Patriot Act Roundup: American Local News and College During COVID-19

[zoaster_toaster]

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Hasan Minhaj has been on a roll covering the troubling decline of local newspapers in America and whether a college degree is worth pursuing amid a pandemic and how they treat the people who work there.

Source 1, 2

OP Note: I'm extremely mad at my undergrad alma mater's treatment of grad students.

Comments

[bananainpyjamas]

Man that second video hits close to home. The last year of my PhD (job hunt + finishing dissertation) was one of the lowest points of my life and I'm someone who achieved a so-called ideal outcome, i.e. a tenure-track faculty position at a prestigious university.

Honestly the big thing is there's a fundamental supply/demand problem. Each department churns out an entire cohort of PhDs but then turns around and maybe hires 1-2 tenure-track professors in fields with a GOOD job market (and no one in fields with a bad job market, which is most of the humanities). So you get this glut of PhDs with no stable career prospects, but departments aren't willing to cut down their PhD admissions to match the realities of the market because they need the cheap teaching/research labor. That in turn leads to PhD students and adjuncts putting up with insane amounts of bullshit just for the chance at one of those elusive tenure-track faculty positions.

[honeyspun]

I went to grad school for library sciences and, while it is so much chiller than most fields, I still hated it. apparently I can't get enough of it (barf) bc I'm going back in the fall for my doctorate in education. I never thought I'd want to go into administration, but ours is so goddamn incompetent and adversarial that I've felt compelled to participate in making structural changes. we'll see how the fall goes and whether or not I can stand the elitist circle jerk that is academia.
on verra...

[aspacecake]

I'm Canadian, so though education has been increasing in cost it's not nearly as bad the States

[dnttllhrry]

I'm in higher ed, so I need a grad degree to make any substantial amount of money. I think I also like learning amongst cohorts. Something I haven't done in 10 years since my undergrad. But I completely understand why people choose not to go to school anymore. I was one of them up until a year ago.

[aesha]

I am too, and I when I graduated from UG in 2006 I had no interest in grad school. Then I decided that in order to move up I’d probably need one because otherwise I’d hit a ceiling. I finished in 2016 and now I’m trying to remember that I don’t like to study before I end up getting myself into a law or edd/phd program. Lol

[sadteenager]

I'm finishing my thesis for my master's in english over the summer and working on-campus full time through this month. I'm grateful to have been rehired for another but at part-time, due to budget issues bc of COVID. It's just annoying to be more educated than my boss and not be getting paid enough to live even at full time. It really shows how out of touch universities are. I've literally had the director of my department ask me why I was working two other part-time jobs in addition to my part-time (at the time) assistantship in the office and it took all my self control to not laugh in her face. I'm currently looking for part-time retail work and obviously no shame in doing that kind of work but it is just difficult to have gotten this degree and for it to not really pay off.

That being said, I'm fully thinking of PhD and MFA programs just to live off of student loans lol and/or defer payments on my current loans.