Posted on 12/06/2021 7:46:40 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Insider (formerly Business Insider) published what was meant to be a heart-rending story about a single mom burdened with $430,000 in student debt and a sick child, all to help promote student loan forgiveness. Instead, the article should remind us that degree jockeys in the liberal arts are, for the most part, incredibly foolish.
“Maria” is a 48-year-old with a Ph.D. in some unidentified major (but it’s clearly in the liberal arts), who took out $360,000 in student loans to get her degree. Insider assures us that Maria was very thoughtful about borrowing the money:
Maria had a goal to teach at a university full-time. Today, she "absolutely" regrets pursuing that goal.
While Maria’s undergraduate education, which she completed in 2001, was funded through scholarships and Pell grants, she knew more advanced degrees would give her a leg up in university teaching — especially as a woman in the industry. So she pursued a master’s degree and a PhD, the latter of which took seven years to complete.
It was not a decision she took lightly, and at the time she believed the commitment would be worth it. Maria, who requested her last name be withheld for privacy reasons, extensively researched the program, and its statistics for employment post-graduation looked promising. However, she was unable to land a full-time university job after graduation in 2014 and found herself unable to afford her student-loan payments.
Now, at 48 years old, Maria’s student-loan balance is $430,000 — all from her advanced degrees, per documents reviewed by Insider.
No wonder Maria says “I feel like I’m in a hole that I’m never going to get out of.” She’s right.
The only genuinely sad thing about Maria’s story is that her daughter got leukemia, sucking up much of Maria’s money.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
The rest of the story, however, is a tale of stupidity. This woman spent at least 15 years in academia, acquiring $360,000 in debt (the additional $70,000 is accrued interest), in the hopes that she could get a job in a university.
Really? I don’t care how much she researched it. There are only 1,452 U.S. News-ranked schools in America, with the rest being community colleges, beauty colleges, etc. The latter may offer valuable degrees, but they’re not offering big, Fauci-style bucks to their faculty.
But, in some organizations, they equal money.
Most liberal arts PhD programs at good schools, they pay you to come. It you don’t get tuition remission and a stipend, don’t go!
So, $430,000 in debt= no new car, no house to own, no luxuries BUT she gets to work for a university for her entire life so she can pay them back for the ‘education’ she got from them.
Seems fair. Idiots gonna idiot.
Short answer is “no.”
Long answer is “not on your life.”
A neighbor’s grandson is in his 2nd year of college majoring in English. He’s thinking about teaching at the college level and plans to go for a PhD in English. He’s early enough in the academic cycle to smarten up. Hopefully he will.
Some people are addicted to collecting expensive diplomas. They can’t think rationally about their problem, even though it’s a life long slow motion train wreck. Not only is it vanity, as they think their degrees and titles make them better than others, but they imprecisely assume they will end up more well off because of it.
Maybe if you had a PhD in science or architecture, it’d probably would be worth it. But the other 90-percent of the offerings aren’t worth the time or money involved.
Unless you have the prospects of a job waiting for you at the end, a PhD is never worth getting for the value of the work that it provides. PhD’s, more often then not, are just vanity degrees.
In science and engineering they normally won’t even accept students if the department does not have the money to pay tuition and a stipend. One of the schools I applied to did not have the money, the others did. So I went where they had the money to pay me.
When she started out, it was probably a good idea. Who knew that the full-time uno jobs would end up going to management bureaucrats instead of professors? Who knew colleges would end up relying on part-timers to teach the paying students?
But even with that, 360k is a lpt to rack up, even in the best of circumstances!
So he plans to teach remedial reading that should have been instilled in grades 2-4.
Gonna be surprised...
;>)
Amen. Graduate student teaching assistants get a stipend and tuition waiver. If you don’t have the credentials to get one you won’t wind up with the credentials to get a university job. My daughter got a masters in voice performance. Of five schools she was admitted to she went to the one she didn’t have to pay for.
BTW she has a great job: not in music but gained the smart skills that make her marketable. Has never interviewed for a job she didn’t get.
PhD is a “union card,” a MUST HAVE if you wish to get hired long term at a university.
Once hired, you teach a limited load because you are too good to deal with students and PhD candidates do your teaching for you.
A very expensive ego trip.
Meanwhile, there are some long haul truck drivers making 100K/yr.
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