By Professor Doom
Employer: “Kid, everyone has a high school
diploma. What else you got?”
---over a
century ago, a high school diploma meant something, but this is what it’s worth
today.
Part of what made
a college degree valuable was scarcity—not everyone had one. Once government
made high school “free” for everyone, our kids left high school to go get a
college degree, and we opened up our campuses to everyone. A natural
consequence of sending everyone to college is degrees are commonplace now.
So now we have a
bunch of college graduates going out in the world, being told their degrees are
worthless…and heading back to school to get a more advanced degree—this lets
them delay payments on the student loans, if nothing else. Alternatively, they
could flee the
country or become
prostitutes, but for the sake of argument let’s assume these aren’t good
options for everyone.
The same
irresponsible leaders who bloated out our undergraduate degree programs have
irresponsibly bloated out the graduate degree programs. How’s that
working out?
Today, I applied extra lipgloss, perfect eyeliner, and blow-dried my hair. I went to ask a restaurant manager for a waitressing job. You see, the stakes are high – I’m desperate for even a minimum wage job…
…I have
degrees in economics, sociology and politics, research skills in qualitative and
quantitative methods, teaching experience at universities, a decent publication
record, and a significant conference list of presentations. But now I need
lipgloss and cafe connections to get a job.
All those years in
school, paying for that precious, precious, education, and it amounts to no
more than a high school diploma at the end. A Ph.D. is a research degree. It
has some usefulness in “the real world,” but mostly it’s for places which only
care about research, i.e., universities. Thus, the “real world” isn’t going to
pay for it:
Employers external to the university don’t want
a PhD, they want five years of industry experience. Other employers consider me
overqualified for basic research tasks. They don’t want to pay the higher rate
of employing a PhD.
I got the
“overqualified” line too when I tried to get a full time job in the real world,
endless government harping about the value of a mathematics degree
notwithstanding. Now, don’t get me
wrong, studying mathematics as an end was fine for me, I’m ok with being
“trapped” in higher education, and I can still get contracts even if I’m
overqualified for real work.
The problem here
is bigger than just the huge glut of Ph.D.’s we’ve created with our inflated
education system. I’ve mentioned before about how our academics are being
exploited in the massive teaching system, where they bring in millions of
dollars via tuition for classes…while getting paid pennies.
They also get
exploited in a different way:
The truth of it is what the university doesn’t
tell you. You learn along the way that research, including that produced by
PhDs, brings in cash for universities. More PhDs are beneficial for an
institution reliant on government funding. But they compete on graduation for
fewer jobs in what was an already competitive field. The time spent on
producing our PhD effectively renders our previous degrees useless – no
graduate employer wants a degree from four years ago.
All those
graduating Ph.D.s generate research which the (state) school uses to get more
government money, but that too goes to admin, only a few percent of the tax
loot trickles down to the people doing the actual work.
In
Australia, where I study, the emphasis on research production increased….
Those
wishing to retain an academic job were required to conduct their research in
their own time, without a funding budget to support it.
The incredible
emphasis on research production is why we have massive frauds in research
publishing now, with very clear evidence that wide swaths of research in medicine and psychology are quite
fake, and it’s almost certain any field which uses (easily fabricated)
statistics also has a huge fraud problem. I assure the gentle reader the reason
for this is admin determines the validity of research now, and not
academics…and we honestly don’t care about lying to an administration which
lies to us at every turn. They don’t know anything about research, and so have
no means to determine frauds.
Since the author
has given up on academia, she’ll confess to things every other academic who’s
had enough of higher ed confesses to:
The pursuit of more funding is also evident in
the way universities chase more student enrolments, perpetuating the notion
that a degree will guarantee a good job in spite of the oversupply of
education. Students are encouraged to select specific majors which will benefit
the university. I’ve been requested from the higher ups to grade on a curve
since easy grades encourage retention, and I have been prevented from failing
students.
--is anyone else concerned that everyone in
higher ed makes these complaints, complaints that can only occur in institutions
without integrity?
We really, really,
need to reconsider having higher education run by pseudo-academics,
self-proclaimed titans of industry who only concern themselves with growth at
all costs, who view our kids as mere sources of revenue, and who view the
academics as even more sources of revenue.
It’s truly
fascinating watching our institutions turn into Marxist utopias. First the
lowest level workers get exploited as much as possible…but as the money runs
out, the system moves further up the ladder looting as much as possible for the
people at the very top of the system. Always, however, these systems collapse
as they destroy their own base.
The hardworking Ph.D. finishes her essay with
a rant:
More
perniciously, my mentor also considered that all academics are already aware of
the failures of the system, the exploitation that occurs, and the mental health
crisis that accompanies it. Aware, and yet so embroiled in the system that
action is not only not taken, but actively discouraged in favour of adhering to
the status quo.
So, here I
sit, a disgruntled graduate of the system. A PhD turned waitress.
Naturally, the
waitress makes her complaints and observations anonymously, because that’s another
feature of Marxist utopias: you can’t speak out, lest you be considered an
enemy, and be destroyed.
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