Why Some PhDs Are Quitting Academia for Unconventional Jobs
July 24th, 2018“Why did they accept so many of us into this program when there are no jobs?”
The answer is simple:
Universities profit handsomely from graduate student slave labor. It’s a similar model that of prison industries, where convicts are paid pennies per hour to manufacture a wide variety of products. Instead of goat cheese, or clothing, undergrads are the main product output from universities. And there’s a lot of work involved in churning millions of undergrads through the mill every year. Grad students help turn the gears of the machine, at very little cost.
This is not a recent development.
There was an underground newspaper at the university I attended that was distributed in various bathrooms around the campus. In one of the more memorable issues, high tuition fees, grad student conditions, the scam in the University bookstore, etc. were juxtaposed against the cost of the University President’s bathroom remodel and other insane and profligate wastes of money. For the cover of the issue, the ARBEIT MACHT FREI sign from Auschwitz had been photoshopped on to an image of one of the prominent entrances to the campus.
You get the point.
Anyway, this was almost 25 years ago.
Additionally, with regard to why “unconventional jobs” are popular with this demographic, a friend of mine, with a PhD in Cognitive Science, told me that mentioning a PhD on a CV for jobs outside academia indicates to employers that you have been, “Dipped in shit.”
In essence, it indicates that you’re older and have less practical experience than other people applying for the job. While it’s great that three out of the four people in the article below started their own businesses, if you’re trying to get a normal job and you have a PhD, you might want to leave that off your resume.
Via: CBC:
Canadian statistics from 2013 suggest that completion rates among PhD students range from only 50 per cent in the humanities to about 80 per cent in the health sciences. Students leave for many different reasons — the gruelling work, the isolation, the terrible job market.
According to 2011 figures from Statistics Canada, the most recent data available, fewer than one in five people with an earned doctorate have full-time teaching jobs.
Another 20 per cent teach part-time at universities, instruct full- or part-time at colleges, or hold contract-based jobs, according to the Conference Board of Canada.
