Slow hiring ups interest in grad school

With the Dow Jones Industrial Average down about three percent since the start of the semester and wary Wall Street firms cutting back on hiring, some students and recent alumni are finding it more attractive to pursue a professional degree instead of private sector employment.

"As job opportunities shrink in the corporate sector and on Wall Street, many more students are likely to think of graduate school as a good alternative," economics professor Burton Malkiel said in an email.

The number of Princeton students applying to medical school has risen 18.1 percent from last year, according to Health Professions Advising. Data is not yet available for law school applicants this year, Career Services Director Beverly Hamilton-Chandler said.

From 2004-05 to 2005-06, the Law School Admissions Council (LSAC) recorded a decrease of 10.3 percent in the number of senior and alumni law school applicants from the University, but no statistics are available for this year to show whether that trend has reversed with the recent economic downturn.

Princeton's numbers this year may, in part, reflect broader longterm trends in the number of law and medical school applicants rather than recent worries about the job market. The Association of American Medical Colleges reports a steady increase in total applicants to U.S. medical schools, from 33,625 applicants in 2002-03 to 39,108 in 2006-07 — an overall increase of 16.3 percent. The number of applicants to law schools fell 2.4 percent during the same period, from 90,900 applicants in 2002-03 to 88,700 applicants in 2006-07, according to LSAC.

But Health Professions Advising director Glenn Cummings said he's also seen student interest in joint degrees — like the MD/PhD, MD/JD and the MD/MBA — rise as of late, a trend he attributed partly to current economic uncertainties. "Some of that may be an increase in students feeling a little insecure about the job market," he said, noting that they may believe a joint degree would broaden their options in the future. "I hear that fairly frequently from students."

Cummings added, however, that a glut of aspiring doctors is unlikely in the near future, even with the recent spike in medical school applications. "The job market in medicine is still very healthy and strong," he said. "If anything, we're looking at a shortage of physicians."

The market's recent woes are also affecting how some underclassmen are formulating their postgraduate plans.

"Money is definitely a concern," Ankit Bhatia '10 said. Though he is interested in both medicine and business, Bhatia said he is attracted to what he sees as greater job security in medicine. Consequently, he said, he hopes to pursue a five-year MD/MBA degree. "[It] combines my interests quite well, and I feel like I have something to fall back on with a degree like that," he said.

While undergraduates interested in law hesitate to attribute their aspirations purely to financial concerns, they also acknowledged the stability associated with a degree in law or medicine.

"You can do lots of things with the degree," Jesse George-Nicol '10 said, noting that a JD can open doors to jobs with a high degree of stability, such as posts in the government sector.

Aaron Spolin '08, former president of the Princeton Pre-Law Society, said aspiring lawyers appreciate the financial stability of the profession. "People who want to go into law, I think for the most part, recognize that ... if you're a lawyer and if you're a good lawyer, you don't need to worry about money that much," he said.

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But, Spolin added, "I think that the people who are committed to being lawyers, and the people to whom the excitement of the law appeals — those people will be lawyers regardless of the economic situation." Personally, he said, his interest in law school "has almost nothing to do with compensation."

But economics professor Uwe Reinhardt, who is also a columnist for The Daily Princetonian, said economic uncertainy leads to rising interest in professional degrees. "Over the past decade ... faced with the choice of picking up that easy gold [on Wall Street] or undertaking the ardor of a medical education, even some Princetonians who originally had intended to become physicians probably opted for the gold instead (and ditto for law)," he said in an email.

"Not only is the gold easier to come by on Wall Street, but one also ends up with higher social prestige ... So when things go well on Wall Street, Princetonians go thither — for the gold and the social prestige. When Wall Street looks more rickety, some students rediscover medicine and other less golden professions."