Thesis Hatement
slate.com
slate.com
Upper level education costs a lot of money and involves years of time, don't these people think about what they want to do with their lives? Don't they do at least cursory research into what that degree will mean to their careers?
Every high school has some sort of career counselor. Colleges have many of them. These days, research on the Internet (these are pre-PhD Lit students, don't they know how to Google?) makes it simple to look up salaries, opportunities to be hired, personal stories from those in the career, etc.
Maybe this trend toward people realizing that many degrees are near useless is just a result of the economy and tougher times finally making the practicality of education paramount. It seems a shame that you need bad circumstances for people to evidence some common sense, though.
Yet lots of people smoke even though they're fully aware of the risks. It appears that the author knew of the job outlook for a Lit PhD all along but chose to ignore it. I think we all exist in that optimistic dream-world state of mind at some point.
We should, but too many people don't and keep going into academia anyway (I was one; everyone thinks they're different, but I can at least say I had some ulterior motives).
For at least a decade, lawyers and law students have been arguing that law school is a bad deal, and it really took until 2012 for that to sink in. I think we're seeing a similar process unfolding around grad school more generally.
Academic grad school isn't in most cases as pernicious as law school, because if the school is paying you, even some trivial amount, quitting after two years is easy, but many of the basic supply and demand problems remain.
"Is a college degree enough?" was a pervasive question when I got out of undergrad in 1991 since we were in a recession. My placement center and many magazines had "What is this degree worth?" compilations. This same information has been available online for at least the last 10+ years.
Ironically, I always thought of myself as being pretty blissfully unaware and unthoughtful of my own career and where I was headed... but I knew what my salary and job prospects were for my career before I settled on my major when I was a Sophomore in college.
What's your experience with this? I've found earnings and job market to be regular features of career counseling sessions.
They typically won't tell a student "sure, you can go for a PhD, but it's a waste of time." Schools and colleges tend to be biased towards thinking more education is always better.
I brought this up to my guidance counselor and asked why I was wasting my time in high school when I could just as easily buy a book. Half-considered dropping out of high school and focusing my studies on topics that were interesting (physics, chemistry, cs, math, and possibly finance).
Our dialogue went something like:
GC: Uhh...don't drop out. You should stay in school it's good for you
Me: But I learn better straight from the book, it's what I'm doing for my courses now anyway...
GC: You need to have teachers
Me: Why?
GC: It's hard to get into [a reputable?] college without graduating from high school.
Me: ...
Kind of wish I did drop out back then. I would have probably spent a lot of my time honing a particular craft, although CS and Finance/Accounting seem to be the easiest choices (lower cost of entry compared to chemistry/physics/biology - requiring labs).
tl/dr: I wanted to drop out of high school and study independently. Guidance counselor encouraged me to stay in school. Wish I left so that I could focus on interesting subject areas.
If you're not into the structured part at all, then it will chafe from friction. However, the structure is definitely there for a reason because, if you're really pushing the limits, you'll be thankful for the times when you stumble and there is a structure to fall back on.
So you're left with two choices that maximize independent learning: 1) drop out or 2) make it past undergrad and become a master student.
I'm in a PhD program right now, but some of the best stuff I'm learning is happening through Coursera. ...and that's great, but the fact that I have a community of other full-time students and researchers to work with makes all the difference. If I were just sitting in a room learning for learning's sake, it would be totally different. I feel really lucky that I can put my ideas into practice, and I totally love the academic environment for facilitating that. To me, it's worth it.
However, most of my classmates were so intensely interested in researching their specialities that they decided the risk was worth taking. After all, it's not like they're particularly suffering during grad school. Grad school in the humanities gives you blissful amounts of time to really geek out in the speciality of your choice, and at top-flight universities, the first few years are free (except for the opportunity cost.) If you get in, your basic expenses and tuition are covered.
Note how we lionize entrepreneurs who intensely pursue a low-probability dream, whether they succeed or fail, while grad students pursuing their own low-probability dream get nothing but scorn. Odd, no? What needs to be changed isn't necessarily grad school, but academic culture - particularly its attitudes towards and adaption to failure. If their community was as understanding of their own failures as ours is of our own, perhaps there wouldn't be such drama about their low rate of success.
I disagree with your characterization that grad students are getting scorn. At least in my post, I don't intend to scorn. Maybe a "marked lack of sympathy for a self-made mess" would be what I'm trying to convey. I also disagree that there is a significant commonality between entrepreneurs and grad students because of their probability of success.
I'm just wondering why PhD students are surprised that higher degrees in the humanities aren't the easy gravy train they imagined. It seemed pretty obvious to me 20 years ago. Seems easily researchable 20 years ago. As time has gone by, it has just seemed more and more obvious.
What needs to be changed isn't necessarily grad school, but academic culture - particularly its attitudes towards and adaption to failure
I disagree again. Making it nicer to fail won't help those people. Opening their eyes to the real risk vs reward scenario earlier on would.
Conflating the entrepreneurial and academic communities as far as the understanding of failure doesn't help. Entrepreneurs who fail learn important lessons about what doesn't work and are encouraged to dust themselves off and apply what they've learned. They're still entrepreneurs when they try again.
Academics who fail while working on obscure/useless PhDs should most properly learn to stop being academics.
One other point is that resources like YC did not exist when I started my PhD. I was about to finish as YC came out and I felt finishing up my PhD was the better option. I had some friends who had just started their PhD programs and they quit to pursue startup opportunities (undoubtedly a good move for almost everyone). Timing and luck I guess.
Last year there was something in the news about the payment of professors, which was about $5000 a month. This is an entry level pay of a software developer (without Master or PhD) in Germany.
Working all days of the week is incredibly common.
And, unfortunately, crunch time specially near major conference deadlines is almost becoming the norm. Of course, the focus on publication is another problem related to that.
Many research positions are in industry, or are postdocs or non-tenure track. Besides the fact that many countries don't have anything similar to tenure.
Also, not everybody on tenure track reaches it.
Where? I'm near what, as I understand it, is considered a good area for high-tech workers (Ruhr area), but I don't see many jobs paying this much (maybe I'm looking in the wrong places?)
If you get a literature or anthropology PhD - then outside of teaching it's useful mainly as a hobby.
Basically, right now, a CS PhD can find a tenure-track job if they are willing to broaden their search to include non-research-only professor jobs. Of course, this should not necessarily inform whether a person should get a PhD in CS, as it takes 4-6 (or more) years and who knows if this will still be true then.
(I had to try this, because rewriting a title is a mere exercise for a humanities major like me who used to work as an editor.)
Aside, I'm sure there are a lot of STEM graduates here congratulating themselves on both their employablity and their superior moral character. Upvote!
Your title rewrite is missing a word by the way. :)
Edit; I got downvoted for saying what now appears in the top comment. Tut.
- a CS PhD
Not that love of subject is a bad reason to get a PhD, but if the end goal is teaching a local course every now and then, you could presumably do that after you have the MS and (potentially) while pursuing the PhD, right?
If one adheres to the utilitarian philosophy, I think it is easy to see that there is a problem. If the goal is to maximize happiness, then it would clearly be better if people who love to read and discuss books can do that as much as possible instead of doing something that makes them unhappy. How would you solve the problem?
I wonder if her perspective were different had she graduated from an Ivy.
Clearly, her personal experience can be extrapolated to everyone everywhere looking for a tenure track literature professorship. If she can't do it, nobody else should bother trying.
I wouldn't have hired her either.
Yeah, the success rate for startups is low, but at least there are different routes to success (side project, bootstrapping, angel, VC, etc). If you want to be a professor the only option is to get a job at a university.
Take a look at the faculty roster of UCI, and look at where they got there PhDs I don't know about German, but in math and science, most of the top-50 or top-100 university faculties got their PhDs at top-15 universities.
If you run the numbers and look at the ratio of PhDs to professors, it's obvious why.
But credit where credit is due: Academia, especially in the humanities, is everything but cosy. There is little money in it, there are few available positions.
However, being a slight bit along the same way as the author, I can only relay what I see around me every day. From the group of PhD students around me, how many hold any illusions as to what academia means? None that I have met. Out of a group of ~10 people, some almost finished, some at the beginning (this is not in the US, so everyone has done a masters or equivalent before), nobody wants to become a professor. One wants to become (and judging by how she's doing, she will be) a curator, I see people interested in broadcasting, teaching (as in: school), publishing and politics. It might be different in the US, I do not know. But here, it is painfully obvious to everyone I meet as to what the chances are to land a faculty position.
Do I care? To a degree (no pun intended). Would I like to go into academia? Yes. Do I know what that means? Yes. I write quickly, I enjoy a wide range of topics, I don't mind giving talks etc. I am flexible. Would I have to move if I wanted to go down that route? Yes. Does that bother me? No, it really doesn't. I will give it its fair shot, I will finish the PhD, and I will have a look around for post-doc positions. If it doesn't work? Fair enough, publishing or IT or something else it is.
I am not terribly bothered about money, not because I am somehow well off, but because I do not particularly care. I don't need that much to be happy. As long as I will be able to buy books and music here and there, go out every now and then and have a somewhat nice flat somewhere, I will be fine. I would like to be able to have dog, though.
I don't understand the vitriol on HN, I really don't. Everytime the humanities come up, there are the same type of comments, comparing software development entry salaries to professors, talking about student debt etc. Many here seem to be incapable (or unwilling) to even acknowledge that their own set of values is not universal, that not everybody wants to make it or even cares about making it.
In many ways, I qualify for things here, I dabble in programming, I use LaTeX/Emacs/org-mode for all my work, I use Linux permanently, write my own shell-scripts, report bugs etc. That does not mean I would necessarily like to be a programmer. HN is obsessed with making money and in doing so forgets that not everyone shares the same worldview.
I'm sure I will be fine. I do not have any student debt, I will start doing whatever it is I will be doing with a clean slate, I owe no money and I see my experiences as everything but lost time. I love what I am doing, and It would be a pity to give it up. If I have to, I will, but until then, I'll see where it'll take me.
P.S.: I'm doing German now (though I have done other European languages before). Just like the original author. Her choice of topic probably didn't help her overall feelings about her position, either. Kafka is one of those authors about whom so much has been done that it is hard to approach him without a huge amount of preconceptions.
e: syntax
Humanities PhDs are fundamentally different from science PhDs, they set people up differently, teach different skills and have different requirements.
He's a smart, good-looking guy who has a lot of powerful friends in multiple locations.
His knowledge of German philosophy isn't really relevant.
http://www.charlierose.com/guest/view/6717
Prior to Palantir, Alex established the Caedmon Group in 2002. Based in New York and London, the Caedmon Group offers clients access to high-quality investment opportunities in the areas of hedge funds, venture capital, private equity, and intellectual property in the United States and Europe.
Alex earned his law degree at Stanford University and received his Ph.D. in neoclassical social theory at the University of Frankfurt, Germany. A U.S. citizen, Alex is bilingual in English and German and fluent in French.
To be fair we should note that Palantir is a CIA operation whose job is to help the US military destroy indigenous peoples world wide in prep for western corporations to come in and exploit local resources.
Pretty much everybody at Palantir (such as Mr. Miller) reads HN regularly though since they post here all the time to promote and justify their company's fine work in suppressing people. The German social philosophy angle fits right in there.
Love the work you guys do attacking journalists and threatening their families. Real classy.
Because I don't think that this expectation really exists in the US. I have close friends who are pursuing PhDs in mathematics and literature and have consequently met a great many PhD candidates in both of those fields. Almost all of them, with few exceptions, expect that they will get a good post-doc position and, following that, will get a good tenure track position. They have no backup plans, they have no skills that could provide them a job in anything but academia, and it's not hiring.
But I think this criticism is the same that HN readers have, just better expressed. When I read these criticisms here, I don't take away a pervasive thought that people believe a literature PhD (for example) to be worthless on its own. Instead, I see a lot of criticism of the expectation that one would get a PhD and everything would simply work out.
I'm sure that there are some HN criticism that a literature PhD is inherently worthless. But I think (and hope) that this is the distinct minority. But I do see a lot of messages critical of the fact that one spent x years working on a PhD and has developed no skills beyond the ability to critically analyze Beowulf and has no backup plan if the job market for fine arts PhDs was poor (and it is). And while the tone may be exceptionally callous, this expectation and this behavior should be criticized.
When interviewing for engineering positions afterward, my interviewers would often try to put some spin on my MA, like:
"Well, I'll bet an intensive two-year study of film made you a better developer."
To which I'd reply, "No. No it didn't. It was fun though, and I learned a lot. I'd do it again in a heartbeat."
Not everything is about software, and not everything has to be. I didn't spend those years studying film as some oblique exercise in... well, in anything. And the value I gained from the experience can't be measured in dollars. (As cheesy as that sounds...)
Is it really that hard to admit that you did something expensive because it was kind of fun?
[1] http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/08/21/report-social-network-de...
Wow. Not judging, are we?
I was a liberal arts major the first time through the mill. I agree that the charlatanism tends to fail quicker in the scientific and technical fields--you need a Stalin behind you to get as far as Lysenko did, but fad upon fad in the humanities has a long run in the academy. That said, I don't know of anything more worth doing well than the humanities.
A problem that I see is that US academia had a long run as a successful pyramid scheme. All those undergraduates showing up during the GI Bill years and then the baby boom kept the colleges expanding. Somewhere after 1980 the rate of expansion slowed down, and the graduate students were scrambling for positions. But everyone's expectations had been set by the boom. The days of genteel academic poverty in the 1940s and before were forgotten. But if you look back at books about that time--Jacques Barzun's essays in Teacher in America, Ulam's memoirs, parts of Wallace Stegner's novel Crossing to Safety--you'll see that it wasn't an especially secure life, and not always a contented one.
I work as a programmer. I am not obsessed with money--a very easy thing to say if you've been comfortably solvent most of your life. But I do need to make a living. Academia was never really an option. I've enjoyed schools as a student, but found them to induce a bit of claustrophobia even when I knew that I was just passing through.
The irony burns like flames from hell.
I wish HN admins would require approval on any sites with submitted content like slate, extremetech etc. Those guys are a whole lot of noise without much signal.
How many people would bother with an article telling us that academic jobs for Literature PhDs are hard to find?
[angry bold]Stop whining and start working. [/]
This article is one of the many articles, blogs, etc I’ve read from academics complaining that there are no jobs and how it's so hard, and OMG the hours are long, and why is this happening to me, and waaaaaaaaaa, I'm a victim. I literally have 2 of them talking about this right now across from me as I’m typing this. You know what they aren’t doing? Working (says the guy who is typing on hacker news:) ). Stop complaining and start being the best. Every academic that I have a lot of respect for was able to get a job. They are also the ones that work their asses off, networked, give talks, and play the game correctly. Being “smart” doesn’t get you a job, regurgitating papers isn’t what makes a good faculty member and thinking that you deserve a job because you have PhD does NOT quality for a job. Simple as that.
Yes, there are very few jobs and way to many PhDs. But, I’d bet that statistic would look much different if you looked at people who actually work smart ,play the game and have some business sense. When you have no business experience at all, and only have been through school with your parents paying your way , well..yeah, it’s an eye opening experience that working is hard. Deal with it, stop complaining and go work harder/better than anyone in your field or work at starbucks.
I think a labor shortage in some academic fields is a good thing. CS has been good to me, and I may eventually get over what I had to do to get my PhD, but if there wasn't a good job waiting for me, I don't see why I'd blow the opportunity cost on it.
I would love to study the humanities. One of my favourite classes in college was British Lit. But universities are just too damn expensive. If I'm going to spend ten of thousands on an education it's going to be one that can pay off loans.
Oops.