A blog explains why incurring debt to go to graduate school is a terrible idea, so terrible that he’s come up with 100 reasons to avoid graduate school altogether.

He’s talking about the liberal arts and the so-called social sciences, but his arguments (and evidence) can be applied to the sciences, to some extent.

Even if the tuition and your living expenses are paid for you, the experience is not “free” in any real sense.

You have to count the time spent as an opportunity cost and a waste of years you could have spent working, building a family,  starting a business, investing, or even just traveling and doing things you really love or care about, whether that’s volunteering for some cause or painting or woodworking or looking after your parents or siblings.

It’s simply not true that more formal education makes you healthier, wealthier, or wiser, which is, after all, what most people want out of life.

Of course, there are exceptions for everything, and in a handful of cases, for “born  teachers,” the supremely motivated and talented,  the very well-to-do, the extraordinarily self-sacrificing and dedicated….or  the terminally scheming…. the effort might still be worth it…..in the sciences.

The rest should probably take a pass. Unless, of course, they can do it free and do it fast:

“1. The smart people are somewhere else.

 If you think that going to graduate school will allow you to spend your days in a community of the enlightened, consider the axiom that it is unwise to borrow money that is difficult to repay.

To go into debt for a graduate degree in the humanities is to go into debt for a credential that, at best, will qualify you for a job with a relatively low starting salary in an extremely competitive job market.

Meanwhile, you will have removed yourself from the job market to pursue this degree, so don’t forget to add up the years that you will have incurred debt when you could have been earning money. But surely people in graduate school would be too smart to finance their educations with debt…

According to FinAid.org: “The median additional debt [the debt that graduate students pile onto the debt that they acquired as undergraduates] is $25,000 for a Master’s degree, $52,000 for a doctoral degree and $79,836 for a professional degree.

A quarter of graduate and professional students borrow more than $42,898 for a Master’s degree, more than $75,712 for a doctoral degree and more than $118,500 for a professional degree.”

This is not intelligent behavior. The smart people are somewhere else.”