So perhaps it is your job to tell them their employment prospects will not improve with another useless graduate degree, and they will be older and poorer for obtaining it.
Many of the most lucrative jobs right now are available to bachelor’s degree holders. Computer software. Banking. Accounting. Even nursing can be solid. Grad school really isn’t a good place to just wait out poor job prospects for most people
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Yes, I know an ungodly amount about how people make it work here and why. Here’s how it breaks down:
- Family. Lots and lots of local family.
- The woman quits her job or goes part time.
- (most often immigrant families) The kids make long treks to and fro and sometimes don’t make it to school, and when they come back are alone until the neighbor calls the police, at which point someone leaves a fulltime job and sometimes moves, meaning the kid loses stability, friends, etc.
I tried at one point to organize a chartered bus service, but there weren’t enough people who both had money for that and needed it daily to make it go. I also talked to local principals, school board, and city-council people about rejiggering regs and shifting a city bus schedule by 10 minutes, to no avail. All this work was, of course, unpaid. The fact that women do it all over the country is not a reason to justify it or regard it as a thing that should be, or must be.
We do have after-school care but not nearly enough to meet demand. Again, local funding has something to do with this. At my daughter’s elementary, the earliest you could sign up was a year before kindergarten enrollment, at which point you could expect a place in 2nd grade.
I do not know what city you are in, but the fact remains, thousands of women there manage work and childcare everyday, and at least among African American communities, have done so for countless generations. One could look for another job or another city, given that you are highly educated.
Academia is considered very flexible in most places, not sure why it wasn’t for you. Presumably any of the students could babysit?
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For goodness’ sake, blossom, I’m starting to think you like whomping people for the hell of it.
If I’d had such neighbors, within blocks, don’t you think I’d have done that? People around here have to work. Single moms on both sides; end of block a stay-home mom who was stay home because she had a severely autistic and frequently violent child. She was a caregiver and she didn’t have bandwidth for another child.
Really, give people some credit for having explored all the corners of their own situations.
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I’m not hiding my age.
And the notion that we should encourage? facilitate? young people with limited prospects spending MORE money on a not-needed Master’s degree because that’s a good way to kick the can down the road? Yikes. You’re the one that wants a systemic change-- start here.
“But their employment prospects are telling them what to do. They’re not in it for summer camp.” Seriously- an employer is telling a kid with a Bachelor’s that he’d be more employable with a Master’s degree? Sure, if the MS is in Cyber, Analytics, Civil Engineering. And kids are trying to decide if they should get a Master’s focused on Employee Relations or “the more marketable” HR Master’s?
Answer- neither.
To your three points on how it works- try waving those three answers in front of any Boomer woman you know and watch her explode. No family, no CPS, and nobody quit. That represents reality for millions of women who are now approaching retirement age.
I’m not telling you that working part-time is a luxury. It was clearly the right choice for you. But I am giving you a reality check that many of your economic observations and policy suggestions are based on your own experience- of freelancing, then fulltime, or fulltime but flexible. And that it is hard- very hard- to raise a kid on a freelance salary, or even a fulltime salary which comes after many years of slogging away needing flexible hours.
OK Boomer. I’m not telling you “we did it, so you should too”. I AM telling you that your trope that only someone with a kindly grandma or aunt close by who can provide childcare, or that someone needs to quit her job, is not reality for millions of families. And for the Boomers who ended up needing to take care of that elderly grandma AND still had kids at home who needed dinner and permission slips signed, and supervision- maybe have a little patience that they don’t buy into all your observations…
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Yep, that’s the drill.
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While I’m impressed by your grit and determination, this type of situation is probably why fewer people have kids these days. We give a lot of lip service to family values in our country, but very little support to working parents.
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Yeah, I’ve explained that one. Custody laws don’t allow one to be so footloose and fancy-free, plus it means unknown prospect of other supports for the kid and attempting to acclimate the kid in a new place, new school, while facing the same problems as before as a single fulltime-working mom.
There’s a reason why so many American women leave work when they’ve got small children. A lot of it has nothing to do with soccer. There’s also a reason why all those women in Iceland keep their jobs after having children. That one’s got nothing to do with soccer, either.
It was the part-time, stable, salaried academic job that provided the flexibility to do pickups etc. However, it took seven years to get that job. I’d get interviews, then apologetic calls because the salary line had disappeared and they weren’t hiring for the job after all.
If you’re on the urban east coast, you’re accustomed to a wealth of employment opportunities. These things don’t exist in most of the country. Yes, I know, you want to say, “then move.” I refer you to the top of this post.
A quarter of the children in my daughter’s kindergarten had mothers governed by the same laws. Large proportions of children all over the country have grown up in families subject to them. Do you remember when I was talking about how in order to solve K-12’s problems, you also have to take care of radical inequalities? That’s one small, but important, part of them.
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Dude, read more carefully, please. I worked salaried part time. Total work? Well more than fulltime. Salaried was but one among many simultaneous gigs.
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Truce. I have never walked in your shoes, you’ve never walked in mine.
But I will point out that among the educators I know (from classroom teachers up to heads of ed policy and evaluation at the state level) there is quiet agreement that since we haven’t yet figured out how to solve hunger in our schools (despite billions spent on breakfast, lunch) or how to address health access issues (despite different billions spent on eye exams, hearing tests, etc.) or literacy gaps, I am not optimistic that we’re going to “fix” the many and complicated issues associated with custody in a divorce situation.
Not optimistic. Feeding kids is simple comparatively. And even that is very, very hard.
Truce. I lived in the urban Midwest when my kids were born. I had neighbors who had three and four generations of family close by. (I did not). It was easier to navigate social issues and childcare, employment issues moving to a place where everyone was a nomad of some sort. Nobody expected you to have family close by to help, because THEY didn’t have family close by to help. Made it much easier.
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I am sympathetic to OP’s situation, but she doesn’t seem to acknowledge that her choices had a lot to do with it. Perhaps she did not choose to be a single mother, but once that happened, her choices could have changed. If academia wasn’t great, presumably she was qualified for other work, and family courts are usually quite sympathetic to a work-related move to improve salary. Most adult women are well aware of the childcare situation in the US before having kids. It hasn’t changed. Similarly, the poor market for academic employment hasn’t improved in 20 years or longer. Given those realities, many make other personal choices regarding how to structure their lives. It would seem appropriate for OP’s students to do the same.
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Neither do I. I think Communism is the most destructive ideology that ever infected humans. Which is why I am keen to prevent it.
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I’ve thought about this. The UK had huge inequality for a long time. Why was that sustainable? I think because they had an immense empire which acted as a release valve. The ambitious and discontented could try to make their fortune in the Empire rather than foment change at home. I’m not sure what our parallel would be. Sending disgruntled liberal arts grad abroad to teach English?
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All people working at an institution want it to survive for obvious reasons. What people anywhere would sacrifice their personal interests for some “public interest”?
Higher ed is definitely ripe for disruption.
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Well, the UBI folks say that redistribution indeed has to be part of the solution.
We’re going through an economic revolution that is as wrenching as the first Industrial Revolution (Communism/socialism became popular among at least a sizable portion of the working class almost everywhere for a reason).
I’ve seen Noah Smith say that Biden’s trying to make the US in to a 2-track economy like Japan (world-leading companies in tradables subsidizing an inefficient and large service economy that serves the purpose of keeping a lot of people employed). Japan has been able to pull that off due to immense social cohesion, pretty strong personal conservatism, and collusion among leading companies, however, keeping wages down at their top companies. For the US to pull that off, you would need laws, not just social constraints. I suppose we could try the Nordic model (high taxes but companies are actually pretty unregulated and the high taxes are used to pay for a lot of service jobs like childcare, education, and healthcare/people care).
Agree with this. Our great private school does much better with T30Uni/T15LACs than the well-known governor’s school in town(not TJ). Naviance consistently shows our kids are admitted with lower SATs than that school, and the %admits are better as well. Too many super smart kids gathered in one high school can be very limiting for those that don’t rise to the top.
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There may be a few reasons for that, though. Privates tend to have more counseling(/packaging) resources. And privates also tend to have more hooked applicants. Were you comparing the SAT of unhooked with unhooked?
I was comparing total to total . I have no way to know legacies but I know the recruited athletes to top schools the last 2 yrs and they are removed if outliers. Anecdotes, really, not data. IT is true that the counseling is far better at our private than this well known public Gov School. Which surprised me though maybe it shouldn’t have?
I mean, that’s a big part of what you’re paying for. . .
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For sure. I used to hear young people talking all the time about how they wanted a zillion kids. Not anymore. My kid says it sounds like a scam, and I’m like, you are the sweetest of peas, and I’m not sorry, but yeah, I’d say that’s about right. And for all the work-life balance baloney, I notice that there are very few faculty in my dept who don’t have wives taking care of the home show. We did have one single mom, and boy did that career fall apart hard, even though her mom kept showing up on visas to help out.
A lot’s changed that people who made it through in other times don’t see, and don’t have reason to see unless they’re going looking. CPS, for instance, can turn your life and your kids’ lives upside down like ICE, and you will get reported – by neighbors, by mandatory-reporter teachers – for going latchkey-70s. And if you’re not rich, with stay-home soccer-minivan friends, the people around are poorer and busier than they were 40 years ago, and less able to help out. The rate of change along many axes is part of why the problems are so hard to solve: it’s why it’s taken a whole generation’s getting crushed by school debt, and yelling about it, for the rest of the society to turn around and say, huh, maybe it’s not an avocado-toast problem after all. 20 years ago, the problem barely existed. And people want credit for having survived hardships from days gone by, ones that have been superseded. You get keyword triggers, too, that really get in the way. Look what happened above as soon as I said “part-time”, which in blossom’s context meant something very different than it does in a 21st-c context.
I remember several years ago starting a course with Reagan’s Morning in America campaign, and because this is entirely historical for students now, I tried setting it up with late-70s malaise and Carter being a massive bummer from the Oval Office. The kids failed to see what was bad. To them the whole situation looked actually very good, and they’d have traded in a heartbeat. School that doesn’t indebt you for life? Jobs that don’t require college? Some kind of dental care for most? Those union hourlies were what? All they could see were the Great Society remnants, which looked pretty awesome next to what they had. Their conclusion: these 70s people were massive complainers.
I do have some hope for things’ turning around, and again it’s generational. After decades’ worth of “wt_, how am I a volunteer 24/7 nurse for free,” from mostly-women caring for family members – and GenXers bailing on eldercare altogether – there’s federal-level legislation that addresses the fact that you have to pay and support people, that women aren’t just another kind of slave. Housing, food, min-wage, medicine – again, I’m seeing local attempts at change all over the country that are getting squashed at state level, but they’re being squashed because they’re serious, and would work. And in the end the intense, intense conversation among anyone under 30 about race, class, opportunity…I think we’re already on our way, frankly. I also think that the novelty will be much less novel than many people fear.
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