Professional Paradox

I've been toying with the idea of going back to school to get my Masters next year, applying this upcoming December.
Besides the stress of prepping -Portfolio, letters of recommendation, and the oh-so-daunting GRE -I have discovered how absolutely asinine it is to get a Masters in Architecture in such a bad economy.

I know, if you can't find a job, it seems productive to go back to school. Sure it is, if you are from a country where your education is free and living expenses taken care of by the government. But in the US? If you're going to shell out $150,000 for a Masters degree, you hope that when you get done with your 3 years of strenuous suffering, you have a job waiting for you to help you pay off that mountain of loans.

I sit right next to the woman in charge of hiring interns and employees here. About 300 hopefuls have applied  for an internship here, and I'd say about half of them were cut from the pile right away -no matter how talented, how impressive their tome of work, how long their CV or list of recommendations. If they have a Masters degree completed? They're out. Buh-bye.

Why?
They're too damn expensive. In Denmark, at least, there is a minimum wage set by the Dansk Ark- Architecture association. If you're an architecture student, pre-completion-of-Masters, the wage is about 1/4 of that of a degree holder. If you're a company suffering from recession, who are you going to choose? A youngin' with a modest amount of experience, sufficient technical know-how, an open creative mind, and a reasonable price tag, or someone with marginally more experience, slightly more refined technical-know-how (but really, very little difference), and a pretty costly price tag -not to mention a diva attitude and a list of demands, simply because, well, they hold a Masters.

The choice is clear.

And for me, as well. It makes no sense at all -the only reason I would go back to school within the next year-ish is if I'm really itching to do my own work again. But then I should just time-manage and enter into a few solo competitions in whatever free time I can manage to scrape up.

For now, I don't mind being paid in beans, living on Struggle Street, gaining experience anywhere I can find it. For now, I'm finding work opportunities, against all odds, and the work opportunities will keep coming so long as I am fairly cheap to hire, and willing to work (and stupidly? I am!). And when I'm done with my Masters? With such huge debt looming over my head, I won't be willing to take a crap-paying job. I simply won't be able to afford it.

And when I do finally go get my Masters, I'll have a pretty strong sense of what kind of designer I am, and a diversified CV to boot, so when I do have to trump other Masters-holding hopefuls and make my way to the top of the job-application pile, it'll be no sweat.

Who would you choose? An expensive Masters-holding Architect with little to no work experience, or one with a wide range of experience, plus the work done in school?
No offense to those who've decided to go the Masters route directly out of school. Perhaps I'm just justifying my own route to myself. But really, good luck out there. It's a grim market, and those loans won't pay off themselves...