Why So Many Ph.D.s Are On Food Stamps

WFSU.org ^ | Tue May 15, 2012 8:16 pm | By editor

[DeaconBenjamin]

With the economic troubles of the past few years, it's no surprise that the number of people using food stamps is soaring. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that an average of 44 million people were on food assistance last year; that's up from 17 million in 2000.

What might be surprising, though, is one subgroup that's taken a particularly hard hit. The number of people with graduate degrees — master's degrees and doctorates — who have applied for food stamps, unemployment or other assistance more than tripled between 2007 and 2010.

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

I'm Michel Martin and this is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. Coming up, teenagers are getting ready for the summer but for many of them it is not all sun and fun. There have been gloomy numbers on the jobs front. So we're going to speak with Hilda Solis. She is the secretary of Labor and she will tell us about how the administration is trying to help more teens get that coveted summer job.

But first we go to the other end of the education spectrum, where you'd think those job concerns might not be a big issue. Now, we've talked on this program a number of times about how more Americans have been relying on food stamps and unemployment benefits to get by, but you might be surprised to learn, as we were, frankly, about one group that has taken a particularly hard hit.

The number of people with Ph.D.s who have had to apply for food stamps or other government assistance like unemployment more than tripled between 2007 and 2010, according to a recent study. The Chronicle of Higher Education recently reported on this and we wanted to know more so we've called upon staff reporter Stacey Patton. Also with us is Tony Yang.

He received his Ph.D. from the University of California Riverside three years ago. He's worked off and on as a history lecturer since then but he has also relied on unemployment benefits and food stamps to get by. I welcome you both. Thank you both so much for speaking with us.

STACEY PATTON: Thank you, Michel.

TONY YANG: Thank you.

MARTIN: Stacey Patton, let me start with you. Why are people with doctorates getting hit so hard?

PATTON: Well, I guess there's a bit of back story to answer your question. When I started covering graduate students for the Chronicle, I noticed that there's a lot of overlap between graduate students and adjuncts. These are contingent faculty who are working on contracts. And there's been a major shift in the past 30 years in universities' reliance on contingent faculty.

They work part-time. They don't have health benefits. They can be fired or not have their contracts renewed. And so it's a much cheaper way - it's a cost-cutting measure for many universities. But what we continue to do in graduate schools is to encourage people to get Master's degrees and Ph.D.s and the economy has taken such a hit and so has higher ed, has taken such a hit, that they do their work and then come out and not have, you know, opportunities for jobs.

MARTIN: Well, let's bring Professor Yang in here, because he's kind of a real world example of exactly what you're talking about.

Professor Yang, you graduated in 2009 and you told Stacey that the first thing you did was file for unemployment and that for the past three years you have worked, but as I understand it you've never been able to put enough hours together to earn a living wage. Does that about sum it up?

YANG: That about sums it up. I think one of the bravest things to do is try to graduate into the Great Recession, but it's an extremely difficult job market and you're always constantly hustling to try to get another job or an appointment and you don't turn them down even though you probably should.

And it's an experience I think a lot of us have shared, those of us who are just coming out onto the job market right now, particularly in higher education.

MARTIN: At your peak, your best year of earnings, do you mind if I ask, what was it?

YANG: It was about $32,000.

MARTIN: Thirty-two thousand in your best year. What about your worst?

YANG: Ten.

MARTIN: Ten.

YANG: Yeah.

MARTIN: So you were making as much as a nanny, basically.

YANG: Probably.

MARTIN: A full-time nanny in an urban area.

YANG: Yeah.

MARTIN: Who's actually making what they're supposed to make, you know. Yeah.

YANG: Yeah.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

MARTIN: Yeah.

YANG: You know, Professor V.P. Franklin, he teaches here, and he was teaching at Harvard on one of these renewable contracts years ago, and someone at Harvard, one of the tenured faculty members, told him, well, but you have prestige teaching at Harvard. His response was, and this is my response to my students - yeah, I can't eat prestige.

MARTIN: Hmm.

YANG: You know, I have the prestige of holding a Ph.D., but that ain't paying the bills.

MARTIN: We're talking with a rising number of people with advanced degrees who are relying on food stamps and other government assistance to get by. I'm speaking with Tony Yang. He holds a doctorate and has used government benefits to make ends meet. He's currently unemployed. Stacey Patton is a reporter for the Chronicle of Higher Education and she wrote about this recently.

Stacey Patton, you talked about the fact that a number of states have cut their higher education budgets. Are the universities who are using what you call contingent faculty, what I think a lot of people call adjuncts, explicitly as a cost saving measure, or is there some other cover story, if I can use that phrase to...

PATTON: It depends on who you ask. Certainly many of the adjuncts would say that it is definitely a cost-cutting measure, and the universities will say, well, our budgets are being cut. We would love to hire more full time faculty but we just can't.

MARTIN: Did you have a hard time getting people to talk about this? And I guess the other question I was asking is, do people feel a sense of shame about this?

PATTON: Mm-hmm. Well, I would hear graduate students and adjuncts say, well, I make so little bit of money that I actually qualify for food stamps and so what I did was I got in touch with many organizations such as the New Faculty Majority, Coalition of Academic Workers and other unions, and talked with their leaders and said, hey, have you heard of people who are actually on government assistance? And they all said yes.

The people just kept emailing me, telling me their stories. And then it was a matter of, well, who wants to go on record? And definitely there was a lot of shame. There were a lot of people who wanted to remain anonymous because you go to graduate school, you get a Master's degree, you get a Ph.D., it's a hard thing to embrace that you're also now on welfare.

MARTIN: Mm-hmm. Professor Yang, do you mind if I ask you, was it a difficult decision for you to decide to go public about your circumstances and to be interviewed and to use your name?

YANG: You know, I don't have a problem with that. It might just be my personality. It might've been really the fact that I grew up on food stamps and grew up poor and I really don't have a problem with it, and I'm not particularly judgmental about it. My parents, on the other hand, are probably a little bit ashamed.

I've had my mom tell me on more than one occasion I got the wrong Ph.D., because mine's in history and not in computer science, because I could somehow be gainfully employed. There's this perception out there that if you have a Ph.D., you remarkably walk into a 50, 60, 70 thousand dollar a year job. And that's just simply not the case.

MARTIN: Well, let me just focus on something you just talked about here, which is your choice of area of study, your particular academic discipline. There were some comments I noted, Stacey, on the site about this. There were a number of people who offered their own stories but there were also a lot of people who were very unsympathetic, Professor Yang.

They kind of took the same position as your mom, which is: You're smart, why couldn't you figure out that this was going to be a soft job market? And I apologize if that sounds hurtful, but I did want to ask if that factored into your decision-making at all.

YANG: To some extent it did. I mean, that's why I'm doing economic history and not just, you know, a cultural study of the new left, not to deride those sort of studies. But it did guide it at some level for that. On the other hand, I think that there is a specific problem with justifying the lack of available fulltime teaching positions by sort of saying, well, you know, the market dictates what the market dictates.

You know, in a larger political sort of aspect, we teach civics and how the government functions, and when you slash budgets, particularly on the humanities side, you're saying that it's not important as the engineering disciplines or as in the biochemistry disciplines. And that has very deep effects. And something I tell my students, that the result of some of this horrible political divisiveness, or people not understanding political ideology or rhetoric, can be directly traced to the lack of under-funding, you know, these basic civics classes.

MARTIN: Stacey Patton, have you found that there are certain disciplines where graduates or people who hold these degrees are more likely to be under-employed than others? Does it tend to be concentrated in the humanities?

PATTON: From what I'm hearing, yes. I did a short survey that accompanied the piece and took note of the top fields and which graduate degree holders were also food stamp recipients. And I believe the top were English and History and Communications or something like that. But there were people who were also in biology and in the sciences. I saw maybe two respondents who were in the math.

MARTIN: And, finally, you mentioned that there's a vast gap between people who have kind of tenured positions, administrators and people like Professor Yang, who are just starting their careers. Is this seen as a problem in the academy?

PATTON: Oh, definitely. Definitely. I hear all the time from, you know, adjunct advocacy groups. I hear it from the adjuncts themselves. I think graduate students are also very anxious. The level of transparency about student outcomes and the availability of jobs and what we're training students to actually do to meet the market demands is starting to be a serious conversation.

In terms of people with Masters and Ph.D.s on government assistance, I think, has come as a shock to many people. I too was shocked by the numbers. It's about one percent of Masters degree holders and one percent of Ph.D. degree holders who were on government assistance, so someone might come along and say, oh, that's such a small number. But what's frightening to me is that the numbers more than doubled in a three-year period and so one has to wonder, is this trend going to continue to increase if the government's data has actually captured a full picture of people who have these degrees who are also in graduate school and also relying on food stamps, or are even eligible for government assistance?

MARTIN: Professor Yang, I have to ask. If you had to do it all over again, do you think you would still pursue your doctorate in this area, in your discipline?

YANG: I would. I think it's always worth pursuing intellectual pursuits. It's always worth it to sort of gain a better understanding of the world. And let's face it, you know, if you have a Ph.D., you're in a subset of the population. There's a tremendous amount of skill and determination to actually get that degree.

I think at the end of the day, your skills will translate to something. It just might not be in our field and that's something that's a little bit sad because we're losing a lot of potential and a lot of expertise. But I think it certainly is worth it, at least from an intellectual standpoint, to go ahead and pursue your interests and curiosity and find out what, you know, your subject matter is all about.

MARTIN: Tony Yang has a Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Riverside, and he was kind enough to join us from that campus. Stacey Patten is a staff reporter at the Chronicle of Higher Education and she wrote about the number of people with advanced degrees and graduate students who are relying on government benefits, including food stamps, to make ends meet, and she joined us from Baltimore.

Thank you both so much for speaking with us.

PATTON: Thanks, Michel.

YANG: Thanks, Michel. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright National Public Radio.

[Jeff Chandler]

[faithhopecharity]

not a single word in this long article about going into business for yourself or even seeking employment in a business or company of any kind? It just has to be giving lectures to clone or churn out even more almost-useless “unemployable” people? There was certainly something missing in all those phd programs!?

[Domangart]

I have worked almost every day since 1970. One of the things my history reader told me was never get a degree in history because of things like this. This is a grown adult who has been taught to create through research, a book. If he can’t feed himself than they should recall the PHD and hand him a diploma.

[pepsionice]

I would say this...up until the 1980s...if you were getting a PhD...it was in a medical field, or engineering, or economics. Generally, you stepped out and were successful at getting work from that point on in life.

We’ve reached the point where you have various PhD’s of little to no value. A guy who says he has a PhD in Civil War history? Worthless. A gal who says she has a PhD in climate science? Probably worthless.

When you consider the amount of money that this PhD trail will cost you...you’d never be able to pay back the loan on tuition costs.

[Aria]

My brother in law has a PhD in Sociology from the University of Amsterdam. Poor guy has never worked in his field here in the U.S. and probably should have stayed in Holland. Life hasn’t turned out well for him here. His brother has a PhD in astronomy, worked as a consultant for governments, including NASA, and is now living on a very nice retirement since he never left Holland.

[Pontiac]

You know, in a larger political sort of aspect, we teach civics and how the government functions, and when you slash budgets, particularly on the humanities side, you're saying that it's not important as the engineering disciplines or as in the biochemistry disciplines. And that has very deep effects. And something I tell my students, that the result of some of this horrible political divisiveness, or people not understanding political ideology or rhetoric, can be directly traced to the lack of under-funding, you know, these basic civics classes.

Listen to your mother.

You know, in a larger political sort of aspect, we teach civics and how the government functions, and when you slash budgets, particularly on the humanities side, you're saying that it's not important as the engineering disciplines or as in the biochemistry disciplines. And that has very deep effects. And something I tell my students, that the result of some of this horrible political divisiveness, or people not understanding political ideology or rhetoric, can be directly traced to the lack of under-funding, you know, these basic civics classes.

Basic civics should be taught in high school not college you bozo.

Well obviously you did not study economics, At least not the supply and demand part of economics.

When the economy is bad fewer people go to college and when it becomes obvious that college grads with humanities degrees are not getting jobs students do not pursue humanities degrees. If students do not pursue humanities degrees colleges do not need as many humanities professors. Therefore colleges hire fewer humanities professors and there is a glut of humanities professors and the wages fall for humanities professors.

By the way not many private sector concerns need employees with a PhD in history. Like I said listen to your mother.

[monocle]

Not all PhDs are created equal. How many unemployed Phds have degrees in women studies or black history versus those in engineering or mathematics?

[sinsofsolarempirefan]

I would say that unless you are going to teach history at university level, getting a PhD in History is a waste of time. However, we still need people whose talent falls that way to do them. We need to place some value on the arts and culture, learning something like history or english lit teaches critical thinking and vital analytical skills that everyone should know to a certain level...

[Lancey Howard]

Why So Many Ph.D.s Are On Food Stamps

???

Because the "global warming" scam was exposed and the "grant" money dried up?
Just a guess...

[Hugin]

How many janators and plumbers who never got to go to college worked to put Prof. Yang through school? How many are paying taxes now so he can pretend to make a living teaching economic history (from a Marxist prespective, no doubt).

[Pontiac]

I certainly mean no disrespect to the humanities as it was encompassed in the early twentieth century. But the humanities as it exist today bares little resemblance. I could also say that history as taught today also bares little resemblance to history taught in the first half of the twentieth century.

Unfortunately we can not make use of every person whose talents lead them to the arts, literature and history. That leaves us with the reality that many people will have to choose a profession that must be in a profession that is a second or third choice.

This man would have been better off I he had been given some tuff love advice to go in a different direction.

[9YearLurker]

Since when is a barely working adjunct who just got his PhD three years ago “Professor” Anyone?

[Kellis91789]

There is a basic problem here with PhD’s that are useless for anything but teaching new students. Instead of training JUST his replacement, a professor will spend 40 years churning out 1,000 new PhD’s. It is slightly dishonest of universities to encourage more PhD candidates in purely academic fields than they have professors in that field planning to retire.

[elcid1970]

Nothing new here. Back in the 1970’s these underemployed PhD’s were called “gypsy scholars”, wandering from one temp teaching job to another. Brought their liberal disgruntled attitudes into the classroom. A drag on society IMO.

[central_va]

Most Piled High and Deepers do it so they can teach and be an authority figure in a class of young nubile college babes. They do it for the chicks.

[slapshot]

Every PhD with a degree Agriculture Science, Animal Science, or Poultry Science I know of is doing OK. A few Phd’s with Literature, English or Art History degress i have known over the years- not so hot. As for me, I chose not to go for my Phd in Food Science b/c I had a wife, a toddler and one on the way...an MS has been OK on this end

[elcid1970]

If you can find it, check out “The Professor Game” by Richard Mandel (1977). Not dated even thirty-five years later. College chicks quickly ID the PhD losers by their low salaries, little cars, little other things, & compensating radical politics. Then as now.

[HotKat]

Their PhD certificate can be used as toilet paper. Recycling at its finest.

[Traveler59]

I did a short survey that accompanied the piece and took note of the top fields and which graduate degree holders were also food stamp recipients. And I believe the top were English and History and Communications or something like that. But there were people who were also in biology and in the sciences. I saw maybe two respondents who were in the math.

Wow, I don't even have a Masters Degree and I know this much.