Before launching the application process , it seems prudent to consider whether you should go to graduate school at all.

The single best reason to go to graduate school is because you have a passionate interest in a subject area. There is some molecular process that just fascinates you, or some nineteenth-century French feminist poet whose words wake you in the night with a start. Graduate school offers a chance to advance your understanding of those topics that have fascinated you as an undergraduate. Graduate school is often also a place where you can combine disciplines that are not combinable in undergraduate studies, such as chemistry and art history, or acoustics and marine biology. You could be the one to discover a fail-safe method for dating and authenticating oil paintings, or you could discover once and for all how to communicate with dolphins. These interdisciplinary inquiries offer some of the most exciting opportunities for study at the graduate level.

Many students are motivated not only by the study itself but also by the desire to pursue a profession that requires a graduate degree as a credential. To become an attorney, doctor, dentist, scientist, veterinarian, architect, psychologist, or college professor, you must successfully complete one or several graduate degree programs. There may be some rare exceptions, but certainly the overwhelming majority of practitioners in these fields will possess the normal academic credentials.

If you are interested in becoming a college professor, you need to know that the competition is fierce at this time, with many more highly qualified candidates completing their preparation each year than there are available slots. For more on this, follow the ongoing debate in the Chronicle of Higher Education and the newsletter for the Modern Language Association. Being willing to move anywhere increases your chances, but a prudent person will also have a backup career goal.

Perhaps you are interested in earning more money over the span of your career. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has studied high-income individuals for decades and found that high-income people have more education than lower-income people. As a matter of fact, there is a lockstep relationship between education and income (see diagram below).

As you can see, after completing your bachelor’s degree, you are making a million-dollar decision whether to get the doctorate, and about a million-and-a-half-dollar decision when you pursue a professional degree. These are not decisions to make without considering the lifetime income implications. Even a master’s degree will give you a $400,000 boost in lifetime earnings, which will certainly allow you to pay back any loans you take out along the way. In the top earning category, a recent study found that primary-care medical doctors average $191,000 in annual income. In addition to the strong positive impact on income, higher education has a strong negative impact on unemployment. For example, the unemployment rate for PhDs runs around 1 percent or 2 percent. (There is a myth that PhDs are unemployed and underpaid; the exact opposite is true.) Further, those PhDs who don’t find academic jobs earn even more outside of academic life.

Graduate school is probably the second best investment you’ll ever make in your life, after your bachelor’s degree. And remember, the beautiful thing about investing in education is that it cannot be repossessed.

Also, if you’re interested in continued career advancement throughout your working life, plan on graduate school sooner or later. We’re in an era that touts and believes in continuous learning. It’s becoming hard to find a senior executive without a graduate degree—whether in business, nonprofit, or government. The trend toward higher education for all senior managers is compounded by the trend to work for more and more employers over the span of a career. The latest business school data suggest that current graduates will work for six to fifteen employers between graduate school and retirement. This means that even if you are an outstanding performer, you will need to prove yourself to others who are not personally acquainted with you. Credentials are essential for smooth and continuous career advancement.

Money and career advancement aside, graduate education contributes to a rich and full quality of life. If you are an engineer and you drive under a bridge, you see more than a bridge; you see stress dynamics. Everything you see, do, touch, or think about will be influenced by your graduate education. At least one longitudinal study of college-educated workers found a lockstep relationship between education and reports of satisfaction with life (not just work life, but all aspects of life: work, family, social, financial, and so on). Plato’s dialogue, Philebus, amounts to an elaborate argument in favor of the intellectual life. Don’t trust me; trust Socrates as quoted by Plato.

If you like to do research, then graduate school is an opportunity to pursue that passion without regard to any immediate industrial or economic benefit. If you enjoy designing methodologies that will prove or disprove hypotheses and you can live with the results either way, then you’re truly a candidate for graduate school. Even if you eventually pursue a career in industrial research, you may forever think back fondly to the intellectual freedom of your academic years.

If you just enjoy going to school and you’re naturally good at it, going to grad school is certainly a better use of your time than whiling away a few years in an entry-level job. For those who find the academic life easier than, say, learning how to sell insurance by phone, pursuing graduate education is a logical endeavor.

Finally, it has been proved that with each year of graduate study your IQ will go up, and that people with higher IQs have more sex than people with lower IQs. (There’s another study that says graduate students have a below-average frequency of sex, so this may be a delayed benefit.)

So if you are going to have more satisfaction, more money, and more sex, why wouldn’t you go to grad school?

Three warning signs concerning your graduate school plans:

If your primary motivation for going to graduate school is to please someone outside yourself, then you had better rethink the whole endeavor. If your father thinks you have to be an attorney or your mother thinks you have to be a doctor, and that’s your main motivation for pursuing these goals, then you’re in trouble. One study of unhappy attorneys showed that a significant proportion of them went to law school in the first place to please a close family member. You need strong internal motivation to thrive in graduate school. If you and your mother agree on your academic plans, fine, but if you disagree, better think twice before making a move not in alignment with your own interests.

If you’re not at all sure what you want to pursue at the graduate level, that is a milder warning sign. You may need to seek more academic and career counseling; discuss your plans with mentors, parents, and other people you admire; take some career aptitude tests; take a few more classes in the subjects that interest you; and otherwise explore your options. Some schools will admit you as an unspecified-major graduate student and allow you to take graduate courses in one or more disciplines for a year or two while you decide. Even some outstanding students find themselves unsure of their next academic step.

Finally, some students seek to avoid a bad job market by hiding out in graduate school. This is okay as a general rule, as long as hiding out in graduate school does not take the place of prudent career planning. In other words, if you choose a graduate degree program that will enhance your career goals later, then fine, but if you’re just passing time and running up loans—that is, if you’re just delaying confronting your career problem—then you’d be a lot better off facing your career issues now. Interestingly enough, the skills required to get into a highly competitive graduate program are the same ones that would allow you to seek and obtain desirable, career-launching employment right now.

If you’re unsure of your academic and career plans, answer these questions: When were you the most excited about your studies as an undergraduate, and what were you doing that caused all that excitement? What would you do for a living if money were no object—or, taking this to the logical limit, what career would you be willing to pay someone else to let you do? What have you fantasized about doing for a living? Think of several people you deeply admire. What do they do for a living?

Many, if not most, graduate applicants are somewhat vague about their career plans, but you certainly should have some plan for utilizing your education in a career, no matter how tenuous that plan may be and how many times you change that plan later.

One of the worst reasons not to go to grad school is that you don’t know how you’re going to pay for it. If you want to go, you can find a way to pay for it.

There may be no more confusing and illogical thing in the world than graduate school financing:

Suppose you wanted to buy a car, and you went down to the car lot and asked the salesperson, “How much for this beautiful red convertible?” Further suppose that the salesperson then said, “Well, I dunno. You need to apply for the car, and if we decide to sell it to you at all, it’s either going to cost you $50,000 or we’ll pay you to drive it home. First, you have to fill out all this paperwork, pay a nonrefundable deposit, give us three references, and wait for months.”

That’s a nutty way to do business, you might think, but that’s exactly how graduate financial aid works. You simply cannot tell how much it will cost until you apply and are admitted. The sticker price on that car and the sticker price on graduate education are often meaningless.

It’s often cheaper to go to an expensive school because those schools have deeper resources for aid. At some schools, in some departments, no one has paid a dime to attend the program in decades. The tuition is offset by grants, foundation monies, and various endowed funding mechanisms; the schools continue to publish tuition rates because other departments may be actually collecting tuition (for example, the chemistry department is well funded and nobody pays, while the theater department collects full tuition).

Sometimes students are forced to make a decision on which graduate school to attend before they receive a financial award. A close friend of mine received a letter from a Harvard graduate program that started out like this:

The letter was dated April 17th. It didn’t say one word about a financial award. So he crafted a quick and clever response:

“I am honored to be offered a position in the fall incoming class. I am slightly confused by the fact that I have not received a financial aid package. However, since I know as esteemed an institution as Harvard would not make such an offer in jest and, as you know all my financial particulars in my application, I assume the award, when it does eventually come, will be sufficient to allow me to participate in this wonderful opportunity. So, I am delighted to accept.” (Incidentally, this weird practice is hardly unique to Harvard.)

It’s often cheaper to pursue the PhD because PhD candidates are better funded than master’s candidates. Even while they’re taking the same classes and sitting side by side, PhD candidates may be paid to attend class, while master’s candidates pay for the privilege. Don’t let financial fears keep you from pursuing the degree you want. For more on these issues, visit the website for the Council of Graduate Schools, www.cgsnet.org , and the National Center for Education Statistics, www.nces.ed.gov .

By the way, never pursue the PhD unless you want the terminal degree; in other words, don’t apply for a PhD when you really want a master’s just because the PhD funding is better. The “bailout master’s” is not counted the same in industry or academe as the master’s you intentionally obtain; you will be seen as someone who “dropped out of a PhD program.” If you’re unsure, pursue the master’s degree first. Many people have a master’s in one topic and a career in another field, or have two master’s degrees in unrelated topics, but getting a PhD is like getting married in a Catholic church in a Latin American country. It’s a real commitment.

In general, it is cheaper to go to school full time rather than part time for two reasons. First, the money you borrow to go full time is repaid after you graduate, when you should have a much higher rate of earnings. Even considering the accrued interest on the loans, it will probably cost you less overall. Second, students who go to school part time frequently do not get the career boost that comes from completing a full-time degree program. The big reward for those students who go to school part time is frequently a card of congratulations from their employer. So what? If you end up having to change jobs to achieve the market rate for your education, what have you gained by working your way through?

Many college graduates seek an employer who will pay for their graduate education. Is this smart? Sometimes not. Employers place many restrictions on these programs, including a period of time after completion during which, if you leave your employer, you must repay their investment in your education. A basic understanding of economics indicates that they believe they are paying you below market rate for your salary or they wouldn’t do it. If the employer you already have and are happy with is willing to pay your education expenses, fine. However, you should not choose an employer based solely on this factor. Whether you’re choosing an employer who may fund your education or considering whether to take advantage of your current employer’s funding, be sure to run the numbers yourself before you think you’re getting something for nothing. Usually your greatest boost in salary will come from going to school full time, with the goal of aggressively seeking a full-time career position that requires your new education.

Even if you have the means to pay for your entire graduate education, it is often advisable to apply for financial aid. Much financial aid at the graduate level is merit based, and failing to pursue these awards will leave you without the necessary credentials to obtain postgraduate employment and other appointments. In particular, if you eventually want to be a college professor or a university-based research scientist, you almost have to be a teaching or research assistant while in graduate school. Although these assignments are most often run as aid programs, you should consider their other benefits.

Here are the most typical aid sources:

Teaching assistantships require you to teach undergraduate courses or labs. You will probably have your tuition waived, and usually receive a stipend (which varies widely from school to school). Having a teaching assistantship is very prestigious; if you plan to become a college professor, it’s an impressive addition to your credentials. However, the workload can be severe, with all your preparation and grading effort in addition to your class time each week. Whatever your estimate of the time commitment, you should expect it to be almost double during your first semester.

Consult IRS Publication 970 and Tax Topic 421 for tax rules governing scholarships, fellowships, and assistantships.

You get teaching assistantships by applying to the department you will be in as a graduate student. You need grades good enough to impress everyone in the department. It also helps to have done some teaching, tutoring, or proctoring as an undergraduate. Sometimes students get assistantships in other departments to offset their educational expenses. For example, I interviewed one student, a native speaker of French, who got an assistantship teaching first-year French even though he was studying something else at graduate school. You can also supplement your income with less well-known, assistantship-like assignments elsewhere in the university system; for example, you could serve as a residence hall advisor or a career counselor, especially if you’re studying any kind of psychology, counseling, business, or higher education administration.

You get research assistantships by applying to a specific professor or laboratory at the graduate school. These are much easier to get, in that you don’t have to impress a whole department to win an assignment. The best way to earn an assignment like this is to learn as much as you can about the research going on in the lab, then let the laboratory chief know of your desire to participate in that research. It’s a big plus if you have a great respect for the concept of integrity in original research, have conducted original research as an undergraduate, or have already been published. You do not need perfect grades to earn these jobs; I spoke with one dean who funded a research assistant whose overall GPA was 2.85 (but it is important to note that his GPA in math, physics, and fluid dynamics was 3.85, and this was a fluid dynamics lab).

To see how your stipend stacks up, go to http://gradschool.binghamton.edu/stipendsurvey .

If you are admitted to a program and then invited to visit, this is not really optional even if they say it is optional. If you decline, you may be giving away your assistantship. When you are invited to a tour or a meet-and-greet with departmental faculty, it is a very serious error in protocol not to appear. Assistantships are often assigned, formally or informally, on these types of tours. If you cannot afford the ticket, ask them to pay for it. In many cases, they will.

Be careful with your terminology. Financial aid at the graduate level usually means a loan. You should inquire about funding and support, which includes the much larger world of scholarships, fellowships, assistantships, and grants. If you cannot get a research or teaching assistantship with your department, look for other part-time jobs with the department that could gain you both exposure to professors and savvy in how the department operates. This can cut down on your time to complete the degree program and help solve any problems you may run into as a graduate student.

Fellowships are large awards that come with no strings attached; that is, the student doesn’t have to perform any work to earn the award. They are reserved for those students whose academic promise is so great that they shouldn’t be distracted at all from their studies—or, more rarely, for underrepresented students the program has a great desire to recruit. Fellowships come in two flavors: internal and external. You learn about internal fellowships from the graduate school or department to which you’re applying. You learn about external fellowships (the same as a scholarship, really) by researching them yourself. Two good websites are finaid.org and fastweb.com . Three sample books on this subject are The Best Scholarships for the Best Students by Asher, Morris, and Fazio-Veigel; The Scholarship Book by Dan Cassidy; and the older but still useful Grants for Graduate and Postdoctoral Study by Peterson’s. Your academic or career development advisor can point you to more. It is your job to do the research. For example, the EPA offers a generous fellowship including research-related expenses for graduate students in environmentally-related fields of study. The Gertrude Fogelson Cultural and Creative Arts Award was created to encourage and honor mothers who demonstrate talent in visual arts, creative writing, or vocal music. The Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships provide stipends and tuition for “new Americans” who hold green cards or are naturalized citizens, or who are the children of two parents who are both naturalized citizens. Just to give you an idea of how obscure some scholarships can be, there is a scholarship for fans of Klingon, the language spoken by a warrior class of aliens in the Star Trek science fiction franchise, offered by something calling itself the Klingon Language Institute. You don’t actually have to speak Klingon to apply, but it helps. See for yourself at www.kli.org/scholarship . You can get graduate scholarships and fellowships for everything from world peace (Rotary World Peace Fellowship) to world conservation (Doris Duke Conservation Program), for going to medical school while being Scottish (Dr. Edward May Magruder Medical Scholorship Clan Gregor Society), and for being a woman (Woodrow Wilson Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship). Interested in veterinary science? The American Kennel Club gives $160,000 a year to vet students. You don’t actually have to own a dog.

All joking aside, if you are in the sciences, you are expected to apply for three or four third-party fellowships when you apply to graduate school. You don’t actually have to win the scholarships, but you are supposed to have been savvy enough to know you were supposed to apply. (This is one of those unwritten rules that ought to come from your advisor.) Now you know. The NSF and NIH offer, literally, thousands of appropriate awards. A little research on your part should uncover funding that matches your background and interests.

Grants are just smaller fellowships, ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, and they work exactly the same way; you can find them by using your fellowship research resources. With a little effort and experimentation, you may find extra money available to you because you graduated from high school in Iowa, or your father works for a telephone company, or you’re left-handed, or a felon. No kidding. The money’s out there. You just have to go seek it.

You should not pay for a scholarships search service. My review of them is that none provides anything you cannot get for free online or from books. Do your own research and don’t believe anyone has unique access to “secret” money.

Tuition waivers are extremely common for PhD candidates and for all candidates in the laboratory sciences. They are less common for master’s degree candidates in the humanities and for most students in preprofessional programs such as business, law, medicine, architecture, and so on. As mentioned above, many programs list tuition in their bulletins and literature, even though no one has paid that tuition in years.

When all else fails, you can fund the gap between what you need and what you can get granted or waived with education loans. If you have a pulse, are a United States citizen, and have not ruined your credit rating entirely, you can borrow $20,500 each and every year you are in graduate school. Federally guaranteed student loans have been simplified, and a great place to start is on the DOE’s own website: http://studentaid.ed.gov/PORTALSWebApp/students/english/studentloans.jsp . Plan on preparing a FAFSA ( Free Application for Federal Student Aid) and/or forms from the Graduate and Professional School Financial Aid Service (GAPSFAS), available from any graduate or undergraduate financial aid office, or by printout from finaid.org .

Normally, your undergraduate student loans will be deferred while you’re in graduate school. On some loans, the interest accrual is arrested during graduate school. Inquire at the financial aid office of your undergraduate institution, and at the graduate school to which you’re applying, for more details on your particular loan portfolio.

By the way, borrowing is generally the primary way to finance graduate study in professional schools (business, law, medicine, especially), even though there is a hidden assistantship at business and law schools: working for the career placement office. Inquire about how to apply for these coveted slots before you attend. Otherwise, plan on borrowing a lot. You will get the payback if you complete the program in a timely manner and launch a career with average success.

A student did ask me once if she should borrow $30,000 to study dance in Manhattan. I asked her to explain to me her plan for ever being able to repay this money. She decided not to borrow the money. Though the program very strongly encouraged her to take on this large debt, even they couldn’t tell her how she would be able to earn enough as a dancer to pay it back.

Be careful about interpreting average income for professionals as a form of guarantee as it may take years to hit the top of the earning curve. Starting wages for college professors and lawyers and so on may be rather modest. Also, be careful about projecting your income from tables like the example on this page . In the highest earning category—doctors, lawyers, dentists, and veterinarians—the big money goes to the doctors and the top lawyers. Many veterinarians and lawyers have trouble repaying large education loans.

Student debt is not to be taken lightly. Even though it is almost always a good investment, you need to watch your total indebtedness. There’s an old saying in law school: “Live like an attorney while you’re in law school and you’ll live like a law student when you’re an attorney.”

Remember, your first source for financial aid information of all types is the program to which you are applying, but you may not find out how much it will cost until you’ve applied and been accepted. Even after you’ve gotten a financial offer, however, there may be room to play. Some schools are responsive to appeals based on need (married with children, long distance to relocate, medical needs, and so on); others have responded to appeals based on competing offers. I know one student who was offered admission to Harvard and Stanford, but only got a support offer from Harvard. He took Harvard’s written support offer to Stanford and said, “I have this offer from Harvard. I think your program is better, but of course I’d be crazy to turn down this stipend.” Stanford came up with a slightly higher award. Some deans have told me that they try never to do this—adjust an offer on request or match another school’s offer—but students tell me it happens frequently. Especially when the difference is small, say $5,000 or less, going back to a program to ask again may result in a matching offer. It can’t hurt to ask, especially if you explain that you’re only asking because you think their program would be a better match for you.

Finally, on the whole topic of paying for your grad school education by assistantships and fellowships, you need to know about Getting What You Came For by Robert L. Peters. This outstanding book goes into greater depth on different funding sources, the benefits of assistantships, selecting an advisor, departmental politics, and other important matters. I could not recommend this book more strongly for anyone pursuing an academic master’s or PhD. Another book that explicates academic culture is What They Didn’t Teach You in Graduate School by Paul Gray, David Drew, Matthew Henry Hall, and Laurie Richlin. This is an excellent guide to understanding the sometimes bizarre world of graduate academic programs, and a must-read for new graduate scholars.

In addition to the books mentioned in the text, also check out:

In addition to the websites mentioned in the text, also check out:

The following pages list some of the most prestigious scholarships in the world. To win these, undergraduates typically work with the scholarship committee on their undergraduate campus, and early planning is absolutely critical. The application processes typically require essays, recommendations, and personal interviews. Some applications are regional, which may give an advantage to those applying from less competitive regions.