<p>Yes mythmom. In my own lifetime I saw the defense industry dry up and people who had worked in this industry had to reinvent themselves. I saw the dot com boom and know people who were on their toes and got in early and are now retired millionaires.</p>
<p>The economy changes. None of us should get our sights too set on one path, we should all be a little adaptable.</p>
<p>mythmom:</p>
<p>I totally agree. There are many fields that involve a lot of risk, perhaps even more than academic ones. And one cannot predict the future. The students who rushed into physics during the Sputnik era found the job market closed to them when they got their Ph.D.s.
I was addressing the two-body problem specifically as an additional factor to consider, not making a judgment as to who has got it harder!</p>
<p>Loved your last post, Mythmom. :)</p>
<p>Yeah… I dunno. I’ve been a waitress, a law librarian, a stage director, a script doctor for television, a teacher, a stay-at-home mom, worked in a call center, now working at an arts non-profit. I mean, really, it’s been a wonderful life with a great family and amazing travels and adventures. My husband is in a notoriously unpractical profession in the arts, but has managed to work at consistently since he left college.</p>
<p>Life isn’t what your job is. Well, not for me anyway. What my jobs have been has been a reflection of interest, practical need and opportunities. Yeah, we’re pretty broke by College Confidential standards, but we own a little house, have no debt, and our kids are in college and doing great in their infinitely impractical majors. We are who we are. Not a one of us could have worked in business or engineering or … whatever. I would have done myself in by now if I’d followed that path.</p>
<p>My humanities kids will figure out how to move through life. We all have to.</p>
<p>I agree with an earlier poster that one can happily and greedily live a life of the mind without grad school – and even after grad school without entering academia professionally – but I expect both my kids will make the choice to go. They know it’s choice to make for the experience itself. Not such a bad experience to have if you like what you’re doing!</p>
<p>marite: Yes, you are definitely right about the “two body” problem. I have seen couples with many solutions to this problem and others who couldn’t quite ever solve it to their satisfaction.</p>
<p>Even very elite folks face this – Ann Fadiman and her H (forget his name), but National Book Award nominees (she won, he didn’t) are at Yale and Amherst respectively. One of them has a beastly commute.</p>
<p>Some of poetgrl’s statements about famous authors could stand a little reality check:</p>
<p>Wallace Stevens never sold insurance. He was a lawyer, and during most of the fertile part of his career as a poet he was General Counsel of The Hartford Life Ins. Co. In other words, a well-paid big deal.</p>
<p>Herman Melville did, in fact, support himself with his writing, at least for a longish time. His early works were best-sellers, and even when his later works – the ones for which he is famous now – did not sell, or were not even published, he made a decent amount of money making personal appearances (i.e., lectures). He also had the good sense to marry a rich wife. He died a pauper, but it took decades of commercial failure, depression, alcoholism, and erratic behavior to achieve that.</p>
<p>Emily Dickinson wasn’t publishing, but that was by choice. She was also wealthy and privileged, and she was well-known in the blogosphere of her time, maintaining active correspondence with famous literary and academic figures.</p>
<p>I’m not sure what lessons to take from this, but none of them was suffering for his or her art that much.</p>
<p>JHS, you and your facts really get my goat!</p>
<p>No, JHS I’ve never suffered through all of my publishing, for my art, all that much either. Done pretty well in that area without any problem, at all. But, I don’t expect to make a living off of it, either. Niether did Stevens, who absolutely despised his life in insurance, not to mention his wife. As for Herman Melville? You really believe that the books for which he is not famous were not his best books? The ones that didn’t sell? What is your point with that, exactly? I’m unclear.</p>
<p>Is your point that one cannot have a life of the mind outside of ivory tower academia? rotflol. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>Maybe it’s a deja vu situation, but didn’t we just have a lengthy thread a few weeks ago about this exact subject, and maybe the exact same article? (Sorry if someone else has already pointed this out – I haven’t read the whole thread.)</p>
<p>There have been several similar threads which included discussions of the author’s previous articles. This particular piece appears to have been published on Feb. 8, 2010.</p>
<p>A doctor can’t exactly go hang a shingle without a significant investment in being licensed by the state, buying or leasing expensive equipment and hiring staff either. And many professions are limited to opportunities in certain geographies. The ski instructor can’t relocate to follow a spouse to Florida. The spouse running the family business can’t just up and relocate. Life is hard. Work is hard. Some careers require compromise or sacrifice. In other news, the sun sets in the west. Academia seems no different from anyone else.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Not the same article, but there was another thread on an article by this author that was advising people not to go into Humanities grad school. This article was in response to the response to that article.</p>
<p>PG: But a doctor could. An academic just could not be a prof without a university, just as a ski instructor cannot teach skiing without snow. I did mention that the two-body problem is not limited to academia but within academia it is more of an issue than in many other professions, partly because academics tend to marry other academics (a problem exacerbated by the increased number of female Ph.D.s–male Ph.Ds are more likely to marry non-Ph.D.s than female Ph.D.s to marry male non-Ph.D.s).
The problem, as I wrote, is not just from the perspective of the job seekers but also the institutions. To the point that some act like vultures, checking out which marriages are breaking up so that one of the partners suddenly becomes available and unencumbered by a spouse in need of an academic job. The number #1 reason for academics to turn down job offers is not money but family issues, and more specifically spousal issues.
As for retooling, a lot of Ph.D.s do and often have to hide their Ph.D.s in order to make themselves more marketable.</p>
<p>While I agree with a lot of the posters that this article seems to be heavy on the angst and not very balanced, I do think there’s one difference between academia and other professions regarding the difficulty of finding a spot. In most academic fields, your specialty is very specific and you’re hired for that specialty. Most universities only need one expert on 19th Century French Thought, for example, which is how you wind up with only 3 openings in the country. Most other professions are a bit more general in their application.
I do think most people going into academics today are pretty aware of the lack of positions. My Dd who is in her second year of a social science program at a top university certainly is. But she’s also interested in museum work, publishing, or teaching in a private high school or community college. (some of her fav HS teachers were PhDs and she can imagine that life) She’s not sure she wants to stay on the hard track of “publish or perish,” fighting for a tenure track position at a research university but doesn’t need to make that decision just yet. She’s fully funded with health benefits and living in a fun town with a lot of other young people, studying something she cares about, having a pretty good time and growing up. It’s not a bad gig for the next few years, which is how she looks at it. She doesn’t feel like an indentured servant- she can quit anytime. But she does believe that her opportunities will be better with an advanced degree, especially if she wants a career in museum work. Private high schools like teachers with doctorates, too, as long as they’re good teachers. And at least no one will ever tell her she needs to go back to school! ;)</p>
<p>poetgrl, I completely agree with you that the life of the mind can exist outside academia, but it takes a certain amount of material support, which all of the people you cited had.</p>
<p>As for your other points – Wallace Stevens and Herman Melville both seem to have been unpleasant people in different ways, like many authors. I don’t think Typee is a better book than Pierre or Moby-Dick, but Melville made lots of actual money off of it. (He might well have been able to make money from Moby-Dick if he had published it. Pierre – that was never going to support anybody.)</p>
<p>
Some are. You’d be surprised how many are not.</p>
<p>I was appalled, for example, at the number of history graduate students at my university who are PAYING for their degree. That is not even advisable at Harvard, let alone Podunk U.</p>
<p>Equally surprising (and heartbreaking) are the number of students who post in May: “Rejected everywhere…what do I do?” Those kids are too focused on getting into graduate school and academia, their only focus. Such students don’t have a back-up plan for rejection or a lack of job offers.</p>
<p>The only issue I have with the article is that it places the blame mostly on professors. Truthfully, most prospective graduate students ARE told about the dismal career prospects. They simply choose to bury their heads in the sand and trot off to graduate school anyway, confident that THEY will surely secure a good job.</p>
<p>Otherwise, I very much liked the article and think it’s right on target.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Just to clarify, he was a ‘clerk’ but one who needed the B.S. level education he had to evaluate patents for electromagnetic devices. He had that job because he couldn’t find a job teaching…</p>
<p>
You cannot be admitted to Harvard (and Yale, Princeton and their peers) without be fully funded by Harvard. This may mean funding that is not dependent on teaching as at Princeton or funding that is relying on teaching at Yale, Harvard and elsewhere, but you cannot use your own money to pursue a Ph.D. in English, history or the like.</p>
<p>I am appalled, too, at the students who are paying their own way through humanities and social sciences grad school; I suspect Podunk U needs them to teach undergrads on the cheap. They are truly being exploited.</p>
<p>The arguments here back and forth are as old as the hills, that as they say the more times change the more they stay the same…</p>
<p>In any of the ‘academic’ or ‘artistic’ fields, there are always those who go into it with delusions of all kinds. There is the person who figures they will go to grad school in English Literature, wind up a PHd on Elizabethan Grammar (aka why Shakespeare’s plays were really written by his basset hound Smedley), get that position at an Ivy or a New England LAC, and lived the charmed life of a professor. And yeah, it has never been easy, even back in the golden age (if one existed), besides the obvious, that professors tend to stay on the job until they are well beyond the age of medicare and SS eligibility, and openings tend to seem to dry up in humanities areas at the first sign of financial trouble, there also was a lot of competition. These days, as Universities try to shed what beancounters love to call ‘fixed costs’, more and more teaching is done by the gypsies of academia, non tenure tracked adjuncts and such, who teach at a bunch of schools with no benefits and fairly little pay (last article I read, several years ago, at a school with tuition at 1k/credit, 3 credit classes, they were paying the teacher like 2 grand to teach 20 students…you do the math). And yeah, they are in for a rude awakening when those dreams of teaching at a college out of some movie evaporate mighty fast…(on top of that, I suspect professor salaries at many schools are not exactly going to be ‘up there’ so to speak, least not in the humanities). </p>
<p>Using my perspective from the arty sides of things, it is the obverse side of the coin known as classical music. Lots of kids dream big, I see a ton of violin students who think they are going to be the next Josh Bell or Hillary Hahn (many of them with egos to match, something neither performer has btw), they really believe because their teacher pushed them to play paganini at 11 and so forth they are hot stuff…some get into the top conservatories, and then come out and hit the wall of reality, that the number of top soloists is a very small number (maybe a couple of dozen on violin), and that orchestra jobs in the big ones that pay well are rarer then a steak cooked at barely warm temperatures…(ironically, many of these same kids looked down on orchestra, chamber music and so forth, as ‘beneath them’…until they hit the real world. )…</p>
<p>In music, a lot of the kids have been working at this pace since before they were teens, done everything, spent a fortune on lessons, programs, you name it…plus conservatories/music schools are mostly as expensive as Ivy’s…towards a job future that is almost impossible to predict, that as one music critic wrote it, never seems optimistic. </p>
<p>The direct analogy is to do it the people in both cases have to go into it eyes wide open; that if going in for the humanities in a grad program, be realistic about their chances, and what their future holds. If they want to be a perpetual student for a while, being the academic bon vivant, knowing they will have to re-invent themselves, great, or if they have the potential to actually make it as a teacher of some sort, go for it. You need to have the passion to want to do it in either case. Eventually people who go into either path
find what they need to do, either leave it entirely, or reframe what they end up doing. </p>
<p>There are a lot easier ways to make money, if you want to get rich go become an investment banker or plastic surgeon or whatnot…wanna do something you are passionate about? Be aware of the realities, be nimble and take it from there. As others have pointed out, talk to people who went into IT or engineering because it was a good career path where you could make a decent living, and look what third world labor has done to that…</p>
<p>Warbler, EVERYONE needs a back-up plan. The kid who has been pre-med since she was 9, the aspiring CPA, the physical therapist wannabee, the kid who didn’t go to college at all to pursue a professional career in dance or basketball. In some fields you are one injury away from ending your professional life. In some fields, the industry dries up before you get credentialed. In some fields, the job market shifts dramatically (look at print journalism pre and post internet) and unpredictably.</p>
<p>I find the myopic preoccupation with finding the ONE THING AND ONLY ONE THING I can see myself doing to be a very millenial generation obsession. Our parents were happy to have a job that put bread on the table, and if it involved interesting people or not getting black lung disease that was a bonus. The baby boomers, after early dabbling with our hippy stuff, mostly ended up happy if their jobs didn’t get moved to Mumbai in 2002 or get eviscerated in last year’s meltdown. </p>
<p>My kids friends (mid to late 20’s) seem convinced that there is one thing and only one thing. It must be that thing. If you want to help people it has to be medicine (because god knows nobody else ever helps people). If you love the environment, you have to work for Greenpeace (because engineers who are developing electric cars or engines that run on soybeans hate the environment). If you are creative, you have to work for Steven Jobs or Steven Spielberg or about 5 other people in the world named Steven.</p>
<p>This is the big lie, in my opinion. PhD candidates think they’ve got it tougher than anyone but frankly, so does everyone else in their cohort. The med school applicants think that no other process in the world is as arduous as theirs (except when they’re waiting to be matched with residencies and then they’ll complain that it’s so tough, it makes med school admissions look like a cakewalk.) The young lawyers kvetch that getting a job at a big firm is so hard it made getting into Penn law school look easy, except of course passing the bar is next to impossible if you want to work in a civilized state like Illinois or Massachusetts or California or NY. (The other bars are so easy I am told.)</p>
<p>Where is Plan B? Where is the perspective? Where did all the young people go who figured out that if they couldn’t make a living teaching French literature they’d find some other thing to do?</p>
<p>And where are all the parents??? Where does this rigid thinking come from that it’s Plan A or bust?</p>
<p>blossom, I think that “follow your dream” has become such a mantra that people tend to ignore the unpleasant realities.</p>