Village Voice, April 27th, 2004
Generation Debt - the New Economics of Being Young
by Anya Kamenetz
Wanted: Really Smart Suckers
Grad school provides exciting new road to poverty
Here's an exciting career opportunity you won't see in the classified
ads. For the first six to 10 years, it pays less than $20,000 and
demands superhuman levels of commitment in a Dickensian environment.
Forget about marriage, a mortgage, or even Thanksgiving dinners, as
the focus of your entire life narrows to the production, to exacting
specifications, of a 300-page document less than a dozen people will
read. Then it's time for advancement: Apply to 50 far-flung,
undesirable locations, with a 30 to 40 percent chance of being offered
any position at all. You may end up living 100 miles from your spouse
and commuting to three different work locations a week. You may end up
$50,000 in debt, with no health insurance, feeding your kids with food
stamps. If you are the luckiest out of every five entrants, you may
win the profession's ultimate prize: A comfortable middle-class job,
for the rest of your life, with summers off.
Welcome to the world of the humanities Ph.D. student, 2004, where
promises mean little and revolt is in the air. In the past week,
Columbia's graduate teaching assistants went on strike and temporary,
or adjunct, faculty at New York University narrowly avoided one.
Columbia's Graduate Student Employees United seeks recognition, over
the administration's appeals, of a two-year-old vote that would make
it the second officially recognized union at a private university.
NYU's adjuncts, who won their union in 2002, reached an eleventh-hour
agreement for health care and office space, among other amenities.
Grad students have always resigned themselves to relative poverty in
anticipation of a cushy, tenured payoff. But in the past decade, the
rules of the game have changed. Budget pressures have spurred
universities' increasing dependence on so-called "casual labor," which
damages both the working conditions of graduate students and their job
prospects. Over half of the classroom time at major universities is
now logged by non-tenure-track teachers, both graduate teaching
assistants—known as TAs—and adjuncts. At community colleges,
part-timers make up 60 percent of the faculties.
Average teaching loads for grad students have increased, while
benefits are often cut off after five years. Humanities TAs are paid
stipends ranging from less than $10,000 at a public school like
SUNY-Buffalo to $18,000 at unionized NYU. Adjuncts, more and more
likely to be recent post-docs who couldn't find a better position,
earn less than $3,000 a course—usually without benefits, and far less
than the $60,000 yearly national average for full-time professors.
Meanwhile, the debt burden has grown: The average holder of a graduate
degree spends 13.5 percent of his or her income paying back loans
(eight percent is considered manageable). Fifty-three percent of those
holding master's degrees, 63 percent of those holding doctorates, and
69 percent of those holding professional degrees are over $30,000 in
debt. If they end up as "marginal employees," the academic freedom and
security of tenure is replaced by a constant anxiety and alienation.
But the Internet means no isolated community has to stay that way. A
new group of tortured, funny, largely anonymous websites are providing
an outlet for academics who feel like they're getting spanked by their
alma mater. They have names like Invisible Adjunct, (a)musings of a
grad student, Beyond Academe, and Barely Tenured, and they address the
emotional just as much as the practical consequences of competing in,
and losing, the academic job-market lottery.
Founded in February 2003, Invisible Adjunct quickly became one of the
most popular such blogs. Dozens of regular posters followed discussion
threads like "The Old Boy Network" and "Is Tenure a Cartel?" Invisible
Adjunct's author—call her IA—is a New Yorker in her late thirties with
a Ph.D. in British history, an adjunct for the past two years. "I've
spent all these years and I've failed," says IA, who entered graduate
school in 1993 and received her Ph.D. in 2001. "You agree to do this
five-to-seven-year low-paid apprenticeship because you're joining this
guild. And if you end up as an adjunct you think, wow, I'm really
getting screwed over."
The also pseudonymous Thomas H. Benton was a frequent contributor to
Invisible Adjunct's blog and has penned a series of cautionary columns
for the Chronicle of Higher Education. He is even more blunt than IA.
"The premise of graduate education in the humanities is a lie:
Students are not apprentices preparing for a life of scholarship and
teaching," he says. "They are a cheap source of labor and status for
institutions and faculty and, after they earn their degrees, most join
the reserve army of the academic underemployed." Benton, a professor
at a small liberal arts college, warns his students about trying to
follow in his footsteps. "My experience as a working-class kid who
finally earned an Ivy League Ph.D. is that higher education is not
about social mobility or personal enrichment; it is one trap among
many for people who are uninitiated into the way power and influence
operate in this culture."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Grad school applications are up slightly over the last decade, as
unemployed college grads seek a haven from the job market. Every
winter, a new crop of bright, bookish, maybe slightly fuzzy-headed
kids, the kind who cover the sidewalks of the Lower East Side and
Williamsburg, decide they're sick enough of the 9-to-5 grind to borrow
some money and go back to school.
Unlike trade schools, most graduate programs do not offer prospective
students detailed data on job placement, which varies widely from
program to program. Tri-State Semi Driver Training School in
Middletown, Ohio, for example, guarantees a job before you even start
driving, while the American Language Institute in San Diego promises
lifetime placement assistance to its teachers of English as a foreign
language. Your local Ivy League English department can't offer the
same deal: Last year, the Modern Language Association expected some
965 Ph.D.'s to be granted, while only 422 assistant professorships
were advertised, a drop of 20 percent from the year before. In the
foreign languages, there were only 263 positions advertised (for the
620 Ph.D.'s projected), a drop of one-third from the previous year.
The MLA estimates that students who entered English programs in 2003
had a 20 percent chance of coming out with a tenure-track position.
The situation is better in history, where the number of new Ph.D.'s in
2003 almost equalled the number of new jobs, after a decade of
"overproduction," with growth coming in trendy specializations like
the Middle East.
But numbers like these do little to deter the best students. "Top
undergraduates are arrogant; they lack perspective," says Benton.
"They've been fawned over all their lives, and they think grad school
is there to help them realize their potential, not to use them up and
toss them out."
Dan Friedman completed a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Yale
University this spring after 10 years. He now teaches at a private
high school in New Jersey, making twice the $25,000 he was offered as
a university part-timer. He says that as a TA back at Yale, he tried
to warn his favorite students. "I've had a few bright students,
majors, who are often interested in carrying on and I've said to all
of them, 'Don't do it.' I really wanted them to stop and think. And
without exception, they thought I was joking. Only one of them came
back to me—she ended up at NYU—and said, 'Now I know what you were
talking about.'" Friedman says, however, that he isn't sure he would
have taken his own advice back then. "I didn't know what I was getting
into. It would have been different if I had known. You're committed to
your subject and you think, I want to study literature. You don't
think of yourself as a 40-year-old trying to support a family."
As a scholar of contemporary theory, Friedman quotes a cultural
critic's perspective on the economic impact of the love of learning.
"As graduate students get more and more exploited, people believe in
it more and do it despite the difficulty." He refers to the 2001 book
The Invisible Heart by feminist economist Nancy Folbre, which
describes how the work that is most important to a society tends to be
the most undervalued. "Teachers, nurses, people who do things they
really care about, get shafted."
Devotion to the academic world, however, is not necessarily healthy.
"People develop this identity," says IA. "They say, 'This intellectual
work is who I am.' And it's hard to give that up. Even though there
are two jobs in your field this year and 300 candidates, it still
feels like you've failed."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ironically, defining herself as essentially an academic cuts off the
humanities Ph.D. student's best shot at making a decent living: a job
outside the academy. Last year, Alexandra Lord and Julie Taddeo
created the website Beyond Academe, whose purpose is to profile
history Ph.D.'s, like themselves, who've found satisfactory employment
while still practicing their discipline—with museums, nonprofit
foundations, government agencies, or as researchers for companies.
"I've been stunned by what people have said at some of the blog
sites," Lord says. "They seem to believe that working as an adjunct
and earning $19,000 and having no health insurance is preferable to
working outside the academy. I think this prejudice is even stronger
with people in grad school now than it is among older faculty." For
her own part, Lord has no regrets. "I was a single New York woman
teaching in a small rural town in Montana. I could go days without
speaking to my colleagues, and all my social contact was with 18- to
20-year-olds. I felt that I had sacrificed my personal life for a
professional career and I didn't see a reward." Now a public historian
in Washington, D.C., Lord has peers she can talk to and makes $37,000
more than she did as a tenure-track professor.
The Invisible Adjunct is herself headed beyond academe. After making a
final pass at the academic job market, she is leaving the academy, and
her blog, behind this spring. "I'm finishing up my semester of
teaching and then I'm just going to have to figure out what my next
move should be."
Like Lord, Friedman has no regrets at leaving the ivy-covered walls.
He currently teaches literature and an interdisciplinary seminar to
high school freshmen four days a week and coaches soccer. "The best
phrase I've heard for us is the intellectual lumpenproletariat," he
says, using the Marxist term for the ground-down members of the
underclass who lack the class consciousness for revolt. "If something
happened to empower those people, there would be an incredible
efflorescence of culture in this country, because there's more of them
now than there ever has been. But they are too busy scuttling around
getting shitty jobs."
