I only have a 4 year degree myself, so perhaps I am giving graduate work greater esteem than my experience allows.

As one of my friends said about their teaching qualification, “P.E. teachers get the same PGCE as everybody else.” There are plenty of other degrees that don’t teach anything valuable and exist purely to provide ammunition in the argument “I should be paid more.” The average MBA student is not held in especially great esteem by their professors either.

Doing research is by all accounts difficult and draining to a ridiculous degree but if you did well in undergraduate coursework graduate coursework is more of the same.