On Graduate School

(This is a blog reply to my friend Mr. Redurgam's fine post on the same subject)

At the current Mountain West state university where I teach (this year) I have taken to telling my students not to go to graduate school in the humanities, even if they have funding because there is simply no way they will recoup their expenses.

One of the many amusing things about graduate school is what happens at the end - you spend the entire process slowly gaining control. As a brand new master's student one learn that nearly everything you learned is wrong, that the concern now is about argument and methodology. One then spends years slowly gaining control again - until you write a dissertation and emerge as the world's foremost expert on your particular tiny little subject (which no one cares about - trust me). Then, you apply for jobs (in my case 96 over the past two years) and await the inevitable rejections (or better yet, no word at all). The academic job hire process has two immutable rules: 1: cachet over-rules talent, and 2: the process is profoundly irrational and run by social imbeciles with an overwrought faith in their intellectual capacities.

I have been extraordinarily lucky in this process, from those 96 applications (and this all without degree-in-hand) I have had 2 AHA interviews (for 3 jobs), 5 phone interviews, three on-campus interviews and 3 job offers (all non-tenure track). I have a fine job now, but it is a one year post and I was passed over for consideration for the permanent position, I am moving across the country into the fetid wastes of the deep South to teach at a branch campus of a state university in a building shared with the state unemployment office. Luckily I enjoy teaching, so for a few years this will work out ok - long enough to ride out the depression and the 3-5 year drought in academic hiring.

On that subject, 3-5 years might be optimistic. Reality is this: state budgets run a year behind the economy, and private school endowment managers drank the CDO/CDS Kool-Aid harder than virtually anyone else, faculty with retirement planning through TIAA-CREF saw their portfolios drop by 15% to 45% percent since this summer depending on how they were allocated (remember that many mutual funds "broke the buck" this year) and as a consequence they will put off retirement until they recoup their losses (which could be the better part of a decade) there were about 135 total US positions listed at the peak this year (in contrast to 195 the previous year), I'll be stunned if that number exceeds 50 next year and 35 the year following.

Anyone planning on finishing next year or the following year may well find themselves locked out of even adjunct work, as folks from this year (and from an overhang of graduates from the early 2000s) float around (with more teaching experience) taking those kinds of positions. I recognize that I am lucky - while the job I am going to sucks, in a shitty town and a part of the country I do not want to live, it is permanent and in a growth area for the school (the branch campus is open enrollment and adjacent to a military base that is a winner in the base realignment sweepstakes). Also working in my favor (in this one regard) is that I am without wife and children, so I needn't take into consideration the feelings or needs of others.

That's another reason to avoid graduate school - it's murder on marriages and long-term relationships.

Time for some whiskey.