When dreams die hard

After I graduated from college, I started out in a PhD program in political science at Columbia. 

I can't remember what I was thinking, other than that I wanted to live in New York City. But I must have envisioned myself as a college professor.

It didn't take me long to figure out that, although I did enjoy living in NYC, I wasn't cut out to get a PhD.

Given the era, and the demand for professors, and the fact that my PhD would have been a prestigious, Ivy League one, I might have landed a job teaching somewhere. Probably not at a particularly high-end school, but maybe at a nice, middle-tier liberal arts college somewhere.

But other folks near and dear to me were cut out to get their PhD.

My husband was a PhD economist; my brother Tom -  mid-career as an engineer on large scale construction projects -  got his doctorate in civil engineering. 

Although he took a couple of occasional adjunct jobs at BU and Brandeis as favors, and enjoyed his teaching stints, Jim never pursued a career as professor. Tom ended up shifting to academia and spent many years happily teaching at Northern Arizona University. 

And a friend of mine from business school had a doctorate from Stanford, and had been a tenure-track professor at BU when she decided that she'd had it with academia.

But PhD was just not for me. I had no idea where my ambitions lay - 50+ years on, I'm still trying to figure that one out - but it wasn't with me in the baby-blue and black Columbia doctoral robes and a natty velvet beret.

There are plenty of folks out there who do want to get PhDs, who do want to teach. And most of them, in the current environment, are out of luck, stuck on the boulevard of broken dreams.

Maren Wood, who founded a firm that helps those with doctorates find jobs, says that the market for full-time professors has collapsed. Between 2007 and 2020, the number of openings in philosophy dropped by roughly half. The number of openings in English fell by about 60 percent.

Universities staffed up to accommodate millennials, she says, and now they’re trying to cope with declining enrollments, which are predicted to continue indefinitely. “There’s nothing wrong with a PhD,” says Wood, chief executive of Beyond the Professoriate, whose platform is currently used by Harvard and BC. “The problem is there are no jobs.” (Source: Boston Globe)

Which leaves those who so dearly want to teach hustling for whatever part-time, adjunct jobs they can string together, scuttling from one ill-paid job at College A to another ill-paid job at College B. 

Wood comes by her knowledge the hard way: up close and personal. With a PhD in history.

... her breaking point was in 2011 when she came in second place for a job thousands of miles away. The gig was a one-year position. In Reno. And she was told the pay wouldn’t even be enough to live on.

The woman doing the hiring encouraged Wood. “You came in second place!” she exclaimed.

“For what?” Wood asked.

Wood was smart to get out, and smarter still to figure out a business that would help PhDs find work outside of academia.

Over 30 percent of nontenure-track educators in higher education make under $25,000 a year, according to a 2019 survey by the American Federation of Teachers. Another 30 percent make between $25,000 and $50,000 a year. But over the past few decades, the number of adjuncts has grown much faster than the ranks of full-time faculty.

I know a number of poets and writers who are adjuncts, and it can be brutal. They stay in for love of writing. Those with PhDs stick with it for love of the field they've chosen. 

It's easy to see why the schools keep the PhD pipeline going. The students they're churning out with degrees are a source of cheap labor while they're pursuing their degrees. My husband, like all graduate students of his era (mid-1970's) taught sections of economics classes when he was at Harvard; I actually don't recall if he got paid, or whether it was a requirement at the time. And, once they've earned their doctorates, those newly minted PhD's are a cheap source of labor as adjuncts off the tenure track.

And for the full, tenured professors who work with grad students, advising them on their research and theses, well, it's probably more satisfying than teaching grade-grubbing undergrads who may only be taking their course because it's required. And in many fields, it's a great source of free/cheap labor to work as research assistants. 

But given that so few are going to be professors, the students are better off looking elsewhere for employment. 

In some fields, there are many lucrative positions in industry. I don't imagine that there are many biochemistry PhDs who can't find a job in pharma. 

Others will end up in positions that may only be tangentially related to their interests. (My friend from business school was a Jane Austen scholar. She ended up in tech product management.)

I feel bad for those who'd set their sights on jobs as professors when there are so few of those jobs out there. But that's life. And while they were pursuing their PhDs, they at least got to spend their time working on a topic that they were likely passionately interested in, which is more than a lot of folks ever get to experience. 

Still, hard to see dreams die hard for anyone. Glad I was never such a dreamer (but maybe, just maybe, I should have been...). Too late now! I'll have to live and die content with my little old non-academic master's.