Help, My Degree Is Underwater | Hacker News Reader

Help, My Degree Is Underwater

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14 pointspeter12315 comments

As one of the (soon to graduate) 20-something Ph.D.'s referenced in the article, I feel no sympathy for any whining. The only problem people like me face is false expectations. We were all promised professorships, but it was mostly a lie.

My attitude: No tenure track positions available? Crappy pay for indefinite post-doc appointments? Screw it! I'm going into the software industry...

No, I don't worry about the advanced degree holders. What I worry about is the kid graduating high school and being fed false expectations. Too many people don't understand how correlation works. i.e. "Hey! People with college degrees make more money, so if we get every American high school student to go to college and get a degree, they'll all make more money!!!"

...uh, no.

And not understanding how economics work. If everyone has a degree, having a degree is less valuable and won't be a differentiating point for being paid more.

Bite your tongue. I'm no defender of graduate education, but I think it's a tad on the mean-spirited side to refer to what these people are doing as "whining".

A lot of smart, hard-working people have just been screwed by circumstances that are beyond their control. Not everyone with a graduate degree knows how to code. Moreover, just because someone doesn't know how to code doesn't mean that they studied basket-weaving, and are therefore useless. If you worked your butt off getting a PhD in the sciences, only to graduate this year -- well, that's just plain bad luck.

Finally, trust me: if this downturn goes on long enough, even the programmers will feel the pain. So if I were you, I'd start hunting for a big hunk of wood, and start knocking as hard as you can.

First thing I would say is that you don't have to code to get a job. The reason I classify what these individuals are doing as "whining" is because there's not a lack of opportunities, just a lack of the opportunities they expected to have.

Let's take, for example, the English Literature Ph.D. working at a Starbucks in NYC (I know a few...). Why are they there? Because they want to be in NYC. They want to be near the "action", by which I mean the publishing houses and big universities. Great! That's one choice.

Another choice would be to travel out to the heartland of America which is in dire need of educated individuals. Get a teaching position and set-up writing workshops, for the locals to improve their resumes even. Take up an interest in back-woods folk lore. --or-- What about other countries? I hear that the Czech republic is in need of professors. Poland, too!

You see, the problem is that college coddles people (or at least, it did me), and graduate school coddles people. It's not that these individuals can't go out, be creative, try something daring, and maybe fall flat on their faces a couple of times. No, instead, working an 8 hour shift to go home, change, hang out at the bars the "writers" hang out at, and desperately try to sell that novel to yet another publishing house is, let's face it, comfortable. Sure, there's a chance at success, and some people willingly make this choice.

The bottom line is: if the years upon years of education you've received can't somehow be turned into good fortune in the absence of an obvious path forward, then what good were they in the first place?!?

You can't be serious. You're talking to someone who left academic science to go into software, yet even I don't blithely assume that more than a handful of my colleagues could have done the same thing, even in a good market. Furthermore, you've totally ignored the fact that I wasn't talking about PhDs in English literature (I know quite a few un- or under-employed engineers and scientists, who are neither unskilled, nor lazy) so that you could draw a caricature of the slacker intellectual.

I suppose that you could take the attitude that everyone who isn't picking up the proverbial shovel right now is just "whining", but I think you're missing the point: if we're in a position where our most educated and talented people are digging ditches and serving coffee, then everyone else is well and truly screwed. It isn't "whining" to observe that it's probably not in our best interest as a society to have lawyers and scientists stocking shelves and slinging espresso to make ends meet.

With all due respect, I think you're missing the point. I did not mean to imply that the individuals you were referring to were of the "slacker intellectual" variety, I merely used the English Lit major example as a reference to the original article. (Personally, I wouldn't classify those people I know as slackers to begin with. Comfortable != Slacker)

The point is, if the education you received doesn't improve your ability to provide for yourself, then something is either wrong with the education you received or the approach you're taking to the job market. Let's take the first of those possibilities.

I know individuals who are working on very focused topics; things like "The anharmonic instabilities of zwitterionic heterocycles and their effect on fragmentation patterns" (I just made that up, so don't bother Googling it). For these individuals, if they can't secure a post-doc studying Mass Spec, or an industry position in a Mass Spec lab, then they're screwed! But really, is that the job market's fault?If your education is not sufficiently broad, then your education is broken.

What about the second option? What if you get out of school and there are no opportunities? Well, who was supposed to provide those opportunities? The Government? Yeah well, guess what...the government doesn't care so much about science and research any more. Really, though, whose fault is that?

I have the same issue with biologists who moan and groan, "whine" even, about the Intelligent Design movement. They always want to view the poor understanding of evolution by the general public as being the fault of the general public, rather than a failure of scientists to adequately explain themselves and their work. If you can't get a job doing hard science, why not look for work as a science writer? Why not start up your own science outreach program? I'm sure there must be a market for "traveling science shows" (I used to be part of one in high school).

The only way such opportunities wouldn't exist is if the population is just so apathetic to knowledge and learning that they can't even be bother to listen when you break things down for them. If that's the case, go somewhere else! Highly educated Americans are going to have to start thinking of overseas as a viable job market. What America has is a glut of educated individuals, and small demand for them. Trust me, there are plenty of places in the world where those positions are reversed. Why not "Scientists without borders"? There's already Engineers without borders...

"The point is, if the education you received doesn't improve your ability to provide for yourself, then something is either wrong with the education you received or the approach you're taking to the job market."

False dichotomy. There are plenty of other options, including (but not limited to) industry trends, bad/slow job markets and people who make weird stereotypes about the work ethic of graduate students.

The lottery nature of the academic job market has been publicised for a while now; there is no longer any excuse for phds to grumble that they were lied to about a paradisial ivory tower. Although I think the US phd system too much of a commitment in terms of time, there is much to be said for a fully-funded 3-4 year phd in the uk, especially if started when your in your early twenties. The flexibility of humanities phd schedules gives you more opportunities to learn a new skill than many jobs would, e.g. programming, or maybe to start a small company. I knew about the 'doctoral pipeline leading to nowhere' before I started my phd, and this encouraged me to get involved in the enterprise culture during my postgrad studies. Whilst the limited job opportunities for humanities phds are increasingly publicised, it should also be pointed out how difficult, isolating, and depressing the process of doing the phd can be, for many students. I believe there is ample justification for whining on that issue.

To the liberal arts majors/masters/Ph.D.s don't say nobody told you it would be like this. My engineering/math/science friends would tell them the truth when asked and they wouldn't hear it. All they needed was +1 level (major to master, master to doctor) and THEN they would get that amazing job that would pay them for knowing the first year red dye paint was imported to Scandinavia.

No. That isn't how the world works. You get paid for knowing useful things, like the coefficient of friction of various materials, the modulus of elasticity of building members, the viscosity of fluids, how circuits work, how to program. Useful things.

The problem with an engineering student telling a liberal arts student that their degree isn't valuable, is that the engineering student's opinion is very rarely grounded in experience. Although one group happens to have the "right" opinion, that's all it is until reality vindicates it.

Does a fact need to be grounded in personal experience? I know that 10 gigabit ethernet exists, but I have never actually experienced it. Likewise, I know that a degree in history increases someone's expected earnings much less than a degree in nuclear engineering. Even though I have no personal experience in those areas.

Our society needs diversity to thrive. If we have a society made up of only people that know 'useful' things (or what is considered useful today, as this changes through time), it becomes vulnerable, in the same way that a population with a narrow gene pool is vulnerable.

So, it's important that we have people who understand the causes of the second world war (history) or the difference between signifier and signified (semiotics) in the same way that it's important we have people who understand about the viscosity of fluids; our society is all the poorer without them.

This has already been here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=556625

also, from the same poster, to the actual source (slate). I flagged this one.

this is a good. college tuition costs need to not just drop, but crash. they won't until people stop propagating the idea that they are required.

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