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The Ph.D. Now Comes With Food Stamps
- YuriNiyazov 15y agoDoes it make me a bad human being if I feel zero pity for highly educated people who do not understand the basics of supply and demand in their chosen job market?
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- jseliger 15y agoI suspect people downvoted you because of the tone and your use of a rhetorical question—if you'd just said, "I don't pity highly educated people who don't understand supply and demand in their chosen job market." And you know what? You're right. I'm in English Lit grad school, and the number one thing I tell other people who are contemplating it is not to go. Then I tell them to read Louis Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas and Thomas Benton's articles: http://chronicle.com/article/The-Big-Lie-About-the-Life-of/63937/ http://chronicle.com/article/The-Big-Lie-About-the-Life-of/6... .
- sparsevector 15y agoI think the problem is more complicated than basic supply and demand. There is a lot of demand for college education. Enrollment is higher than it has ever been, and the people profiled in this article have jobs. The problem is that in order to cut cost colleges are hiring more and more adjunct professors as opposed to full-time, tenure track professors. It's not uncommon for these adjunct professors to take on jobs at multiple community colleges in order to make enough. The end result is that they are doing as much or more work than a full time professor but for less pay.
- wtvanhest 15y agoIt is still over supplied. If it weren't then colleges would be forced to hire tenure track professors to fill the positions since there wouldn't be enough people to teach.
- kijin 15y agoWhy would colleges want to hire tenure-track professors if adjuncts can teach the same number of students for less money? The full-time vs. adjunct debate has nothing to do with whether college is over- or under-supplied. It's a problem with how colleges supply whatever it is that they supply.
- sunsu 15y ago"Why would colleges want to hire tenure-track professors if adjuncts can teach the same number of students for less money?" That is precisely the point. There is an oversupply of people willing to do the job and thus people are willing to do it for less money (teaching adjunct). If there were a shortage, then the university would be forced to pay more and give more benefits (hire tenure track).
- kijin 15y agoThere seems to be a lot of confusion in this thread about what one another is saying. sparsevector said that colleges are not oversupplied, because there's a lot of demand for them. wtvanhest replied with a comment that sounds as if colleges are oversupplied, when in fact his evidence suggests that teachers are oversupplied. That's off-topic. So I was trying to point that out, and now you're repeating wtvanhest's argument that teachers are oversupplied. That's not a bad argument in itself, and I'm not downvoting you (HN doesn't allow me to downvote replies to my own comment) but it's still off-topic in the context of sparsevector's argument above.
- wtvanhest 15y agoI downvoted his comment while trying to upvote it. (android phone is hard to use hn on) which is probably why it went grey. I am talking about professors since that is what the article is about and completely not worrying about colleges since that is off topic. The entire point of the article is that a person who decides to get a PhD in history should be paid because they went to school for 4 years. To me, that concept is ridiculous and people don't get to be paid a lot for what they want to do in the absence of basic economic theory. Too many professors, not enough demand = low pay. It sucks that person made that choice, but there are plenty of secretarial jobs which pay above poverty level which someone with a PhD in history could get.
- StevenRayOrr 15y agoMedieval History, English, & Film Studies. I shouldn't throw stones, because my chosen discipline of Political Theory is not exactly a bustling field. But: what did they think they were getting into? Education for the sake of education is fine, but it is incredibly difficult to take care of a family when you completely ignore economics. Study what you love, sure, but don't expect that it will lead you to financial success.
- Agathos 15y agoThey do exactly what people outside of academia do: look at those who came before. They see their advisors doing fine. Academia is weirdly deceptive in that way.
- yummyfajitas 15y agoThis is a silly excuse for anyone who started grad school after google was invented. It's also a silly excuse for anyone in their 2nd year who ever spoke to a 5-6th year.
- gjm11 15y agoSince you ask: Yes, actually, it does.
- YuriNiyazov 15y agoBy what moral standard?
- Cadsby 15y agoBy one different than your own? Not being snarky, and I'll assume your original question was asked in good faith. However, logical arguments, no matter how well crafted, tend not change people's minds about moral issues. If you don't care, then you don't care. And there's probably nothing that can be said in this thread that will change your position on the matter.
- yummyfajitas 15y agoThe racial overtones of the article confuse me - should I be more sympathetic because the literature professor is white?
- scarmig 15y agoThat's what immediately jumped out at me. Which is sort of funny, because the majority of people on Medicaid are white, IIRC. I attribute it to, on the reporter's part, two parts laziness to one part subconscious racism.
- jbooth 15y agoIf you watched fox news for a few weeks, you'd be forgiven for thinking that approximately 99% of medicaid went to black people, and that those expenses are responsible for the majority of the budget deficit. I suspect that the reporter's channeling the media environment as "what most people believe", which would make the subjects' whiteness somewhat novel.
- Cadsby 15y agoI think the article was seeking to address the widely held view that the vast majority of public assistance recipients are black, and relatedly that they're lazy, uneducated (by choice), and all around primarily responsible for our nation's financial problems. Of course this has never been true, and part of the point of the article was that it's even less true today. Perception is very important in how people view these issues. When people see someone they can relate to, someone that looks like them, or their sibling, parent, next door neighbor, etc., it becomes a lot harder to sit in judgment and be morally dismissive of their circumstances. I've lived in various parts of middle America, Tennessee, South Dakota, Montana, and many of these people feel these programs should be abolished exactly because of this misperception. Of course when you point out that their grandma, or auntie or cousin is on Medicare, food stamps, etc., their immediate response is - "Well I'm a hard working, Christian American, I deserve these things. It's those OTHER people who are the problem."
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- sadlawyer 15y agoThis isn't the half of it. Many PhD programs are funded, and most people going into them know they're studying things for the joy of learning about them and are not necessarily going to find work easily, especially at lower ranked schools. Try going to one of the top ten law programs, taking out an enormous amount of debt, dealing with 3 years of opportunity cost etc., in what's supposed to be a professional program that tracks you onto finding good paying work, and then finding out no one wants your professional services. Not whining ... I made my bed, it's made of student loan bills, I've got to sleep in it. But you can be damn well sure that I shout from the rooftops about the very dubious investment proposition that even "elite" educational programs offer these days...
- castillo157 15y agoWhat? No one needs an expert in medieval studies?
- tzs 15y agoThere's a Nova episode about the effort to prove that a portrait was a lost da Vinci. An important part of the investigation was Elisabetta Gnignera, a costume historian and expert in renaissance hairdos, identifying the bound ponytail of the girl in the portrait as being a style that only ever became prominent in Milan, and only for a few years--the same years when da Vinci served the Milan ruling family as artist and engineer. I thought it was cool that there are people who are experts in renaissance hairdos--and that their knowledge can actually be put to practical use. (There is much more than the hairdo evidence to tie the painting to da Vinci. It's worth watching the Nova episode if they show it again. The combination of historical research and modern scientific analysis was quite intriguing).
- dbecker 15y agoThey make it sound like a new development, but this has been the Chronicle of Higher Education's bread-and-butter topic for a long time. I somehow got on their mailing list during grad school, and I've received regular updates about the supposed oppression of the worlds PhD's and graduate students ever since.
- javert 15y agoMs. Bruninga-Matteau does not blame Yavapai College for her situation but rather the "systematic defunding of higher education." In fact, it is the systematic overfunding of higher education that has led this person to getting a degree that is worthless. Plus her own poor choices, of course.
- WalterSear 15y agoChoices, in her partial defence, she did not make in a vacuum. I'm willing to gamble that at least one person indoctrinated her with 'follow your dreams, and the money will come'.
- dalke 15y agoWhen I was in physics grad school, some 20 years ago, I was paid $11K/year. As a single male with no dependents, living in a room which cost $200/month, and walking distance from classes and work, it was quite doable. Others, married and/or with children, had it more complicated. Some students did get welfare. The plan was that after graduation we would have access to much better paying jobs. But some of my friends, PhD trained in chemistry or physics, still found it difficult to find a job in their chosen profession. Many ended up with postdoc positions, making more than the adjunct professors mentioned here, but still with little money and little job security. One may say they have "zero pity for highly educated people who do not understand the basics of supply and demand in their chosen job market" - and bear in mind that I'm talking here about people trained in the sciences, and not humanities which is oft smirked at for its dearth of job prospects. But the thing is, we as people get to decide what failure means. We don't need to let one bad choice prove ruinously disastrous. As jseliger's link points out, I, as a 21 year old who outside of a few summer jobs had never been outside of the academic environment, really did not understand the job market and options available to me, so made my decision on rather limited information. I hadn't even realized, for example, that graduate schools paid TA salaries. I thought I would have to apply for scholarships like I did for my undergraduate education. It worked out well for me, but it also felt like a lot of chance was involved. Lady Luck could easily given a worse roll. I do not see my success as purely my own achievement. I do not want my failures to be my own cross to bear, and nor would I wish that on others. Yes, I believe in funding a strong social safety net.
- scarmig 15y agoThis article is tailor made for a lot of Nelson Muntz-ish "HAHA"s. 1) Gloating over your own skills being in demand can be short-sighted. How many of the people here were thinking, "wow, I'm really passionate about medieval history, but I'll go into software development because that's where the big bucks are?" I'd hazard to say none: people choose to do what they enjoy, not what will make them money. Just because your passion happened to line up with today's market discipline doesn't mean that anyone whose passions aren't in that same direction are fools. (And do you really want a bunch of people who have no innate skills in programming flocking to IT and CS in the hopes of cashing out?) 2) That said, I'm not massively sympathetic toward her. Lots of people don't have the ability to easily cease living off food stamps: she could find a job to catapult her into the middle class in a matter of months. It's a choice on her end. Though, it's not even clear that it's a poor choice, since she gets to do what she loves and has enough money plus entitlements for food, shelter, and medical care. 3) But to tease out some points even further... most people are more interested in pissing on her choices than in figuring out how they can use her situation to better the world. Wait, (ostensibly) great teachers in obscure topics are out there in abundance working only a couple hours a week? Shouldn't we be spending more time wondering "Is there an opportunity here?" than wondering if her choices make her education worthless or if she deserves our pity or not?
- xaa 15y agoYep at #1. Perhaps, as an exercise in empathy, people here could imagine how their lives would change if, due to "supply and demand", programmer salaries dropped to $20k/year.
- YuriNiyazov 15y agoBelieve it or not, I imagine that all the time, and keep a long list of subjects that I casually read about on the side as a hedge. The first thing I would do is ditch programming as a means of producing a living, and only do it as a hobby, and immediately reorganize my life to transition to a field that pays what programmer salaries are now.
- phamilton 15y ago
- phamilton 15y agoI think the underlying assumption in the article is that people who get an education are more entitled to a high paying job than those who don't have such an education. That entitlement is a huge question. Why should they be entitled to higher paying jobs? Because they worked hard to get there? I used to work 12 hour days as a construction worker making $10/hour. I work half as hard as a programmer as I did as a construction worker, yet I earn 8 times as much. In the 4 years of school it took to get here, I can't even pretend that I worked harder than my former colleagues did. Clearly how hard we work isn't the only factor in our wages. So what is this entitlement based on? I'm not asking what wages should be based on. We almost all agree that you should be paid according to the value you add. My question is why it is (or why is it supposed to be) surprising that someone with a PhD in medieval studies can't find work. What is the assumption by the general public based on?
- Cadsby 15y agoI'd substitute the word "entitlement" with "expectation". And it's not hard to see why they'd have it. I'm 29, and I can clearly remember getting the message from every corner of society that more education = higher income/earning potential. From every teacher, guidance counselor, and regular adult in my life the message was the same. College education means financial security.
- cageface 15y agoThese people could come to SE Asia and actually make more money teaching basic English, in cities where the cost of living is 1/4th or less that of any US city. The English teachers I talked to in Hanoi said they couldn't spend their entire salary there if they tried.
- vectorpush 15y agoSupplemental skills are essential, even for us fancy-pants code warriors. On the day they were awarded their degrees, the half dozen buddies I have who graduated as computer science majors could barley fizz-buzz their way out of a shot glass; it took a lot of studying, experimentation, and self-direction outside the classroom before they really came into their own as valuable professionals. Software is a lucrative career path, but a college education from most universities is almost worthless on its face. Degree holders with a dim economic outlook need to consider the value in supplementing their education with a skill set that allows them to capitalize on their specialized knowledge.
- pchivers 15y agoObligatory Thomas H. Benton link: Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go http://chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-in-the/44846 http://chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-in-the/44846
- ja27 15y agoCan't help noticing that she's unpacking her food stamp purchases in front of a $300 KitchenAid mixer.
- rsanchez1 15y ago"...with a Ph.D. in medieval history..." Say no more. She's just lucky she had a Republican governor to blame for her economic situation. "Some are struggling to pay back student loans and cover basic living expenses as they submit scores of applications for a limited pool of full-time academic positions." That's the real problem right there. If she went into higher education expecting to make a comfortable living from it, she should've checked her prospects first. I can't imagine there would be very many opportunities for a medieval history doctorate.