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<snip>Hope this isn't going too overtime, but this topic is really interesting to me because my husband is working on his MLIS (Master's in Library and Information Science). He's entering his third year of studies and it's no easy venture: weekly exams, 30-page papers every few weeks, the whole shebang! I was surprised to hear about the work load for a friend of mine who is working on a master's degree in the education field. Her projects for one quarter included reading a couple of books, answering some questions about the readings on the front and back of ONE sheet of paper, and her final project was a 10-page long PowerPoint presentation! Apparently the goal of the final project was to make sure they knew how to use all of the functions of PP because that slideshow was atrocious: colors, graphics, and effects mixed together to make a seriously ugly slideshow. So it seems that the institution offering the degree, as well as the type of degree being earned, may have an effect on the level of difficulty. I no longer assume that just because someone has a master's degree that they worked really hard for it. Jennifer </snip>
The timing of an MA or MS is more critical than the topic. If you eliminated from current MA/MS programs all the students who completed BA/BS and couldn't find jobs, the programs would be decimated. If you then eliminated all the students trying to wait out an economic downturn by hanging out in grad school a few years before jumping into a (not very good) job market, universities would start having major problems.
The selling point of an MA/MS to students is that "average salaries" for degree holders are x dollars more than BA/BS degree holders. That is, hang out another couple of years, eat more pizza, drink more beer, and get an extra X thousand a year when you graduate.
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