Why are CHE articles like this still being written?

[hazelshade]

BA from Pace University, PhD from CUNY Graduate Center.

[mahagonny]

This is a modern liberal's conundrum, isn't it? The guy has the right degrees, but not from the right schools. So what does he expect, a TT position to be handed to him? Obviously he's going to get the normal level of scrutiny. OTOH, he's minority from a dirt poor, uneducated family, the kind of person for whom upward mobility is the story that swells your heart with pride. And to make things worse, he's stirring up more shit on the always bothersome 'adjunct porn' front. Probably why this thread has stalled. How do you treat this one?

[Caracal]

Weirdly this discussion feels oddly comforting right now...

It always feels like when we have these kinds of conversations we are talking about 10 different things and hopelessly conflating them into one big ball.

I had a small grad class at a place that is top ten in the field. A while ago I tried to figure out what happened to some of the people who I haven't stayed in touch with. About half of the cohort has a tenure track job somewhere. As far as I can tell, I'm actually the only person adjuncting. (And for what its worth I have a pretty good situation in the sense that it isn't my family's main source of income and I get a steady number of courses at one institution)

The people who didn't end up in academia are doing various stuff, but quite a few are employed as researchers at private or non profit places.

Is this representative of elsewhere? Maybe not. There are too many grad programs and some where people just don't get tenure track jobs. The adjunct system is crummy. However, there's this idea out there that grad school just leaves this trail of wreckage and failure through people's lives and I just don't think its true. I think the narrative exists because of how large a place tenure occupies in the world of academia. Lots of people graduate from law school and end up not actually practicing law and we don't think of this as some huge failure. They just ended up in a different career. For a few years Rebecca Shulman was all over the place writing about how academia ruins lives. Ironically enough she was doing this while becoming a prominent writer. She seems to be off the academic beat, I think she just wrote a book about her love affair with Germany. All seems to have worked out ok.

[mahagonny]

For a few years Rebecca Shulman was all over the place writing about how academia ruins lives. Ironically enough she was doing this while becoming a prominent writer. She seems to be off the academic beat, I think she just wrote a book about her love affair with Germany. All seems to have worked out ok.

For now. She's young enough that all kinds of trouble could be coming. What people need to be thinking about now is how long are we going to live and where will the money come from.

However, there's this idea out there that grad school just leaves this trail of wreckage and failure through people's lives and I just don't think its true. I think the narrative exists because of how large a place tenure occupies in the world of academia.

The noise gets blamed on the 'losers' in the system. Actually a lot of the noise comes from administrators who are in the advising business. What they need and don't have is a plausible way to advise people how to use academic jobs in their lives. You don't need someone saying 'borrow tens of thousands of dollars, then get a PhD so you can give back to the community and have a fun hobby that you should quit because it's burning you out and making you bitter.' They've got a rhetorical juggling act and it fails.

[jerseyjay]

Lots of people graduate from law school and end up not actually practicing law and we don't think of this as some huge failure. They just ended up in a different career.

If anything, I think that the situation for law school is often worse than for humanities doctoral programs, because the out-of-pocket cost of law school (i.e., not just the opportunity cost) is so much higher. So if you have somebody who studies law, gets over their head in debt, and cannot find a job as an attorney, or gets the legal equivalent of an adjunct job, then, yes, that is a failure.

In the United States, there is no inherent relationship between most undergraduate minors and jobs. That is, you can major in English or history or Spanish or Physics and get a job in something totally different. That's fine, because the point of a liberal arts degree is really to prepare the skills one will need for any variety of jobs--reading, writing, arguing, parsing evidence, etc. Different disciplines have different approaches, but theoretically, it really doesn't matter what your undergraduate degree is in unless you want to pursue certain certain vocations. My father was a math major who became an attorney, and my mother was an English major who became a therapist. Nothing wrong with that.

Like medical school, law school, or business school, doctoral education is a professional education. Of course it is different than these obviously vocational schools, but the point is to prepare somebody for a particular career. There are cognate careers, i.e., non-professor jobs that involve the skills learnt in grad school. And there are people who decide they just don't want to be a professor. All that is fine.

But if people go though a postgraduate professional program, do relatively well, and are unable to get a job in that career, then there is something wrong--either with the person or with the system. And since there are so many such people, it would seem that much of it seems to be a systematic problem.

[Wahoo Redux]

I want to be sympathetic to people who find themselves in bad situations.

But you aren't.  Not really.  You will say you are...but you aren't.

And I have posted many times about the growing concern with this dynamic higher ed and in the culture at large.  People are calling for change.

[Wahoo Redux]

Why doesn't Sports Illustrated run articles like this? There must be hundreds of thousands of decent writers who could tell the tale of a childhood and early adulthood dedicated to ultimate achievement in their sport only to find themselves undrafted. Where is my big automobile?? Where is my beautiful house???

Is an adjunct college teacher really analogous to an athlete who did not make the pros?

[Wahoo Redux]

Lots of people graduate from law school and end up not actually practicing law and we don't think of this as some huge failure. They just ended up in a different career.

If anything, I think that the situation for law school is often worse than for humanities doctoral programs, because the out-of-pocket cost of law school (i.e., not just the opportunity cost) is so much higher. So if you have somebody who studies law, gets over their head in debt, and cannot find a job as an attorney, or gets the legal equivalent of an adjunct job, then, yes, that is a failure.

In the United States, there is no inherent relationship between most undergraduate minors and jobs. That is, you can major in English or history or Spanish or Physics and get a job in something totally different. That's fine, because the point of a liberal arts degree is really to prepare the skills one will need for any variety of jobs--reading, writing, arguing, parsing evidence, etc. Different disciplines have different approaches, but theoretically, it really doesn't matter what your undergraduate degree is in unless you want to pursue certain certain vocations. My father was a math major who became an attorney, and my mother was an English major who became a therapist. Nothing wrong with that.

Like medical school, law school, or business school, doctoral education is a professional education. Of course it is different than these obviously vocational schools, but the point is to prepare somebody for a particular career. There are cognate careers, i.e., non-professor jobs that involve the skills learnt in grad school. And there are people who decide they just don't want to be a professor. All that is fine.

But if people go though a postgraduate professional program, do relatively well, and are unable to get a job in that career, then there is something wrong--either with the person or with the system. And since there are so many such people, it would seem that much of it seems to be a systematic problem.

+1

Nicely put.

[marshwiggle]

Why doesn't Sports Illustrated run articles like this? There must be hundreds of thousands of decent writers who could tell the tale of a childhood and early adulthood dedicated to ultimate achievement in their sport only to find themselves undrafted. Where is my big automobile?? Where is my beautiful house???

Is an adjunct college teacher really analogous to an athlete who did not make the pros?

It is as far as the sense of entitlement goes. Working hard does not, and never has, guaranteed a job. Unless the number of degrees granted is regulated to match the number of jobs, it isn't possible.

[mahagonny]

Why doesn't Sports Illustrated run articles like this? There must be hundreds of thousands of decent writers who could tell the tale of a childhood and early adulthood dedicated to ultimate achievement in their sport only to find themselves undrafted. Where is my big automobile?? Where is my beautiful house???

Is an adjunct college teacher really analogous to an athlete who did not make the pros?

It is as far as the sense of entitlement goes. Working hard does not, and never has, guaranteed a job. Unless the number of degrees granted is regulated to match the number of jobs, it isn't possible.

We're all entitled, but only some of us get away with being that way.