Thinking of grad school in the humanities? Are you ready to gamble your future–your marriage–your kids’ future–your health–your retirement? In part 2 of my interview with Monica Jacobe, she describes how graduate school resembles a lottery. “You can do everything right, ” she says, “and you still won’t get a job.” After a median 10 years of study, most humanities PhDs will have dropped out or not received a degree.
Of the minority who do earn a degree after ten years, and perhaps four or five years of job-hunting, 40 percent of language PhDs will still not have tenure-track employment. That means no tenure-track job of any kind–not in North Dakota, not in a community college, not at a religous school where you have to sign a loyalty oath to the pastor.
And if you do get that job–in what could be your late 30s or even early 40s–what awaits most is a salary similar to a moderately experienced bartender or a 23-year-old police officer.
In many fields this means that perhaps 1/4 of the folks who started graduate school over the past decade might get a shot at lousy pay in the tenure track.
If present trends continue, that percentage should drop considerably for folks entering grad school this year, to 1/5 or even 1/6.
Of course since the vast majority of qualified persons who might have thought about grad school but couldn’t afford the luxury never even applied, talent–especially working class and middle-class talent–is rushing away like water over the falls. And if family wealth determines who can afford the professorial life as a sort of jolly volunteerism, the wealth gap means that folks from racial and ethnic minorities are less likely to see themselves as able to afford this particular form of philanthropy.
As always, see more video at the youtube channel.
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Comments
This entry was posted on Sunday, January 13th, 2008 at 4:18 pm and is filed under "job market theory" and why it's silly, MLA, Precarity, academic labor system, corporate university, graduate education, youth is a category through which class is lived. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
“And if you do get that job–in what could be your late 30s or even early 40s–what awaits most is a salary similar to a moderately experienced bartender or a 23-year-old police officer…”
I don’t understand. Why should graduate-educated people be guaranteed of a higher-paying job than one of the working class? What makes you so special? Your sheeplike willingness to swallow the lie of corporate higher ed and pony up thousands and thousands of dollars to keep it going?
I have an undergraduate degree, people from time to time advise me to go to grad school… no way! Waste of time and money and you don’t get anything out of it. The deck is still stacked. Funny how you academics are just figuring that out!
Anyhow, when you want an actual revolution, you know where to find us blue-collar woggies…
This is a perfectly reasonable sentiment. I share it, to a point: highly educated folks are generally also workers. Mills, Braverman, Aronowitz, and many others have observed for decades that the blue/white collar distinction is ideological, not material. And most higher education faculty in the humanities earn less, not more, than many “blue collar” workers.
One main consequence of lots of education is “sheeplike” investment in the system, and a willingness to accept the “psychic wage” as a substitute for a real wage.
Your other point–about education and deserving a higher wage–you might think through a bit more. If someone takes an additional ten years of education, it’s reasonable to expect a modest premium in the wage, or only the rich could afford the luxury of study.
Which is where we are now, actually.