Why do these teachers take on such a life? You could say that the long-timers were fooled, they are now in too deep, and can't start a new career, but those deciding whether to do a PhD must know what they are facing, no? This sort of article has been going around for many years.
I entered grad school at 22, thinking I would become a CS prof. I loved CS research I did as an undergrad in a prof's lab. That prof was my role model for my still not fully formed brain. I wasn't told all these things by him or the program, but I did my research and found stats about how so few PhDs become profs. Side note: all the profs are those who made it, so their advice about how to make it is like taking financial advice from lottery winners.
I read lots of these kinds of "grad school isn't worth it" confessionals. But many were about humanities PhDs, not STEM. And I thought I was special, above average, even maybe a genius. And I was special, but apparently not special enough. I dropped out to work in tech and have a better salary and life than my few ex classmates in my program who did make it in academia.
But one of my housemates was a humanities PhD who also started at 22, and was smarter and a harder worker than any of us STEM PhD students. We all thought that if any of us deserved to make it in academia, it was him. But the humanities are shrinking in the academy. What the article describes is his current life. An PhD from an R1 university who can only find a patchwork of adjunct positions at different 2 year community colleges. He can't go work in tech, who is going to pay a historian six figures or even a living wage? He got some work doing freelance writing and editing, mostly helping college applicants with their essays, but ChatGPT is destroying the freelance writing market.
We all made these decisions at age 22, after spending 4 very formative years in college. I made the same stupid decision he did and mine worked out, but the intellectual bug that bit me just so happened to be infinitely more valuable to industry than the one that bit him.
> Side note: all the profs are those who made it, so their advice about how to make it is like taking financial advice from lottery winners.
Or taking business advice from successful entrepreneurs. Everyone is looking for the magical advice—The Formula. But there is none. You can execute perfectly and still lose. You can also bumble through without trying and succeed. You can grow up in the wrong country. You can have the right parents. So much is out of our control. We almost always underestimate the outsized role luck and chance play in our endeavors.
This kind of talk was bubbling around STEM phds, too at top institutions in the 2005-2015 era, so even if you're in your early 40s, you should have at least been able to make an informed decision.
There were a number of careers that undergraduate me was somewhat enamored of. But undergraduate me, surprisingly, was also aware that the odds of my attaining them at the levels I would find satisfying and at least reasonably lucrative were vanishingly small. So I should just stick with a job from my good engineering school.
>ChatGPT is destroying the freelance writing market.
As someone very close to this area, I seriously question this. Yes, there are very low-rent content mills with material being cranked out by people who are being paid pennies per word. But serious freelance writing being commissioned by many corporations (where the pay is more in line with $1/word) are not going to be replaced by ChatGPT anytime soon. The writers may use ChatGPT as an assistant and perhaps rates will decline further over time but this basically falls in the same category as we won't need programmers any longer.
Maybe? But now you're in the category of AI will take all the jobs.
> He can't go work in tech, who is going to pay a historian six figures or even a living wage?
I appreciate the thinking that went into the parent post, but I want to challenge this statement, which is emblematic of the kind of reasoning that paints training in the humanities as frivolous and out of touch with the demands of the market, as if the market is the sole arbiter of reality.
I recently earned a PhD in a humanities field, and I'm currently gainfully employed as a research software engineer at a major university. I'm making less than I did when I was in tech just out of college, but more than many of my humanities colleagues in various positions between the PhD and the tenure track.
My point is not to brag about being able to get into tech with a humanities background, but to say that I don't think I'm anything special. When I was first applying for tech jobs out of college, I drew on my training in literature and human languages to guide my learning and application of CS fundamentals. I admit that I caught a lucky break with companies willing to take a chance on someone with a non-traditional background, and I'm grateful to have these skills to draw on if a traditional academic career doesn't work out for me. But I think my story is repeatable.
But back to the original point: rather than denigrating the value of a history PhD, it's important to question the market forces that have created this kind of precariousness for people who possess not only important knowledge about the past but, more importantly, the training and skills to use that knowledge to interpret the present.
The assumption that jobs are available to people because of what they _know_ is based on faulty logic that comes from the MBA-ification of everything -- the obsession with "deliverables."
Really, what PhD training in any discipline brings is both a deep pool of knowledge and the training to synthesize and use those "facts" in novel ways.
> ChatGPT is destroying the freelance writing market
Relatedly, this statement only makes sense if one assumes that we have given up on teaching everyday people -- non-specialists -- the importance of the medium for a message's delivery, dissemination, and broader understanding. "ChatGPT is destroying the freelance writing market" because we have collectively failed to reinforce the value of human perspectives on an issue.
Allowing "The Market" to dictate reality has led to schisms in shared truth like climate change denialism. We need interpreters of history, literature, drama, etc. in order to get back to any hope of getting back to broad agreement about what the world is.
Will we ever get everyone to agree? Of course not, but market forces can't repair these divisions.
As the old Upton Sinclair quote goes, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
I worked as a lawyer from 2007-2014. Most of the partners I worked for had PhDs and had taught at least briefly in the 80s-90s. They went back to school to get JDs (their PhDs were in unrelated fields) and now make very good money as biglaw partners. One is married to a professor at an R1, but that's the extent of their connection to higher ed.
The lack of jobs for PhDs has been a trend for several decades. These guys are smart and are successful. They came from all different fields. And if they hadn't detoured into academia they would have had an extra 10-15 years of legal earnings (or the ability to retire that much sooner).
Status and autonomy. Even an adjunct professor still gets addressed with a honorific. You rarely have anyone yell at you or look over your shoulder as you work. And, as a friend who has a TT job at a Canadian University recently observed, it is generally the adjuncts who most adopt the professorial look: sweaters, jackets with elbow patches, horn-rimmed glasses.
So long as these things are enticing to enough people, supply will outstrip demand and wages will fall.
I think this is an underrated point in these discussions. There are three components to every job: how much value other people get out of you doing it, how much value you get out of doing it, and how many other people want to do it. Whether it's game development or adjunct prof'ing, employers know when the job their offering has benefits beyond pure salary, and they adjust that salary accordingly. The humanities grad students I knew weren't stupid. They could see the statistics in front of them. But staying the university world for a bit longer, and seeing other people do the same, tempted them down that path, and continues to tempt a surprising number of them.
Academia is one of the very few places where you can do research of your choice. If your theory is like a bug in your brain then you have few other options.
You can’t do that either. You are dependent on grant funding which means you can’t just research what you want, you need to tailor it to what the grant writer wants. If you want to truly research what you want you need your own huge pile of money.
Even in academia the freedom of inquiry is circumscribed by performance expectations by peers and administrators, especially pre-tenure. While tenure-track professors do not have managers telling them what to research and how to go about doing it like many industry researchers do, they are often expected to publish regularly (preferably in top venues, and at top universities this is required), do “impactful” work (where “impact” is often measured by citation counts, awards, examples of adoption by industry, etc.), and raise money for the university by acquiring grants. Grant agencies such as the National Science Foundation have their own requirements that have a way of circumscribing a professor’s research direction, and they are very competitive to earn.
So, it is more accurate to say that academia gives professors the freedom to run their own research organization, but if that professor wants a good shot at getting tenure and staying in the good graces of the university, the professor needs to be mindful of the expectations that the university has placed and the requirements of funding agencies. Even if a professor is mindful of these things, research is inherently risky, and a professor runs the risk of not getting tenure due to research results and grant-earning efforts not meeting expectations.
This is distinct from the idea that a professor can do whatever research he or she wants. Theoretically this is true in the sense that there will be no manager watching over the professor’s shoulder, but if the professor isn’t meeting the university’s performance expectations for publications and grants, the professor won’t make tenure, and even post-tenure the university could find ways to make life difficult for the “unproductive” professor.
I’ve thought long and hard about this, and I personally believe that a professor actually has more freedom in predominantly teaching environments. At teaching-oriented universities, the publication and grant-earning requirements are typically lower than that of research universities. At all-undergraduate colleges, sometimes there are no expectations for research. Of course, reduced research requirements mean increased teaching requirements, which could be challenging for researchers who don’t have an interest or talent for teaching. But for those who love teaching and who want reduced or even non-existent “publish or perish” pressure, then a teaching-oriented institution is a great alternative. Even if one’s research is restricted to winter and summer breaks due to the workload of teaching, this certainly beats trying to do research as a hobby on nights and weekends while juggling a 9-5 job and only getting 2-4 weeks PTO per year.
The article itself is basically a direct description of how people are lured into academia with exactly that expectation, and then end up in the gig economy. Not "choosing" much of anything. The market says you're the academic equivalent of a taxi driver.
There are other locations to consider theory if theory's your thing.
NGOs and Foundations: Earth science, plants, genetics, ecology, astronomy, education, data science, sampling/measurements, foreign affairs, international politics, finance, economics, public outreach. Ex: The Carnegie Foundation and Sub-Foundations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Corporation_of_New_Yo...
Gov: support of aeronautics, engineering, data science, computer science, forestry, agriculture, architecture, almost every hard science, economics, finance, law, even recreational specilists. [1] Feds have ~3M employees. States have ~5M employees. Local govs have ~14M employees. [2]
A lot of the jobs are workaday jobs, yet there's still a bunch out of ~22M that are somewhat "research". Formerly a contractor at NASA, and even for a contractor (not civil servant), seven publications. Mostly, minor citations, maybe 10-15, yet still, seven publications on research topics.
This kind of thing is arguably the real injustice in higher education - or "structural oppression" if you prefer. At least half the other college diversity initiatives are at best smokescreens to hide any discussion of how non-tenured faculty are treated.
I had discussions with my children about this issue before they even went to college. The one that went on to an advanced degree decided she'd rather be an MD than a PhD. It's much more rewarding, and even if you want to do medical research (she didn't) a dual degree is better than just a PhD.
That's the flip side of academic freedom. Once you trust a group of people with self-governance, they would invariably use it to enrich the insiders at the expense of outsiders. Just look up how a Greek democratic poleis worked.
That's probably a compromise you would willing to make for a many centuries out, internationally ranked universities. But petty colleges should be ran more like service sector.
Having said that, it's quite possible that a single mother of two, working in service sector, is simply untenable without extra help coming from the outside.
Except it's not self-governance, the changes have happened when academics have been replaced by administrators. If instead education providers were required to stop abusing the use of casuals (which new rules in AU are starting to introduce), we'd get better outcomes for everyone (students and teachers alike).
Community colleges do a great job. I went to one before the 4 year university for electrical engineering and gave me a much better foundation than those that went straight to the 4 year uni.
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I read lots of these kinds of "grad school isn't worth it" confessionals. But many were about humanities PhDs, not STEM. And I thought I was special, above average, even maybe a genius. And I was special, but apparently not special enough. I dropped out to work in tech and have a better salary and life than my few ex classmates in my program who did make it in academia.
But one of my housemates was a humanities PhD who also started at 22, and was smarter and a harder worker than any of us STEM PhD students. We all thought that if any of us deserved to make it in academia, it was him. But the humanities are shrinking in the academy. What the article describes is his current life. An PhD from an R1 university who can only find a patchwork of adjunct positions at different 2 year community colleges. He can't go work in tech, who is going to pay a historian six figures or even a living wage? He got some work doing freelance writing and editing, mostly helping college applicants with their essays, but ChatGPT is destroying the freelance writing market.
We all made these decisions at age 22, after spending 4 very formative years in college. I made the same stupid decision he did and mine worked out, but the intellectual bug that bit me just so happened to be infinitely more valuable to industry than the one that bit him.
Or taking business advice from successful entrepreneurs. Everyone is looking for the magical advice—The Formula. But there is none. You can execute perfectly and still lose. You can also bumble through without trying and succeed. You can grow up in the wrong country. You can have the right parents. So much is out of our control. We almost always underestimate the outsized role luck and chance play in our endeavors.
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As someone very close to this area, I seriously question this. Yes, there are very low-rent content mills with material being cranked out by people who are being paid pennies per word. But serious freelance writing being commissioned by many corporations (where the pay is more in line with $1/word) are not going to be replaced by ChatGPT anytime soon. The writers may use ChatGPT as an assistant and perhaps rates will decline further over time but this basically falls in the same category as we won't need programmers any longer.
Maybe? But now you're in the category of AI will take all the jobs.
I appreciate the thinking that went into the parent post, but I want to challenge this statement, which is emblematic of the kind of reasoning that paints training in the humanities as frivolous and out of touch with the demands of the market, as if the market is the sole arbiter of reality.
I recently earned a PhD in a humanities field, and I'm currently gainfully employed as a research software engineer at a major university. I'm making less than I did when I was in tech just out of college, but more than many of my humanities colleagues in various positions between the PhD and the tenure track.
My point is not to brag about being able to get into tech with a humanities background, but to say that I don't think I'm anything special. When I was first applying for tech jobs out of college, I drew on my training in literature and human languages to guide my learning and application of CS fundamentals. I admit that I caught a lucky break with companies willing to take a chance on someone with a non-traditional background, and I'm grateful to have these skills to draw on if a traditional academic career doesn't work out for me. But I think my story is repeatable.
But back to the original point: rather than denigrating the value of a history PhD, it's important to question the market forces that have created this kind of precariousness for people who possess not only important knowledge about the past but, more importantly, the training and skills to use that knowledge to interpret the present.
The assumption that jobs are available to people because of what they _know_ is based on faulty logic that comes from the MBA-ification of everything -- the obsession with "deliverables."
Really, what PhD training in any discipline brings is both a deep pool of knowledge and the training to synthesize and use those "facts" in novel ways.
> ChatGPT is destroying the freelance writing market
Relatedly, this statement only makes sense if one assumes that we have given up on teaching everyday people -- non-specialists -- the importance of the medium for a message's delivery, dissemination, and broader understanding. "ChatGPT is destroying the freelance writing market" because we have collectively failed to reinforce the value of human perspectives on an issue.
Allowing "The Market" to dictate reality has led to schisms in shared truth like climate change denialism. We need interpreters of history, literature, drama, etc. in order to get back to any hope of getting back to broad agreement about what the world is.
Will we ever get everyone to agree? Of course not, but market forces can't repair these divisions.
As the old Upton Sinclair quote goes, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
The lack of jobs for PhDs has been a trend for several decades. These guys are smart and are successful. They came from all different fields. And if they hadn't detoured into academia they would have had an extra 10-15 years of legal earnings (or the ability to retire that much sooner).
In 2016 I put up "Universities treat adjuncts like they do because they can" in response to one of them. https://jakeseliger.com/2016/02/25/universities-treat-adjunc.... Supply and demand.
Deleted Comment
So long as these things are enticing to enough people, supply will outstrip demand and wages will fall.
So, it is more accurate to say that academia gives professors the freedom to run their own research organization, but if that professor wants a good shot at getting tenure and staying in the good graces of the university, the professor needs to be mindful of the expectations that the university has placed and the requirements of funding agencies. Even if a professor is mindful of these things, research is inherently risky, and a professor runs the risk of not getting tenure due to research results and grant-earning efforts not meeting expectations.
This is distinct from the idea that a professor can do whatever research he or she wants. Theoretically this is true in the sense that there will be no manager watching over the professor’s shoulder, but if the professor isn’t meeting the university’s performance expectations for publications and grants, the professor won’t make tenure, and even post-tenure the university could find ways to make life difficult for the “unproductive” professor.
I’ve thought long and hard about this, and I personally believe that a professor actually has more freedom in predominantly teaching environments. At teaching-oriented universities, the publication and grant-earning requirements are typically lower than that of research universities. At all-undergraduate colleges, sometimes there are no expectations for research. Of course, reduced research requirements mean increased teaching requirements, which could be challenging for researchers who don’t have an interest or talent for teaching. But for those who love teaching and who want reduced or even non-existent “publish or perish” pressure, then a teaching-oriented institution is a great alternative. Even if one’s research is restricted to winter and summer breaks due to the workload of teaching, this certainly beats trying to do research as a hobby on nights and weekends while juggling a 9-5 job and only getting 2-4 weeks PTO per year.
There are plenty of folks that do private research on their own time. This is the right choice for the vast majority of folks that have the "bug".
The article itself is basically a direct description of how people are lured into academia with exactly that expectation, and then end up in the gig economy. Not "choosing" much of anything. The market says you're the academic equivalent of a taxi driver.
There are other locations to consider theory if theory's your thing.
Museums: support of archaeology, art analysis, sociology, geography, history. Ex: The British Museum, https://www.britishmuseum.org/research/projects
Aquariums/Zoos: Earth science, plants, genetics, ecology, animal science, zoology, microbiology, nutrition, pathology, physiology, medicine, conservation. Ex: Columbus Zoo and Aquarium, https://www.columbuszoo.org/science
NGOs and Foundations: Earth science, plants, genetics, ecology, astronomy, education, data science, sampling/measurements, foreign affairs, international politics, finance, economics, public outreach. Ex: The Carnegie Foundation and Sub-Foundations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Corporation_of_New_Yo...
Gov: support of aeronautics, engineering, data science, computer science, forestry, agriculture, architecture, almost every hard science, economics, finance, law, even recreational specilists. [1] Feds have ~3M employees. States have ~5M employees. Local govs have ~14M employees. [2]
A lot of the jobs are workaday jobs, yet there's still a bunch out of ~22M that are somewhat "research". Formerly a contractor at NASA, and even for a contractor (not civil servant), seven publications. Mostly, minor citations, maybe 10-15, yet still, seven publications on research topics.
[1] https://www.usajobs.gov/help/working-in-government/unique-hi...
[1] http://www.truthfulpolitics.com/images/u-s-government-employ...
That's probably a compromise you would willing to make for a many centuries out, internationally ranked universities. But petty colleges should be ran more like service sector.
Having said that, it's quite possible that a single mother of two, working in service sector, is simply untenable without extra help coming from the outside.
Deleted Comment