Why do people do postgraduate courses?

I saw a surprising statistic the other day: about the study motivation of postgraduate students. They were given a choice of saying that their motivation was (a) mainly employment / career, (b) mainly personal development, or (c) employment / career and personal development equally important.

Now the result needs to be taken with a large barrel of salt. The main focus of the investigation was something else entirely (about website resources for postgraduate students), and the number of responses was low (42 out of a sample of 300). But there's no obvious non-randomness to the respondents, and the results are (I think) still surprising. These were:

• Employment / career and personal development equally important: 18
• Mainly personal development: 14
• Mainly employment / career: 3

Now would you have guessed that only 3 respondents would say that their motivation was "mainly employment / career"? For several years now, since the UK's new funding regime for HE introduced much higher fees, my university (like others) has been striving to focus courses, qualifications and student support on career advancement, and presumably higher income - on the assumption that that is what will most motivate students and justify their investment in their study. But now I'm starting to doubt this. How can "personal development" really mean so much to postgraduate students that they are prepared to pay so many of thousands of pounds in fees?

Here's a dark thought. Postgraduate students, at least at my university, are overwhelmingly in mid-career, already engaged in professional practice, and one change which has affected professionals in all disciplines over the past decade or so is the increasing buraucratisation of their working lives. Tight performance management, inflexible reporting systems, and management by targets and strategic cascade have all combined to make professional work more like that of a white collar production line, so that it's harder for professionals to keep in touch with the reasons why they entered the profession in the first place. Those who think of themselves as creative in their professional practice find this particularly difficult (as this Dilbert cartoon about management obstruction of creativity illustrates).

Under such circumstances, what does a professional do? Leave and do something else? But usually there are mortgages to pay and children to feed. And most of the time the reasons for doing the job are still visible and salvageable - but they need support outside of anything which the workplace itself provides.

And perhaps that is where postgraduate study comes in: supporting "personal development" in the sense of reaffirming the professional's identity as someone who is good at their calling, who shares core values and standards with other co-professionals, and is more concerned about perfecting their practice than advancement in a management hierarchy, which will usually mean doing less of what they love and doing more of what they hate. So the return on investment for postgraduate study may be not so much about career advancement but career sustenance: not enabling students to get a better job, but to live with the one they have.