“Going to grad school’s a suicide mission.” The ponzi, er, higher education

Yesterday, I re-connected with yet another high school classmate, "D" and, of course, catching up included details about our respective education and careers since high school (not the musical!) ended 30 years ago.  I told her about how and why I quit engineering, and how I am doing something now that is truly my calling, which I would do even if I were not getting paid for it. (editor: you might want to remind your colleagues, who regret not being able to get rid of you, that not getting paid is metaphorical!)

I lucked out with having found a tenured position in a university.  Luck plays a huge role, and increasingly so, even for those graduating from prestigious universities.

At Yale, we were overjoyed if half our graduating students found positions. That’s right—half. Imagine running a medical school on that basis. As Christopher Newfield points out in Unmaking the Public University (2008), that’s the kind of unemployment rate you’d expect to find among inner-city high school dropouts. And this was before the financial collapse. In the past three years, the market has been a bloodbath: often only a handful of jobs in a given field, sometimes fewer, and as always, hundreds of people competing for each one.

The ponzi scheme is simply awful.  It works like this:

• We convince every high school grad that there is no life for them if they don't get to college
• At the same time, we convince everybody that professors in universities, even the ones at Podunk U, that their worth will be measured by their research
• Most of the research, particularly outside the natural sciences, is nothing but intellectual onanism.
• At "research universities" this means that somebody has to do the teaching
• So, universities recruit a whole bunch of students in their doctoral programs
• These graduate students do not realize that it is a pyramid scheme, and think that there are going to be plenty of jobs out there for them when they graduate
• And then comes the day of reckoning--no jobs in academe
• Intense competition for the few available ones
• And the degree and qualification are useless for most non-academic settings

If only professors and departments will think differently, right? Dream on:

You’d think departments would respond to the Somme-like conditions they’re sending out their newly minted PhDs to face by cutting down the size of their graduate programs. If demand drops, supply should drop to meet it. In fact, many departments are doing the opposite, the job market be damned. More important is maintaining the flow of labor to their domestic sweatshops, the pipeline of graduate students who staff discussion sections and teach introductory and service courses like freshman composition and first-year calculus. (Professors also need dissertations to direct, or how would they justify their own existence?) As Louis Menand puts it in The Marketplace of Ideas (2010), the system is now designed to produce not PhDs so much as ABDs: students who, having finished their other degree requirements, are “all but dissertation” (or “already been dicked,” as we used to say)—i.e., people who have entered the long limbo of low-wage research and teaching that chews up four, five, six years of a young scholar’s life.
If anything, as Menand notes, the PhD glut works well for departments at both ends, since it gives them the whip hand when it comes to hiring new professors. Graduate programs occupy a highly unusual, and advantageous, market position: they are both the producers and the consumers of academic labor, but as producers, they have no financial stake in whether their product “sells”—that is, whether their graduates get jobs. Yes, a program’s prestige is related, in part, to its placement rate, but only in relative terms. In a normal industry, if no firm sells more than half of what it produces, then either everyone goes out of business or the industry consolidates. But in academia, if no one does better than 50 percent, then 50 percent is great. Programs have every incentive to keep prices low by maintaining the oversupply.

Defenders of this ponzi scheme--the essay in The Nation is no exception--often like to argue that all the adjunct positions need to be converted to full-time tenure-track positions.  In other words, to solidify the ponzi scheme, and not address the root cause of it all: the hyped up overselling of higher education.  

The best lines in the essay are these:

of course it is precisely China—and Singapore, another great democracy—that the Obama administration holds up as the model to emulate in our new Sputnik moment. It’s funny; after the original Sputnik, we didn’t decide to become more like the Soviet Union. But we don’t possess that kind of confidence anymore.

Not so fast ... remember that even the likes of Thomas Friedman writing about the efficiency in decision making in one-party countries like China? 

Crap, I am beginning to sounding like some old curmudgeon! (editor: "beginning" is incorrect. Awshutupalready!)