PhD-oesn’t Matter

Higher education is meant to be the path to success, but that conventional wisdom may not be entirely true.

According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, between 2007 and 2010, the percentage of people with a graduate degree who were on food stamps or were receiving another kind of federal aid more than doubled, reaching 360,000.

In 2007, 9,776 people with PhD’s were receiving some kind of aid. In 2010, that number had more than tripled to 33,655. For people with master’s degrees, the number spiked from 101,683 to 293,029. Austin Nichols of the Urban Institute crunched those numbers for The Chronicle using census data.

Relative to the total 44 million Americans who received some sort of federal assistance in 2010, those with graduate degrees make up a miniscule part of the pie. But their reliance on the system presents a dynamic that contradicts the conventional wisdom.

Those with more education are more likely to have a job in the first place. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, just 4.0 percent of college graduates or those with higher degrees are unemployed in April 2012. That number has remained relatively constant since 2011.

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