Univetsities work to ensure that their qualifications are necessary at every level to get a job, when we have decades, sometimes centuries of experience to tell

Univetsities work to ensure that their qualifications are necessary at every level to get a job, when we have decades, sometimes centuries of experience to tell us that practically they are not. It might be worthwhile if the quintupling, dectupling of costs were accompanied by more teaching and research faculty but instead their numbers have held steady while useless administrators and exploited adjuncts grow and grow. > Professional master’s-degree subjects like accounting, business, education, engineering, and public administration have seen phenomenal growth. The number of master’s degrees conferred in all fields went up by 60 percent from 2000 to 2014. Universities developed these programs not only in response to student and employer demand, but also because they could price them at rates that made them self-supporting. Rapidly growing master’s fields include biology, computer science, homeland security, and health science. > Students pursue master’s degrees to delay entry into the labor market, to gain new knowledge or make new contacts, to raise their salaries, to qualify for doctoral programs, or just to try out a field that they think aligns with their interests. Universities, sensitized to market opportunities, deploy battalions of planners to establish footholds in up-and-coming master’s fields before competitors are able to do so. Some of these efforts are simply avaricious, but most speak to the agility and responsiveness of universities under the influence of market logic.