One of the reasons that universities are able to be exploitative in the master’s degree market is because they’re not constrained in the same way that they are in the market for bachelor’s degrees.
If you’re offering bachelor’s degrees, they all have to be four years long. You don’t have a two-year bachelor’s degree or a six-year bachelor’s degree. You have to publicly publish your acceptance rates, your average SAT scores, so to the extent that you’re selling selectivity, you actually have to back it up with data, whereas in the master’s degree market, you can call almost anything a master’s degree.
The article below from Slate magazine references a recent Wall Street Journal article on MFA Degrees at Ivy League institutions, which found students accumulating outrageous amounts of debt for a Master’s Degree.
But as the Slate article notes, this sort of problem is ubiquitous, because Master Degree programs can be tailored to any gatekeeping function for any job. This clearly creates temptations that even higher educational institutions of top reputation, as well as fly by night “ripper” schools of no repute, can’t resist.
The situation might be described as “Gatekeeping; that’s where the $$$ are.” PSA has long suggested along with various employers, and employees, that the gatekeeping function for employment is greatly in need of disruption, innovation, and simply new ways of qualifying for a job.
Master’s degrees are the second biggest scam in higher education.