By Professor Doom
Hairdresser:
“Didn’t you used to teach at that community college, about 10 years ago?”
Me: “Yep.”
Hairdresser:
“I had a class with you there, even graduated. I hear it’s a scam now.”
Me: “Yep.
I’d like it short in the back, please.”
--I had
this conversation about a month ago. I hope she enjoyed her time at the
community college but…please don’t tell me education is even remotely a path to
riches.
We’re coming to a
critical point in higher education: way too many of our college graduates are
finding out that there simply isn’t a job waiting for them after they get that
degree. Granted, it’s been that way for years, but the critical issue now is
people are catching on to the rigged game.
One solution to
the “no job for the recent college graduate” problem is to go back for more
school. It should be obvious on the face of it that this is a sucker’s game—if
education doesn’t get a you a job, more education isn’t likely to help, right? The
only advantage is, since you’re going back to school, you don’t have to make
payments on your previous student loans, payments you’d have to make if you
keep looking for a job, a job you can’t find.
I imagine merely
a tiny percentage of the population suspects that the situation described above
is not a coincidence. I hope the percentage is growing, as I sure wish fewer
people would double down on education by going to graduate school.
Before going
further, allow me to talk about my own “getting into graduate school”
experience:
My undergraduate
GPA was just barely above 3.5 (that’s “below average” by today’s standards, but
still respectable). My general GRE scores quite good (98th
percentile or so, if memory serves), and I’d won a national award for
mathematical research (2nd place was awarded to someone from a
school called “MIT”). I always wanted to go to graduate school, and so
naturally I applied after spending some time “in the real world” working as a
stockbroker.
I was rejected
from the majority of graduate schools I applied to. It wasn’t that I was all
that weak an applicant, but the recent collapse of the USSR (at the risk of
giving things away) meant the US was being flooded with high quality, famous
(in their field) mathematicians, and this was going to continue for years…there
weren’t going to be many jobs for new Ph.D.s anytime soon, and so grad schools
did the right thing and cut back enrollments.
The point of this
backstory? I didn’t have an easy time getting accepted to grad school, because
the grad schools operated with integrity, responsibly only taking as many
students as the job market could bear.
Higher education
has changed quite a bit since then, especially in the less technical fields
where you can easily get hundreds of kids with 4.0 GPAs looking to sign up for
more debt. If schools were still run by people with integrity, then the
graduate schools wouldn’t be bloated out with way too many students, looking
for far too few jobs when they graduate.
Unfortunately,
admissions, like most everything else on campus, is run by the administrative
caste (on most campuses), and all they want is growth.
A recent
article addresses in detail the incredible disparity between jobs and
graduates going on here, but I’ll provide a few numbers highlighting the
insanity:
English Ph.D.s
Awarded in 2016: 1400
Faculty
Positions in English Available in 2016: 900
Hmm, so over
35% of the Ph.D.s last year are mathematically excluded from getting a job in
academia…the only place where a Ph.D. in English is worth anything. Isn’t it a
little bit irresponsible to do this? I’m surprised there isn’t a lawsuit. It’s
really worth pointing out that a Ph.D. in the social sciences, much like
English, can easily take 6 to 10 years, so it’s a pretty huge investment
considering the low chance of even minimal payoff, and it isn’t just this one
subject.
This situation is
only going to snowball: the 500 people that couldn’t possibly get a job in 2016
are going to try again in 2017, making the gap between “Ph.D.s looking for a
job” and “jobs for Ph.D.s” more like 1,000 recent graduates in 2017…a year
after that and you have more people unemployed for a year (a two) trying to get
the job than you have recent graduates trying to get the job.
Because we’ve
been running surpluses for years, getting the Ph.D. in English today sets you
up for years of unemployment. Ok, English isn’t exactly a discipline known for
doing the math, perhaps other departments are being responsible?
History Ph.D.s
Awarded in 2016: 1000
Faculty
Positions in History Available in 2016: 600
History is even
more self-destructive, with 40% of the graduates mathematically guaranteed for
unemployment. Again spending 6 to 10 years getting the degree (after the 4 to 6
years getting the undergraduate degree) is a disaster, right? It’s only going
to be a few years of this before we hit a traffic jam of more Ph.D. Historians
entering the job market than the market could possibly absorb even if there
were no new graduates.
The chart lists a
number of disciplines, but the trends are very clear: even as the number of
jobs opening is stable, the number of graduates trying to get those jobs are
increasing dramatically. I should mention, most of those positions accounted
for above are sub-minimum wage adjunct jobs: our best and brightest in the
humanities literally are spending 10 or more years of their life to qualify to
wait several years to get a job paying less than minimum wage…and they’re going
deep into debt for the privilege.
The number of
Master’s Degrees being awarded is dropping, but this is more than absorbed by
the Ph.D.s. I take this as a sign people are catching on: they at least realize
the glut means a Master’s Degree is a terrible investment in time. Yes, they’re
moving on to Ph.D.s but that’s the end of the rope, past that point reality has
to set in.
Please, let
reality set in.
It’s obnoxious how
admin wins coming and going here. We’re talking big, big, student loan money
pouring into administrative pockets in exchange for growing the graduate
schools. After graduation, the flood of applicants for any job at all means admin
can get another bonus for lowering faculty pay. Hey, I understand supply and
demand well enough…but I also understand that it’s pure evil for admin to grow
their graduate schools when they know they’re setting people up for financial
ruin.
A number of
comments show that the faculty, at least, know what’s happening:
The academy used the recssion excuse to double-down on
"shedding" full-time faculty positions. That will NEVER stop. The
shift to part-time labor among faculty is as permanent as outsourcing in the
manufacturing sector. PERMANENT.
And yet institutions keep churning out new phd's because they themselves are in the race: more head-counts among their doctoral students means more funding for their own dept's. They won't stop. They will never stop.
The
adjunctification of higher ed has done no good for education, and is a big part
of why the “real” jobs are drying up. I do believe, however, that at some point
it has to stop.
When will it stop? When there’s a guy with the story “I’m 40 years old,
have a list of degrees as long as your arm, and there literally is no place for
me except serving coffee, which I can’t do because my student loan payments if
I had a paycheck would be more than my paycheck” living on every block. We’re
not there yet, I admit.
That said, we are at the stage
where a kid with the story “I’m 24 years old with a degree in Psych, and work
at Starbucks…” is basically on every block, and we’re already seeing
considerable backlash against higher education for creating such commonplace
victims. Granted, the response right now is to try to offer “free” college to
everyone but…the degrees will still be worthless.
I can hardly conceive how people have such
confusion of ideas to believe “We’ll start giving away degrees for free, then they’ll be worth something!”
Another commenter highlights the problem:
Right now, my English dept employees 45 adjuncts in composition,
to whom it pays $2500 per course at 23-student cap classes, and another 20
adjuncts who teach Enlish classes of 35 students at $3000 per course. The ten
tenure-track people make the typical $60-90k a year.
Meanwhile, there are two administrators here for every yenture-track (sic, should be “tenure-track”) faculty member, college-wide. Starting salary for those is $90k.
This is the part that I find so disturbing about higher ed right
now. Sure, supply and demand means we shouldn’t be paying faculty much, I
accept that. But those savings should be passed on to the customers, giving
them a better product (eg, smaller classes) and lower tuition.
Instead, the savings just goes to pay for ever more administrators.
There are many eyewitness accounts in the article, again saying nothing I
haven’t already said regarding what’s going on in higher ed.
The only thing the comments lack is a true solution. Allow me to provide
one:
The legion of administrators and the glut of
graduate students, are both paid for by the student loan scam. Destroy that,
and there would be hope for integrity, and possibly even sanity, to return to
higher ed.
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