Open thread: Penalized for a Ph.D.

From VectorStock

Gertrude Nonterah sometimes gets blowback on LinkedIn when she admits that she left higher ed because she was tired of being poor. She told me, “There's this flawed thinking within academia that when you leave…it's because somehow you are a capitalistic opportunist. Or you don't want to serve people.”

But this got me thinking about the increasing emphasis on employability in undergraduate education. This was the focus of Jason Wingard’s vision at Temple University, before he resigned, not two years into his presidency. And it is a brand pillar at High Point University, which styles itself as the “Premier Life Skills University.” The rising cost of higher education makes parents and students want to see a guaranteed return on their investment. I get it – the higher the financial risk, the more assurance you want that you’re not just throwing money away. But I’m trying to square this reality with what seems like a fool’s bargain for people with advanced degrees. 

I’ll save the research on this for my Tuesday essay, but maybe you can help me resolve what seems like a contradiction: How can colleges and universities continue to ask poorly compensated faculty or graduate students to help undergraduates land better jobs than their own? If the focus of an undergraduate degree is economic mobility, why does it seem that advanced degrees — particularly the Ph.D. — seem to actually diminish earning potential, at least within academe? And if this is so, how can such a system possibly continue to operate as-is?

Here is another unsavory hypothesis: Whatever progress tenure-line faculty might make toward fair compensation or workload reduction (through unionization or other negotiations) is necessarily going to create externalities for graduate TAs, adjuncts, and lecturers. That is, if the tenured folks manage to earn what they think is fair, or reduce their teaching load, someone else (likely with similar credentials) will have to pick up the slack. Take, for instance, the Teaching Professor track at Penn State, which I explored while preparing for our move. These are non-tenured positions with potential for the usual promotions (Assistant, Associate, Full Professor). They come with benefits. But the department head told me that salary begins around $35K. For teaching seven courses a year, primarily first-year writing (that’s a lot of grading), with committee responsibilities to boot. It is astounding that the mean salary for assistant professors at PSU is $123,341 — nearly 100K more than the starting pay on the teaching track. There simply is not enough money in the system, except at elite institutions, to privilege both the student experience and employee well-being (at least not equitably). What do I get wrong with this proposition? 

I frequently told students not to go to graduate school because the prospect of landing a job were slim. I thought that those who could take “no” for an answer were better off, and that the stubborn ones like me who thought they could beat the odds anyway just might have the stuff necessary to do it. But the assumption still was that if you ran the gauntlet and earned tenure, it was a job worth having. This might still be true at exclusive institutions or at flagship universities in states with supportive legislatures. But 71% of faculty in the United States hold non-tenure-track positions, and only 20% of those jobs are full-time. Increasingly, people like me who are/were in that fortunate tenured minority are deciding the job isn’t actually worth it financially, if you can summon the courage to leave. As Gee said in our interview, some say it is rude or crude to talk about such things, but I see financial inequity as an urgent ethical problem in higher ed. A glance at the CVs of tenure-track faculty and teaching faculty at Penn State shows that compensation is anything but meritocratic. Some questions to tease that out (with apologies for any redundancies with the prompts above): 

• Based on the dismal job prospects in academe for most Ph.D.s, what rationale can there still be for encouraging students to complete a doctorate, especially if their goal is to become a professor? Is there any other industry where professionals are encouraged to accept 4-10 years of poverty with a slim chance of a financial return on that investment? I need to probe the stats more carefully to say this definitively, but if only 29% of faculty positions are tenure-track, and if the majority of those are jobs like my former position — at community colleges, private colleges, or regional institutions — then it seems likely that the percentage of faculty earning more than $100K is in the single digits. The fact that this would be seen as an unacceptable return on investment for undergraduates speaks for itself.

• If the goal of undergraduate education is to create skilled laborers, rather than cultured people who think critically, value art, and embrace the importance of history, what is the “why” for graduate students who aspire to become faculty one day? And why would an aspiring academic professional knowingly sacrifice their own earning potential for the sake of helping other people maximize theirs? This WAPO story shows that first-generation academics (always rare) are disappearing from faculty roles. Is not the inevitable outcome a gentrification of the professoriate — people who can afford to teach because they are subsidized by inherited wealth? 

• The only proposition that made sense to me as an academic was that there were higher values, such as citizenship and the pursuit of truth, that made financial sacrifices personally worthwhile. Ironically many of my childhood friends made a similar tradeoff by sticking with dying industries, like logging, because they loved working outdoors. In both cases, there was a big enough “why” to take money off the table, or at least to feel like we were not trading our lives for money. When the “why” diminishes at work, some people protect themselves by pulling back, setting boundaries, and shifting the “why” to other pursuits. I’m too much of an idealist for that, and a full exit was necessary. How do you grapple with the “why” question in your work (academic or not)?

• I still feel that employability for entry-level positions is not so complicated that it requires the full force of the undergraduate curriculum — that employability can be the byproduct of the traditional liberal arts or a more intentional goal of auxiliary programs like internships. Is it not true that the real value of a college degree ought to lie in lifelong rewards, such as self-awareness, curiosity about the world, and the ability to understand more than the present time? Is it overstating the case to suggest that if all a student gains from a four-year degree is the requisite training to land an entry-level position, that that enormously expensive degree will be effectively obsolete once they leave that position for the next one, which will give them most of the credentials they’ll need for further advancement?