A Clamor in My Kindergarten Heart
April 8, 2017 4:27 PM Subscribe
It is hardly surprising, then, that the more years I spent in graduate school, the more often the anxiety about money that I’d tried to calm with temporary safety measures began to express itself in periods of debilitating depression.Sara Appel, writing in Rhizomes, about how anxiety expresses itself in her life as an academic from a working-class background.
More reading:
- We Are All Very Anxious, a manifesto on capitalism and anxiety by Plan C.
- Ann Cvetkovich's book Depression: A public feeling (Amazon). The first chapter (PDF) is available online.
Don't get a PhD. Don't get a PhD. Don't get a PhD.
posted by k8t at 7:48 PM on April 8, 2017 [8 favorites]
posted by k8t at 7:48 PM on April 8, 2017 [8 favorites]
...I had a 20% paycheck garnishment happen for student loans in 2005. It caused me to eventually lose my house to foreclosure and file for chapter 7. In the end sallie got 40k, and Wells Fargo home mortgage lost 400k in 25 future years of mortgage payments that I never made.
It's funny how sallie and Freddie rob peter to pay Paul.
America fucking sucks like that sometimes.
posted by Annika Cicada at 9:27 PM on April 8, 2017 [10 favorites]
It's funny how sallie and Freddie rob peter to pay Paul.
America fucking sucks like that sometimes.
posted by Annika Cicada at 9:27 PM on April 8, 2017 [10 favorites]
Well, certainly don't rack up significant educational debt to get a PhD.
Even with no debt, forgoing the years of income is a massive opportunity cost. You may find yourself 10,12 years later just competing for the same entry level jobs as young college graduates, especially if you're ABD, and in the meantime, you're 35 or 40 and just starting to be able to afford to have children or save for retirement.
posted by jb at 11:24 PM on April 8, 2017 [17 favorites]
Even with no debt, forgoing the years of income is a massive opportunity cost. You may find yourself 10,12 years later just competing for the same entry level jobs as young college graduates, especially if you're ABD, and in the meantime, you're 35 or 40 and just starting to be able to afford to have children or save for retirement.
posted by jb at 11:24 PM on April 8, 2017 [17 favorites]
Yeah, I think his may have had an influence:
Tenure track academic gigs are not plentiful for a variety of reasons and jumps to one university to another are not frequent.
I will keep reading the article.
posted by jadepearl at 4:47 AM on April 9, 2017 [2 favorites]
. Per my admissions packet, I did receive five years (ten semesters) of funding from the Literature program, and also managed to acquire two further semesters of dissertation write-up stage funding from the graduate school. In addition to the more general issue of the high cost of acquiring a PhD from one of the most expensive private universities in the country, however, two factors influenced my mounting debt burden like no other: May-October of each year, the summer semester not covered in my funding packet; and the fact that it took me nine years and a summer to finish my dissertationAnother issue would have been the job market year she would have entered and compounding factor is the length her program. Reading a CV, on the search committee side, is all about constructing whether this person is going to build programs, teach, publish, be a good colleague, university service, bring in prestige, money or any other factors that influence tenure. Her taking almost double the time to finish her doctorate without other factors off setting that, on the line of Brian May of Queen, makes her shot at very well paying faculty gigs low.
Tenure track academic gigs are not plentiful for a variety of reasons and jumps to one university to another are not frequent.
I will keep reading the article.
posted by jadepearl at 4:47 AM on April 9, 2017 [2 favorites]
almost double the time to finish her doctorate
I thought, oh, 7 years to finish, isn't that unusual in humanities PhDs.....is that time length already considered dubious?
posted by thelonius at 4:52 AM on April 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
I thought, oh, 7 years to finish, isn't that unusual in humanities PhDs.....is that time length already considered dubious?
posted by thelonius at 4:52 AM on April 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
Sara and I were at Duke at the same time, and I vaguely knew who she was through campus writing things and women's things. While she was struggling every summer just to pay rent, those of us in the sciences got summer stipends (and got paid more during the school year). It always struck me as vastly unfair, given that the grad students in the humanities were actually the primary teachers of record for courses, courses for which their students' families or loans were paying ridiculously high tuition, while I was getting paid to either lead lab sections or just do my dissertation research.
And that's not even touching the class thing. Like most of my peers, I come from a comfortably middle class family who could have and would have helped me out if I got in trouble. The main help I got from them was in a series of old cars that they gave me after they were done with them, and sometimes help to pay to get those old cars fixed. I know how lucky I was to get those old cars.
At Duke, 9 years to a PhD is not at all unusual in the humanities. I finished in 6, which was in line with the average in the sciences, and that difference is of course entirely because of the funding situation.
posted by hydropsyche at 5:05 AM on April 9, 2017 [16 favorites]
And that's not even touching the class thing. Like most of my peers, I come from a comfortably middle class family who could have and would have helped me out if I got in trouble. The main help I got from them was in a series of old cars that they gave me after they were done with them, and sometimes help to pay to get those old cars fixed. I know how lucky I was to get those old cars.
At Duke, 9 years to a PhD is not at all unusual in the humanities. I finished in 6, which was in line with the average in the sciences, and that difference is of course entirely because of the funding situation.
posted by hydropsyche at 5:05 AM on April 9, 2017 [16 favorites]
Each discipline is different, but if 7 is standard for Lit she still blew past that time standard. I don't want to blame the victim because being a first generation college student has so much disadvantage from the tacit knowledge expectation. For instance, knowing to ask average length of program completion and running your support against that average length and cross that data to average salary based on Cup-hr data. One of the questions I have is where was her advisor in this situation?
posted by jadepearl at 5:13 AM on April 9, 2017
posted by jadepearl at 5:13 AM on April 9, 2017
One of the questions I have is where was her advisor in this situation?
Almost certainly nowhere? Elite programs in particular have a habit of allowing graduate students to sink or swim, and there usually aren't any penalties for graduate programs for poor time-to-completion rates (whereas there can be for the undergraduate equivalents). And there's the expectation that students will do this kind of legwork themselves, without prompting.
posted by thomas j wise at 5:35 AM on April 9, 2017 [11 favorites]
Almost certainly nowhere? Elite programs in particular have a habit of allowing graduate students to sink or swim, and there usually aren't any penalties for graduate programs for poor time-to-completion rates (whereas there can be for the undergraduate equivalents). And there's the expectation that students will do this kind of legwork themselves, without prompting.
posted by thomas j wise at 5:35 AM on April 9, 2017 [11 favorites]
That Plan C manifesto is really good--don't skip it.
posted by The Horse You Rode In On at 12:23 PM on April 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by The Horse You Rode In On at 12:23 PM on April 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
Time to completion is a metric measuring how much financial support the student is receiving from their school, their family, and their spouse. That is all it is.
All ye tenured on hiring committees out there: it is your responsibility to not just refrain from using time-to-completion as a metric, but to also suppress the hell out of any of your colleagues who attempt to use time-to-completion as a metric. This is serious — this may be the most important concrete political action you can take as a professor.
Yes, sometimes there are grad students and assistant professors who do not yet have tenure on hiring committees. But because of our social position, we cannot be the people leading on this — there is a good chance we will lose our careers if we stick out our necks first and the tenured don't follow.
If you're not making hiring decisions based on the need to elevate the voices and scholarship of working-class people, PoC, and women, you are not doing the political work that could justify your scholarly work. Get to it.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 12:51 PM on April 9, 2017 [10 favorites]
All ye tenured on hiring committees out there: it is your responsibility to not just refrain from using time-to-completion as a metric, but to also suppress the hell out of any of your colleagues who attempt to use time-to-completion as a metric. This is serious — this may be the most important concrete political action you can take as a professor.
Yes, sometimes there are grad students and assistant professors who do not yet have tenure on hiring committees. But because of our social position, we cannot be the people leading on this — there is a good chance we will lose our careers if we stick out our necks first and the tenured don't follow.
If you're not making hiring decisions based on the need to elevate the voices and scholarship of working-class people, PoC, and women, you are not doing the political work that could justify your scholarly work. Get to it.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 12:51 PM on April 9, 2017 [10 favorites]
A concept I'm familiar with to the point of having written about it, as a PhD adviser and the developer of a PhD program over more than 20 years (with an 85% placement rate for my advisees...). If you are taking "10-12" years or ABD at 40, in most cases you're doing it wrong, or your grad program is lying to you.
Or maybe you fell ill, or had a child - or your mother had a stroke while you were writing up - or maybe two out of three happened. And then you're out - and the years of work you put in and the years of (higher) income you didn't have don't disapeer. You're older, you have less energy, you have no savings - and everyone your age got on the property ladder 10 years earlier and you probably never will. It puts a real dent into your dream for making it into the middle class.
I went to an elite university for my PhD, with full funding. Yes, most of my classmates graduated within 7 years - notably 7, even for those who have done very well.
But that still doesn't take away from the fact that those of us who don't finish - for whatever reason - have had a significant opportunity cost. I am ABD - and will be ABD when I'm 60, because I have changed fields. I needed to find work as an ABD because I needed to pay the rent, and I most certainly was applying for entry level jobs (because a masters doesn't get you far these days). I ended up taking a job at Starbucks for part of the time, where I met two other people with masters degrees. I had 1/2 of a PhD written, but that's worth bupkis outside of that specific field (though, ironically enough, one of the things I studied is working class culture).
I'm glad your students have done well. But that's like being thankful they just didn't happen to get cancer. Shit happens - and no one can guarantee that they will finish a PhD. No amount of good advising could have helped with my chronic condition or my mother's stroke (and the fact that my mother had a stroke in her mid-50s is directly related to the fact that we aren't middle class, given that her health was much worse even before).
Telling me "You're doing it wrong" -- well, I agree with you. As someone from a working class background, who came from middling state university - trying to get a PhD does feel like the wrong choice. The risks are too great for people who don't have a good safety net. That kind of life wasn't meant for the likes of me.
posted by jb at 7:32 AM on April 11, 2017 [2 favorites]
Or maybe you fell ill, or had a child - or your mother had a stroke while you were writing up - or maybe two out of three happened. And then you're out - and the years of work you put in and the years of (higher) income you didn't have don't disapeer. You're older, you have less energy, you have no savings - and everyone your age got on the property ladder 10 years earlier and you probably never will. It puts a real dent into your dream for making it into the middle class.
I went to an elite university for my PhD, with full funding. Yes, most of my classmates graduated within 7 years - notably 7, even for those who have done very well.
But that still doesn't take away from the fact that those of us who don't finish - for whatever reason - have had a significant opportunity cost. I am ABD - and will be ABD when I'm 60, because I have changed fields. I needed to find work as an ABD because I needed to pay the rent, and I most certainly was applying for entry level jobs (because a masters doesn't get you far these days). I ended up taking a job at Starbucks for part of the time, where I met two other people with masters degrees. I had 1/2 of a PhD written, but that's worth bupkis outside of that specific field (though, ironically enough, one of the things I studied is working class culture).
I'm glad your students have done well. But that's like being thankful they just didn't happen to get cancer. Shit happens - and no one can guarantee that they will finish a PhD. No amount of good advising could have helped with my chronic condition or my mother's stroke (and the fact that my mother had a stroke in her mid-50s is directly related to the fact that we aren't middle class, given that her health was much worse even before).
Telling me "You're doing it wrong" -- well, I agree with you. As someone from a working class background, who came from middling state university - trying to get a PhD does feel like the wrong choice. The risks are too great for people who don't have a good safety net. That kind of life wasn't meant for the likes of me.
posted by jb at 7:32 AM on April 11, 2017 [2 favorites]
jb: Telling me "You're doing it wrong" -- well, I agree with you. As someone from a working class background, who came from middling state university - trying to get a PhD does feel like the wrong choice. The risks are too great for people who don't have a good safety net. That kind of life wasn't meant for the likes of me.
Thankfully for me, I wasn't from the first generation of university-goers in my family. I was from the first-and-a-half generation. My mother had already learned the lesson that you did, the hard way, about the wisdom of working class people with minimal support being cautious when the promises of higher education are dangled in front of you. If you're working class, higher education is something to approach with realism and calculation, not hope and easy optimism. The higher the education, the more you turn to calculation and the less you turn to optimism.
posted by clawsoon at 8:43 AM on April 11, 2017 [2 favorites]
Thankfully for me, I wasn't from the first generation of university-goers in my family. I was from the first-and-a-half generation. My mother had already learned the lesson that you did, the hard way, about the wisdom of working class people with minimal support being cautious when the promises of higher education are dangled in front of you. If you're working class, higher education is something to approach with realism and calculation, not hope and easy optimism. The higher the education, the more you turn to calculation and the less you turn to optimism.
posted by clawsoon at 8:43 AM on April 11, 2017 [2 favorites]
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Selmer Strad Model 37 here. Paid for it by pounding fence posts.
posted by clawsoon at 6:15 PM on April 8, 2017