countries. @hola2288 - given your self-described profile and the fact that applications appear to be down this year, I would try to examine why you haven't gotten any funding, and then work hard to improve that for the next round of applications. Waiting a year might seem like forever right now, but it will be worth it if you can reduce your loan burden. FWIW, I got money from 5 programs (three top and two second-tier), and I had an OK GPA from a top undergrad, fluency in one foreign language, a few years of solid but not spectacular work experience, no time spent in DC, and a really good GRE. At the risk of coming off as patronizing... Did you have a low GPA? If so, taking some extension courses or local community college courses in relevant subjects could mitigate that Did you have a low GRE score? Presumably you had to do OK on the SAT to get into a "fancy" undergrad - study hard and take the GRE again Have some people in your network give you critical feedback on your essays - maybe they're not as polished as you think Do the same with your resume Are you straight out of undergrad? If your time in DC "for work" means "unpaid summer internship"....that's not as impressive as you think. The economy is good. Find a shittily paid job at a local non-profit and work there for a year or two before reapplying. I guarantee you, you will learn a LOT about the world, probably more than you will in grad school tbh And to give you the perspective of someone who is on the other side of this whole dilemma... I took out just under 70k (after a 1/2 tuition fellowship, burning through my savings, various part-time jobs throughout grad school, and a little help from my parents), and I can say it had a huge impact on what kind of jobs I pursued upon graduation because I was determined to stay on a 10-year repayment plan. It basically eliminated anything non-profit or local government, and made me unwilling to deal with the vagaries and delays of the federal hiring process (and this was pre-Trump...things have only gotten worse). I entered the private sector, and have been paying off my loans on a 10-year standard schedule, and am only just starting to feel good about my financial situation a few years out after a couple of promotions and a recent job change that came with a significant salary bump. But it's still hard to say it was "worth it", because I'm not actually doing what I thought I wanted when I entered the program, and my loans were a big part of that.

Hmm. I'm clearly not a cheerleader for these programs, but OP's testimony seems...improbably extreme. I know plenty of people who are unhappy with / bitter about their IR grad school experiences, but none of them are dodging loans in South America. It's more like...they have unfulfilling office jobs in DC and are stressed about finances because they are going to be on income-based repayment plans until their 50s. Some people I know definitely struggled to find full-time jobs -- I know multiple people who took internships after graduation just to avoid a hole on their resumes. But all eventually found something. Whether it was worth the 100k piece of paper is another question.

Where on earth did you get that 150% rule? Navient? I remember hearing a "100% of starting salary" rule when I was applying a few years ago, and I don't think that IR career trajectories have increased dramatically over the past few years. Mapping Your Future (a non-profit educational counseling group) recommends no more than 8% of your gross earnings. Based on a 60k starting salary, that means taking out no more than 35k in loans assuming a 6.8% interest rate. (Also, in much of the public and non-profit sectors, 60k is not guaranteed starting out, especially if you don't have much work experience). Now I will grant that that is a pretty conservative estimate. But another guide is what the federal government considers affordable for income-based repayment plans. To get your IBR payment, you take your salary and subtract 150% of the federal poverty line. So let's do some math: $60,000 salary minus $16,335 = $43,655. To get your IBR payment, multiply that by 15% to get about $6,550, or about $546/month. That translates to less than 50k/year in loans, assuming a 10-year-repayment plan and a 6.8% interest rate. (I used this calculator).

I was recently at an alumni event for my school, and in the pitch for us to make donations, they mentioned the importance of raising funds for scholarships right now because admissions are down. I think Trump is having a big impact on would-be policy types, in addition to the stronger private sector as other posters have mentioned. So that could be a boon to those of you who are applying now, in terms of admissions and financing. But of course there's the concern about the effect that Trump and his acolytes will have on hiring and funding in the government and related industries. This is totally anecdotal, but my 24-year-old sister graduated from a less prestigious college than I did with a similar liberal arts degree, and she and the vast majority of her friends are all in career-oriented jobs at the moment, primarily in the private sector. Meanwhile, my friends and I who graduated during the height of the recession were in much worse jobs at that age on average. Personally at 24, I had an admin-level job at a fairly interesting organization that had an unofficial a hiring freeze for most positions for a number of years. Among my college and high school friends, and the admin-level colleagues I had at my aforementioned job, pretty much all of us went back to school for something or another. Now of course there will always be people who are passionate about policy/IR and will apply for these programs no matter what, but I do think that there were plenty of applicants in recent years who might have chosen other paths if they hadn't found themselves working a dead-end job for 28k in their mid-20s.

Thanks for coming to my defense...some of you. @ExponentialDecay - I'm confused. You have no debt, but claim to not have come from a wealthy background. Did you even do one of these master's? If so, it sounds like you were one of the lucky minority who got a full ride or who managed to save up a lot of money before going back to school. That's great for you. But your experience is not the norm and it's ultimately irrelevant to my post, which was aimed at people who are considering taking out huge loans on the promise that these degrees will provide amazing career opportunities or deep life satisfaction, making the insane monthly payments "worth it." Some people achieve great success after these programs, but from what I've seen, most people's experiences are more mixed, which can be a hard outcome to accept after spending 100k plus interest on an advanced degree. @Sigaba- My screenname is based on a childhood pet (RIP), feel free to over-analyze that if it pleases you. And yes, my parents provided some support for me during my graduate studies (maybe like 5-6k over two years?). But they are not subsidizing my rent years after graduation, which is the case for a few of my classmates, the very same ones who are able to take 50k/year jobs and live in $1,500/month studios after obtaining ludicrously expensive master's degree. I'm not sure why some are interpreting my posts as talking shit about my friends, especially as I haven't even mentioned which grad program I went to. Also, I'm not intending to malign those who are receiving parental support deep into adulthood, or those who come from wealthy backgrounds. I come from a middle/upper middle class background myself, and have been given a lot of things in life I didn't earn (#whiteprivilege). And if my parents offered to pay off my grad school loans, or to provide me with ongoing rental assistance, I doubt I would hesitate to accept. But I want to help people who do not have significant family financial support to understand what they're competing against.

@ExponentialDecay You're working pretty hard to turn my comments into some kind of screed against non-Americans, which was not remotely the intention of my original post. As I said in my follow up, many of the international students from my program will be the first ones to complain about how the difficulty of getting sponsored for a visa has hampered their career prospects in DC. The ones who took out loans are in the worst position because they need to earn American dollars for as long as they can to pay them off, even if they'd rather return home. My goal here is not to talk shit behind my friends' backs, but rather to share the perspective of a somewhat recent graduate who hasn't become a cheerleader for the program, because that's what most applicants are going to encounter if they go to admissions events or ask to be put in touch with alumni. Do you really think that anyone who is unhappy with their IR master's experience is just a pathetic whiner? I'm not sure why you're so defensive about the fact that I am suggesting current applicants think long and hard about the financial trade-offs of these kinds of degrees. If money were no object, most of my points would be moot. Also, you assume I applied straight from undergrad, but I actually entered my program in my mid-20s after two full-time jobs, one in the private sector abroad (not teaching English, FWIW) and one at a non-profit in a major US city. I had never worked in Washington, DC, though -- but if I had been able to achieve career success in this town before the degree, why would I have ever gone back to school? I was hoping to use the master's to go from working with individual groups on the local level to effecting broader changes at a higher-level in my particular policy area. Maybe I was naive about what I as an individual would be able to achieve, or about how my stress about debt would stop me from pursuing more impactful policy jobs**. But I bet a lot of current applicants browsing gradcafe are equally naive, if not more so, considering how many classmates I had who came straight from undergrad and took out 6-figure loans. The point of my post was not to insult your life choices, but to provide a critical perspective for current applicants to consider. **I wasn't disparaging the private sector writ large. But I'm not sure how you can spin selling reports on healthcare policy so that hedge funds and major banks can know whether to invest in Aetna and Humana. Because that's the kind of work that a lot of "boutique consulting firms" in DC are doing, and it's where a lot of my classmates have ended up.

Interesting project. Your ranking seems reasonable to me, although I'm not very familiar with Yale Jackson. But as my ranting on another thread might suggest, I fully support efforts to create more transparency about these schools!

All right thanks for the responses everyone. A few clarifications. @ExponentialDecay - I hadn't intended to disparage non-Americans, and I recognize that many feel trapped in the STC cycle at IGOs precisely because of the visa situation. But I would actually consider that to be another example that the false promises that these programs make to students about their employability post-degree. It's certainly been a source of complaint amongst some of my non-American friends, especially the few who aren't getting any parental support. I won't get into the MBA stuff too much, because to some degree that was just me whining, and people are right to say that those programs are much harder to get into and often more expensive. But I would argue that the financial ROI is much higher (which is what I'm talking about here), especially given that if you pay sticker at any of these IR/policy programs (which most people do) and have no family money you will be trying to pay off 6-figure debt with a mid-5-figure job. Yes we will get raises, but few of us will ever catch up to MBA people getting 100-120k right out the gate. And yeah, the "changing the world" bit was a turn of phrase, and a tongue-in-cheek one at that.** I've always been a more cynical/skeptical type and actually did a lot of research on these programs before going to school. In addition to time spent on gradcafe under another username, I did a lot of "networking" interviews with graduates of various programs. I had no illusions that someone was going to appoint me to a top role at UNDP right out the gate, but I also didn't think that so many of my classmates and I would be working for parasitic boutique consulting firms selling our research to questionable elements in the private sector just to pay the bills, or that many more of my classmates would be stretching their loan repayments out to 25-year periods just to take the more interesting/altruistic policy jobs. Finally, lifestyle. What did I expect? Well, I would have expected to be able to afford a studio apartment in a decent neighborhood by this point without sacrificing all my other financial goals, now that I'm a certified adult with a fancy master's and a solid job. If you're single (i.e. no one to split the rent with), financially independent, and have IR-masters level debt in DC, that's very hard to accomplish if you're being smart about long-term finances. This is why you see so many Washingtonians with good jobs living with multiple roommates into their mid-30s. It's also why you meet a lot of otherwise smart/responsible people who casually mention their credit card debt. There was an interesting Washington Post article the other day about how DC is the most indebted place in the US, in terms of student loans at least. Look, you can disparage me and say I don't belong in this city or that I clearly was naive or stupid upon entering my program. But I wrote my initial post the day after I attended a party with a lot of my fellow alumni who were basically all complaining about some combination of their jobs, their loans, how broke they are, etc. I've had a lot of friends sheepishly admit they often wonder if it was worth it. And most of these people have jobs at name-brand places like the World Bank/Ashoka/Eurasia Group/PwC etc. I think there are definitely cases where these degrees are worth it. But I would argue those cases never involve taking on massive debt and I'm hoping to urge current applicants to be a little more skepitcal about what these schools' marketing departments advertise. **Actually, one of the things that bugs me most about DC is how important everyone thinks their jobs are, but that's a tangent for another day.

I graduated a few years ago from one of the top 5 master's programs that gets a lot of attention here at Gradcafe. I had a better than average outcome - I got a job within 2 months of graduation, and have a solid salary (~80k after two raises) with benefits. Still, I would strongly caution anyone considering one of these programs to think long and hard about it, unless you have a trust fund and are 100% certain that you could never want to live anywhere but DC. These IR/MPP programs open a few doors, sure, but they close a lot of them too. In retrospect, I wish I had gotten an MBA or tried to climb my way up without the over-priced master's degree, and a lot of my friends from grad school have expressed similar things in the past few months, now that we're sick of our first job or two out of grad school but feel trapped with constrained career prospects and lots of debt in most cases. Why I regret it: Even after scholarships and some limited help from my parents, I still graduated with about 70k in debt. That's about half of what some of my classmates have, but it still sucks having to make $600+/month payments until I'm in my late 30s. Some of my friends with bigger debt loads are barely covering interest and will be lucky if they've paid down the loans by their 50th bdays. Less than half of people at my prestigious program got any aid whatsoever. Debt is a frequent conversation topic at all social events these days. Most of the highest-paid gigs in IR/policy go to people with MBAs or JDs. If you manage to, say, scam your way into federal consulting at Deloitte you'll be getting paid 30-50% less than your similarly-credentialed colleagues with MBAs. A lot of the most prestigious-sounding jobs for pure IR/policy people have crappy salaries (most non-profits or working on the Hill) or no benefits (STCs at the World Bank and IMF), and the only ones who can take them are the rich international types and some Americans whose parents subsidize their lifestyles. Most everyone else gets some boring office job that is vaguely policy-related, but no more interesting in practice than working at Dunder Mifflin or wherever the dude from Office Space worked. Your fancy degree does not get you out of cubicle hell. And your dreams of changing the world will be crushed when you realize the reports you're writing on healthcare policy are being sold to private companies and financial investors so that they can make even more money. Though I couldn't have predicted this when I enrolled, federal hiring is an absolute shitshow right now, or at least more so than usual - mass hiring freezes, extreme uncertainty about future staffing levels, long backups with security clearances. That's assuming you want to even work for this administration. Most people I know who are working for the federal government are contractors, which means no loan forgiveness. DC is insanely overpriced, and the culture here is pretty boring, even though people tell me it has massively improved from 10-15 years ago. But if I never see another soulless luxury apartment building with a fancy spin studio and an overpriced trendy but bland restaurant in the ground floor retail space...it will be too soon. When you inevitably decide you want to leave DC, you will find that these degrees do not confer nearly as much prestige as the admissions' offices will have you believe. And before someone accuses me of being bitter....well, I kind of am. And so are most of my friends, even the ones with jobs they could probably brag about if they felt so inclined.