You know exactly what you hope to do with that. You hope to find a tenure-track job at a college or university where you will teach anthropology to generations of students, some of whom will go on to graduate school and write esoteric dissertations of their own (see Reason 29). For some reason, however, this is hard to articulate in a conversation. One problem is that you can see a certain absurdity in this cycle of which you are now a part. Another is that you know just how hard it is to get a tenure-track job, and you may not have a Plan B. As a result, this question, which you will face repeatedly, is always an awkward one to handle. Your answer will usually end up being something along the lines of “teach,” and your listener will nod, immediately grasping the absurd cycle himself and finding it even harder to relate to you than he did three questions earlier.
You basically already said this in all the reasons you cited, and your other reasons are all getting repetitive. Just change the title to "36 reasons" and stop already.
ReplyDeleteSeriously, if you care so much about what vocationally educated suburbanites think, why didn't you join them in the first place?
The issue here is whether the "vocationally educated suburbanites" have it that much better. Trades aren't the solution when annual legal and illegal immigration are both in excess of the number of jobs created yearly. Also, trades aren't the solution when the whole economy is in the crapper.
DeleteI never thought this blog was about what other people think, but rather about the inherent wisdom of choosing to go to graduate school, and a general criticism of our scholastic process.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I don't believe he/she has covered the immediate social consequences of going to graduate school yet, which was touched on in this entry.
If you never go to graduate school, you will never become the kind of self-deluded and arrogant fool who believes you are better than 99% of the rest of the population, vocationally educated suburbanite or otherwise, because you fancy you are living the "life of the mind."
ReplyDeleteSeriously, Anonymous 11:18, there are dull and petty professors, who get duller and pettier the more intellectual capital they earn, just as there are intelligent and thoughtful suburbanites who may happen to spend their days in a cubicle. Moreover, going to graduate school and, if fate serves you, becoming a professor, does not make you a better person than Joe the Office Manager or Jane the Marketing Director.
More importantly, the point of this post, it seems to me, is not what other people will think of you. Rather, as a graduate student, you will eventually -- usually not until you are far into the ABD stage -- begin to become aware of "a certain absurdity in this cycle of which you are now a part" at the very same time you begin to learn "just how hard it is to get a tenure-track job." Trying to explain your situation to people who are a part of your life but are not academics makes it painfully obvious just how crippling the abyss of absurdity is in which you now find yourself.
Fantastic. 100 Reasons, you're my hero.
ReplyDeleteTo be fair, pretty much any humanities major ever has gotten that question in undergrad. "Oh, you're majoring in history/art history/English/anthropology/sociology/whatever. What are you going to do with that?"
ReplyDeleteOr they cut right to the chase and ask, "Are you going to teach?"
Yeah, I agree. Anyone who's gone to undergrad has either gotten over that or they haven't, in which case they're not going to grad school.
ReplyDeleteHow you are perceived by others affects every aspect of your life, from your job prospects to your social network. You can believe that what people think doesn't matter if you want (will to power, I guess?) but to insist it doesn't have *any* consequences is ridiculous, at least from the stance of a cultural historian.
ReplyDeleteJ.H., I think that the undergrads who can't get over this question are sometimes the ones who run to grad school when they realize that their degree in English (or whatever) isn't really suited for anything else.
ReplyDeleteThey would be better off thinking of their college degree as just a "college degree" instead of a "Bachelor's in English." They shouldn't feel the need to make their futures fit their majors.
Somehow, people have gotten into their heads that "soft" degrees in the liberal arts are like engineering degrees. Engineering firms hire engineers, but does anybody specifically hire poli-sci majors?
It's better to take your "college degree" (the minimum qualification for all sorts of jobs nowadays) and use it to get an entry-level position at a place where you will be trained to do something that you can make a living at. It doesn't make sense to think about a liberal arts B.A. as anything more than proof that you got through college.
Except in this country there are no entry-level positions, and no company training programs. Everyone wants to poach experienced talent from everyone else, and no-one wants to have the overhead from training employees who will probably leave to work for a competitor.
DeleteI have never worked for any business in America where I was trained for the requirements of the job in which I was employed. That's over ten positions across multiple sectors over thirty years and includes family businesses, educational behemoths, manufacturers and services producers. In one instance the work was considered dangerous. It was always 'teach yourself.' At one business I was shamed and humiliated whenever I didn't know how to perform a particular task, for which I was never trained.
In the case with the greatest discrepancy between level and duties, I was hired as an "intern" to work as a minimum-wage (no benefits) software architect. No training, two prior courses in programming.
My best and only employee training experience to date was during college, when I worked as an English teacher for a Taiwanese company. I was required to observe ten hours of courses prior to teaching one myself.
This country dropped the ball on workforce development decades ago. The consequences will include many billions of dollars in lost productivity and large-scale unemployment.
Except for the undemanding, vocational and non-academic degrees like business and education, the same can be said about all bachelor degrees as well. Most employers want skilled and uneducated. They really would prefer you to not know who Noam Chomsky is, so financially it is best to see any B.A. as a scarlet letter or just a generic college degree.
ReplyDelete@Anonymous (March 21, 2011, 1116 hours)
Delete< http://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/innovation/2013/09/16/does-entrepreneurship-mark-the-death-of-the-university/2814415 >
< http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/decline.htm >
< http://www.cato.org/blog/liberating-liberal-arts-making-higher-education-affordable >
< http://overland.org.au/2011/02/%E2%80%98oh-the-humanities%E2%80%99-or-a-critique-of-crisis > – note this vis-à-vis what I mean when I state (no pun intended) that "Australia is NOT Canada".
In addition, you may also like to check this out in relation to the British as well:
< http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/education/do-colleges-need-fees-of-up-to-6000-to-survive-30063385.html >.
I did a PhD (in the UK) on the writings of a 19th century Dutch intellectual. I remember once telling some people about my research who laughed and responded, "but how will you ever get a job with that?"
ReplyDeleteHowever, I was offered a position at a Dutch uni (which was very interested in the perspective of a foreigner working on one of their figures) whilst in my final PhD year - where I'm now very happily working.
Picking what seemed - to some very pragmatic, 'pick an obvious career specialisation otherwise you'll never find work' people (who knew nothing about academic careers) - a fairly abstract academic training made no career sense to them... but I'm very glad I didn't listen to them!