
'The Great Shame of Our Profession' - jseliger
http://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Great-Shame-of-Our/239148?utm_content=buffere76dc&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
======
xaa
Many interesting points here, but the most striking to me is how this is yet
another industry that is socializing their costs by paying employees so little
that they have to get food stamps, hiring people part-time so you don't have
to pay benefits, etc. I guess you sort of expect that from Wal-Mart, but a
university?

It is true that supply exceeds demand for PhDs, especially in humanities, and
prospective PhDs should be aware of this, but I can't really see any excuse
for this behavior by universities. It's bad for the taxpayer, bad for the
employee, and bad for the students. Only one it's good for is the
administrator, who can pocket a bonus for cutting costs. The government
shouldn't stand for this, IMO. I think this would be a good way to frame an
argument for a minimum wage in such a way it would appeal to a conservative.
"Businesses: you must pay employees enough so they aren't eligible for (most
forms of) public assistance."

As the link points out, faculty are complicit too by taking on unsustainable
numbers of grad students out of pure self-interest.

~~~
humanrebar
> I think this would be a good way to frame an argument for a minimum wage in
> such a way it would appeal to a conservative. "Businesses: you must pay
> employees enough so they aren't eligible for (most forms of) public
> assistance."

Is it better to not pay them at all?

If the problem is that people can't afford their bills, the solution is to
help them afford their bills (minimum income, negative income tax, cash
welfare, etc.), not to distort labor markets.

We need to make sure that there is modest marginal cost to employment or else
people will have limited ability to retrain or otherwise break into new labor
markets.

~~~
VLM
Yes its better not to pay them at all because it sends a strong economic
signal of "go do something else you're not wanted here".

Far better they get a new career and become net sources of tax money rather
than net sinks.

At the macro level you have a totally different problem if there's 320 million
people and only 90 million jobs, well...

There is no logical reason retraining or breaking into a market naturally
requires receipt of food stamps. If there were a healthy demand, pay would be
healthy.

~~~
humanrebar
There is healthy demand for lower risk employees. It's a big ask for an
employer to sink $50k into an unknown employee. If we want people to make bets
on the inexperienced and untrained, we need to lower the stakes. $40k/year is
a big bet.

Telling people to just find another industry is well and good, but what
industry will pay a 55 year old underemployed person full salary and benefits
just in case they're a tragically misunderstood diamond in the rough.

And this is a real problem. The employment rate is in the basement. There are
structural issues that need addressed.

------
6stringmerc
Here's all you need to know about the greatest shame in Academia:

> _According to the most recent MLA jobs report, there were only 361 assistant
> professor tenure-track job openings in all fields of English literature in
> 2014-15. The number of Ph.D. recipients in English that year was 1,183. Many
> rejected candidates return to the job market year after year and compound
> the surplus._

Now, this begs a much deeper, more heady discussion regarding priorities and
values within the US Higher Education system. The question to consider is
_Does this out-of-whack-ratio mean we have too many English graduates or not
enough English jobs?_ And - while you'd probably knee jerk to the former
rather than the latter, I think I could make a compelling case to disagree.

It's not that it's wrong to pursue a lifetime in English or Music, it's just
very tough to realize that as a nation, the US has its priorities terribly
fucked up and refuses to support even a decent standard of living and
healthcare for those who would devote their lives to such pursuits. This
should be in bold text on every student loan application in the Liberal Arts,
and perhaps others as well. We don't need room after room of high minded PhDs
talking Milton, but we do need PhDs to be taxpayers, and there are plenty of
immigrants year after year that if English was a priority, it would get
funding and infrastructure to support both the Educators and Students. Which,
as we can see, isn't the case for now.

~~~
crystalmeph
I'm not sure why you think it should be a priority for the nation (meaning the
taxpayers) to support those who devote their lives to the study of literature.
Do those pursuits pay off in some tangible or intangible form down the line
that justifies the upfront, and very tangible, expenditure you want taken out
of my paycheck?

I'll agree that military spending is out of control, and that the welfare
system in general needs to do better than cut people off past a certain point,
but that doesn't mean we should pay for apartments for English majors with the
money we're currently spending on bombs.

~~~
wishinghand
> the welfare system in general needs to do better than cut people off past a
> certain point

Is the welfare system the opposite right now with that problematic gap? Make
too little and you're on welfare. Get a job, make too much for welfare, and
welfare cuts off, leaving this precarious middle area that many can't make,
losing their job again, and then falling back into welfare?

~~~
crystalmeph
We're venturing a little off-topic here, but I'll walk with you a bit:

I'm not sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing with me here.

My understanding of the current welfare system is that you get $Y from welfare
as long as you make less than $X dollars from a "real" job, but as soon as you
make $X dollars at your job, you lose the entire $Y from welfare.

That's a bad system. A better system would keep paying welfare once you make
more than $X at your job, it would just start reducing the amount of welfare
you receive, e.g. for every $1 you make above $X, your welfare payment reduces
by $0.50. This ensures that as you make more money at your real job, you
aren't actually suddenly reducing your take home pay.

Basically a negative income tax for those making less than some threshold.

~~~
lelandbatey
It's interesting that you mention that particular welfare structure, since
that's actually already used in a huge way in the United States, in the form
of the "Earned Income Tax Credit"[0], which while I don't hear it talked about
publicly very often, is a huge program that sounds like it does a lot of good.

To quote Wikipedia:

    
    
        At a cost of $56 billion in 2013, the EITC is the third-largest social welfare
        program in the United States after Medicaid ($275 billion federal and $127
        billion state expenditures) and food stamps ($78 billion).
    

And this is an example, also taken from Wikipedia, of the way the EITC might
work in the real world:

    
    
        For example, a married couple with two qualifying children and yearly income
        of seven thousand dollars will receive EITC of $2,810 (going up the hill).
        At fifteen thousand dollars, this couple will receive EITC of $5,036
        (plateau). And at twenty-five and thirty-five thousand dollars, this same
        couple with their two children will receive EITC of $4,285 and $2,179,
        respectively.
    
    

[0] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_income_tax_credit#House...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_income_tax_credit#Households.27_average_taxes_and_income)

~~~
krakensden
You're right, and most programs try to do some sort of gradation instead of a
sharp cutoff. Unfortunately, all the programs are different, with cutoffs at
different points, with differing coarseness. A lot of this is related to the
problem of making taxes doable by hand, which, several years after the
invention of the pocket calculator, could be considered a little outmoded. A
lot is also related to the general difficulty of making any changes at all to
welfare programs.

------
anigbrowl
When I read articles like this, what i don't understand is why the brilliant
minds in the various different departments that are actually experts in their
domains don't get together and come up with a scheme to oust the
administrators. How can you educate students to go out and change the world if
you can't even fix your own institution? What exactly is stopping faculty from
going on strike or figuring out a way to subvert the power structures which
everyone can see to be damaging tot he university's mission?

~~~
jdhopeunique
The administrators are often former or current faculty. In articles and
discussions similar to this there is often this conflict portrayed between
faculty and administration but the reality is that they are often the same
people. If not from the same institution, then from another institution.

Universities sometimes require or encourage support staff to have higher ed.
degrees. Computer tech support positions may require a bachelors degree.
Career counseling or academic advising may require a masters. Faculty
encourage students to get graduate degrees at the universities they(the
faculty member) got their graduate degree from. Politicians and alumni get
favors for their families. Universities are practically influence and nepotism
laundering machines. Faculty are simply part of the power structure, each
trying to improve their position within. Grad school practically selects for
individuals who are invested in the institution and will not rock the boat.

~~~
maverick_iceman
_> The administrators are often former or current faculty._

That used to be true but not anymore. A lot of the administrative stuff these
days are career administrators.

------
jankotek
I think great shame is that many educators lie about future career prospects
in their profession. It is like pyramid scheme; only way to make living is to
teach at university, and create more educators.

~~~
spott
I think the great shame is that many educators _don 't know_ about future
career prospects in their profession.

------
hackuser
FWIW, adjunct professors I know have been corroborating this for awhile. Also
note that conservative politicians in the U.S. are increasingly applying
ideological pressure on academic research, and also as government budgets are
cut, more is funded by private interests looking for particular results.
Adjuncts have little power to protect themselves and the integrity of their
work.

Finally, looking at the political situation in much of the developed world,
you wouldn't be surprised by the fact that the study of the humanities (and
social sciences) has declined; perhaps we need to invest more in it.

~~~
k5329
>Also note that conservative politicians in the U.S. are increasingly applying
ideological pressure on academic research

Conservatives didn't politicize the academy alone. Studies[0] have shown left-
wing professors will openly admit to discriminating against conservative peers
and students. From the abstract I quote:

"In decisions ranging from paper reviews to hiring, many social and
personality psychologists said that they would discriminate against openly
conservative colleagues. The more liberal respondents were, the more they said
they would discriminate."

Other studies[1] have confirmed that there is an incredible lack of political
diversity in certain university departments and that it's likely caused by
outright discrimination.

"This article reviews the available evidence and finds support for four
claims: (1) Academic psychology once had considerable political diversity, but
has lost nearly all of it in the last 50 years. (2) This lack of political
diversity can undermine the validity of social psychological science via
mechanisms such as the embedding of liberal values into research questions and
methods, steering researchers away from important but politically unpalatable
research topics, and producing conclusions that mischaracterize liberals and
conservatives alike. (3) Increased political diversity would improve social
psychological science by reducing the impact of bias mechanisms such as
confirmation bias, and by empowering dissenting minorities to improve the
quality of the majority’s thinking. (4)"

Given that these university departments are overtly discriminating based on
political affiliation, is it any surprise to see funding for these university
departments being politicized? Sorry, if you're discriminating based on
political affiliation, you're not doing science, you're doing activism.

[0]:
[http://yoelinbar.net/papers/political_diversity.pdf](http://yoelinbar.net/papers/political_diversity.pdf)

[1]: [http://heterodoxacademy.org/2015/09/14/bbs-paper-on-lack-
of-...](http://heterodoxacademy.org/2015/09/14/bbs-paper-on-lack-of-political-
diversity/)

~~~
tstactplsignore
Honest question: does this also mean that Earth Science departments should go
out of their way to hire climate change denialists, and Biology departments
should go out of their way to hire creationists and anti-vaxxers? I suspect
you think the answer is no, but many US right wingers likely disagree with
you. It's difficult for me to understand how things are "just different" for
the history, psychology, and sociology departments when it seems also very
possible that widely held and well supported positions in those fields might
also inherently contradict the US conservative worldview as they do in the
biological and Earth sciences.

Also, have you considered that academics don't select for liberalism, but
liberals select for academia? In my field (Biology) it seems like it'd be
almost impossible to find a well-qualified faculty candidate who is an average
US conservative without applying some truly outrageous "affirmative action"
for conservatives. Difficult to see how that sort of thing would do anything
but dilute the quality of a department's faculty.

Honestly it's funny, because usually conservatives seem to reject the concepts
of relativism: have you considered that there are certain truths in these
fields that simply contradict the conservative worldview? If that is true,
wouldn't departments be throwing these truths aside in a quest to be basically
be "politically correct"?

~~~
k5329
>Honest question: does this also mean that Earth Science departments should go
out of their way to hire climate change denialists, and Biology departments
should go out of their way to hire creationists and anti-vaxxers?

Absolutely not.

>In my field (Biology) it seems like it'd be almost impossible to find a well-
qualified faculty candidate who is an average US conservative without applying
some truly outrageous "affirmative action" for conservatives.

Have you considered that your view of an "average" US conservative is
incredibly biased by the media you consume and the environment you operate in?
And that your incorrect stereotype might be the reason you seem comfortable
making arguments against observed discrimination that you would immediately
reject if they were applied to other groups?

In the current environment you operate in, would you even know if one of your
peers is conservative? Is it safe for them to be "out" about their political
beliefs?

> Also, have you considered that academics don't select for liberalism, but
> liberals select for academia?

I've considered it, but the evidence suggests that discrimination is a better
explanation of the facts. Haidt notes that historically most university
departments were not the political monocultures they are now. Haidt also
responds directly to your criticisms about qualifications and personal
preference. I quote:

On intelligence:

"[Are conservatives simply less intelligent than liberals, and less able to
obtain PhDs and faculty positions?] The evidence does not support this view…
[published studies are mixed. Part of the complexity is that…] Social
conservatism correlates with lower cognitive ability test scores, but economic
conservatism correlates with higher scores (Iyer, Koleva, Graham, Ditto, &
Haidt, 2012; Kemmelmeier 2008). [Libertarians are the political group with the
highest IQ, yet they are underrepresented in the social sciences other than
economics]"

On self-selection:

"Self-selection clearly plays a role. But it would be ironic if an epistemic
community resonated to empirical arguments that appear to exonerate the
community of prejudice—when that same community roundly rejects those same
arguments when invoked by other institutions to explain the under-
representation of women or ethnic minorities (e.g., in STEM disciplines or
other elite professions). [Note: we agree that self-selection is a big part of
the explanation. If there were no discrimination and no hostile climate, the
field would still lean left, as it used to. But it would still have some
diversity, and would work much better.]"

Given that there's ample evidence of explicit evidence of discrimination
against conservatives in academia, that is a straightforward explanation for
the disparity we observe.

I'd highly recommend reading the three papers I've linked in this thread for
an overview of this issue which goes deeper than the "conservatives don't want
to be in academia and even if they did, they'd be too stupid to contribute
anyways" idea.

>have you considered that there are certain truths in these fields that simply
contradict the conservative worldview?

Have you considered that every ideological system has its own blindspots, and
that the mechanisms of peer-review breakdown in an ideological mono-culture?
Consider that some of the social scientific concepts facing the toughest
scrutiny in the ongoing replication crisis are concepts beloved by a certain
ideological group, like implicit bias and stereotype threat[0]? And that
ideological blindspots can negatively affect the search for scientific truth,
both by embedding values in the research that's conducted and by the absence
of research in other directions? That these ideological blindspots might even
exist in your own field of biology?

[0]: [http://heterodoxacademy.org/2016/02/23/are-most-published-
so...](http://heterodoxacademy.org/2016/02/23/are-most-published-social-
psychology-findings-false/)

~~~
tstactplsignore
>Have you considered that your view of an "average" US conservative is
incredibly biased by the media you consume

Err, I was just speaking in terms of public polling information- gallup is the
"media" I'm consuming here. The median US Republican (good proxy for
conservatism) does not believe in evolution or climate change- extremely
difficult to find a serious faculty candidate who fits that profile, just for
starters. Do you not agree with that?

You misinterpreted my second point- I am not trying to argue that liberals are
more intelligent than conservatives (the data you share would have been what I
suspected, though) - rather I was trying to explain that if we require a
faculty candidate to have views similar to the median US conservatives, we'd
likely be passing up on many, many highly more qualified candidates if it's
simply a numbers game.

>Given that there's ample evidence of explicit evidence of discrimination
against conservatives in academia

This is possible in the social sciences, where one's work can explicitly belie
one's political worldview- but how does it explain the trends in the life and
hard sciences? Faculty in fields like Biology and Physics are also
overwhelmingly liberal, but departments generally know nothing about the
political views of faculty candidates. Honestly, the only people who can be
discriminated against here would be those who are very vocal of their
political views on public internet profiles, and even then honestly nobody is
stalking your Twitter when evaluating you for a faculty position. I think that
this evidence directly contradicts the possibility that discrimination is
primarily responsible for the political imbalance of academia.

> And that ideological blindspots can negatively affect the search for
> scientific truth, both by embedding values in the research that's conducted
> and by the absence of research in other directions? That these ideological
> blindspots might even exist in your own field of biology?

Of course- this is all serious stuff to think about and I often do. The
_other_ thing to think about is: how do we achieve that while also keeping
cranks and denialists out of power positions in institutions of learning? It
seems like those in the field are usually the best at distinguishing crankery
from genuine ideological difference- if we don't trust them, who do we trust?

I get that you personally see the difference between what you're proposing and
affirmative action for climate denialists, creationists, and anti-vaxxers. I
do too. I'm okay with Scott Alexander and Peter Thiel faculty. I'm okay with
Milton Friedman. The problem is I think that this line of ideological
affirmative action would lead to professors Ken Ham, Jenny McCarthy, Glenn
Beck, and Milo Yiannopoulos. There are _many_ people in the US who talk the
same way about academia, but are talking about _this_ kind of change. If you
can propose measures to introduce the reasonable kind of change you seek that
is robust against the insane, anti-intellectual, scientific-existential threat
kind of change _a large number of other conservatives are seeking_ , I'd be
tentatively on board.

~~~
k5329
Oh one other thing:

>Faculty in fields like Biology and Physics are also overwhelmingly liberal,
but departments generally know nothing about the political views of faculty
candidates.

One of interesting thing to keep in mind, is that while it's true that biology
and physics professors also lean liberal, the ratios are inline with what the
ratios have historically been in academia as a whole. They are closer to 3:1
or 4:1. Fields like sociology or social psychology are closer to something
like 20:1. A college student taking a sociology class is more likely to be
taught by a Marxist than a Republican[0]!

(Please don't tell me that the intellectual underpinnings of marxism are more
correct than that of conservatism. I'll have an aneurysm.)

[0]:
[https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/opinion/sunday/a-confessi...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/opinion/sunday/a-confession-
of-liberal-intolerance.html)

------
Balgair
Very good paragraph here:

>The truth is that teaching is a diminishing priority in universities. Years
of AAUP reports indicate that budgets for instruction are proportionally
shrinking. Universities now devote less than one-third of their expenditures
to instruction. Meanwhile, administrative positions have increased at more
than 10 times the rate of tenured faculty positions. Sports and amenities are
much more fun.

The author alludes to sports and nice dorm rooms as the place where the money
goes, but is that true? Do they really take up all of the slack that was once
the use for instruction? That can't be right. There has to be a lot more
corruption than that these days.

Still, if the University really has become High School 2.0, then this makes
sense in a way. But the real question we then have to ask is what happens then
to the MA/S? Is that then the new BA/S? I have been told so by many hiring
managers that it is the case. Follow the logic here, that then means the PhD
is the new MA/S. Perhaps these students are smarter than the author lets on.

~~~
apozem
Sports and luxuries for students have absolutely become the focus of
universities. It's hard to sell an ethereal "better education." It's easy to
show off your new athletic dorms and massive scoreboard. I know that's absurd,
but that's how administrators seem to think.

[http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/09/15/athleti...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/09/15/athletics-
cost-colleges-students-millions/2814455/)
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/sports/wp/2015/11/23/runnin...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/sports/wp/2015/11/23/running-
up-the-bills/)

~~~
slackstation
This is what happens to a market when the person paying for it and person
receiving the service are seperated.

It can be generational (parents pay for kids education) or time (a person buys
something at 20 that they will pay off at 45).

I also think that the prestige of a degree combined with less and less real
world application of that degree has something to do it with.

I think that the market value for certain degrees is falling below the market
price for said degrees and what you are hearing is people complaining loudly.

I think if there really was a serious market for pure academics and high
value, quality degrees someone would be tapping that market already. There is
plenty of expertise, plenty of study in the subject and plenty of players
would would be ready to provide that service.

I think far, far too many people look at college as a four year luxury party
with a side of academics rather than the other way around. People going to
college today seem like the most privileged demanding consumers.

The new source of costs in colleges which eclipses academics today is services
that didn't exist 20 years ago. It's gone way beyond merely housing and a few
health services.

Colleges are giving students what they want and what they want is scoreboards
not lower student-to-professor ratios or cutting edge research. People have
always wanted more cake and circus. College is just as consumer driven in this
culture as anything else.

------
primelens
I'll repost what I wrote on a previous discussion of this article on FB:

Most versions of this discussion lament the fact that students come into
graduate programs with little idea of what the academic job market is like.
One could respond - and many do - that it's a "free market," no one is forcing
them to choose this profession over any other. However, this rational-actor
reasoning can only be expected to work if effective channels were set up to
inform students before they've sunk in too much time, and cost (both in terms
of money and lost opportunities). Do such channels exist? While I agree that
the responsibility largely lies with faculty, there are few incentives in the
system for them to lower the number of PhDs. And any system that depends on
the uprightness, or clarity of vision of individuals (even liberal humanities
professors) is bound to be leaky at best.

While this essay puts some numbers to the problem - approximately 1 job for
every 4 PhDs per year, for example - I think this is one domain where more
data and analysis could serve as a wake-up call. Those 1 in 4 odds, I'm sure,
are far from evenly distributed. They are heavily skewed towards a handful of
elite institutions. Go to school elsewhere and the odds stack up much higher.
Consider the applicants who graduated in previous years but have remained in
the market and the odds are even more daunting, and made worse during job
shortfalls like that after the '08 downturn.

If informing graduate students of the magnitude of the challenge they are
taking on is the best approach to the problem, then the profession needs to do
better than trust this to individuals and institutions who have no incentive
to scare away a large portion of their students. Does a dataset exist that
makes this information accessible? I'd expect some resistance from departments
to share detailed information, but the MLA should have enough information from
their member surveys. When grad students send in their first $23 check to the
MLA, perhaps they should receive a dossier with employment data for the last
10 years and a few choice graphs to scare the living daylights out of them!

------
patmcguire
It'll be interesting to see what happens when the tenured start dying off en
masse. They're not going to replace everyone with tenured faculty — what is
the university going to look like if almost no one has tenure?

------
scythe
This will be fixed when there is a suitable economic signal, which can
accurately be used by the customers of universities in order to estimate the
quality of instruction at a university. If this sounds like a ranking, let me
remind you that the rankings have been destroyed by Goodhart's law for decades
now.

Markets depend on some level at consumers who know what they're buying; if all
of the consumers are blindfolded, firms will sell them pieces of paper. If a
university can attract students by investing in its instructors, it will do
so. Currently they can't.

------
michaelmrose
The genesis of the current stupidity is that the government is willing to lend
tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars for people to learn about literature
regardless of whether there is any market whatsoever that would justify the
expenditure.

The managerial/administrative class sucks up as much of this wealth as it can
for itself and like minded individuals while burning lots of it in conspicuous
displays of wealth like football stadiums designed to attract more
interest/wealth some of which will stick to their hands.

This waste is probably nowhere more apparent than in areas of study which
require so little special equipment and expenditure like literature. The
single most valuable resource, a library, is available for free to most, next
up is the teachers time which costs only a small fraction of what the student
is paying.

When basically students are paying 20x the actual cost of the teachers time
for the credentials to participate in the institutions that only exist because
of the easily borrowed money in the first place it seems that this is
unsustainable nonsense most easily rectified by cutting off the money supply.

In the longer term it will be necessary to implement means by which we can
legitimize means to connect teacher to learner without an unnecessary
intermediary that takes almost all of the resources.

Providing a way to achieve this wouldn't be terribly hard fixing our entire
system which depends on credentials from this dysfunctional industry to
legitimize employment isn't but cutting off the money is the first step.

------
woodandsteel
My understanding is that this problem is in part due to the huge boom in
higher education after WWII. Departments got into a growth mode where they
produced more ph.d.'s than were needed to replace the present generation of
college professors. When the grow came to an end in the 1960's, they should
have cut way back on graduate students, but they didn't, and so we now have a
great surplus of would-be professors as compared to the number of available
slots.

------
Animats
Journalism used to be a second source for jobs for English majors, but that's
dried up.

------
slackstation
Why do we treat people with PHDs as idiots who in their 10 years of collegate
level study don't ever think about their debt, their job prospects or their
lives as they do it.

Do you think that grad students don't read articles like this? Do they
understand points that author laid out?

If they do as a group stop applying for PHD programs knowing that their job
prospects are abysmal? If so, why don't more people either a) cut their losses
or b) not pursue a PHD in a wholly oversaturated market?

The exploitation argument works if you have completely illiterate and
uninformed workers who work on the promise of advancement or pay that never
comes. This doesn't hold water for professionals who literally spend every day
working with the people they are trying to become.

The question then begs why do all of these intelligent, well educated people
go through such great hardship, knowing full well the level of poverty
involved. Every grad student I've ever known has joked about how poor they
will be, how little they get paid, how miserable they will be on the other
side.

Here's a radical idea; intelligent people are choosing this hard life because
they value something in it more than the hardship they are going through to
get it.

Now, you may disagree that the hardship is more than what they will get in
return. You may also make the point that by definition, most of them won't
even have the opportunity to achieve their goals. You may even make the point
that colleges don't prioritize academics. I would agree with you on those
points, especially the last one.

What's clear though is that they are people making this decision deliberately.
College isn't the kind of thing where you just fall into like some academic
gulag. At every step of the way, people applied, got loans or secured
financing, moved across the country and put in hard work to achieve. All of
this to say that somehow they were tricked by the "system" that's against them
and is out to exploit them and their labor?

Now people are saying that colleges and society needs to put out a helping
hand to all of these poor souls who find themselves in a position after a
decade of deliberate decisions. If people put more support for this and made
English PHDs more sustainable, I predict that you would see ever more PHDs and
even more people trying to get into the field.

The problem lies in the fact that some people will make irrational decisions.
Some things cost more (in money) than will give out (in money). Some people
will get caught up in their love of books and academia and pursue a degree for
the joy of literature but, then complain that a decade or professional reading
and writing has yielded a mountain of loans and little else as prospects in
the job market. It may even be that well meaning but, nefarious English
professors are inspiring students to fall in love with Literature and teaching
and speaking and this infatuation is causing a glut in the job market.

I would be more sympathetic if it weren't for the fact that this is a decade
long process and you are doing in the very environment you are trying to
enter. It'd be one thing if it took a decade to become an astronaut on Mars
and we had a professional industry for training astronauts that lied or hid
the fact that there aren't astronaut jobs available.

But, people see struggling grad students for four years in undergrad, and
spend a decade being a struggling grad student. All the while pressing on. I
have no sympathy for smart people making dumb decisions all the while studying
books. The loud suffering of people who have made bad decisions is an
important vital thing to listen to.

Allow people to keep making these decisions. Post this article and send it to
every current and prospective grad student. Let them know that the road to a
PHD is paved in suffering and misery (as if they don't already know).

Watch how few of them actually change their minds and alter their course. They
are adults and are making decisions for their own lives inside dynamic systems
that will work against their favor. I don't want to impose artificial
limitations on the freedoms of a system because so many people make irrational
(by my perspective) decisions for their own lives knowing full and well the
consequences.

