Should I get my Master's now or wait?

In general, the longer you wait, the harder it is to get back into the scholar mode. If you are going to do it, I would think that the sooner the better particularly if you can do it on line on your own time.

Any chance your place of employment will pay for you to get your masters?

Also, how much more money will you make once you have a masters?

If you’re not even sure what field you want your master’s degree to be in, then you don’t belong in graduate school yet. Don’t go to grad school unless you’ve found a field that really excites you.

If you go for a PhD in the natural sciences, social sciences, or humanities, you don’t pay to go to school—they pay you. You work your way through with assistantships. If a program admits you but doesn’t offer you any support, then either the program is underfunded or you are not really good enough to make it in this field (some programs will still take your money, especially the for-profit schools, but the better ones won’t).

Some MA/MS programs work this way too, especially those that are designed to feed into PhD programs. Terminal MA/MS programs may not, but if you hope to eventually go on to a PhD, then you would not want a terminal MA/MS.

MD, MBA, or law degrees are another story.

The usefulness of an online masters degree depends on the kind of work you want to do. You’re also missing out on the personal connections and networking that would take place in-person.

You need to figure out what you want to do, how much it would pay, how much the required education would cost and how long it would take to repay the educational loans vs. how much you can earn with just your bachelors to decide if you should go to school now.

I’m a big fan of getting a job that provides educational benefits and then working through your master’s degree (which might not end up costing you anything).

I agree with @Cupcake Let your employer pay for it.

I think @submariner is right “Don’t go to grad school unless you’ve found a field that really excites you.”
I would worry less about @rojo‘s observation about “the longer you wait”, if you know your interest you will get back into the groove. I dropped out for about three years before finishing a B.S. and that was one of the best decisions I ever made. I had good focus when I went back.

When students ask me whether they should take on postgraduate study, my first questions are where do you want it to take you and what is the likelihood of that situation occurring. If you only want to do it because you love to study – go for it. If you want to do it because it will enhance your work prospects, make sure that it will get you where you want to go by doing some research and then if the answer is positive, go for it. Just make sure the outcome you want is realistic and beneficial to you.

Thanks for the answers. I’ll try to respond to everyone here.

If I get the job with probation, no, they do not pay for me to go to school. In fact, I don’t believe any of the companies I plan on applying to do that. Most likely, I’ll be on my own to pay for it.

I do know that I want to work in Criminal Justice. The reason I said I was unsure of the exact degree I wanted is because graduate schools vary widely in what they offer. One school might only offer an MS in Criminal Justice while another might offer an MS in Forensic Psychology or Legal Studies or Security Administration. So, I’d have to do research on schools to decide what fits my goals best. I’ve been looking at Kaplan, Walden, and DeVry and they offer a wide variety of options.

I think I’m just going to hold off for a bit, maybe a year or so just to weigh my options once I know more about them. As of right now, I can only spout out statistics on salaries with a BA vs. an MA/MS, but those numbers really mean nothing to me specifically. I don’t know enough about potential career tracks yet to know what I could potentially earn specifically. If I get into probation, the great thing about starting there is that I would quickly become familiar with all of the local cops, attorneys, judges, etc. and I’m sure I would learn a lot from them and make useful connections.

If I don’t get in with probation, that’s another story. I may actually end up in a career more in the business field than criminal justice. I’ve been employed at a bank for the past three years, so I plan on applying for bank jobs, perhaps in human resources or even branch management. Anything but being a teller, really. I also plan to apply for a counseling job at a substance abuse treatment facility that I became familiar with through probation. They hire people with only a BA, though they prefer candidates to have a Master’s. I will also be searching for state/federal jobs. I have no interest in being a correctional officer or a police officer, so my CJ options are pretty limited.

Since next semester is my last semester, I’m starting to delve into my career options a bit more than before. I studied psychology and criminal justice because it’s what I love to learn. I had a broad idea of what I wanted to do when I started, but it’s pretty scary that the end is quickly approaching and I have to figure all of this out if my first choice doesn’t pan out. I plan to take it one step at a time – I don’t expect to walk out of college right into my dream job. It’s a process, and I’ll start at the bottom.

I was hoping for more financially-based answers, though, other than having a company pay for it. The money situation is my biggest concern.

Don’t ever pay for a master’s degree.

Definitely, definitely, definitely don’t pay for a master’s degree from a for-profit school.

I didn’t realize we were talking a for profit masters. How do employers even view those? I think @nikipedia raised a really good point.

Can someone explain that to me? Every person I know with a Master’s paid for it through school. If an employer won’t pay, but you want a graduate degree, what other option is there but to pay for it yourself?

It isn’t a matter of paying for school or not, it is about the institution itself. State schools, like University of Florida or Ohio State are non-profit. So are schools like Harvard. These new schools that have popped up in recent years, the for-profit schools, are run by corporations basically and their main goal is to make a profit, while non-profits are focused on the pursuit of education and research as their priority. Professors at nonprofit universities usually have a little more flexibility in how and what they teach, while the for-profits have a more systematic way of teaching. I don’t know how some job industries view a masters degree from for-profit schools, it might be ok in your field. For the most part I think the for profit schools are seen as beneath the non profit schools. I don’t even know how the for-profits work? Do they make you apply? Or, just take anyone? I guess for a masters you still need to pass some sort of test.

@JLeslie Well, online programs at state schools here don’t even exist. My university offers very few online courses.

All the schools I mentioned are for-profit? How would I find that out? I know these are popular programs, though. Yes, you still have to apply and they offer federal loans and all that just like other schools. I figured that, as long as it’s a nationally accredited institution, it’s alright.

Accredited is very important.

That is one of the appeals of for-profit, is they have been more innovative in online and flexible schedules. They kind of captured that market.

Here is a list of for-profit schools. You also could google the specific school you are considering.

I would talk to people senior in your field about how they look at for-profits. @nikipedia is in the science field, and I would assume it is frowned upon.

Please, please, please do some research into for-profit institutions. They are diploma mills that are very expensive and tend to be VERY poorly regarded by the people who might hire you. Here is a summary of the problems on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For-profit_education#Potential_drawbacks

“Some critics have called for-profit education ‘subprime education’, in an analogy with the subprime mortgages bubble at the heart of the Great Recession – finding uninformed borrowers and loading them with debt they cannot afford, then securitizing and passing the loan onto third-party investors. Short Seller Steve Eisman (famous for being a character in Michael Lewis’s The Big Short) has described the accreditation situation regarding for-profits like ITT as follows: ‘The scandal here is exactly akin to the rating agency role in subprime securitizations.’”

If you want to find out if the institute you’re applying to is non-profit or for profit, you should be able to find out pretty easily through google. All 3 of the ones you mentioned are for profit.

Terminal masters degrees usually cost money; there are very few exceptions to this. However, if you get a masters degree as part of a PhD program, your tuition should be waved and you will likely be paid to do research or teach. If you consider that tuition for masters programs tends to approach $50,000, then for a 2 year degree, the difference between these two paths starts at $100,000. If you add your (admittedly small) teaching or research assistantship, at ~$20,000 per year, you are looking at a net difference of $140,000. So even if you only want a masters degree, it is worth $140,000 to simply enter a PhD program and leave after you finish your qualifying/comprehensive exams, at which point you will be awarded a masters degree.