This was very much my experience, too. I think there's a vicious circle that's heading for a crash, soon, which basically involves programs admitting more and more grad students to give their tenured professors graduate classes to teach (and thus shuffle off those pesky introductory courses to said grad students). Then, of course, you have all these people with grad degrees seeking jobs, which they either don't get, or get and necessitate the admission of more grad students...you get the idea.
Of course, I'd make a comment about those of us wise enough to pursue CC jobs, but there are Ph.Ds working part time here who can't get full time employment.
Well, they keep saying it's gonna crash, and yet it doesn't crash! As Walter Benjamin put it, "that it 'keeps going on like this' is the catastrophe."
There's tremendous snobbery at Research I schools about CC jobs, and really about anything other than Research I schools. I was always astonished by the people in my program who said that they were there because they wanted to teach. If you want to teach, I said, there are some amazing high schools, and you don't have to spend all that time training to be a researcher! But no -- teaching high school was anathema.
(Though one of my dearest g-school friends, who just never could write a dissertation, eventually said fuck it, annointed himself a doctorate in a very silly made-up critical field which I shall not name here because it would be too Googleable, and is happily teaching at a private school on the East Coast.)
This all sounds in line with my experiences too (or at least with what I know of how people ended up) -- and yet, because it's not bleak enough already, I'll note that the 34% doesn't include the half or so who didn't finish the degree.
I think Berube talks about that stat also in the piece, I'm too lazy to go back and check, but in my program I'd say it was probably closer to two-thirds who didn't finish, though memory fails.
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Of course, I'd make a comment about those of us wise enough to pursue CC jobs, but there are Ph.Ds working part time here who can't get full time employment.
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There's tremendous snobbery at Research I schools about CC jobs, and really about anything other than Research I schools. I was always astonished by the people in my program who said that they were there because they wanted to teach. If you want to teach, I said, there are some amazing high schools, and you don't have to spend all that time training to be a researcher! But no -- teaching high school was anathema.
(Though one of my dearest g-school friends, who just never could write a dissertation, eventually said fuck it, annointed himself a doctorate in a very silly made-up critical field which I shall not name here because it would be too Googleable, and is happily teaching at a private school on the East Coast.)
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I think Berube talks about that stat also in the piece, I'm too lazy to go back and check, but in my program I'd say it was probably closer to two-thirds who didn't finish, though memory fails.
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