One thing many PhD students have in common is dissatisfaction. Some describe their work as “slave labour”. Seven-day weeks, ten-hour days, low pay and uncertain prospects are widespread. You know you are a graduate student, goes one quip, when your office is better decorated than your home and you have a favourite flavour of instant noodle.
There is an oversupply of PhDs. Although a doctorate is designed as training for a job in academia, the number of PhD positions is unrelated to the number of job openings. Meanwhile, business leaders complain about shortages of high-level skills, suggesting PhDs are not teaching the right things. The fiercest critics compare research doctorates to Ponzi or pyramid schemes.
[...]
America produced more than 100,000 doctoral degrees between 2005 and 2009. In the same period there were just 16,000 new professorships.
But on Gilligan's Island, one out of seven of the people is a professor who gets all the respect and a hut with no roommate. Surely the real world is just like Gilligan's Island. Right?
ReplyDeleteFor thirty years there has been a need for a general strike by adjuncts and grad students.
ReplyDeleteBut Bubba, the Professor didn't get any of the girls, either, you'll note.
ReplyDeleteI know this will be an unpopular position on this blog, but I call bullshit.
ReplyDeleteI came into academia by way of acting, a profession for which there are no statistics like "100,000 for every 16,000 jobs, bla bla bla." The very idea is laughable. You don’t decide to go into acting because you’re hoping for an insta-job upon graduation with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in theatre; you do it because you want to be an actor. Some people succeed in the theatre world; many more don’t. But you don’t see a lot of former actors referring to their first few working-for-peanuts theatre jobs as “slave labour.” Nor do you see them writing articles for the Economist about how the years they spent working on a BFA (or waiting tables in New York or Toronto or London while going to audition after occasionally successful audition) were nothing but a Ponzi scheme, so it wasn’t even worth the attempt.
After making the switch to academia, I ended up being one of the lucky ones (and yes, just as with acting, succeeding in academia is at least as much about luck as it is about talent and perseverance) who ended up in one of those coveted tenure-track jobs. But what if I hadn’t been? There still would have been no reason to regret getting the Ph.D., because in training for this particular career, I didn’t just study to be an academic, I actually went about the business of being one: I taught and did original research and submitted articles to journals and helped run conferences. Even if my academic career had stopped short after two years of a master’s and four years of a doctorate, it still would have been six solid years of participating in a profession I’d wanted to participate in. Just like an actor who spends the four years of her BFA going to auditions and dancing and singing and acting in actual shows and then ends up doing something entirely different after that--even if she does end up starting her own business or going to law school, she still got to spend those first four years being an actor.
Life is about experiences, not about choosing the golden option that is most certain to make you your first million by the time you’re forty, or pushing yourself higher and higher up some career ladder of your own making just for the sake of not feeling like a failure. How typical of the Economist to neglect that aspect in their calculation of what kinds of endeavours are worthwhile.
For thirty years there has been a need for a general strike by adjuncts and grad students.
ReplyDeleteI can't imagine how the adjuncts at my school would organize, much less nationwide.
But Bubba, the Professor didn't get any of the girls, either, you'll note.
Well, not on camera. But we all know the song. It clearly emphasizes a close systemic proximity to "Mary Ann". Indeed, he is mentioned between "the movie star" and Mary Ann. I think he might have been dipping into both of them, actually. Gilligan and the Captain always seemed to be suffering more from tension in the loins than the professor ever did.
@jae/jenny: You can be young and stupid as an actress, but most people with PhDs suffering through their peanut job years are in their 30s or more.
ReplyDeleteIf they have kids or a family, they're fucked. At least actors/actresses use their 20s to figure out if this is a viable career or not. You can crash with friends, work days at the coffee shop for health insurance. You can't do that as an adjunct. You can't work 50 hour weeks waiting for the T/T job and squeeze in a part-time job at Starbucks for the health insurance.
People invest too much time training for the PhD. By the end of 12 years of school, you should be ready to settle into a career. Your 30s is not the time to start screwing around.
And as I've mentioned before, I left classical music with an injury and chose (stupidly) academic instead.
Everyone knows being an actress is stupid. Most people don't realize that about academia.
The actresses I know all quit when they had kids. It's one thing to follow your dream, and another to starve your kids. Most academics in my generation (X) saw it as the conservative choice, the one where you stood the best chance of being creative AND feeding your kids. The joke was on us.
ReplyDeleteI second AM.
My guess is that not all PhD's are interested in jobs in academia. The most recent GRE Survey of Graduate Enrollment and Degrees shows:
ReplyDeleteDoctoral degrees awarded 2008-09 (number, percent of total)
Arts and Humanities 5056 9.5%
Biological/ Ag Sciences 7220 13.6%
Business 1573 3.0%
Education 7618 14.4%
Engineering 7429 14.0%
Health Sciences 6907 13.0%
Math and CompSci 2746 5.2%
Physical Earth Sci 4826 9.1%
Public Admin 501 0.9%
Social&Behavioral Sci 7165 13.5%
Other Fields 1933 3.6%
Total 52974
Most education doctorates are by the already employed and I think most engineering PhDs go into industry (maybe same is true for bio and physical scientists?). The ratio of degrees to jobs is overstated. This is not to say that the ratio for humanities and social scientists isn't as dire as implied - few jobs outside academia there.
I decided not to have kids so that I could enjoy several more decades of irresponsible couch-surfing!
ReplyDeleteAlso...I think there is something more complicated going on than just too many grads and not enough spaces. My own field, I note, is overstuffed with folks, although I am beginning to learn that you get jobs through nepotism. This sucks, but it is the way of the world, and if the way of the world wants to get me paid doing something I love, so be it.
People in my discipline in their 40s and 50s have also begun pointing out faculty in their 60s and 70s who "really should retire." We are a discipline that is remarkably long in the tooth overall, and while I don't wish to seem disrespectful to my elders, I know a hell of a lot of elders who are growing their Texpatrian tomatoes...and maybe should retire.
(On still the what, fourth hand? It's not like unis are queuing up to replace retiring faculty, it's more like "Oh, great! One less line we need to pay! Huzzah!)
Yeah, we don't get our retirement lines back, so I'm praying they'll stay. Every retirement now means one less person doing service work. I think the unis have figured out that without a standing faculty, not only do you pay much less in salaries and bennies, but you don't have any faculty governance, either.
ReplyDeleteNot that we do anyway.
@ AdjunctSlave
ReplyDeleteThese things are far easier to do now than ever before thanks to email and cell phones....if you can plan time to be in an auditorium together things are possible. Mass action takes time, but once it starts moving it is like lighning, especially right now when nobody but the silverbacks and the lardheads of the Administration are happy with how the academy is.
If anyone hasn't checked out the smug comment from Charles Rowley, it's worth the read. http://charlesrowley.wordpress.com/2010/12/19/why-completing-a-phd-is-truly-worthwhile-1/
ReplyDeleteHere's a guy who hasn't been on the job market since 1984 letting us know how much of a meritocracy academia is -- those without TT jobs or tenure are there because they are unworthy.
- FRP
True?? This silly piece of writing is filled with the most egregious falsehoods imaginable. I can't believe people on this blog have fallen for this Fox News style of journalism.
ReplyDeleteI blogged about this idiotic article here:
http://clarissasbox.blogspot.com/2010/12/irresponsible-journalist-at-economist.html
Everyone with a tenure line needs to stay in it until they fucking die. Don't retire until you are heedlessly blowing your nose in your sweater and loudly and publicly soiling yourself. Those tenure lines aren't coming back. It will not get better in 30 years. It will get worse. I expect that if I left today my tenure line would be filled by someone with a one-year contract. In 20 years, it will be filled by several adjuncts all teaching my courses electronically, and located thousands of miles from each other. For less than a fifth of my pay.
ReplyDelete@Clarissa--
ReplyDeleteHonestly I'm not sure how I feel about you using this blog to redirect viewers towards your own private blog. If everyone did that we'd all be replying to each other's outside blogs, and what would the point be of discussing stuff here?
But in general I have to admit I have a natural antipathy to any post anywhere that says anything remotely like "HEY LOOK AT MY BLOG! I BLOGGED ABOUT THIS ON MY BLOG!"
@Strelnikov
ReplyDeleteYou are sounding downright revolutionary. I'd march in that protest.
@Free Range Prof
ReplyDeleteNot to mention that Rowley is a right-wing nut, but I'll let that slip because there are so many bloggers of a "conservative" persuasion that a blog was started to mock many of them; the glory that is "Sadly, No!" (www.sadlyno.com).
@Jae/Jennie:
ReplyDeleteI mostly agree with you, and I say something similar to every one of my students who intend to go for a Ph.D. in astronomy. One problem with this is that my department chair hates it, because he's under pressure from the dean to increase enrollments. This is problematical, because we're a physics department: there just aren't that many students out there anymore who can do what we do, thanks to NCLB. Nevertheless, I do my best to steer students into useful fields in which there may be jobs, such as science teaching, or energy. So how does my department chair respond? He's tickled silly that I'm starting up a new course on cosmology. (That's the origin of the Universe: it has nothing to do with haircuts or makeup, that’s cosmetology.)
A big part of the problem here, at least in the natural sciences, is that there's no shortage of senior people who still think that aggressively recruiting students, often into quite abstruse fields, is still a good idea. This has been going on at least since 1989, when the NSF loudly trumpeted an "imminent shortage" of Ph.D.s: one might say it's been going on since Sputnik. How do we get them to stop doing that?
Academic Monkey: Yeah, I'm still not buying it. If you don't get a job, you leave the one career and do something else instead, like the vast majority of the people in the western world tend to do, several times in their lives. Non-academics who work for a while in one job and then move on to something different don't generally think it's the end of the world; why is it for us? And in our case, even if you do move on, you still got to work in the field during the years of your Ph.D., which makes it quite different from training for years for a job you never actually get to practice at all. Then again, I don't think trying to be a successful actor is "stupid" (as you say), either, and I don't regret the years I spent in that field one bit.
ReplyDeleteFroderick: That is ridiculous, agreed. But that is quite different from saying academia is being irresponsible in training more Ph.D.s than there are academic jobs. I say we should take a two-pronged approach: tell our students the truth about the fact that academia is anything but a sure thing, and mentor the ones well who aren't scared off by that. It's all you can expect in any career, really.
@Stella: I, too, could do without "LOOK AT MY BLOG!" posts. But doing it straightforwardly beats adopting another identity to praise one's own blog in the third person (a longstanding practice known in the 19th century as "puffery" -- but not, of course, in relation to blogs).
ReplyDeleteI tell my students that the chances of getting a job in my field, at this point, is almost impossible. And, even after I say this several times and tell them that I was an adjunct for 9 years before getting lucky, they still want to get a Ph.D...in the end it is their choice.
ReplyDelete