I HATE the don’t go to grad school essays, which generally appear to be from people who are also otherwise bitter about their jobs or their lives. And they’re the privileged ones. So there’s a tone of self-service and self-pity that is a little sickening coming from those quarters. Any tenured prof who isn’t grateful for his or her privileges is frankly deluded.

That said, and contrary to my colleague above, every year I talk with PhD applicants or admits who have never had anyone explain the job market to them or the politics of post-PhD employment. Part of this is an effect of poor mentorship, which is more common than we want to admit.

So I explain the situation to them, and say “don’t get a PhD if this isn’t the thing you’re most passionate about” but I also tell them I love my job, grad school can be a valuable experience if you go into it with your eyes open and make good choices, whether or not the story ends with tenure (which is a messed up narrative anyway). It is important to puncture that narrative because if you tell people only a certain percentage of them will wind up in TT positions, 100% of everyone will believe they’re going to be in that group.

Honestly, the market wasn’t so great in the late 90s when I was coming out. We had the same conversations, just no blogosphere to circulate them. It’s gotten worse but it’s a structural problem and we should be addressing it that way.

“The problem with the “no one should go to grad school” articles are that they, unconsciously or not, shift the blame for the endemic joblessness onto the most vulnerable, those who are, or will soon be, unemployed. This is especially pernicious when these arguments come from tenured faculty who should be exactly the ones who have the greatest responsibility to try to fix the Academy. Implicitly, they accept conservative narratives about individual agency within capitalism. Rather than fight the real enemy (the corporate administrators, the Tea Party Governors, neoliberalism, etc…), they turn it into a moralistic argument about what some 22 year old should be doing.”

So the question is how is someone supposed to start their own small business in this situation? Let’s leave aside the current capital strike and the notable unwillingness of banks to provide loans to small businesses. What’s a good business plan these days? Automating someone’s job. Of course, once you’ve automated that job, you’ve also made yourself redundant so you have to bounce from contract to contract just hoping that someone more capitalized with more workers doesn’t come along and take the ever dwindling supply of contracts from you.

The problem is that, increasingly, there’s no one left to buy anything. We’re moving towards a dystopian future where 1% of the population controls all of the resources and uses a giant military-prison-industrial complex to keep the other 99% at bay. That one percent can only buy so much artisanal cheese, faberge eggs and $6,000 dresses…

This is why individual agency is a myth. It’s what happens when baby boomers (who have the dumb luck to be born into an unprecedented, broad-based economic boom) mistake their good fortune for gumption and human value. Basically my response is: ‘what, you did what you were told, went to college, took out a thirty-year mortgage and eventually ended up owning your own house and retiring so you could live off of social security? you’re certainly tending towards the mean for your age and educational levels…’ For those of us in our twenties, the stakes should be clear: unless we radically re-imagine our economic order we might as well curl up and die.