Not everything is a "secret govt conspiracy."
Google will give you lots more articles, but here is one to get you started:
http://chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-Applications/124387/September 14, 2010
Graduate-School Applications Spiked After Economy's Plunge
By Peter Schmidt
Chronical of Higher Education
The number of people applying to the nation's graduate schools spiked after the economy tanked in 2008, a new report by the Council of Graduate Schools shows.
The report, released today, says applications to graduate schools in the United States rose by 8.3 percent from the fall of 2008 to the fall of 2009, the last year studied by the council as part of its annual comprehensive examination of trends in postbaccalaureate education. By contrast, over the previous five years, from 2003 to 2008, the growth in applications to graduate schools had been relatively flat, rising by an average of less than 1 percent annually. Historically, applications to graduate schools generally have surged in recessions, as people who have trouble finding work have gone back to school to earn advanced degrees expected to help them in the job market.
Among those seeking to enter graduate school in 2009, the most popular fields were business, engineering, and the social and behavioral sciences. The area with the fastest growth in interest, however, was the health sciences, in which applications rose by 14.6 percent over the period studied.
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