The College Fix

After seven years of toil that nearly stopped us from becoming Mr. and Mrs., my wife completed her Ph.D. this summer.

It was a bitch, to paraphrase Nas: a cross-country move that split us for two years, poverty wages for her and a very rough adjustment to a “virtual office” for me, not to mention starting our social lives from scratch.

And it’s not remotely over, because getting a Ph.D. is like Morgan Freeman getting paroled from Shawshank and then struggling to adjust to freedom.

That’s why I gobbled up Charlotte Allen’s eye-opening and depressing look into the job prospects for Ph.D.s in a recent issue of The Weekly Standard.

Allen’s prime example of the disastrous job market for the highly educated is biologist John Cooley, who discovered the bizarre mating rituals of the cicadas that emerge every 17 years to terrify the Eastern seaboard.

Cooley has taught at Yale, published widely and done every radio interview imaginable, but he’s never landed a tenure-track position:

At age 47, he is a more or less permanent fixture in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut’s main Storrs campus, but only as “adjunct faculty,” which means teaching jobs for a few thousand dollars per class, no benefits of any kind, and certainly no job security. “I share an office, and right now I have no lab,” Cooley said in a telephone interview. “All my lab equipment is now in a storage unit.” In 2013, Cooley, a cicada celebrity but with little hope of a sustainable academic future, enrolled in UConn’s business school, and he now has an M.B.A. degree.

Allen’s article should give pause to anyone considering or just starting a Ph.D. program. They are likely to:

• end up as adjuncts making less than $3,000 per course, meaning they have to “shuttle among multiple campuses” just to earn a “barista-level income of, say, $25,000” without health insurance

• have no paid time off for research, meaning they can’t advance in their careers

• risk living out of their cars, subsisting on food stamps and dying in poverty. (Read these Seattle Magazine and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette articles about long-term elderly adjuncts who died in poverty.)

It should also alarm parents who spend tens of thousands of dollars a year to send their children to supposedly prestigious schools where “their young Jayden or Sophia isn’t actually being taught by the Nobel Prize-winners advertised on the faculty but by shabbily attired nomads with ancient clattering cars who are wondering how to get the phone bill paid,” Allen writes.

Who benefits from this system? Current tenured professors and those who hope, like frequent lottery-ticket purchasers, to become them by whoring themselves out for years:

A professor I contacted sent me this email: “It’s a hypocritical system in which we talk about how much we ‘love’ students while they are undergraduates, only to exploit them as graduate students and then adjuncts.” The professor refused to let me use the email for attribution: “One can’t even talk about these questions from inside the system without risking serious pushback.” …

It’s certainly true that professors love having graduate students around. … Graduate classes tend to be small, easy-to-grade seminars rather than huge lectures with hundreds of bluebooks. Grad students form an eager slave-labor force for research and teaching assistance, and their very presence on campus assures faculty and administrators that their institution is a serious scholarly enterprise, not a cow college in the middle of nowhere.

A case study: My wife

As a relatively uneducated hack who was loathe to spend money on more education with no clear benefit, I asked my wife (who’s a woman of color, for what it’s worth) whether Allen’s narrative matched her experience.

Pretty much, she said. (This is heavily paraphrased.) Her self-evaluated prospects are brighter because she’s seeking a long-term, untenured clinical professorship (i.e. doing, not teaching), but she had a near-useless adviser and worked the equivalent of full-time in part-time positions where her pay was capped.

She said students have to take unpaid positions to secure funding if they want to be remotely competitive going forward (sound familiar?), and her friends in the program were similarly worked to death by their professors.

She spent a couple terms adjuncting while she finished her Ph.D. and is now doing the same thing, teaching two classes at one university for poverty wages, holed up at home grading and preparing most of the week, complaining about her underwhelming students and how much hand-holding they need (again, sound familiar?). She expects to have her sought-after clinical position in three years.

This next year is devoted to publishing rather than earning a living wage, so she can make it past the first hurdle in job interviews. Hence I’m the breadwinner – a guy with a bachelor’s, no marketable skills outside writing (and tearing apart young reporters’ copy), no debt and less stress than most well-paid people I know.

As Allen says, the best options for the hordes of underemployed Ph.D.’s is probably to “just say no to adjuncting and its Dickensian miseries”:

This past April Jason Brennan, a philosophy professor at Georgetown and a self-described libertarian, incurred the Internet wrath of the famously left-leaning adjunct-advocacy community by proclaiming that “it’s hard to feel sorry for [adjuncts].” There’s no reason for them “to wallow in adjunct poverty,” Brennan wrote, pointing out that they could “quit any time and get a perfectly good job at GEICO.”

Or Progressive. Even Flo is just a Groundling who spent 15 years after her bachelor’s in English trying to book gigs (i.e., honing her job-interview skills) before landing the big one, as she told her alma mater as commencement speaker this year.

And she’s pretty hilarious outside commercials too.

Like The College Fix on Facebook / Follow us on Twitter

IMAGE: Piotr Marcinski/Shutterstock