Transferring Graduate Schools (Masters)

[joro]

What is your take on transferring schools for a Masters program if it means you will have more than a 90% chance of getting a good paying job ($80k+) straight out of school?

[fuzzylogician]

Sounds good, what's the catch?

ETA: seriously. This is a naive question. You gave a good reason to transfer, why would you not do it--ignoring the obvious "it's hard to do"?

Edited August 10, 2010 by fuzzylogician

[joro]

The catch is that I would have spent a year in a program already and have spent money on that program. And if I were to stay another year, then I would graduate from that program. I just think that I would have wasted money.

[fuzzylogician]

Well, then there are two (very broad) questions - a quantitative and a qualitative.

Concretely:

How much do you expect to earn after you graduate from school A, and how much of an increase can you expect if you graduate from school B? How much can you expect to earn after e.g. 5, 10, 20 years after you graduate? Is there really a significant difference between the two incomes? Does this difference remain after you've been in the work force for several years or is it only for the first few years -- when you're fresh out of school -- and you can therefore expect future salaries in the same company or in other companies to depend on the quality of your work and not on your school name? How much of the training can you do on the job? Do you expect to acquire skills in school B that you will have a hard time or find impossible to learn on your own/on the job? Related to all this: what kinds of jobs do you expect to find graduating from each school? Based on an average of recent graduates, where do they find jobs, how much do they earn?

Money is a concrete thing that you can look at and compare; there is information out there to be found. Job prospects are also very important.

Non-concretely:

Do you have a strong preference? Would you feel like you missed something if you didn't go to the more prestigious school and as a consequence maybe had a harder time starting off? Would the extra year of work make up for (maybe) starting with lower wages or having a harder time finding a job? On the other hand, do you have the (mental) ability to go through the application process again? Stay in school another year? Move again? I'm assuming here that your investment in another year of school will repay itself after X years of work in the better jobs an education from school B will open for you, otherwise obviously it makes no sense to spend more time in school..

In the end it's a question of the balance between what you expect to gain and what you'll have to invest, and only you have enough information to answer that question.

Edited August 10, 2010 by fuzzylogician