Universities are offering doctorates but few jobs
Graduates frustrated by the lack of tenure-track positions available amid budget cuts are looking off campus. Many find work that wouldn't have cost them years in school or put them deep in debt.
Alana Semuels, Los Angeles Times
June 4, 2010
As they walk in hooded robes to the strains of "Pomp and Circumstance," many students getting their doctorates this spring dream of heading to another university to begin their careers as tenure-track professors.
But when Elena Stover finished her doctorate in September, she headed to the poker tables. Frustrated with the limited opportunities and grueling lifestyle of academia, Stover, 29, decided to eschew a career in cognitive neuroscience for one playing online poker. She got the idea from a UCLA career counselor, who was trying to help her find employment.
» Don't miss a thing. Get breaking news alerts delivered to your inbox.
"The job market is abysmal, especially within the academic system," said Stover, who spent six years getting her doctorate at UCLA. --
Full text
Comment: In human and financial terms, the education bubble may be equal or even surpass the cost of the financial bubbles. In any case, the education bubble is of the same kind as the debt bubble and as such it has has the same kind of hubris and false monetary system at its roots. Now, it is the latecomers who pay the price: the latecomers to the financial bubble and likewise the latecomers to the education bubble. In a wider perspective we may well conclude that an historical period is coming to an end, a period that began in the 1950s and which defined itself in the 1960s. As early as in the 1970s, this period reached its peak and since then there has only been decline, a decline interrupted by short spikes. Yet more recently, a new pattern is unfolding with the decline accelerating and the spikes getting weaker and shorter each time. Ever more losers, and less and less winners.
No comments:
Post a Comment