Reply to Indiana University political science placement director writes scorched earth letter to PhD students

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Even our DD who is doing a post grad work year at HYP school in chemistry says the PHD students have warned her off getting one. She doesn’t plan to go into academia if she gets one.

How will the US stay competitive with this type of system? HYP fully funds these types of PhDs![/quote]

+1. It is not just humanities PHDs who have trouble finding jobs in academia. Academia is basically run by the elderly now. Both of my parents are PhDs and professors at a university. They are 78 and 76 and have no plans to retire yet. Most of their colleagues are boomers or older. I"m a gen-xer with a PhD and am a SME at a think tank. I've never been interested in being a professor (I've done adjunct work like lots of folks in DC to pad my resume), but it is brutal out there. I think they should have mandatory retirement ages for professors (not just tenured ones, but any full-time faculty). [/quote]

One reason some professors may not retire is because of university-subsidized housing. I know a tenured professor at a university in NYC who loses university-subsidized housing the moment they retire. That definitely factors into the retirement question for them, because they are NYC-born and bred. Even with the university subsidy, rent is still very pricey and they've never owned their own house or apartment so they don't have that several decades' worth of real estate investment to roll over into housing after retirement. In a different expensive city, the one we lived in before we moved back to the DMV, the university paid 1/3 of the price of our house for the tenured professor who moved in and will get that money back if/when the professor retires or moves away, but that means that the value of that professor's stake in their house is lower and they won't have the full appreciation to roll over into new housing somewhere else.

I'm not advocating for pity and sorrow for tenured professors who refuse to retire -- tenure is a fantastic gig if you can get it -- but there can be a bit of a golden handcuffs situation.[/quote]

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