This question arrives in my comments and DMs most weeks, usually phrased as a yes or no, and the trouble with answering it that way is that not all master’s degrees are the same thing. A master’s in statistics from MIT and a master’s in a less technical subject from a lower ranked school are not the same product, and they will not do the same thing for you when you start interviewing. Whether any degree is worth it comes down to evaluating the specific programs you can actually get into. There are two checks I would run on any of them, and neither one appears in the brochure.
Find the professor before you commit to the program
When you finish a master’s and start interviewing, you need one project you can genuinely talk about at length. A course assignment will not carry you here, because what you are being asked for is something you can present, and something that holds up through a 30 to 40 minute past-project deep dive where the interviewer keeps asking why you made each choice instead of the obvious alternative.
So before you enroll, look carefully at who actually teaches there. Ideally there is at least one professor whose work you would want to be part of, and ideally you have already contacted them about research assistant openings before you accept a place. Getting in and working with those professors gives you access to data you could not otherwise touch, which is usually the real constraint on whether a project turns out to be interesting. It also gives you their ideas, sometimes co-authorship, and a set of introductions that the course catalog was never going to provide.
If you cannot name one person at a program you would want to work under, that is worth sitting with for a while before you pay the tuition.
Talk to people who graduated in the last two years, and only those
The second check is more practical, and it is the one most people skip. Someone who finished the program in 2020 or 2021 entered a job market that no longer exists, so their experience tells you very little about what you are about to walk into. People who came out in the last two years faced conditions close to the ones you will face, which makes them the only sample worth paying much attention to.
What you want from them is specific: how did they actually do on the job market, and did they feel the program helped them get there? That is a real question with a real answer, and most people are willing to give it.
This is also the easiest networking you will ever do
Reaching out to recent graduates happens to be a much better way into LinkedIn networking than the approach most people default to. You are not emailing everybody you can find to ask for a referral from a stranger, which is the thing that makes recruiters and senior people stop replying. You are writing to someone who went through a program you are seriously considering, and you are asking them questions they are genuinely positioned to answer.
That conversation starts a relationship rather than spending one. A year later, when you are finishing the program and starting to look, you are following up with someone who already knows who you are and what you have been working on. This is a long game, and it works in your favor precisely because you started it before you needed anything from anybody. I wrote up the full version of this approach in the networking guide, including the message I send and the order I contact people in.
The main question to get answered
If you only get one thing out of these conversations, make it this: how much did the program actually help them get the kind of job you are trying to get? Not whether they enjoyed it, and not whether the coursework was rigorous, because those are easier questions that people answer more readily and they will not tell you what you need to know. A program that places its graduates into the roles you want is worth paying for. One that does not is an expensive detour, however good the syllabus looks on the website.
What would make the decision clearer for you, the project you would come out with, or where recent graduates actually landed?
This one also went out on Instagram — see the post there.