Don't get a Ph.D.

Oh, I had an interesting experience with a head hunter recently, he was asking what kind of salary I was looking for. When I told him what I thought was a reasonable range, and what would be a raise relativ to my current situation, he said “Wow, you guys are so cheap.” Meaning, “I’m astonished that someone with your level of education and skills would garner a such a low salary.”

Yeah.

Graduate students are indoctrinated cult drones

disillusioned scientist — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 18:10:39 +0000

Are graduate schools cult-like? You bet.

Although I am currently a tenure-track professor of English, I realize that nothing but luck distinguishes me from thousands of other highly-qualified Ph.D.’s…

End the University as we know it

disillusioned scientist — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 18:05:45 +0000

This op-ed in the New York Times, End the University as we know it, reiterates the problem:

My favorite part:

The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors. In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that there will always be too many candidates for too few openings.

But I think the only way to implement what he recommends would be to start a university from scratch.