A successful academic faces lifelong debt

http://chronicle.com/article/At-What-Cost-/49253/

by Arun2009 • 17 years ago

22 61 17 years ago

patio112• 17 years ago

Maybe being an assistant professor of Native American studies is a lifestyle choice to be indulged in by people who are either married to or descended from people who did commercially valuable work? The engineering department has spots available for us kids who have to work for a living.

javanix• 17 years ago

I agree with the sentiment - anyone expecting to make a ton of money off of a career in Native American studies is naive at best.

That said, the author did manage to be hired in multiple tenure-track positions, and made it to an Ivy League school. One would hope - expect, really - that with that level of career success she should be able to at least pay off their college debts, especially if she was as frugal as she claimed to be in her essay.

jnovek2• 17 years ago

Agreed, doing what you love should be a privilege reserved for the affluent! She was a fool to dream beyond her class; thankfully, she's paying for it now. I hope it stands as a lesson to others.

cynicalkane• 17 years ago

I know you were being sarcastic, but this is 100% true. Doing what you love, instead of what is useful, is a privilege, not a right.

yummyfajitas3• 17 years ago

Yes, doing whatever you want regardless of it's commercial viability is a privilege reserved for the affluent.

Perhaps one day we will become so wealthy that robots do all the work, and people don't have to do anything they don't like. Until then, most of us need to do work that benefits others in order to survive.

jon_dahl3• 17 years ago

You're basically saying that a humanities education doesn't have professional value. I disagree completely. A lot of employers (myself included) would rather hire someone with a philosophy or history major than a business major. For many careers, a corresponding college major is 80% useless and 100% unnecessary.

indiejade• 17 years ago

would rather hire someone with a philosophy or history major than a business major

Why? Business is essentially just economics, which is history (macroeconomics) + philosophy (microeconomics with a little bit of sociology and psychology thrown in). The day YC News readers stop throwing their own feces at business majors will be a fascinating one indeed.

anigbrowl6• 17 years ago

How dare you. This person did work to get where she is - did you miss all the stuff about working as a waitress and a cleaner? Obviously, you don't consider Native American studies valuable because it's a field with limited commercial application. And so you equate this perceived lack of value with a lack of willingness on her part to do any work, a faulty syllogism if ever I've seen one.

I understand that you believe her field of study to be an unwise economic choice, such that the cost of acquiring her expertise exceeds the commercial potential. To me the problem is that even though students are paying more than ever for school, the perceived value of educators continues to fall. a story like 'girl starts out poor, gets PhD and job at top university' ought to be an inspiration, but now apparently we have to tack on '...stays poor because she picked some frou-frou field of study I don't approve of'.

MBA culture has fucked this country up really badly.

pwnstigator7• 17 years ago

MBA culture has fucked this country up really badly.

Agree. The idea that you need to be part of an elite, well-connected, largely hereditary caste to do "business" is ridiculous. People much less educated than us, with minimal social connections, have been "doing business" for centuries, and succeeding at it (although not at great scale).

Most people (outside of that caste) are doing support work with minimal importance, crunching data or filling out paperwork for people who, because of their caste status, get to have their mediocre ideas implemented. Of course this is inefficient; they're bored sick.

tptacek3• 17 years ago

Her field of study is an unwise economic choice. That part of the comment you're replying to isn't an opinion.

sschronk5• 17 years ago

Yes it has.

That's a major problem with the attitude in our country. Greed has overtaken our senses and everyone thinks they are entitled.

Even when you look at the number of students in each major, you will see a very disproportionate number of students majoring in subjects just for the money with a disregard for their talent in the field.

scott_s5• 17 years ago

You misinterpreted his last sentence. He didn't mean "I work for a living, you don't."

He meant "Since both of us come from backgrounds which requires us to work to get through school, we need to pick areas of study that will pay enough to support us."

patio112• 17 years ago

Apologies, time zone differences mean I went to bed before I saw this.

For what its worth, I have a cultural studies degree that cost me six figures. (They had a buy one, get one free deal when I got a degree that had typically results in a career.) I'm going to punt on the question of whether Native American studies is valuable or not. Its sort of like ballet dancing -- I don't have any need for it myself, but don't have any malice in my heart for people who like it. (The question of whether it is commercially valuable or not is an empirical one. Empirically, it just isn't.)

I understand that she did a lot of work to get her degree in a commercially suboptimal field and lifestyle career in churning out more holders of degrees in the same field. She thinks that, rather than having to have slaved so hard for that, I should have to slave so hard for that -- read her last paragraph where she wants society to recalibrate its priorities (i.e. tax folks to pay her to get the schooling to do the job that too many people want to do and too few people want to pay for).

ShabbyDoo2• 17 years ago

If she is current on other financial obligations, should't she be able to finance that $30K at much less than 10%? So, the interest portion would be $3K/year. Is that a significant portion of a Dartmouth Assistant Professor's income?

I live in the MidWest, and cleaning "ladies" want $20-$25/hour under-the-table. Perhaps she should take on such work on Saturdays to reduce her debt load.

[As an aside, I can't understand how bad America can be if one can make this much cleaning houses. Some of these people aren't even all that good at it!]

hegemonicon• 17 years ago

That's what I'd like to know - how LITTLE does an assistant professor make that 60,000 dollars of debt will take a lifetime to pay off, even in the absence of a mortgage (and presumably a car) payment?

luchak• 17 years ago

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/04/14/aaup might be a good starting point ... looks like the average for an assistant professor is around 60k, but Dartmouth is likely to be above that.

coliveira• 17 years ago

Assistant professors in humanities (even at an Ivy League school) don't make much money.

weaksauce• 17 years ago

according to the chronicle the average assistant professor salary is ~$80k. I doubt that a native american studies assistant professor will get that much but I have been wrong before.

http://chronicle.com/stats/aaup/index.php?action=result&...

sschronk5• 17 years ago

I only make about $30.00/Hr as a professor of Computer Science.

The colleges don't pay very well and the degree required to get the job is very expensive and time consuming.

likpok• 17 years ago

Strictly speaking, if you make more than that you are better off hiring someone to clean for you.

Realistically, if an hour of free time is worth $25 (and to many people it seems that it is), you should go for it.

ShabbyDoo2• 17 years ago

I agree. However, with all the bitching about how bad it is to be "poor" in America, there ought to be people standing on the sidewalks in nice communities advertising their cleaning services if they can get these prices.

It's worth it, but I question why the market clearing price isn't lower.

cce• 17 years ago

I think that she mentioned 'bad debt' -- this is typically a reference to consumer-level debt, often at 15-26% interest. Assuming 20% usury, the interest payments alone are $500/month, or 20% of her disposable income assuming she's lucky enough to have a assistant professor post (45-60k) -- adjunct professors make far less. Likely she also has another 20-60k in 'good debt' as educational loans at a more reasonable 8-12% interest.

jrockway• 17 years ago

The comments on the site are ... pleasant. I don't think I've ever seen a blog post where the author admits to having some personal flaw where the first 10 comments aren't "HAH UR DUM". Looks like the Chronicle attracts slightly more intelligent readers than the average blog.

sschronk5• 17 years ago

I'm a college professor myself. It is a thankless job. You spend more than 20 years in school, washing dishes, working at a dead end job waiting for that moment when you finally get to teach.

My teaching job pays about $30.00/Hr. However I only get to work about 25 hours a week or so. It's not much money to live on.

Also realize the pressures of college teaching:

Society needs you to teach skills to the students that they will need to excel. The students have been given a free ride all the way though High School.

How do you teach C programming to students that cannot do any algebra and have no understanding of logic?

If you make the class hard enough for them to excel in the global marketplace, all of the students drop out.

It you make it easy enough for everyone to pass, you have scarcely covered the first one or two chapters of the book.

mixmax• 17 years ago

I think this is a huge problem for America.

It's a political problem because a working democracy requires smart people that are able to understand complex issues and cast their vote accordingly. As an outsider it's probably easier to see, but American politics has turned into a farce where political issues matter much less than appearances on the right talkshows and hitting the lowest common denominator. The press has to play along with this, if they don't nobody will read their newspapers or see their newscasts. Jon Stewart, a comedian, is often seen as one of the best political reporters in the country.

It's an economic problem because in the future (and now) we have to be pretty darn smart to compete in the international arena, and India, China, etc. are basically eating Americas lunch.

Education is one of the best and most important investments a country can make, and to be frank I think it's despicable that a college professor doesn't make more than you do.

catzaa6• 17 years ago

> Jon Stewart, a comedian, is often seen as one of the best political reporters in the country.

This is part of the problem. Instead of people reading in depth newspapers they want to be entertained. They then switch to comedy shows which take sound bites out of context for the laught of the minute and call it politics.

ganley• 17 years ago

Many people have worked off far larger debts on far smaller salaries, many of them working far more difficult jobs than being a college professor. Not to mention those to whom these kinds of educational opportunities were never even a possibility. A little perspective is in order.

wglb• 17 years ago

While I empathize with the difficulties she surmounted, I think it not good to be ashamed of where you came from. To the contrary, attaining the recognition that she did starting with the humble beginnings should be something to feel proud of.

A successful academic faces lifelong debt

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