Posted on 08/18/2005 5:04:35 PM PDT by bloggodocio
PhD = Playa Hater Degree! Yeaaaaa Boiiiiii!!!!!
Is this a bad thing????
Well, I intended to get a PhD in History, but wound up with an MBA instead.
"Piled hip Deep"
If only they'd stop giving out 4-year degrees so indiscriminantly, that would be nice too.
PhD = Post hole Digger
Yes. For the technological and scientific future of the country, it is a bad thing.
Having said that, and being a former English & history major myself, I don't know why people get PhDs in these areas anymore. The fields are terrifically overcrowded and wages in them are low.
In my field, there are still jobs and the wages are high. In addition, almost everyone is completely funded, so there is little doctoral debt (that happens at the lower levels). Worse comes to worse, I can take my PhD to industry. Hard to do that w/a doctorate in early 17th century Englsih women writers.
Piled higher and Deeper...with colleges run by the type of people who work there, what attraction could there be to competing with those type of people for a limited number of tenure track positions?
Having escaped once from academe, I know I won't go back...
I could agree w/that if employers would stop requiring 4 year degrees for entry level jobs that could be done w/2 yrs of community college.
In the big cities I've lived in, it's hard to get a office job w/o a degree, even if you are answering phones and photocopying. It creates an artificial market for graduate degrees because people have to get a masters just to differentiate themselves from the crowd and have promotion opportunities. You wind up w/jobs advertised for people w/grad degrees that a 4 year grad could do.
I've known many bioscience candidates, and nearly all of them had to quit and take their masters instead. The reasons- burnout, babies, and bank accounts (they need to start working to support their new family).
But more than any other factor- low morale. They are surrounded by folks with more brains than manners or personality, including professors, underlings, and co-equal lab partners... very unpleasant people.
Everyone should read what William James wrote over a century ago: The Ph.D. Octopus
The U.S. Department of Education reported that there were 6,967 degrees awarded for education in 2002,
Well, theres the problem
PhD = Purple-Haired Dykes? Pointy-Headed Dorks?
"Is there really a viable non-academic job market for someone with a doctorate in English? I'm not sure we've done such a wonderful job explaining to students the range of things they can do with a Ph.D..."
Honestly I'm not concerned about the decline in English PhD students. I am more concerned about fields such as Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics, Engineering, etc. These are the fields that Chinese and Indians are going into and these are the fields that are critical for us to maintain the technical superiority of our military and national security in general.
I worked in a call center once where well over half of the gals on the telephone had a BA....sad, but true
The problem is anyone under 30 without a 4 year degree is considered marginal. Older people can still get away without a 4 year degree, at least for now....
This does tend to de-value education, but when you look at the product of most public high schools, it is not suprising that employers don't take the HS graduates seriously anymore.
Tech schools and Junior colleges should be better respected, but for some reason we denigrate the benefits of these very sensible institutions.
Then we end up with an army of marketing majors, cat therapist, Interior designers, historians (ahem!) and lawyers.
What we are going to end up with is a quarter of the country that is over-educated and under paid, but living in relative comfort doing essentially silly jobs, ....while three quarters of the nation exist in a precarious state desperately competing for an ever shrinking pool of domestic manufacturing jobs....or competing with "immigrants" ...hehe
it's an odd situation, but nothing we can't deal with
As for me, I'm a proud poor Ph.D candidate who knows full well I'll never be rich and famous teaching history.
And since I happen to like America, I'm relatively unemployable at most public universities.
But it's ok,
People should live their lives and do what they want to do.
If money was your only motivating factor, you'd be a prostitute or drug dealer......
Odd how the article treats the decline of doctorates in the humanities as some sort of crisis. Perhaps it will inspire people to invent more new fields like "gender studies" which make only a very doubtful contribution to human wisdom.
I work with a lot of these undergrad kids during our summer sessions.
They come over and pay massive amounts to get intensive english skills. Mainly from China, the kids study engineering, Information Tech, and business.
Their major goal is to secure a graduate degree from an American institution.
We at the university make a little green, and the kids get their first step towards academic success/conquer Amerika studies...(most actually love America)
Now, without putting down my countrymen, I'd have to say these young chinese kids bust @ss constantly. I've never seen anything like it.
The Asians will enroll in 15 hours and then spend 75 hours a week in the library. They think nothing of going on 3 hours sleep a night. Very few of our 19 year old American students can match the Asian students work ethic.
**(The exception is our kids in the military, but again, the guys in boot camp are not living the pampered "let's get drunk and laid" college student lifestyle)**
As far as the Ph.D's you're absolutely right, the overwhelming majority (I'd say 90% at my instution) of advanced degrees taken by international students are in fields such as engineering, chemistry, computer sci., and interestingly, agriculture related sciences.
The second tier are the Business majors.
Very few waste The Party's money in pursuit of a MA in Literature or history.
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