Check out Michael Bérubé's Humanities Unraveled and Timothy Burke's Late Afternoon of the (Academic) Elites.
So here the debate stands: We need to remake our programs from the ground up to produce teachers and researchers and something elses, but since it is not clear what those something elses might be, we haven't begun to rethink the graduate curriculum accordingly. (Anyway, we're not trained to do that! All we know how to do is to be professors!)
I don't see any sign that academia is reforming itself. The number of exploited workers continues to grow, and unfair elitism has intensified. Tuition keeps rising. I honestly don't know where it's all going. I guess I'm just happy to be watching all this unfold from the outside.
Relevant: Megan McArdle's American New Mandarins.
Apt. 11d 
To the extent that this is a “problem,” it will only be addressed to the extent that students stop enrolling in these programs.
At this point, I think that the “problem” of law school will start to be addressed, because the application rate has dropped in half, to the point that there now won’t be enough applicants to fill up all of the spaces.
But asking how the problem of PhD programs will be addressed is like asking how we will solve the “problem” of minor league baseball, where thousands of people toil for 6 or 7 years in their 20s for a chance to play in the major leagues, most of whom will drop out or be cut before they make it. As long as there enough baseball players who want to play in the minors, it will keep happening. For the same reason, school will keep enrolling PhD students into their programs until they stop applying.
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The power of professors to remake academia generally stops at the program level. We can change degree structures, course requirements, objectives and outcomes. We can and have cut back on grad program admissions, not that it does much since we’re a small M.A. program, anyway. We can’t change staffing levels or the turn to adjuncts although we continue to try our best to work against those decisions imposed from on high.
The gulf between academics and administration has widened exponentially since I first became aware of academic politics in my youth. That divide has a lot to do with the mess we’re in. It’s not the only part, but it’s troubling when I know that the only way my experience will ever get heard on high is to do something so high profile in research that the administrators will grant me some ‘face time’ so, eep!, off to write another article!
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There are days–today is one of them–when I wish I was on the outside too.
I would never, ever, ever recommend any of my children do anything in academia, even if they were extremely interested. I would do anything to talk them out of any intellectual profession. Or law. Or super-competitive business profession. Actually, at this point, any elite profession whatsoever except for medicine, where they actually nurture and protect their students (My husband’s family are all doctors, over several generations, so I’ve seen this up front). There is something soul draining about the competitiveness of modern society, and for the sake of their happiness I prefer them out of it.
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There are smaller professions where one can have good quality of life while maintaining an intellectual avocation on one’s own time, and since that’s what most academics (and PhDs without academic jobs) do anyway in the sense they spend years publishing stuff they don’t care about but that’s publishable to get ahead, that is what I hope for my children–a solid job that is useful to society and a life of the mind or the arts that exists in another realm without dollar signs attached to it.
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Thanks for link to the Berubé essay. Sigh… it has so much to do with my life. Pretty frustrating… no solution in sight.
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OK, I’m going to be annoying, so bear with me.
Some years ago, you were all about how the public schools sucked and something had to be done, and you were drawn to (I’m not saying you positively supported) things like vouchers, charters, Michelle Rhee, etc. And it ends up those things all were worse for public schools, and Rhee is a conservative fraud and Arne Duncan isn’t much better.
Now you’re on the “academia sucks” bandwagon. And who else is on that bandwagon? http://www.salon.com/2013/02/22/conservatives_declare_war_on_college/
So I’m not feeling really inclined to take you seriously on this “academia sucks” bandwagon. First, I don’t think the institution itself is inherently broken. I think society is broken by rampant income inequality, and the problems in colleges reflect those, or are a result of, these greater structural problems. Yet your focus is on how academia sucks, and it seems like blaming the victim.
I think you and everyone else concerned about higher education and K-12 education and parenting and all this stuff would start focusing on changing the mindset of a society that seems to think that income inequality is a-ok because some people are deserving and others aren’t. And stop getting yourselves sucked into whatever red meat issue the conservative media start whipping up people into a froth over. It’s all a distraction from the real issues.
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I’ll endorse Wendy’s bandwagon charge.
Take a look at this: http://healthland.time.com/2013/02/20/bitter-pill-why-medical-bills-are-killing-us/
and then tell me why higher education has a target painted on it.
Or why we’re playing this kind of game at all–moving serially through professions and institutions, mowing them down and blaming them for the ills of middle-class life (and as we smash up each one in turn, making more and more people refugees from the middle-class by destroying the institutions that supported middle-class jobs).
The crisis of sustainability that we’re all facing has deep roots, deep sources, and it’s all connected. Chasing whatever scapegoat of the moment is being used to distract from the big problem is for suckers–it’s basically being an enthusiastic player in the Hunger Games.
Our allegedly broken higher education system is the envy of most of the rest of the world, particularly the idea of a liberal arts approach–I’ve met with a bunch of delegations from South and East Asia over the last three years interested in how they can get away from narrowly vocational higher education systems that are tightly controlled by national bureaucrats, because they’re not serving either the society OR the economy very well. And yet here we are in the United States increasingly determined to break and destroy the system that everyone else would like to borrow from.
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The liberal education model is great, but I don’t think it scales past maybe 10% of the population and trying to make it the gateway to the bottom of the middle class has hurt both the middle class and the education system.
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I don’t know what to do about the broader point of moving society or fixing all of academia, but there are very large sectors of the post secondary system which I would not recommend to any individual I could think of and by no means are all of those in the for-profit schools.
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Thought this Balloon Juice post was interesting:
http://www.balloon-juice.com/2013/02/22/the-problem-is-just-that-you-are-cheap/
I look at my university, and you could argue that what we’re doing is replacing the training that companies like Marriott and Fidelity and Darden used to do, but making the students themselves pay for it. Maybe *that* is the problem. And again, it’s not a problem with the university model; it’s a problem with a pro-business, anti-worker society, with businesses taking less responsibility for the costs that make their companies work and putting it on the individual.
Also, as an FYI, my sister went through 4 years of nursing school and just got her first nursing job after an education that involved both classwork and clinical work (her training at the hospital my dad died in meant that the nurses there took extra-good care of us)–but she still had to do an intensive 2-week full-time training when she started her job.
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As I understand her, Laura is talking, first and foremost, about the problems of graduate education in the humanities and social sciences. It isn’t the case that businesses used to supply the training that graduate schools are now forced to provide. The glut of ABD’s working as adjuncts for low pay and no future is not a product of corporate downsizing. The problem is that the universities themselves have gulled these people into expending years of time and labor in a way that benefitted the existing tenured faculty, but did not benefit the people themselves.
This may not be the biggest problem in the world. No adjunct ever starved to death, that I know. But it is a terrible waste and abuse of good people.
In a field where I know more, I see a very similar problem in the thousands of students who foolishly took on huge debt loads to attend third-tier law schools. Even in a good market, this was a bad idea, equivalent to borrowing money in order to play the lottery. Most of those children will never get jobs that require a law degree. If I were a working class parent, that could have been my son or daughter. My heart goes out to them.
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So how do we stop people from getting humanities PhDs and law degrees when they’ve spent their entire upbringings being told to follow their dreams? Really, no, do not follow your dreams. Become an actuary instead. By the time they’re applying for grad school it’s already too late as Becoming an Academic has become part of their identity.
Rather than dissuading people from grad school altogether maybe the goal should be to redirect them to two-year professional programs that (sometimes) translate into real jobs. That’s not a cure-all, of course, but two years of debt is at least better than five.
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That is exactly right.
Also, credit, government subsidies and the youth of the target demographic make the higher education sector very vulnerable to wild price inflation. Your typical 18-year-old has no idea what it feels like to pay off a five-figure debt. As a matter of fact, I think people generally 1) have a hard time understanding money and 2) have an even harder time understanding debt. At least initially, a lot of people (even really smart people) see borrowed money as somehow “free.” That may sound dumb, but it’s the truth.
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I think there are specific issues to discuss within the choices being made in higher education, but I also agree with Wendy that a bigger issue is the growing income inequality in the country and the lack of a tax base to support the things Americans do want in their country.
Yes, adjuncts (and post-docs and research assistants are an exploited labor force, and, as in other situations where one group is more powerful than another, the shrinking pie has been increasingly unequally allocated as it shrunk (or didn’t grow). For the state/community college systems, the increasing adjunctification and higher tuitions are a result of the undermining of state support for those institutions. They didn’t occur in a vacuum.
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To continue on the theme (and, probably, to repeat myself), it boils down to a society requiring individuals to directly take on risks that we used to share (in the case of tuition, that individual 18 year olds to take on the risk of significant debt in order to get an education that is practically required), instead taking on the risks as a state.
I think folks felt comfortable taking on those risks when things were going well, but that they didn’t really understand the risks they were taking (with similar views playing out about retirement funds, health insurance, mortgages, . . . ). Now, people have to figure out whether they’re willing to take the risk when they are feeling the downside, and not just the upsides. My impression is that a majority of Americans don’t want to take on all those individual risks, but until they also show that they want to pay for it, I don’t know what solution we’re going to end up with.
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“To continue on the theme (and, probably, to repeat myself), it boils down to a society requiring individuals to directly take on risks that we used to share (in the case of tuition, that individual 18 year olds to take on the risk of significant debt in order to get an education that is practically required), instead taking on the risks as a state.”
I think you have to consider the fact that we have never had so many young adults going to college. If there was greater support per student in the old days, there were also fewer students.
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I feel like people are changing the subject from that raised by Berube (and, I think, our hostess). People getting Ph.D.s (or wasting their time in graduate school without getting a Ph.D. in the end) are not 18. They don’t take on mountains of debt (though those getting J.D.’s often do). They are, however, exploited and misused and spat out by the system, and I don’t see what it has to with income inequality. It has to do with bad, irresponsible behavior by tenured faculty and administrators who should know better. If the theory is to let those mandarins off the hook because of problems elsewhere in America, I say no.
There is a slightly similar problem for some 18 year olds, like the famed Courtney Munna, of getting expensive, useless degrees. But most undergraduates (including, I gather, Wendy’s students) are studying practical subjects and can expect jobs that justify their investment in education. The problem is mostly at the graduate level.
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y81, I think there are two issues, and I am emphasizing one whereas Laura may be emphasizing the other, but I think the issue I’m focusing on has been raised, particularly in MM’s article. I don’t think MM is talking about problems at the graduate level (though of course, who ever knows what she’s talking about, and yes, I know she’s probably reading this).
Graduate education and undergraduate education are of course linked, but I think most middle-class Americans don’t give a crap about graduate education in general (which really is and should be about people who deeply care about scholarship and teaching, the life of the mind and the life of the mouth), but they are very very interested in undergraduate education. They connect at the point where graduate students are used as cheap labor to teach undergraduates, but with the adjunctification of the university, that’s not quite as common any more.
I’m sure there’s something more deep to say here, but I have 70 more exams to grade before I can go to Florida, so back to the grind I go.
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Oh dear. I took a day off from the Internet and I see that I have become Rush Limbaugh. Ha.
OK. Let me just say that is bullshit.
Problem 1. Grad programs chew up smart, young people. Leave with them no job, no retirement plan, and basically unemployable in any other profession.
Problem 2. Nobody is doing anything about it. Faculty and administrators have no interest in making changes.
Problem 3. At many universities, these unemployable PhDs are working without benefits and for little money.
Problem 4. Nobody is doing anything about it.
Problem 5. Students are leaving college with large amounts of debt.
Problem 6. Nobody is doing anything about it.
I thought that being concerned about disadvantaged groups made a liberal.
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I agree that there is great pressure on state and city colleges right now, because of the sorry state of state budgets. But these problems existed long before the budget problem. The Invisible Adjunct was blogging about this situation, when the economy was far more rosy.
I will be the first on line to advocate for greater state support of universities, but I think that with even greater funding, there just aren’t enough spots for tenure track faculty.
My graduate program was run by really fine individuals. One of my advisors in particular was a swell guy. However, very few people came out of the program and found jobs. Steve and I were very, very lucky. We finished our programs in respectable times with little debt. Steve got out of academia, so we could put food on the table. But other friends were destroyed. They have mountains of debt. They spent 10+ years in school. And now are marginally employed.
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I agree that there is a similar and growing problem even in the hard sciences (particularly in the biological sciences). As govt funding for research has gone up, universities consider science departments to be cash cows and there is increasing pressure on faculty to bring in money. A consequence of this is for faculty to hire increasing number of graduate students and postdocs who do most of the work with faculty increasingly being fundraisers and managers.
I think this is unsustainable, and sometimes wonder whether this would negatively affect the academic enterprise on the whole in the intermediate future.
I agree partially that higher education does not deserve to have a target painted on it. On the other hand, universities are increasingly behaving like corporate entities with negative consequences for their main
mission of education and research.
I also would never advise anyone I know to pursue a doctorate unless it is in professions where graduates have no problems getting employed. I certainly would not advise them to enter doctoral programs in the sciences, especially biological sciences [I have a science Ph.d]
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You would be wrong. Liberals only care about certain disadvantaged groups, but they care far more about advantaged groups most notably themselves. The IMF and World Bank just made Ghanaian residents considerably poorer this last week. There has been no mention of it on any liberal blogs. In contrast those same blogs spent buckets of electronic ink and tears lamenting that the relatively very, very rich and white Greeks are now slightly less rich than they were. Meanwhile people barely surviving in Nima many have to pay 20% more for everything. Caring about certain groups like rich Greeks and not others like poor Africans does make one a liberal, but the term disadvantaged doesn’t fit well in here.
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I don’t think MM is talking about problems at the graduate level
It’s hard to see how anyone could read her article and reach that conclusion, but then again some people turn Megan’s articles into gibberish when they read them. Maybe something to do with smudged eye-glasses.
It did seem like neither Megan nor the blogger she was quoting were familiar with “alt-ac” as an academic path for PhDs who didn’t want to pursue the tenure track. Alt-ac has nothing to do with the undergraduate tuition issue, and is not intended to “fix” the PhD problem.
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Here’s a thought: When my kids were little, I thought that the best way to make sure that they did well academically later in life was to read them lots of books, do art projects with them, take them to museums, take them to children’s theater, etc. Many of my neighbors simply opted to purchase the ‘gifted test’ online and cram their 7 year olds full of the information that they knew would be tested. Their kids were fast-tracked by the school in third grade and mine were not. My kids had larger vocabularies and could write better but the other kids had learned a specific set of skills that were being tested and screened for. Somehow I had foolishly given my kids the equivalent of a liberal arts preschool education and others had given them kids a technical education. They chose the short-cut and it worked.
I think it’s a metaphor for life right now. There’s pressure for everyone to find the short-cut, to reduce the risk (I like that comment upthread because risk is a good way to think through this problem) and to assume that all that matters is the end. We’ve become a society that can no longer afford music or art or theater — Interestingly, all of Europe is having the same conversation. (Article in the London Times today about a town where the new STarbucks advertised for 8 baristas, and got 1700 applications, many from people with college degrees.)
Part of me feels like I learned my lesson when my kids were little and I can’t aford to let them make the same mistake in college.
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Separate out the specific issue of doctoral students and their job market from the general issue of “students leaving with lots of debt”, first off.
Because the “doing something about it” in those two cases is quite different. The only place they converge is that the simplest thing someone can do about it is to say, “Don’t do it: don’t go into lots of debt unless you have a fairly clear idea of what college is going to do for you and the institution you’re attending does its best to keep your debt levels as low as possible”. And so too doctoral study: one thing to be done is to say, “Don’t do it unless you have a clear idea of the odds and the challenges”. Which, in fact, some people ARE saying. Like me (over ten years ago) and Pannapacker and quite a few others. With law schools this advice seems to be sinking in, other education not so much.
When it comes to the general situation, Laura, I think you are not recognizing how the miserable situation of the academic job market is now structurally similar the miserable situation of the entire economy. There are no secure middle class jobs left anywhere to look forward to, just about. The answer to the problem is bigger than any single group or institution. One of the things I was writing about this week is essentially: what do could you expect faculty at a research university to do about it? You know that I agree that many TT faculty at the R1s are still way, way too recumbent, too complacent, too unwilling to make some of the adjustments. That’s what Berube was writing about too. But even if they started tinkering more radically, they are eventually going to come up against a crisis far bigger than them and not of their own making. Then what? Should they all commit suicide? Close all the universities down for good? Give away half their salaries to a compensatory fund for the academic underemployed? When you say, “nobody is doing anything about it”, what do you have in mind as doing something? I have some ideas, have had ideas for fifteen years, and maybe my undergraduate-only institution might be moving in some of these directions soon (as will others, I hope). But the really big problems will eventually defeat us all if we just play the game of blaming each profession or institution in turn for a general structural crisis.
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This is a weird discussion. I’m not quite sure why we are disagreeing. This was a quickie post that linked approvingly on what you and Berube wrote. confused.
I didn’t write that much in the blog post about the problems with graduate education, because I did that a lot nine years ago when I started blogging. I’ve been out of grad school for 12 years now and a lot of time has passed. In fact, I had to go back to my archives and delete posts to protect the innocent.
The problems with my old graduate program are completely self evident. There are absolutely no secrets. No funding. Poor track record with placing students. Horrid record with getting students through the program in under ten years. Admitting too many students. Too many silly MA programs. Lack of oversight over the faculty-student relationship. I can go on and on. Outside review boards said the same thing.
I honestly think that a program with these kinds of problems should not exist. The doors should be shut.
It’s quite a leap to go from the particular grad program should be shut down to “close all universities for good.” And it’s an unfair leap.
Yes, there is a collective action problem in curbing the problems in academia. There are people who have jobs there and need to pay the mortgage. Huge bureaucracies keep the system in motion. But change has to happen.
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(I’m going into the city for the day with the kids. Not going to be checking comments until later tonight.)
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My apologies to Wendy. I got confused and thought Laura had linked to this MM post.
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I think the main solution to Laura’s problems 1-4 is that 21+ year olds have to stop shouldering the risks associated with a grad degree. They don’t take this option because they aren’t ready to give up their dream yet. Is it really better for the profs to make the decision for them?
I do think that where our society is producing incentives that are exploitative (in science I think a part of this problem is the NIH-funded research grants used to support grad students which encourages the expansion of the programs), we should think about the overall effects of our investments, and reconsider.
For grad students, though my advice is the same as for law school. if you choose to go, only go to a problem with a strong reputation in your field, and have an alternative plan in mind, along with a deadline of when to pull the cord.
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I think your old grad program is at one end of the spectrum–so I think this is one important issue, to not misidentify it with the whole or the norm.
Which is where you started this thread–you weren’t saying, “Let’s figure out how to close the distinctively bad programs via some tougher accreditation or professional standards”, you were speaking of “academia” overall, generally. Trying to create transparency and standards that help students identify substandard or underperforming programs, or institutions that impose unusually high debt burdens on their students, is a pretty manageable task–and quite different than “academia”.
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The problems I am worried about are with graduate and professional education, not undergraduate education. Yes, undergraduate education should be cheaper, second tier schools that are as expensive as first tier ones but without the aid programs need to scale down their tuition, etc.etc., but if I want my kids to get an undergraduate education–if I think they will be severely limited if they do not–then who am I to tell other people, less advantaged people, that their kids shouldn’t? I once read an opinion piece in which someone railed against too many kids going to college and they should all become plumbers or something (despite the building downturn), but then he admitted that he had kids in college. If fewer kids go to college, then those that do–mainly those whose parents are wealthier or educated themselves–will maintain their traditional advantage. That’s what I call class warfare, and I think it’s one factor in the current conservative war on higher education.
No, everyone does not need to go to college. I tell you who doesn’t need to go to college. Someone who already has the benefits of being in the educated class because they come from an educated family. My father has a PhD, my brother didn’t go to college but has a better job than me in the computer industry. He already has the higher standard of health that an educated person has, because of what he learned out our dinner table; the longer life expectancy; the better parenting practices, like reading books at nighttime and teaching abcs prior to preschool; the interest in being a participant in the political life of the country. He speaks well, performs well in groups of educated people. He didn’t have to go to college to get all of that, so since his job is one of the few remaining good jobs in society that doesn’t require college, more power to him. Though I think he’s expecting all of his kids to go.
But the kids I teach–inner city kids from lower middle class backgrounds, with an average family income in the thirties–college can literally be a matter of life and death. Kids they knew from childhood are getting shot. They are getting out. It doesn’t matter if they won’t make a ton of money (though some will). It doesn’t matter if they end up in middle managerial positions at places like Walmart. They are getting something more than a better job, something that will benefit their kids, and their kids’ kids. That will improve their health. Enable them to move in different social circles. And all that for the average debt less than the cost of an SUV (thanks to the state taxpayers, who now only pay 17% of what it costs to operate the universities). That’s why at last year’s college graduation, there was an old grandmother who was saying “God bless you, God bless you, God bless you,” to the faculty as they passed by.
I say, put your money where your mouth is. If the pundits think too many kids are going to college, they can start by telling their own kids not to go. But they won’t do that. That’s why I know they don’t mean what they say.
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Sorry that was so long. This war on undergraduate education thing has really been getting to me for a while.
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I do think that the problems of undergrad ed and graduate schools are tied together, but I won’t go into it right now.
Lisa SG, I taught at a college like yours for several semesters. I had students who had brothers in gangs mixed with kids who got into Ivies, but couldn’t afford it. It was the same school that my mom got her BA years before. She was a second generation Italian from the Bronx who paid for her education by working two jobs. I am EXTREMELY in love with colleges who serve this population and DEEPLY disappointed when they lose sight of their mission.
My grad program was definitely on one side of the extremes on the continuum of bad grad school practices, but all programs suck to a certain extent. I got my MA at the U of C. Even though I got all A’s, I didn’t want to stay there, because it was such a miserable place. Quite a number of my friends took 10+ years to graduate, too. Berube said that its takes an average 8.5 years to finish a PhD in the humanitiies. That the average. That means that quite a number of people at all sorts of grad programs are getting done in their mid 30’s. Getting done in the mid-30’s killed me, because I needed to make babies at that time.
My grad program is a multi-million dollar program. They occupy an entire building in mid-town Manhattan. Big time bucks. They produce about 50 PhDs in all subject every year and only about half of those find jobs. Millions of dollars to make 25 professors? Crazy. Incredibly inefficient. Why do they do it? Because making PhDs isn’t the main point of the program. The main point of the program is to draw in higher level professors into the school, who have no interest in teaching Lisa SG’s students. Professors with big reputations increase the schools rankings. Also, the grad program produces all sorts of cheap labor for the undergraduate schools. And they all pay tuition. Nice all around. Just not nice for the grad students.
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Just got here. Wow! Quite a discussion.
Laura, you write and run a wonderfully humane blog, the first one I ever visited and one that keeps me coming back. You couldn’t be less like Rush if you got up every morning and thought about not being him.
But I do agree with Tim’s last post: it’s one thing to say that your program, and lots of others, are run in a destructive, unprofessional way; another to talk about “Grad programs” or “Academe.”
I teach both graduate and undergraduate students. 60% of our undergraduates are on scholarship, 100% of our graduate students, for five years–tuition and stipend, with some supplements for research travel, language training and the like. Then there’s teaching to fill in when the fellowship ends. We lose some–including some we shouldn’t. But more than 80% finish, on average in just over 6 years, and the vast majority of them end up with academic jobs. It’s not perfect: but it’s also not an abbatoir, and there are others like it (and no doubt others that function better).
What few departments do, however–and here too I agree with Tim–is to be transparent. We collect data about completion rates and times, but don’t make it easy to find. And we don’t seriously try to collect and display placement data. What we list are, for the most part, first placements, many of them post-docs and VAPs; only a few departments give details about placements outside the academy or update the details about academic placements. As a result, there’s no way that an undergraduate interested in graduate work in history, or her adviser, can find accurate data about likely outcomes.
We should do a lot better, and I hope that in the next few years we will.
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Thanks, Tony. You’re terribly sweet.
Yes, yes. I did paint a broad brush with that blog post. Sigh. It’s hard, because I feel like I fought for reforms for years when I was in grad school. (The length of time and the lack of funding was just part of the problem with our program. There were other problems, including very inappropriate advisor-student issues that I can’t go into on this blog.) And then I fought for years on these issues in the early years of this blog. And got nowhere.
The broad paint brush came out of despair. That’s why I’m increasingly making big plain statements like, “don’t get a PhD” without any nuances or footnotes or qualifications.
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That’s why I’m increasingly making big plain statements like, “don’t get a PhD” without any nuances or footnotes or qualifications.
I’ve started to add detail about Ghana to every statement I make. It’s a trend.
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It seems that Prof. Grafton, supra, is talking about Princeton. Nobody is talking about shutting down or de-funding Princeton. It is a good illustration of how the guild mentality dominates: respectable lawyers won’t take a stand against sleazy lawyers, honest bankers won’t take a stand against crooked ones, and professors with programs that deserve to stay in business won’t take a stand against abusive programs. Instead we get this “hang together or hang separately” mentality that every lawyer, or every graduate program, must be defended at all costs. Why can’t universities police themselves? Why can’t the powers that be in academia take a stand against programs that aren’t delivering value?
I know lawyers are no better, but I concede readily that many of my colleagues are scum; I doubt that Prof. Grafton is that candid.
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We could talk about law schools, where dodgy lawyers and scummy academics meet.
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“I think you are not recognizing how the miserable situation of the academic job market is now structurally similar the miserable situation of the entire economy.”
I think that’s correct.
It’s also true that as long as I can remember, the blue collar world has been hard hit. At different times, farmers, coal miners, steel workers, auto workers, oil workers and loggers have all struggled, but for a long time, education and white collar jobs were an escape hatch from those problems. What’s relatively new is that the white collar world is struggling (or, maybe, it’s just not big enough to shelter all the aspiring escapees from the blue collar world).
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Laura said:
“The problems with my old graduate program are completely self evident. There are absolutely no secrets. No funding. Poor track record with placing students. Horrid record with getting students through the program in under ten years. Admitting too many students. Too many silly MA programs. Lack of oversight over the faculty-student relationship. I can go on and on. Outside review boards said the same thing.”
That sounds awful. What did they lure you in with?
Another issue to keep an eye on is credential creep. There are a lot of professions outside academia where a master’s degree has become or is becoming the standard expected credential (K-12 teaching, social work, engineering, psychology, etc.).
“Berube said that its takes an average 8.5 years to finish a PhD in the humanitiies.”
Bear in mind that it’s not necessarily taking all that time to finish the dissertation–some people are basically done but are circling the runway while waiting for a job to appear.
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My husband reminds me that you have to bear in mind that a lot of people come in with MAs (which may or may not be much help). So it’s hard to say when the clock started. Was it at the beginning of the MA or the beginning of the doctoral program?
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“We could talk about law schools, where dodgy lawyers and scummy academics meet.”
Paul Campos has been all over this at Lawyers, Guns & Money. Transparency about outcomes for graduates is starting to make a difference, but (1) the law schools have been forced to provide information; and (2) they are engaging in all kinds of jiggery-pokery to inflate the employment numbers.
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….coulda knocked me over with a feather when I read NYT this morning about vet degree holders. When I was in school, vet school was a Golden Ticket.
I think some of what’s going on is the slowness of Geezer Parents like myself to take account of changed conditions. So we back our kids going down blind alleys.
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I still remember when the vets would only do two things for dogs, neuter them and put them down.
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“. . . take account of changed conditions. So we back our kids going down blind alleys.”
But, because there are no safe alleys. Trading risk (and reward) for security doesn’t seem to be an option. How then, do we advise? My two current pieces of advise, not always popular, here even, is first, to get used to the competition and to think about when you’ve lost, or at least are in a hole. In the case of grad school & law school, it’s when you can’t get into a top program. Second it’s to think about the upside and downside risks.
The problem is that lots of people are going to loose often enough that the remaining options aren’t very palatable, unless they’ve really developed a sense of worth apart from what they do and how they are compensated. And, that some people will be better able to shoulder downside risk, allowing them to go after upside rewards that others will be shut out of.
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That’s a good catch, dave s.
From the NYT article on veterinarians:
“She also has $312,000 in student loans, courtesy of Ross University School of Veterinary Medicine, on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts. Or rather, $312,000 was what she owed the last time she could bring herself to log into the Sallie Mae account that tracks the ever-growing balance.”
Is an offshore veterinary school a red flag? One of my young relatives did a couple years of medical school at an offshore location (also in the Caribbean) because she wasn’t able to get into a US program (she quit mid-way with $60+k in debt).
One thing I’ve noticed is that quasi-medical degrees can be quite as expensive as real medical degrees. I remember hearing a call on the Dave Ramsey show from a guy who’d graduated from chiropractor school with $200k in debt, which is roughly what real MDs come out of school with these days. Needless to say, he wasn’t making nearly enough money to carry his loans comfortably.
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I wonder about the ethics of a lot of the expensive veterinary stuff I hear about. I’m a former farm kid, and the idea of putting a dog through chemotherapy is just unimaginable to me.
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I’m in a grad program where I earn more than many of my friends working “real jobs” and get health insurance. No 401K, but I’m going to set up my own Roth IRA and put the savings from my grad school stipend in it. As a wealthy private institution, my school is not known for being particularly generous to grad students, either. It seems there are programs that are terrible, and there are top 10 programs where grad students earn above the median wage, and it’s not particularly helpful to use either as an example of “grad school” or “academia” on the whole, or to base decisions on either. I think most people would agree that going to an unfunded school with a bad track record is a bad idea, and going fully funded to a top program with a good placement record is still a risk but one with reasonably decent odds if that is your dream.
I agree with some people on the discomfort of telling other people not to go to college, unless it’s truly backed by a system where everyone regardless of class can pursue their interests, so children of bankers become plumbers, and children of single working moms become neurosurgeons. Until then, it seems to me that, even if it might be a smart decision individually, telling working class people to skip college feels the re-entrenchment of a class system that the post-WW2 GI Bill socialism seemed designed to erase.
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I do think it’s impossible to know what to advise our kids in this screwed up economy. (Recently talked to my dad who is in his 70’s. Said I had a kid that wanted to go to a conservatory and become a musician and how I was having a really hard time supporting that because of how risky it is — and my dad said something along the lines of “So is everything else. If there’s no guarantee that getting a law degree will get you a job as a lawyer and no guarantee that majoring in history or economics will get you a job at all, then maybe you should actually major in what you want to do.” (This from a guy who went to med school and hated it but doggedly carried on for years in order to support a family.) It sounded very European to me — thinkign of all the Dutch people I know who majored in Medieval-Renaissance studies ‘since there aren’t any jobs anyway’ — of course most of them ended up on the dole for years. (I am somewhat convinced that no matter what my kids major in, they will probably end up teachig English overseas or doing something along those lines, then coming back and getting a master’s in something practical).
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Louisa,
That is a problem. I’m years away from this, but my current thoughts are 1) a firm limit of 4 years of support (with good enough grades, tolerable behavior, etc.) 2) be open about majors 3) require work or internships 4) require a certain amount of “practical” coursework.
Some of the “practical” coursework can be done at a community college, too. A lot of kids will eventually benefit from a marketing course or a basic bookkeeping course or computer classes, no matter what path they eventually pursue. A musician just getting started needs to be able to market herself, manage her business, maintain a web presence, etc.
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