This sooo true. And I can see that now. But no one even had this talk with me when I was in undergrad (though I never asked for recs from profs I didn't know and whose class I did not do well in). All of my profs, advisors, mentors, etc told me to go to grad school. No one said, "Hey, English, not such a good idea." I laugh at my naivete but no one told me any different.

"All of my profs, advisors, mentors, etc told me to go to grad school. No one said, "Hey, English, not such a good idea." I laugh at my naivete but no one told me any different." - Online Ophelia

That's because there is no way of checking; most grad programs do not do any follow up and they don't publish any graduation or placement stats. You would have been better off talking to a second year grad schooler then relying on any Yoda you could dredge up.

BTW I second Prof Snugglebunny on how the clip nailed Howard Bloom....now if they could just slam Dean Botstein of Bard, things would be set.

How sad, my prof told me just Monday not to bother going to grad school for humanities. He pretty much told me I'd make no money, have no life, and that IF I got a job at a university I'd be an adjunct doing the work of 3 profs for nothing. He said to go to law school and make tons of money so I can COLLECT art.

What he didn't tell you is that your chances of becoming one of the lawyers who is wealthy enough to collect art are more or less the same as your chances of becoming a tenured professor at a four year college or university. Just over half of law school graduates actually get jobs in the legal profession, and fewer than 20% of those who do wind up with jobs in law actually end up in remunerative positions such as partner at a big firm.

If you can't get into one of the top six or seven law schools, it is just as bad a decision to go to law school as it is to get a Ph.D. in English.

You're better off taking the 150K you'd spend on a law degree and starting a pornographic website, buying a Quizno's franchise, or getting your electrician's license.

And let's not get started on medical school. The bottom line is that most brain work doesn't pay. It's a race to the bottom, we just happen to be in the lead.

Now you know why my jaw drops whenever I get a student who asks to do a research project, and then immediately tells me that they won't be able to stay up past midnight. This is an astronomical observatory: just what exactly did they think we DO here? If it's process pretty pictures, they often can't even get that right: remember student N, in my post "What they say, versus what they mean." Funny, I seem to recall no problems with staying up late when I was a student, and not always for studying, either.

> You're better off taking the 150K you'd spend on a law degree and starting a > pornographic website, buying a Quizno's franchise, or getting your electrician's license.

Notice the pattern here. All of these are jobs that don’t require a college degree. Thanks to our neglect of vocational programs in high school, and telling nearly all our young people, “You must go to college,” and with so many of them going on to grad school because of the ongoing bad economy, the old economic law of supply and demand is making its effects felt.

I'd only add that the offshoring of almost all the decent jobs that don't "require" a college degree has contributed to pushing more and more people into taking on debt for college degrees they neither want nor need.

If everyone who was wasting time and money on a college degree they don't need figured out that skilled labor--electrician, plumber, car/motorcycle mechanic--was remunerative we'd soon have a huge oversupply in those trades as well. As a society we have simply decided that college is where we want to park all these people, because we can tell ourselves a happy story about how it is "improving" them as human beings and citizens. There just aren't enough decent, non-service industry jobs left for a country with this population.

Then there's the "I won't do that" problem. For example, there is a huge shortage of large animal vets. Everyone who is good enough to get into vet school (hardest professional school to get into by a mile) wants to live in a big city and treat the elite's small dogs and cats. No one wants to go through what it takes to get into vet school and then move to butthole Kansas and work in a large animal practice. So enjoy your (relatively) safe meat supply for, oh, another ten or fifteen years or so. We'll all be broke-ass vegetarians (the latter isn't necessarily a bad thing) in low-paying service jobs after that.

Yes, but Germany has also, for decades, diligently pursued a set of policies designed to protect the kinds of manufacturing jobs that employ those skilled trades. The U.S. hasn't. So even if we revived some version of Vo-Tech education, there would be nowhere near enough jobs for the graduates of such schools.

The flip side, of course, is that in recent years the Germans have been successful at protecting well-remunerated manufacturing jobs by gaming the EU Zone to their advantage. Every Greek, Portuguese, and Spaniard bought a raft of German-made consumer goods--cell phones, automobiles, refrigerators, washing machines, and so forth--thus ensuring the continued prosperity of the German worker. Now that those markets are collapsing under the weight of their cooked books, it isn't clear who is going to keep buying those high-end commodities in sufficient quantities to keep the Germans in beer and sausages.

And, of course, you wouldn't trust the real mouth breathers to do anything that requires skill. To be a good plumber, electrician, or mechanic requires the capacity for logical and critical thought. Those are not mindless professions. Far from it. You need smarts. For a really good argument about this read M. Crawford, "Shopclass as Soulcraft."

Hey, wait a minute. If you take the $150k and put it into setting up a pornographic web site, you have to spend your life making a living running a pornographic web site. That could be embarrassing, especially at family reunions. I'll pass.

If you take that $150k and spend it on going to law school, you have less than a 10% chance of becoming a wealthy lawyer. And even if you do, you have to spend your life being a lawyer. I'll pass.

So, by implication: take the $150k and get a Ph.D. in English. The logic has come full circle.

Oh, dear. Too familiar, and too funny. Like Marcia, I was contemplating grad school at a time when predicting a professor shortage in the near future was in vogue, so I never had such a conversation. And the prediction wasn't entirely wrong: I've had no problem over the last 20 years getting work teaching the baby boom echo kids; I've just been doing so in various sorts of contingent jobs that would not have allowed me to repay loans. Fortunately, the prognosticators put their money where their mouths were, and I had a fellowship designed to address said shortage. If that weren't the case, I'd really be in trouble financially (which is why I try to warn away any student who's contemplating going to grad school on his/her own dime).

Oh CC, I had that fellowship too, and wouldn't have gone any other way. But that fellowship didn't cover the 6 years of lost earnings while I was in grad school, the 3 years in a position that paid LESS than my grad stipend, the 10 years being paid a barely middle-class salary, or the infertility treatments I needed because I delayed starting a family until I had tenure. I was one of the "lucky" ones without student debt, but the costs have still been considerable.

@Marcia -- I figured as much. We're from approximately the same era, and it's mostly holders of Mellon (and Javits) fellowships who know about the Bowen Report. Yes, holding either fellowship by no means mitigated the costs of trying to pursue an academic career in the '90s. In my case, the belief that the predicted shortage had merely been postponed by the lifting of the retirement age -- the most common explanation on my campus -- encouraged me to keep plugging away at a dissertation long past the point when there was any real chance it would lead to a decent-paying job (of course, I'm also a stubborn cuss who tends to finish what I start, so I might have done that anyway). I'm just glad I don't have student loans on top of everything else; that would be the last straw.

As far as I'm concerned, every application for graduate school in the humanities should include a required essay on opportunity costs. If the applicant doesn't understand the concept, he/she doesn't get in, regardless of other qualifications. There are very few things, aside from teaching on the college level, that someone with the sort of brain suited to completing a Ph.D. in the humanities can't do *without* that Ph.D. It's a teaching credential, and if there aren't decent-paying teaching jobs available, there's very little reason for someone who isn't independently wealthy to get one. Parts of the experience of getting a Ph.D. are certainly worthwhile on their own, but, given the costs, I can't make a case for having the experience for the experience's sake (and especially not if it includes providing cheap labor that perpetuates a broken system).

@ Froedrich Frankenstien from FresnoI watched xtranormal.com/watch/7478879....the only part where it failed was that the voices were the same. When a country produces more scientists then there are positions to fill, that country is treading water.

What Was This?

College Misery was a dysfunctional group blog where professors got the chance to release some of the frustration that built up while tending to student snowflakes, helicopter parents, money mad Deans, envious colleagues, and churlish chairpeople.

Our parent site, Rate Your Students, started in 2005, and we continued that mission beginning in 2010. Ben at Academic Water Torture and Kimmie at The Apoplectic Mizery Maker both ran support blogs during periods when this blog had died.