Dismal Job Prospects for PhDs.

I think I have already extended a warm welcome to PhDs to join in our pity party, but one tipster alerted me to this mainstream media article about their job prospects that I thought I should share.

PhDs are usually in it for one thing, to attain the ideal position as a professor in higher education.  As many of our readers at BIDER know, the PhD program is the biggest Ponzi Scheme out there.  Many lemmings feel that higher education will pay off, by allowing them to join the ranks of the very people that educate them. Much like Madoff's investors, these professors to be are shit out of luck:

The number of jobs university math departments were trying to fill in 2009 declined 40% from 2008, according to the American Mathematical Society. There were about 1,000 positions advertised from  October 2009 to February 2010 in the Modern Language Assn.'s Job Information List, a 27.5% decline from the year before. (The association's conference this year will hold the foreboding title The Academy in Hard Times.)

I could have told them that this was going to happen.  Not to toot lawyer's horns, but at least we go to law school under the false impression that we will be learning a skill.  The last people that any university wants to hire are those who have invested time and money in their education.  Instead, they hire graduate students (for free or little pay) or adjunct professors for as little at $20K a year (who are probably working professionals as well).   See my previous post on The Lost Generation of Scholars Who Did Everything Right.
What are we going to do to knock it into students' heads??? Education does not always pay off and often it prohibits you from obtaining work that does.
When I think of PhDs, I have this vision of Aristotle and his students speaking about philosophy for the sake of discussion. I think they were all men of leisure who liked to think and hypothesize.  He abhorred paid work, by the way. I found this quote, where Aristotle said: All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind. Clearly, he did not think of education as a means to become wealthy.  Education was a luxury to be enjoyed by the wealthy for the sake of enjoyment alone.  This dreamer had this to say about his shitty investment:

At least one academic isn't worried. Patrick Horn is paying $25,000 a year to get a doctorate in mythological studies in the Pacifica Graduate Institute in Carpinteria. His working class family balked at the tuition and time commitment, but the 30-year L.A. resident says he's not concerned.

"It's a great investment, and I'm not worried about the debt," he said. "I love being a thinker, I love being a writer, and I feel privileged for the opportunity." 

Patrick, privileged is the last thing you're ever going to feel after taking mythological studies so damn seriously for so long.  Wait until Sallie Mae comes knocking on your door, you will have more in common with the tranny hookers on my street corner than you will with Zeus.  Just saying.
Hardknocks and I differ in our philosophies about education.  I'll let her tell you what she thinks of it, but I think it's unnecessary. In my ideal world, we would all learn practical skills and take a year trip around the world to gain enlightenment and knowledge.  But the real world has robbed our parents of the means to subsidize this sort of worldly education, and has left us vulnerable to the vultures at local universities and colleges to teach us that... how to live, how to think, how to be understanding.

Ms. Jobless Juris Doctor wrote a post on the potential explosion of the education bubble, much like the sub-prime mortgage bubble. Steve Eisman, a economist who predicted the mortgage implosion, is addressing student loan defaults in his latest prediction:

If present trends continue, over the next 10 years almost $500 billion of Title IV loans will have been funneled to this industry. We estimate total defaults of $275 billion, and because of fees associated with defaults, for-profit students will owe $330 billion on defaulted loans over the next 10 years.

This will affect our children and our children's children.  I don't think I will have a kid that will come home with a Doctorate degree.  But he comes home a cop with a badge, or a plumber with a snake--I will be happy as a clam.

More Academics Come Clean on the Value of a Graduate Education

For those of you like a former classmate who thought getting a PhD in the humanities after law school would guarantee a cushy job in academia, think again. It's nice to see more academics like Hope College professor Thomas Benton write the truth about the job prospects in academia, another over saturated and competitive job field. Getting a PhD is an investment in time and thousands of dollars. It could lead to a dream job in academia or you could also end up falling flat on your face with huge debt and few job prospects. Benton's article in The Chronicle of Education also touches on the issue of graduate school specifically benefiting wealthy students while leeching off of students who aren't as privileged or connected, something we've been talking a lot about here. I've posted excerpts from his article below. I also recommend reading another article written by Benton in 2004, Is Graduate School a Cult?. Please forward this to any friends or relatives thinking about waiting out the recession in graduate school. It's important that more students, not just those considering TTT law schools, understand the risks they take when deciding to spend the next five to eight years of their lives on a degree that won't guarantee a damn thing.

The Big Lie About the 'Life of the Mind'

By Thomas H. Benton

A year ago, I wrote a column called "Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go," advising students that grad school is a bad idea unless they have no need to earn a living for themselves or anyone else, they are rich or connected (or partnered with someone who is), or they are earning a credential for a job they already hold.

....

One reason that graduate school is for the already privileged is that it is structurally dependent on people who are neither privileged nor connected. Wealthy students are not trapped by the system; they can take what they want from it, not feel pressured, and walk away at any point with minimal consequences. They do not have to obsess about whether some professor really likes them. If they are determined to become academics, they can select universities on the basis of reputation rather than money. They can focus on research rather than scrambling for time-consuming teaching and research assistantships to help pay the bills. And, when they go on the market, they can hold out for the perfect position rather than accepting whatever is available.

But the system over which the privileged preside does not ultimately depend on them for the daily functioning of higher education (which is now, as we all know, drifting toward a part-time, no-benefit business). The ranks of new Ph.D.'s and adjuncts these days are mainly composed of people from below the upper-middle class: people who believe from infancy that more education equals more opportunity. They see the professions as a path to security and status.

Again and again, the people who wrote to me said things like "Nobody told me" and "Now what do I do?" "Everybody keeps saying my doctorate gives me all kinds of transferable skills, but I can't get a second interview, even outside of academe." "What's wrong with me?"

The myth of the academic meritocracy powerfully affects students from families that believe in education, that may or may not have attained a few undergraduate degrees, but do not have a lot of experience with how access to the professions is controlled. Their daughter goes to graduate school, earns a doctorate in comparative literature from an Ivy League university, everyone is proud of her, and then they are shocked when she struggles for years to earn more than the minimum wage. (Meanwhile, her brother—who was never very good at school—makes a decent living fixing HVAC systems with a six-month certificate from a for-profit school near the Interstate.)

Unable even to consider that something might be wrong with higher education, mom and dad begin to think there is something wrong with their daughter, and she begins to internalize that feeling.

Everyone has told her that "there are always places for good people in academe." She begins to obsess about the possibility of some kind of fatal personal shortcoming. She goes through multiple mock interviews, and takes business classes, learning to present herself for nonacademic positions. But again and again, she is passed over in favor of undergraduates who are no different from people she has taught for years. Maybe, she wonders, there's something about me that makes me unfit for any kind of job.

This goes on for years: sleepless nights, anxiety, escalating and increasingly paralyzing self-doubt, and a host of stress-induced ailments. She has even removed the Ph.D. from her résumé, with some pain, but she lives in dread that interviewers will ask what she has been doing for the last 12 years. (All her old friends are well established by now, some with families, some with what seem to be high-powered careers. She lives in a tiny apartment and struggles to pay off her student loans.) What's left now but entry-level clerical work with her immediate supervisor just three years out of high school?

She was the best student her adviser had ever seen (or so he said); it seemed like a dream when she was admitted to a distinguished doctoral program; she worked so hard for so long; she won almost every prize; she published several essays; she became fully identified with the academic life; even distancing herself from her less educated family. For all of those reasons, she continues as an adjunct who qualifies for food stamps, increasingly isolating herself to avoid feelings of being judged. Her students have no idea that she is a prisoner of the graduate-school poverty trap. The consolations of teaching are fewer than she ever imagined.

Such people sometimes write to me about their thoughts of suicide, and I think nothing separates me from them but luck.