Ok, this isn’t really a law issue, but since I teach a labour & employment law course in York’s Master’s of Human Resource Management (MHRM) program, I thought I’d make note of a recent survey of master’s degrees targeting human resource management professionals. (Shameless Plug: If you are interested in the MHRM, here’s the info. Note also that York’s School of HRM is also the only university in Canada with a Ph.D program in HR)
A survey done of 1,180 readers of Canadian HR Reporter were asked questions assessing their opinion of the various masters’ degrees. The respondents were asked to assess the contribution to potential career advancement of the degrees by assigning a score of between 1 and 5 to each, with 1 being the most valuable and 5 being the least). Looking at the proportion of respondents who ranked programs at either 1 or 2, the results were as follows (including the schools in Ontario that offer the degrees):
MHRM (York): 50.5%
MBA (Various): 50.4%
MIRHR (Toronto): 46.3%
MIR (Queens): 31%
M. Industrial Psychology (Various): 28.2%
I have no idea what the respondents actually know about the programs or the graduates. On the question of whether an advanced degree in HR gives people an ‘an advantage’ in the job market, 31.2% responded that the degrees give a huge (6.4%) or significant (24.8%) advantage, 28.6% responded that the degrees give a “small” advantage, and 29.3% said it gives “no” advantage.
These results are very surprising. The extent to which master’s degrees in business provide advantage, are worth the costs, or prepare graduates for the real world has been debated for as long as these degrees have existed. MBAs in particular have received a lot of criticism in recent years. Check out this piece from Canadian Business magazine discussing the falling prestige of the MBA, for example. The article cites a prominent Stanford professor summarizing studies that have shown “there is little evidence that mastery of the knowledge acquired in business schools enhances people’s careers, or that even attaining the MBA credential itself has much effect on graduates’ salaries or career attainment.”
Do any of you have opinions on the value of graduate degrees to careers in HR or industrial relations?
