In the news: poverty > grad school

In the news: poverty > grad school

February 28, 2009, 12:45 am
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: college, graduate school, higher education, history, humanities, new york times, recession, steampunk

There have been a rash  of sobering articles focused on the state of  higher education recently and I die a little more inside with each passing paragraph.  Was I swindled?  A more paranoid broke Millennial than I might assume society got together and decided that the more necessary education becomes for individual success,  the more money can be bled from burgeoning generations.  While Millennials seem sufficiently bludgeoned, another lie told to my generation (to extort more money?) has been debunked.

I assume that many others like myself were encouraged to head to grad school until this whole “recession thing” blew over, prolonging our education (and our debt repayment timeline) to insulate ourselves from the lonely, painful road to gainful employment post-graduation.  A new piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education clues us clueless Millennials in on a little secret:  Graduate School for the Humanities: Just Don’t Go.  As the recipient of a BA in History, I also flirted with the idea of locking myself up in an ivory tower with a typewriter (or perhaps a steampunk’d computer), a few hundred books about the Cold War and a dream.  But now I see I was a victim of that youthful idealism universities inject into their liberal arts programs.  Some wisdom from the author, Thomas H. Benton:

It can be painful, but it is better that undergraduates considering graduate school in the humanities should know the truth now, instead of when they are 30 and unemployed, or worse, working as adjuncts at less than the minimum wage under the misguided belief that more teaching experience and more glowing recommendations will somehow open the door to a real position.

At least now I can tell my parents that I may be unemployed, but at least I am not continuing my education!  Even after digesting this article, I still held on to the flickering flame inside that tells me I must someday continue my academic pursuits – I will just have to wait until I am filthy rich (society tells me that can happen, too).

And then the NY Times, in it’s continual quest to strip my generation of its youthful optimism, hopped on the humanities haters bandwagon.  I have no proof to back up my claim, but I would guess that the portion of recent college grads who eagerly devour every word in this newspaper/website could be categorized as humanities majors.

“Although people in humanities have always lamented the state of the field, they have never felt quite as much of a panic that their field is becoming irrelevant,” said Andrew Delbanco, the director of American studies at Columbia University.

Heartbreaking.  This must be what Latin felt like when it plunged  into obsolescence.  Wouldn’t you rather be poor than irrelevant?  At least poverty is a struggle people care about and empathize with.

I have a whole slew of new student loan travesties I could shell out, but I think our spirits have taken enough of a beating for today.

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