Indiana University political science placement director writes scorched earth letter to PhD students
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Anonymous
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Anonymous
I'd argue 70+ year old professors have done the profession wrong by not blocking the administration from hiring adjuncts. Why didn't they use the freedom granted them by tenure to demand that the university only hire full time tenure track faculty? Because it benefitted those same old professors to have adjuncts do the teaching while they collected higher and higher salaries and had lighter and lighter teaching loads. |
Anonymous
There is a significant mental health crisis among PhD students and graduates who cannot get jobs in their fields and are saddled with loans, reduced earnings, etc. |
Anonymous
Yes, everyone should retire at 60 so other people can have their jobs. More ageism. Do you hear yourself? And PP is right about full professors being replaced with adjuncts. Higher Ed is not what it used to be and it’s in part because so many people no longer value education. They just want money. |
Anonymous
Tell me you don’t know anything about professors without telling me you don’t know anything about professors. |
Anonymous
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“Higher Ed is not what it used to be and it’s in part because so many people no longer value education.”
It is mostly because universities are immorally overproducing PhDs, knowing they will never get professorships, because grad students are a great source of revenue. |
Anonymous
| I wish someone in my department had had the courage to write a letter like that. It would have saved me a whole lot of money and trouble. |
Anonymous
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“So many shallow finance bros and their mothers on this board who don’t value education for the sake of education”
Imagine being dumb enough to think you need to get a PhD at all (let alone on art history lmao) to demonstrate you “value education for the sake of education” 🙄🙄🙄 |
Anonymous
NP but I agree with the previous poster, and I was in academia for many years, but never with tenure. I'm sure part of my opinion is just jadedness, but there's also the fact that I watched the admin literally bride the faculty of my department to cut a full-time position in return for hiring more adjuncts to lighten their individual teaching loads. Academia wears a cloak of gentility, but ultimately it's just as mercenary and petty as any business. |
Anonymous
Let's be real here. A PhD is 7-10 years of a person's life (and potential income) and can leave a person in 100's of thousands of debt. Anyone who goes through all that just to be a HS art teacher (which you can do with a bachelor's degree) is not going to be satisfied with their career choices. I did something very similar, and although I loved the work, I didn't have the "correct" PhD to advance in my field and could have done the job I had without the huge debt and years of my life spent studying something that is, basically, useless. Education for education's sake is for the wealthy, not for people who need money to live and take care of their families. That's a myth and a ripoff. |
Anonymous
So PhD students are victims? They’re old enough and smart enough to make thoughtful, responsible decisions. Some people love to learn. Not everyone is driven by financial ROI. Mocking their career outcome is pathetic. I’d be thrilled to learn my kids have such educated and accomplished teachers in high school. Especially if they chose to work with teenagers. |
Anonymous
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Had a conversation with a professional colleague a few months back. His university produces about 50 PhDs per year in his specialty.
Last year there were 40 full-time jobs in that specialty nationwide. In other words even if his students were so astoundingly wonderful that they got every single job available in the United States last year there would still be 10 of them who are unemployed. When I asked him why they would keep doing this he had no good answer. It’s clearly just a gravy train. |
Anonymous
This is so infuriating. I'm the PP who advises her undergrads NOT to enroll in an MA/PhD program unless they can attend debt-free. Many of the more ethical programs actually severely limit the number of students they take because the job market is so bleak. This is especially true in the humanities, where many of the PhD students have hopes of landing a job in academia. (In some of the STEM fields, the calculus may be different because a student can presumably go into private industry.) It's truly appalling that your colleague had no good answer to your question. He's either spineless, thoughtless, or withholding the truth because he's uncomfortable admitting how unethical his department practices are. |
Anonymous
Potential PhD students need to ask the right questions, and so many of them are poorly advised. They might be told about how wonderful their star students are and how they land prestigious fellowships and jobs, but unless asked, PhD programs will not say how many students don't land tenure-track jobs, how many drop out, and how many never finish their PhDs. You can't make thoughtful, responsible decisions unless you have all the information you need. There are many, many 21 year olds who are still too young and uninformed about the reality of the academic job market when they apply to these graduate programs. They are smart, but not savvy consumers. |
Anonymous
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These are the people producing gargabes so called researches
Waste of resources |