What I find really annoying is that Inside Higher Ed does not promote good blogs like mine which offer great advice to budding academics (see previous post for one example among many) and, instead, promotes stupid, poorly written whinefests for people who hate academia and invent idiotic reasons to explain that hatred. A blog called “100 Reasons NOT to Go to Grad School” is a case in point.
I will not address all of the so-called reasons the grievously confused author of that blog provides because there are already 80 of them. I’ll just discuss a few so that you get the general picture.
1. The most recent reason is the following:
When will you finish? Of all of the awkward questions that you are asked in graduate school, this one is the cruelest. It is also the one that you are asked more often than any other. Whether asked innocently (as it often is) or laced with judgment (as it often is), the question presents the same problem.
Oh, the tragedy. People might show interest in what you are doing. How will a poor little baby deal with that? The answer is clear, don;t go to grad school because that will guarantee that you will never get asked any questions like “So when will you finish this project?”, “When are you finally going to get promoted?”, “When will you be allowed more freedom on your job?” No, that never happens to anubody except grad students.
2. Then there is this:
Graduate school is hard on your mental health, but it is also hard on your physical health. As a grad student, you spend a long time in relative poverty, and healthy living and poverty seldom go hand-in-hand. Your diet is more likely to consist of cheap processed foods than wholesome fare. Your bus rides are especially crowded during the flu season.
Because as we all know, nobody but grad students eat processed foods and traveled on the bus. All of those people taking buses, they must be grad students. Not going to grad school is a guarantee that you will be able to eat organic and drive a limousine.
3. And, of course,
There is a culture of fear.
Which is so totally absent in the non-academic workplace where you can be fired at will at any moment in time. What I find especially funny is that all these detractors of academia are extremely stupid people. The unenlightened author of this blog is dense enough not to realize that fear has an internal locus of control. If you want to indulge in being terrified of life, you find ample opportunities to do so even sitting in a mansion and going over the bank statement showing that you have millions in your bank account.
4. Academic conferences are stressful or something:
The largest academic conferences can be highly depressing affairs involving thousands of participants and hundreds of desperate job seekers nervously waiting to be interviewed in hotel rooms.
Yes, if you are a blubbering fool who has nothing to say but is trying to pretend like s/he needs to be among intelligent people, then you will be stressed. If, however, you dig your field and love sharing knowledge, you will have a blast at academic conferences.
5. Then, the blogger really made me laugh by communicating the following bit of wisdom:
In August 2011, Yale University released the results of a remarkable study of its own graduate school. Among other things, it found that even at Yale only 68% of those who had begun a PhD program in the humanities between 1996 and 2003 had earned a PhD by 2010 (see Reason 46). But most striking was a calculation of how much, on average, each Yale graduate student had cost the graduate school over a six-year period: $17,421 in the natural sciences, $126,339 in the social sciences, and $143,170 in the humanities.
As somebody who did graduate from Yale with a PhD and is intimately aware of the intra-university politics, In know exactly why this stupid, completely misleading information was published. And I am capable of analyzing such studies and figuring out what political purposes they serve precisely because I went to grad school. And also because I have a brain, which is a concept that the 100 Reason blogger is not familiar with.
6. This is also a funny reason:
The tenure track is brutal.
As somebody who just went through the midpoint tenure review, I can say that the tenure track rocks. You get to see your professional life as a journey that is mapped out for you by your senior colleagues who help you travel it. Everything you do contributes to your progress, and there is a very clear goal in sight. Brutal? Being unemployed and struggling to find a low-paying, boring job is brutal. Teaching twice a week, working on research, traveling to conferences, and getting paid for doing what you adore in the expectation of getting paid even more in six years is paradise. Maybe not being a spoiled brat who finds the prospect of having to work to be “brutal” would help one get that perspective.
[To be continued. . .]
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