My husband is a teacher in a state that requires you to receive either a master's or master's equivalency (36 credits of classes) by your 10th year of teaching.
He has been doing a program online and just finished his coursework. All that remains is his capstone and comps. Comps are a bear, 3 full days of testing and you have to get an 80% in each subject area. The capstone is even worse, which we just learned -- he had planned to complete it this fall semester, but through a mixup with the graduate program just learned that one semester is not considered sufficient time to complete the thesis and they are strongly suggesting he take both the fall and spring to complete it.
My husband is not an academically inclined type of person. He has hated every second of this. We have paid about $17,000 for this program, roughly half of which has been reimbursed.
With the news that the capstone will be worse than we thought, we simultaneously realized he has his master's equivalency via his coursework (he MAY be one class short -- TBD). He is strongly considering just stopping at this point. I encouraged him to continue, but honestly I'm not sure why.
The equivalency is enough to meet his credential requirements and ensure his (small!) raise. The master's degree does not confer any additional benefits. He has no interest in ever teaching outside of the elementary/secondary education level, absolutely no interest in going into administration. To be honest it is likely he will leave the field in 10 years.
The only hard benefit I could find is that he could maybe charge more for private lessons with the degree, but I'm not convinced by that. With a BA, master's equivalency, and 10+ years teaching in the schools, would a masters degree make much of a difference? Plus, we are not really hustlers. He's not very interested in private lessons right now.
I still have this little voice inside of me saying he's so close that he should just finish, but also, I'm kind of sick of higher education and the fact that he had to do this at all always really annoyed me. I don't believe that there are any hard benefits to this at all. I'm sure there are people out there who respect the piece of paper more than we do who will think we are crazy, but am I missing any actual REASON for him to complete the degree?
At this point, even if we learn he's 3 credits short, I'm inclined to have him just take a one-off whatever class to see the requirements rather than deal with the capstone and comps.