Mormon Studies and Kishkumen

[Kishkumen]

I don’t know of anyone who exaggerates the job prospects in academia to enroll graduate students. Most of us discourage our students from pursuing an academic career. Lots of people nevertheless believe that *they* will be the lucky ones.

[Physics Guy]

It’s just hard to know if you’re being discouraging enough. Some people are stubborn, and maybe just a few of them are right to be.

Story of the talented young athlete who gives up his sport when a famous master tells him he “lacks the fire”. Turns out the master says that to everyone regardless of talent. The ones who listen lack the fire.

[Moksha]

I don’t know of anyone who exaggerates the job prospects in academia to enroll graduate students. Most of us discourage our students from pursuing an academic career. Lots of people nevertheless believe that *they* will be the lucky ones.

Sounds like a double bind. You want them to have a job, but without them, you would not have a job.

[Kishkumen]

Sounds like a double bind. You want them to have a job, but without them, you would not have a job.

Universities made the choice to recruit too many graduate students—more than there were jobs in the market for—in order to obtain low-cost teachers. You can pay a grad student much less than you would pay a tenured faculty member, and less than you would pay a lecturer. This is the central problem, in my opinion. MA students in particular are exploited. They get very little time to develop as scholars and spend much of their time teaching because the university wants cheap instructors.

This is not to say that it is bad to focus on teaching more. The problem is that universities often portray themselves as centers for research, recruiting graduate students on that basis, and then there is a kind of bait-and-switch and the students realize they are wanted for their teaching, which they will most likely never get to do again in the same way when they complete their program.