Escape the Ivory Tower

Debt and the PhD

If you don’t follow Karen Kelsky of The Professor Is In, she’s doing an amazing thing: collecting the information on the debt thousands of PhDs have accumulated in the process of getting that degree.

I know I had a lot of shame wrapped up in the debt I accumulated. I was “fully funded,” but I knew exactly one person who was able to get by on the stipends we earned. That she was able to do it convinced me I should be able to do it, but I wasn’t.

We earned $800 a month. I lived in a college town that is miles cheaper than any city, but even though I took on managing the apartment building I lived in (free rent!), it wasn’t enough. I had two surgeries during grad school. I had ongoing health care costs. Food allergies meant the cheap stuff wasn’t going to sustain me. Books cost $500 a semester. Maintaining any kind of mental health meant leaving the house and doing things with friends. My car broke down. I had to buy clothes to bolster my own authority, being a short, young and young-looking woman. $800 a month just didn’t cut it.

I wasn’t able to make it work, and I was incredibly privileged. I got out of undergrad debt free, because my parents had saved for college and because I did undergrad in three years to maximize that money. (My undergrad had a set fee for “full time,” so 15 credits cost the same as 21.) I was fortunate to be able to find lots of flexible work during undergrad to pay my bills. I got full funding for my graduate program. I owned my car (thanks to my father). My dad helped me fund the job search, and my mom bought me suits. I knew, at the end of the day, that my parents could and would help if things went terribly awry.

Short of a major trust fund, that’s a pretty good setup. It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough before the market got so unbelievably terrible, when everyone I knew got some kind of full-time, TT job, even if it wasn’t the one they wanted most. It wasn’t enough even when getting a job wasn’t a dream.

We talk sometimes about academic salaries and how abysmal they are in certain fields. They’re worse, much worse, for adjuncts. But we don’t talk about the debt it takes to even get that far, because our culture has so much money shame.

Kelsky’s survey showed that it’s not uncommon for PhDs in the humanities and social sciences to end up with six-figure debts. When full rides don’t actually cover all the expenses and you’re not legally allowed to work elsewhere*, the system is set up to put you into debt.

You did not fail. You did not do it wrong. The model, that old apprenticeship model that assumes you’ll achieve master status with all of the perks thereof, was never true, and it’s even less true now.

*My assistantship contract actually spelled this out. I had a few colleagues do it anyway, and the department head looked the other way, but it was risky beyond simply limiting the amount of time you had available for school and sleep.

The Light Will Return

Every year, on the winter solstice, my wife and I have a day without electric lights. We light the fire. We light candles. We open the blinds for the little natural light there is.

We spend the day going inward. We nap, we journal, we dream, we plan. We also cook dinner by candlelight, which makes a godalmighty mess, but there’s something lovely about it at the same time.

We wanted a day where we were able to really experience the turning of the year, but it also serves another purpose: reminding us that the light will return.

There isn’t much difference in the length of today and the length of tomorrow and the length of the day after that. This is the end of the pendulum swing, when the changes slow down to stop, and then slowly reverse before catching momentum and zooming through the equinox.

But in a week or two, you’ll start to see the difference, and in a month, you’ll know. The light is returning, literally and, I would argue, figuratively.

Whatever transition you’re facing right now, the light will return. Not as fast as you’d like, perhaps, or not necessarily in the way you’d prefer. But the light will return, because the world we live in moves and changes and frequently moves and changes in cycles.

Happy Solstice, friends. I’m lifting my mug of tea to you.

Don’t Mistake Content for Skills

If there’s something I hear over and over again in working with people leaving academia, it’s that people don’t think they have any skills: “Nobody needs a Dickens scholar / expert in German philosophy / curriculum specialist outside of academia!”

In all of these cases, people are confusing what they know with what they know how to do.

What you know how to do

In the course of gaining all that expert knowledge, you learned a lot of things no one explicitly taught you.

Research. Writing. Project management. Public speaking. Teaching. Assessment. Curriculum design. Training. Time management. Argument. Program assessment. Curriculum review. Employee evaluation. Editing. Grant writing. Proposal writing. Hiring.

And that’s only if you’ve never done anything else outside of academia — no hobbies, no previous jobs, no nothing.

These skills are valuable

When you’re in academia, you’re surrounded by people who have, by and large, the exact same skills you do. So they don’t seem like skills that matter, because everyone can do them.

Except everyone can’t. People outside of academia often have no experience in or comfort with public speaking. They can’t break down information and figure out how to sequence and scaffold it in order to help someone else understand or learn it. They can’t assess writing quickly and comprehensively.

You have a lot to offer a prospective employer, but it isn’t your content knowledge. It’s all the stuff you did to gain that content knowledge, and all the stuff you did to support yourself and serve the university while gaining that content knowledge.

It all counts.

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