Ah, grad school. That shining beacon of ambition, self-improvement, and six-figure debt. For decades, it’s been the holy grail for those who aren’t quite ready for the workforce but also aren’t quite ready to explain to their parents why they’re bartending with a degree in media studies. But in 2025, the tides are turning. The real power move isn’t a Master’s degree. It’s monetizing the aesthetic of academic rigor without actually enrolling.
Let’s weigh the options.
On one hand, grad school gives you structure, community, and the comforting illusion of forward momentum. You’ll sit in seminars, annotate PDFs, and casually drop phrases like “ontological framework” in coffee chats. You’ll build a network—primarily of people who are also stressed, broke, and workshopped the same personal essay eight times. You’ll emerge with credentials, maybe some student loan forgiveness, and a dissertation no one reads but your advisor.
On the other hand, you could start a Substack.
It begins with a post titled “Why I Almost Applied to Grad School This Year.” Suddenly, you’re gaining traction. Fellow almost-academics start subscribing. You launch a free webinar titled “Reclaiming Intellectual Curiosity Outside Academia” and charge $29 for early bird registration. You write threads about theory-adjacent topics like “Foucault and the Creator Economy” or “Is Your Personal Brand Post-Structuralist?” and get 500 likes from people who all list “thought curation” as a skill on LinkedIn.
No office hours. No tuition. No tenured professor asking you to rephrase a perfectly good sentence because it didn’t include the word “hegemony.”
To put things in perspective: a 2023 report from the National Center for Education Statistics showed that average student loan debt for graduate students in the U.S. is over $71,000. Meanwhile, the average cost to start a newsletter? About the price of a domain name and a Canva subscription. One of these comes with free tote bags and existential dread. The other comes with passive income and a chance to be quoted in someone else’s Medium post.
But there’s more. Grad school can take 2–7 years of your life, depending on your field, your thesis advisor’s availability, and your tolerance for coffee breath. Meanwhile, a content-based personal brand can scale instantly. Just record a podcast about “Late Capitalism and Late Checkout Fees,” get featured in a niche newsletter roundup, and boom—you’re invited to speak on a panel about “The New Intellectual Economy.” You don’t even need to know what that means.
Now, to be fair, some disciplines still benefit from formal grad school. Medicine. Law. Engineering. You know, the ones where failure has real consequences. But for the rest of us—people in marketing, strategy, design, UX writing, brand storytelling, “innovation leadership,” and whatever “strategic empathy” is—there’s a high return on skipping the seminar and leaning into the performance of expertise.
We live in a time where being perceived as smart is often more valuable than being certified as smart. It’s why TikTok therapists get book deals and guys who watched one TED talk are leading corporate resilience trainings.
Grad school gives you a degree. A content empire gives you an audience. And in the world of LinkedIn influencers, it’s the audience that opens doors.
So what’s it going to be? Three more years in academia, or three months until your first Notion template drops?
Just remember: your future isn’t determined by your GPA—it’s determined by your ability to write confidently about things you vaguely understand.
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