I love literature and writing. Love it love it love it. I am also aware that every English department at every university, from a business perspective, is nothing more than a pyramid scheme.
"In a potentially related development," the report went on, "Etsy listings for owl-shaped potholders and Kara-Walker-stenciled tea cosies have each risen 37%. However, sales of said knitwear are down 5% since last December."
Wow. I have a BA and MA in English and teach at a university that isn't the best or the brightest but I have a job . . . I have a job . . . I have a job . . . (new mantra)
Back when I started college in 2001, my school's English department hired mainly post-docs for one- to two-year positions. I don't even know how they're going to cut back from that.
Here's my pathetic rationalization of all of this.
This is all true, and I share with many humanities grads the self-loathing necessary to take grim humor in a post like these. What I do want to point out is this: it's only a bad financial decision if you have a reasonable expectation of making any money elsewhere. And I don't. I applied everywhere (everywhere) for two years before I gave myself over to grad school, and I didn't get a whiff of a decent job. The question for me wasn't whether to get a well paying job or go to grad school and be broke; the question was whether to go to grad school and be broke or not to go to grad school and be broke. Between my stipend from school and a part time job on campus, I make more than I did when I was tutoring and subbing. It's still not saying much. But it's not like being in grad is keeping me from untold riches.
Personally, I'm in Rhetoric and Comp, where the job market is a lot better, and because of the focus on pedagogy, there's a reasonable expectation of getting grant funded at some point. Does that mean the odds are good? Hell no. They just aren't as soul-crushingly bad. My R/C department has a near 100% hire rate the last few years, and the small size and insularity of the subdiscipline is a boon. But I don't have any illusions, and I could well end up embittered and working at Borders in five years. But, again, I could do that with or without getting this degree. And all in all I'd rather teach college kids and enjoy real scholarship (and I do) and wake up at 10 than teach high school kids, wake up at 7 and have nothing to show for it down the road. Do I wish I had gone premed way back when? Of course. But I can't go back, and for now, being broke and happy is preferable to being broke and unhappy.
And all of my friends who got their MBA all had to move back in with their parents last year, so at least I have people to commiserate with.
@Seeräuber Jenny: What I take issue with is that higher education was, and continues to be, sold to entire generations of high school kids as the way to get ahead. It's the schools' marketing campaigns that largely convince aimless teenagers (and their parents) that they may not know what they want to do now, but if they spend the next four years of their lives getting a degree, they'll be expanding their minds and they'll be entering the job market with a degree. Whee!
By the time you realize that academia is a dead end, you're often too far into it not to finish your four years. At which point the only thing you're qualified for is grad school. Vicious circle.
@Seeräuber Jenny: To answer your question, on the doctoral level, nobody pays. Getting in without funding is really getting rejected, and most programs will be happy to tell you that. People get GAs/TAs and get a small stipend, health insurance and a tuition waiver-- which, no doubt about it, is slave wages.
Well, at least it's something. It's sad how, the more a body of learning becomes decoupled from the ability to earn a living, people tend to value it less.
@Seeräuber Jenny: I can't speak for anyone else, but I knew it would be bleak when I went into it. Maybe because of this, I always had an eye out for potential job opportunities outside of academia, even though in order for the "grad school industrial complex" to really work, we're not encouraged to do so. And sure, I'm dismayed by numbers like this, but I have tried to be a realist all along so I don't feel, like, suddenly abandoned because I have never idealized academia in that way. I don't think many of us do, but that's the angle that the media likes to take because it makes for a better story.
I was fully funded and I still have some debt, but, you know, so do a lot of people with equivalent "real world" job skills. If I remind myself to keep this all in perspective, it doesn't freak me out too much. (And of course I don't have kids to feed, so there's that.)
@Seeräuber Jenny: there are those of us who ARE smart enough to comprehend the risks and the sacrifices that joining academia entails. i did, and i knew what i was getting into. i DIDN'T think the economy was going to tank so hard and that universities would react so hysterically by cancelling over 1/3 of job searches right when i was ready to go on the market. the academic job market has always been cutthroat: grad students at 2nd tier institutions have a lot of trouble getting jobs, because it is primarily the recommendations letters that seal your fate, and you better make sure that your letters are written by influential people in their field, or forget it. the most disturbing development, institutionally speaking, is the rapid decrease of tenure track jobs that uphold the integrity of the system as a whole. we basically have to apply for every $200 we get, and by the time we are employable we are also really good at applying for money. i have received many fellowships, but i also have a lot of debt. i do not consider my degree "worthless," just temporarily "irrevalent." this job market will separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak: those of us with less careerist delusions will stick it out and get jobs in the end. i just want to be a professor, make a modest living wage, lead a simple, but cerebral, life. i hardly think my goals are worth the mockery or pity i'm seeing here.
@starke: Please don't be mad at me! I was just trying to make conversation.
One summer, I had a work-study job in the humanities administration department of a big-three Ivy League University. I got to read and file the letters of recommendation. Heh heh heh.
I was a lot less anal back in the day and I had to retype something like 50 letters because I forgot the final period in "Ph.D." Boy, was I pissed!
@Seeräuber Jenny: Depends on your program. Well-funded departments will pay your tuition and offer you a stipend of some kind to live on, which can be supplemented by TAing or RAing. If they don't offer you full funding and it's not a poorer school, then they probably don't want you that badly anyway.
I dunno, I think it's probably a mistake to think of higher education as being a way to get a job. I always thought that it was a way to improve you as a human being.
Lincoln Technical Institute advises me that I can learn HVAC repair in a year.
It depends. How many jobs require a bachelor's in something...anything?
To go into debt over that, though...enh. How MUCH debt?
I went into the liberal arts because I hated it the least, was decent at it...and now I wish I'd just gone into business. Maybe I'm just not looking hard enough/tapping my school's career services enough.
I wonder if people REALLY benefit from going to Phoenix University (or whatever it's called) online, Devry, and any other school that's actually advertised on TV.
@maude_flanders: Yes, it is possible to benefit from a degree from Phoenix. I too was sceptical, but then some of my coworkers took that route, and I'm a believer.
I still think that the minority of graduates REALLY do learn something, but it is possible if somebody applies themselves.
Which makes P.U.,DeVry,ITT like all other universities: the actual, individual student effort is what matters. Those schools still have this handicap of accepting last-resort desperate cases and somehow managing to push them through.
If you're not going to grad school to learn HVAC maintenance or phlebotomy than just resign yourself to being unemployed from the outset. No one gives a rat's fistula about how exciting James Joyce is, how words make your life like a Dylan song, or how you should really be working at a place where your talents are appreciated, your vision shared, your play/script/poem/hipster-rap/novella/essay/Snapple bottle quote...great enough to land you a seat in literary effigy, and make you money and royalties for decades (not that you care about material gain. liar). "Naw, if you can't find my friggin expense report which is somewhere lost on my hard drive, I'll fire your ass, and outsource your $10.00 an hour job to India for $.05 rupees, Mr. most prophetic writer of the 21st century/Geek Squad Staples guy."
@Spirit Fingers: HA. Thank you. It puts me at peace with myself, the Raymond Carver characters in my purse, with whom I intend to enjoy a leisurely 30 minute Cup O Noodles lunch, and this pile of documents labeled 'Xerox ASAP'.
However, if English majors were to have an eye towards semantic search and other ways to apply the language (ESL anyone?), a few more avenues would open up. (was an English major)
Bloomy is doing radio promos for the all-news AM station in Toronto, identifying himself only as founder of Bloomberg Media. I think the station must have recently signed with Bloomberg for business news reports.
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This is all true, and I share with many humanities grads the self-loathing necessary to take grim humor in a post like these. What I do want to point out is this: it's only a bad financial decision if you have a reasonable expectation of making any money elsewhere. And I don't. I applied everywhere (everywhere) for two years before I gave myself over to grad school, and I didn't get a whiff of a decent job. The question for me wasn't whether to get a well paying job or go to grad school and be broke; the question was whether to go to grad school and be broke or not to go to grad school and be broke. Between my stipend from school and a part time job on campus, I make more than I did when I was tutoring and subbing. It's still not saying much. But it's not like being in grad is keeping me from untold riches.
Personally, I'm in Rhetoric and Comp, where the job market is a lot better, and because of the focus on pedagogy, there's a reasonable expectation of getting grant funded at some point. Does that mean the odds are good? Hell no. They just aren't as soul-crushingly bad. My R/C department has a near 100% hire rate the last few years, and the small size and insularity of the subdiscipline is a boon. But I don't have any illusions, and I could well end up embittered and working at Borders in five years. But, again, I could do that with or without getting this degree. And all in all I'd rather teach college kids and enjoy real scholarship (and I do) and wake up at 10 than teach high school kids, wake up at 7 and have nothing to show for it down the road. Do I wish I had gone premed way back when? Of course. But I can't go back, and for now, being broke and happy is preferable to being broke and unhappy.
And all of my friends who got their MBA all had to move back in with their parents last year, so at least I have people to commiserate with.
12/18/09
Do these grad students at least receive fellowships, or do they have to take on debt for their virtually worthless degrees? Insult to injury.
12/18/09
By the time you realize that academia is a dead end, you're often too far into it not to finish your four years. At which point the only thing you're qualified for is grad school. Vicious circle.
12/18/09
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12/18/09
Well, at least it's something. It's sad how, the more a body of learning becomes decoupled from the ability to earn a living, people tend to value it less.
12/18/09
That does suck.
12/18/09
I was fully funded and I still have some debt, but, you know, so do a lot of people with equivalent "real world" job skills. If I remind myself to keep this all in perspective, it doesn't freak me out too much. (And of course I don't have kids to feed, so there's that.)
12/18/09
12/18/09
One summer, I had a work-study job in the humanities administration department of a big-three Ivy League University. I got to read and file the letters of recommendation. Heh heh heh.
I was a lot less anal back in the day and I had to retype something like 50 letters because I forgot the final period in "Ph.D." Boy, was I pissed!
12/18/09
As long as you have no regrets, that's all that matters.
12/18/09
12/18/09
Thanks for the info. Needless to say, nobody gets a Ph.D. in the humanities to get rich.
12/18/09
Lincoln Technical Institute advises me that I can learn HVAC repair in a year.
12/18/09
12/18/09
It depends. How many jobs require a bachelor's in something...anything?
To go into debt over that, though...enh. How MUCH debt?
I went into the liberal arts because I hated it the least, was decent at it...and now I wish I'd just gone into business. Maybe I'm just not looking hard enough/tapping my school's career services enough.
I wonder if people REALLY benefit from going to Phoenix University (or whatever it's called) online, Devry, and any other school that's actually advertised on TV.
12/18/09
I still think that the minority of graduates REALLY do learn something, but it is possible if somebody applies themselves.
Which makes P.U.,DeVry,ITT like all other universities: the actual, individual student effort is what matters. Those schools still have this handicap of accepting last-resort desperate cases and somehow managing to push them through.
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/in Rhet Comp
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Just my wax-impacted ear, but that sounded like a euphemism, as in: "Yeah, I was reduced to driving a cab a few times a week, if you know what I mean.
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12/17/09
I guess in the third term, anything goes.
12/17/09