Which state? Or, if you do not want to name the specific one, include it in a group of states whose flagship universities have broadly similar characteristics as yours.
Iâd be interested in that as well. Sounds like a place to avoid and so much different than any state Iâve lived in - TX, MS, OK, CA, OR, AZ. Guess Iâve dodged a bullet.
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Iâd prefer not to test the tolerances of my job protections by identifying, but weâre really not very different from MS, OK, OR, even AZ, once you get behind Crowâs midway at ASU. AZ has a tougher row to hoe, I think. ASUâs managed to build a university theme-park village but you go a few blocks past the last craft brew in any direction and reality sets in, and thatâs down-to-the-bone poverty around there, no hope for miles. Enough mixed-bag at the others to be similar.
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Hmm. I am going to put out a wild theory based on your assessment of others (management consultants) and nurses, that some of the answers to your issues might be found closer to home.
I once had a teacher who understood the struggle of being underfed, overworked and in a high output group of people with advantages. He told me a story about carrying rocks which I never forgot. If you have a lot of rocks in your backpack, the road is always long and you are always tired. But if you take only what you need and try to throw the rocks back, youâll live an easier life. YMMV.
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Even well-connected/tons of social capital adults get shoved aside professionally if the goal is part-time, stable work with benefits.
I donât know you- and I suspect weâd be great friends in real life because I love smart and opinionated people, but since youâre the one who has brought up âdonât look at the outliers, look at the massâ as the lens- I gotta say it- I know plenty of divorced women who donât have family support and donât have family money(or spousal money) to fall back on who came to the hard and sad and yes- realistic learning that they needed a full time salary to raise their kids.
And thatâs what they did. They are not exceptional. Itâs great that there are countries around the world where a part-time job can support a child, but this is not one of them. And the glory days you hearken to were CERTAINLY not those days. I had a working mom at a time when that was unusual in my neighborhood (not because it was so affluent, but because momâs didnât work for pay) and even then- scraping together after school programs and relying on coop arrangements with neighbors, etc. was tough. The only way that could pay out was with a fulltime job.
You want a systematic change to address inequality-- I get that. But you need to diagnose the problem first, and relying on part-time work to raise a child is a problem, whether you are a waitress at the Waffle House down the street, or a highly educated academic at a university.
I have friends/classmates from B-school who have never gotten over their anger and bitterness that after taking a 15 year maternity leave (for one, two or more kids) the corporate world didnât welcome them back with open arms, at their old salary adjusted upwards with inflation, but with flexible hours so they could do pick up at soccer practice, or drive the debate team home in the late afternoon.
it sounds great. But not to their colleagues who put in 70, 80, 90 hour weeks for all those years, plus travel, relocation, etc. AND did the juggling at home. If some of the women who left my company for a decade plus zoomed back into their old jobs (they donât even know excel for godâs sake) there would be mutiny among the ones who have continued to âmake the donutsâ, at whatever personal cost their circumstances dictated.
Iâm thrilled your gig worked out for you. But does your own circumstance dictate optimal public policy for âthe massâ you speak of?
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If your area is not much different then youâre probably OK. Poverty is not hard to find, but at least in the states that I have resided in the most (AZ) there exists nothing like the utter despair you describe.
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Oh, believe me, I wasnât working part-time. My pt job paid a princely $17K when I got it. (Yep, for professional work with a grad degree.) I was working fulltime-plus â kept on freelancing at high level to make the rest of the money, and working much more than required at work to turn that job into something else. Nearly put myself in the hospital that year. But that security, flexibility, and stability meant that at least I knew the mortgage was paid and weâd have health insurance, disability, unemployment, etc.
The freelancing wasnât a choice, either. In order to do fulltime work you need someone who can reliably pick up a kid after school, show up when thereâs a snow day or the kidâs sick, be there when you have to travel, etc. If you have family with stretch to do this, thatâs normally what happens. (For free, mostly work done by women.) But if you donât have that, you canât get a fulltime job. You donât stay employed very long when you have to keep leaving in the middle of the afternoon because the person youâve hired for one hour a day to pick up your kid from school hasnât shown up again. Nor can you move at will to chase opportunity elsewhere under most custody arrangements in this country â youâre on a tether, and unless you can fight successfully for a move, usually to go be with other family and other known good things, youâre staying put.
You probably missed it, but thereâs a whole slice of Gen Z thatâs grown up in this situation. Kids with moms taking in intellectual laundry and patching together poorly-paid part-time to get by.
I would question whether OPâs institution is acting in the public interest. Why are you admitting poorly prepared grad students to begin with, and are the graduate degrees you are giving them (at cost of time and money) really likely to increase their chances of success? Many graduate degrees do not have a positive return on investment. I do not understand why you continue to provide remedial education, which frankly is not your mission
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I was one of those women you seem to claim canât get a fulltime job.
Family members hundreds of miles away. Happy to provide moral support, not much else. Elderly parents whose needs conflicted with my kids needs (If you want me to read about Gen Z then you get to read about the sandwich generation- women like me phoning neighbors frantically during a snow day/early dismissal wondering where the hell my kids were, because they werenât answering the phone at home, and I was hundreds of miles away arranging rehab for a parent being discharged from the hospital (no, it wasnât snowing where I wasâŠ)
And thatâs how I used my vacation days from work for- maybe a decade. Either for a sick kid, or a sick parent, or on some days both.
And you donât think full timerâs freelance??? Editing, SAT tutoring, LSAT tutoring, teaching ESL at night to a roomful of cab-drivers who were pathologists and dentists in their home countries and are trying to pass the boards in the US. And those are the professional gigs. The non-professional freelancing- Uber driving, cater/waiter, dog-grooming, anything that lends itself to shiftwork done after hoursâŠ
But I donât think my own experience makes good public policy. And your insistence that you âcanâtâ hold down a fulltime job if you have kids (maybe you have a spouse but heâs deployed overseas with the military- so he ainât picking up the kids from school) is a little insulting to the millions of women who do just that. Every day. Year after year.
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It is now. It just isnât billed as such. This is what happens in the inequality story.
There are no good choices from here unless economically we turn much more redistributive again. If you say, âWell, this is not very good, you may as well shut it down,â then in some senses you are correct: you stop handing out degrees that donât allow for serious national competition. On the other hand, you consign a lot of people to rotting, and rotting pretty fast, because they donât have enough money to get out and do anything else. Nor are they acquainted with the worlds of A and B cities and the level of competition and prep there. Donât know anything about it.
I donât know if youâve ever been in a town thatâs rotted, where opportunity left and never came back. Itâs not great. When you see that, hanging on is immediately preferable, even if itâs hanging-on with subsidence and waiting for help while people run fantasies about what cockamamie scheme to try next.
Iirc, about a third of our budget now comes from research grants. Under the deal struck by those wily science cats in the 1950s, about 1/3 of the federal money awarded to a U in research grants goes straight to admin for general upkeep of the school. Most of the rest goes to pay for grad studentsâ costs. The grad students also do a lot of the teaching and training of other grad students and undergrads â and more to the point, they do a lot of the actual research, all those experiments. If you kill the grad programs, your grad labor pool vanishes, and shortly thereafter so do your research grants.
Where do you make up the money to support the rest of the university? What do the kids who were wanting to go to grad school, but werenât going to make it to Penn and WashU, do? These arenât light or uncomplicated questions, especially now that we no longer have an economy that requires mostly human robots. One of the things that strikes me about amazonâs warehouse operation as its evolved is that Bezos is actually angry that the people arenât real robots. He really wants them to be.
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How did your kids physically get home from school, though? I mean that was the real sticking point here, apart from âyou canât leave tiny children unattended without risking a visit from CPS.â I donât know anyone whoâd have let me just take off at random hours according to the districtâs whims to go do pickups, even if Iâd had time off to cover it.
I begged or paid others to do pick up when I couldnât, and tried to repay the favor when I could. Seems like most moms do that.
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You still need supports in place to make that happen. If you donât have family/friends who can go pick kids up midday from school (or bring them there), look after them when theyâre too young to be on their own, donât have school districts that bus kids around nicely or do the neighborhood-school thing so that kids can actually walk homeâŠI can tell you what happens here when those supports donât exist. The kids donât make it to school and the district, district attorney, and parents wind up in a standoff, with the DA insisting that the parents do things they physically cannot do while remaining employed.
I spent a long time on transit issues here for that reason. To this day, unresolved.
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I dunno, I know a young, hard-working college graduate who is now grinding his wheels trying to come up with the money for a Masterâs degree in Human Resources. You do NOT need a Masterâs in HR for any HR job that I know of. A Masterâs in Psych? Can be useful. An MBA? Fantastic.
But a made-up degree? When he could just get an entry level job in HR? No, Iâm not crying for kids who want to go to grad school but canât-either their prep wasnât strong enough for them to get in, or they canât afford it. Half these degrees were created as a way to extend the draft deferments for middle class kids who didnât want to go to Viet Nam. Employers werenât crying âWe need more employees with Masterâs degrees in Communications, we need more Masterâs in Tourism Managementâ. No. Universities created them-- it was incremental revenue, these degrees were not expensive to teach (no nanotechnology lab required) and they were a lifeline for kids who were trying to wait out the war.
Of all your arguments, the grad school one is the weakest. And doctoral programs- even worse. We see posts on CC for kids who want a PhD but âiâm not sure in what and Iâm not sure which programs are out thereâ. Are you kidding me? Doctoral programs are not summer camps for kids old enough to drink. If you donât have your discipline already identified, if you donât know the five or fifty people doing the research you want to be doing, you arenât doctoral material. You donât need to have a dissertation topic chosen, but youâre 22 years old and you donât know why you want to go to grad school???
These grad programs are a trap- for the students, for society. One more PhD who canât get a job?
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Yeah, I tried that, too. It helps in that situation to have friends with a lot of leisure. It also means being able to reciprocate, which was not a position I was in. So Iâd try hiring people to show up for an hour in the middle of an afternoon and drive the kid to daycare elsewhere, and that would work for a few days, and then the person would very sensibly decide that it wasnât worth screwing up her afternoon for $10, and not show. And then Iâd get a call.
I donât know what to tell you. Iâm glad you were able to manage it. Itâs not in the cards for a lot of people unless theyâve got family committed enough to the kidâs welfare, and nearby, and functional enough, to make it go. For free, of course.
Never had family nearby. Many schools offer some type of after school care program. Millions of Americans somehow make it work, including those in your town.
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Iâm getting strong Boomer off you, blossom. A lot has changed. Your college grad is grinding his wheels for a good reason. Itâs not at all a happy thing. But Iâm watching the BA-level jobs and advancement evaporate and watching the kids come back. Do they want to spend stupid money on grad degrees, no. But their employment prospects are telling them what to do. Theyâre not in it for summer camp.
Of all the kids in my dept, the ones I worry most about are the undergrad majors. Their bachelorâs degrees allow them to do work that Iâm betting will be robot jobs within the decade. And the reality is that no, we donât need a world stuffed with PhDs. Most of them donât have the creativity required of a serious PhD anyway. What theyâre doing, blossom, is playing for time. Not amusing themselves. Just trying to keep the rent paid. Thatâs what weâre mostly doing in the hinterland at the moment. And this is the problem I keep hanging out the banner about.
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The reality is that soon they will be replaced by robots. And where do those people go. Redistribution wonât fix the issues.
If you believe that the nurses are inadequate, you may want to complain to the nursing program accreditor and nursing licensing exam maker.
The grass is not necessarily greener elsewhere.
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Neighbor was a nurse. Not my favorite person in the world, but a kind soul and reliable. My kids didnât like her kids- I told them to suck it up. She worked surgical, which was three 12 hour days. I had a corporate job- 5 days a week. We scheduled around each otherâs pain points.
Another neighbor was a stay at home mom. I paid her. She was meeting the bus at the end of the street anyway, so taking my kids home, supervising homework-- it was extra cash for her, not a lot of extra work.
Etc. Necessity and all that.
I am not proud of the day I had to call in sick when I was healthy but my kid was not. And my boss at the time- I knew him well enough to describe it as âsomething gynecologicalâ so I knew heâd never ask any follow up questions.
I would not describe any of the people I depended on as âfriendsâ, but I made sure to reciprocate generously. I did 300% of the weekend carpooling to play dates, birthday parties, etc. because I knew I wouldnât be carrying my load during the week. And yes- I supervised dozens of sleepovers for the divorced parents who had a date on the weekend and needed discreet coverage (and someone who wouldnât blab to the ex). That was me.
I paid top dollar for paid child care when they were young, made due with less coverage when they were in school but even with someone doing pickup every day, you need to be on good terms with your neighbors for the snow day early dismissals and emergencies. I cannot COUNT the number of resumes Iâve written and edited, mock interview sessions Iâve conducted, etc. for neighbors who were job hunting. Thatâs just what you do. They had an extra parent around in the afternoons-- I needed that parent. I have skills on how to get a better job- they needed me. Symbiosis.
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