The Ph.D. Now Comes With Food Stamps
chronicle.com
The Ph.D. Now Comes With Food Stamps
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Re: The Ph.D. Now Comes With Food Stamps
#2Does 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?
Re: The Ph.D. Now Comes With Food Stamps
#3The racial overtones of the article confuse me - should I be more sympathetic because the literature professor is white?
Re: The Ph.D. Now Comes With Food Stamps
#4This 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...
Re: The Ph.D. Now Comes With Food Stamps
#5Does 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?
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Re: The Ph.D. Now Comes With Food Stamps
#6What? No one needs an expert in medieval studies?
Re: The Ph.D. Now Comes With Food Stamps
#7Does 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?
I 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/6... .
Re: The Ph.D. Now Comes With Food Stamps
#8They 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.
Re: The Ph.D. Now Comes With Food Stamps
#9Does 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?
I 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.
Re: The Ph.D. Now Comes With Food Stamps
#10Ms. 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.