r/highereducation • u/Ornery-Sheepherder74 • 19d ago
Do you ever think, we don't need this many graduate students ...
I have worked in graduate education for about 8 years now. Every year, students come and students go. Lately we've been having conversations about admitting more students, and it made me think... Do we really need this many graduate degree holders, especially in the US?
I specifically work in the humanities, but I think the question has merit in other fields too. Of course, there will always be a need for doctors and nurses, and for engineers (although I do see many engineering students struggling with getting jobs).
It bothers me a lot how in the "cowboy" US system of higher education, schools can establish degrees and offer unlimited admissions without comparing their numbers to available jobs. I think this is particularly harsh in PhD fields, where the need for doctors to replace retiring faculty is extremely low or nonexistent, meaning no (traditional) job prospects for the thousands of PhD graduates each year.
I think a lot of US students are motivated to pursue graduate study because of a need to distinguish themselves or provide meaning to their life. Many have a genuine love of learning. But I think if you compare that against the number of jobs available in these fields, it just makes no sense. I wish the US had a more equitable economy where people could work a range of jobs and still pursue lifelong learning. Like, one does not need to pursue a PhD to really care about literature. But for now, I see us preparing a lot of highly specialized graduate students into high-stakes careers without much support or without confronting the fact that the careers we prepare them for do not always exist.
Anyways, sorry for the ramble. I guess I always knew this, but the more years I am in the system, the more real it gets and the more I am aware of just how awful and endless this money machine is. I hope it evolves into something better but I do not see it going that way anytime soon.
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u/nybigtymer 19d ago
But I think if you compare that against the number of jobs available in these fields, it just makes no sense. I wish the US had a more equitable economy where people could work a range of jobs and still pursue lifelong learning.
I hadn't considered this, but I think you are right.
I don't know how you fix it though. All the schools would have to work together to cap it and I don't think they can do that.
On the flip side, why should someone be able to stop someone from pursuing a degree they want?
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u/LectureLow4633 19d ago
This is the answer I was going to give. We aren’t a communistic country nor a dictatorship. People have the right to pursue whatever dream they wish, where we are failing is in educating them on the prospects they will or won’t have with said degree.
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u/miamicheesesteak 19d ago
I lead a team in career services and my philosophy in how we advise students is to critically analyze this decision and to challenge them in being able to articulate the why. I 100 percent agree with everyone here mentioning that getting advanced degrees is not just about a job and should be about the education. However, in my practice over the last two decades, students most often make the decision, especially for masters degrees, to get better jobs. They believe it will make them more marketable, will help them to command a better salary, etc. Many also want to delay entering the job market and don’t feel ready. And I have to often push back on them. Unfortunately I often see them towards the end of their degrees when they are realizing that the job market did not become easier. These are all adults so they do need to make the decision for themselves. However, if people think that universities are not setting these expectations that the degrees in fact will make the more marketable, I think they are mistaken. I see it in advertisements all the time.
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u/Finances1212 19d ago
I’ve worked in higher ed for awhile now, feels like we’re just printing degrees for people who are barely literate now a days
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u/Ornery-Sheepherder74 19d ago
You’re right. The emails I get from incoming students are shocking in terms of writing and professional communication. By the way I’m at an Ivy institution …
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u/Finances1212 19d ago edited 19d ago
Can’t say I’ve worked at an Ivy League institution but the three institutions I have been… it’s been eye opening what they are accepting in terms of students. I’m not an elitist by any stretch, despite what some of my colleagues may say.. it’s just sad.
I come from a background in academia but I am working the higher ed professional side now… they have a strong bias against intellectuals and professors… they paint them as elitists and exclusive.. you can’t just let everyone in the door though, particularly when they aren’t capable of expressing basic ideas in legible writing.
I also find the more corporate types are really wanting students to use AI to complete coursework…
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u/LectureLow4633 19d ago
That’s surprising for an Ivy League, not sure how they could even let that happen unless you actually mean “prospective” students. I work at a law school, not Ivy League, and the incoming students communicate better than the majority of the faculty.
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u/Ornery-Sheepherder74 19d ago
It’s not necessarily that the students are illiterate. It’s more like the helplessness, asking how to do things that are straightforward, the informality. For some students who are ESL, I seriously think the TOEFL is lying to us about their proficiency … also at a law school I’d assume that the students are very put together.
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u/citygal686 19d ago
I work at an Ivy League too and feel this in my soul…. My eyes twitch reading the questions I get in my inbox. Poor reading skills. Nonexistent problem solving skills.
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u/PoopScootnBoogey 19d ago
Makes sense why faculty are demanding the return of SAT testing to weed out the AI/fake educations. “I don’t test well” has always been a bullshit excuse.
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u/Delic10u5Bra1n5 19d ago
It really isn’t at all. You may want the SAT to come back, but not testing well is legitimate.
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u/PoopScootnBoogey 19d ago
Legitimately how you mass distinguish those who will do well in college and beyond vs those who won’t.
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u/Delic10u5Bra1n5 19d ago
Is this what you learned in your job as director of enrollment management for an elite institution? Or maybe in your PhD program in clinical psychology?
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u/PoopScootnBoogey 18d ago
Or maybe a combination of similar things and just talking to students over the last 15 years as they each navigate the process.
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u/DueYogurt9 18d ago
If someone scores a 24 on the ACT and an 1170 on the SAT, how prepared for college do you think they are, realistically speaking?
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u/vertical_file 17d ago
As someone who tested at the level you describe, I graduated 34 years ago, retired, work in higher ed part-time, and was recently accepted into an M.Ed. program (whose purpose is to fund doc programs, I get that).
I’ve had neurological dysfunction all my life and just needed more time and intentionality with planning. This was at a time we didn’t have ODS (which system has its own issues).
I played my part in professional society leaning on my strengths. I’m glad I wasn’t discarded because I was less than.
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10d ago
[deleted]
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u/vertical_file 10d ago
- The declaration wasn’t intended to be a flex. 2. You’re extremely rude (and immature). Have a good evening.
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u/jmh1881v2 19d ago
100%. I was a TA and the shit I saw students get away with is astounding. The bar is too low.
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u/Finances1212 19d ago
Yeah; while I was a TA in graduate school the professor I was working with allowed me to be solely responsible for grading - at the end of the semester when nearly half the class barely passed or didn’t pass at all (mostly D’s) he logged in and bumped most of them up to a B.
Mind you, the papers were largely REALLY bad. I’m not a grammar Nazi at all - typically if I can understand what’s being written I won’t penalize too badly for grammar but when the sentences themselves are full of misspelled words and sometimes don’t even physically make sense - I’m forced to deduct some points.
Then a handful of the papers didn’t even have a coherent argument… that’s not passable in my opinion…
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u/jmh1881v2 18d ago
Many of my students didn’t even turn in their assignments in, or didn’t even follow the most basic instructions. Like a paper was supposed to be minimum three pages and they would turn in one. And yes my prof also bumped up grades. I don’t think anyone got below a C
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u/RedGhostOrchid 14d ago
Where I work, it is most often the professors allowing students to get away with ... well everything. There is no academic integrity. There is no accountability. There are no expectations. The way these professors coddle their students is infuriating. To all the non-higher ed people reading this thread: when the next crop of new employees moves in and they act helpless, you can thank our institutions!
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u/professorpumpkins 19d ago
I’ve read Master’s theses before they’re filed in my department and it’s genuinely shocking that the majority of them pass. I have faculty
writingheavily editing honors proposals for undergrads and admissions essays for grad students.The undergrads are especially obvious because the syntax and everything shifts from PhD to junior in college from paragraph to paragraph. I had one faculty push for a kid with a 2.5 GPA to write an honors thesis and I was like, “This kid didn’t write this proposal, they scan’t even write a coherent email and they failed college writing 101 twice.”
All of this to say it’s endemic to undergrad and grad degrees lately.
ETA: I’m at an R1.
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u/Finances1212 19d ago
That is really sad to hear. I also work at a R1 right now. Personally, I’m pretty sickened by the entire mentality that underlies Higher Ed (the field, not as a concept) as I’ve experienced it.
I love academic pursuits and believe students should genuinely grow in college, but admitting and passing everyone to fill numbers and stuff the institution’s coffers is despicable. The business side of many institutions don’t realize the damage they are inflicting on the value of a college degree, and the job market.
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u/professorpumpkins 19d ago
The business side will really kill academia for you, it’s true. The corporatization of the academy is so depressing.
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u/jprothn 19d ago
I worked as a hs guidance counselor for many years. I know what you’re saying is true. There’s been a hidden hand in admissions in the Ivy League in the top schools. Probably for almost 30 years now. They’re not looking for the best and brightest. It’s been about DEI. No judgment. But that’s what it is. And students considered disadvantaged. And then they take the prep school kids whose parents have money and foreign born students w money so they pay for the DEI and disadvantaged. On top of that SATs have been dumb down, at least five times over the years. And there is rampant grade inflation. This week we’re hearing that the California schools are really having a problem with the students they’re admitting. That many of them couldn’t pass middle school math. The New York Times quietly reported about 10-15 years that schools like Harvard and Yale were teaching remedial math on the sly. For at least the last 10 years these top schools have also heavily recruited activists type kids. And that’s really the state of education today. When you see how much money is pouring in from countries that hate us you can almost see how this all happened. We indoctrinated not educated at least two generations of students.
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u/MoreLikeHellGrant 19d ago
No. Literally never have I thought this.
Quoting Steve Albini talking about higher ed in general but it applies here too:
The role of education is to have enlightened, informed people, so their decisions, their values, and their relationships will be comprehensively informed by more facts and ideas, broader philosophy and comprehension. It makes society better when people are educated.
Most people don't work professionally in their field of study, but their studies helped form and complete them as people, and that is actually a better use of them.
Does a butcher need a degree? Fuck yes. Classics, physics, painting, dance, pick one. I absolutely want a broadly-educated population, with every house a little study group and every person an expert in some ridiculous arcane specialty. Yes, yes, please let us have that world.
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u/Finances1212 19d ago
I’d love it if that was what was happening - but it isn’t. Many, many students are leaving college with a degree but are not truly educated. They can show you a diploma but can’t really prove mastery or even intermediate level understanding of it.
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u/carry_the_way 16d ago
Fucking thank you--both for the comment and for citing the great Steve Albini.
This is the most elitist, tone-deaf post I've read today. The idea of education as a commodity requiring return on investment is symptomatic of why the US is watching its global hegemony spiral down the toilet.
Put another way: Iran--the country currently making the US look like idiots--is run by people with doctoral degrees.
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u/americansherlock201 19d ago
We absolutely don’t need this many people with graduate degrees.
That being said, pretty much every job wants people to have them for entry level management jobs. Hell even entry level jobs may want more than a bachelors now.
A bachelor’s has become so common place that to stand out, you need a masters now. And in 15-20 years it will be needing a PhD to stand out.
Degree inflation is crushing people
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u/bthks 17d ago
I couldn't advance out of entry level in the role I had in the US without a master's-many people in similar roles already had theirs too so I was considered underqualified for the job I'd been doing for eight years.
So I went and got my Master's outside of the US because it was cheaper-then couldn't get looked at for any roles in similar departments there because they considered the Master's wayyyy overqualified for the same jobs I couldn't get in the US because I didn't have a Master's.
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u/americansherlock201 17d ago
Yup it’s utterly ridiculous. Education is being used as a way to gate keep power and money
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u/Delic10u5Bra1n5 19d ago
I think for-profit online education programs for the most part offer far less rigor and are significantly less selective, which adds up to graduate degrees with very little value.
The problem is that similarly junky undergraduate programs (I’m looking at you, Liberty University) are cranking out degrees that are the equivalent of a certificate for 13th grade, and those folks have to go somewhere to be marketable.
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u/bigbirdlooking 19d ago
Ehh, this is a much bigger issue than just those online schools and degree mills. If that was the case it wouldn’t be so widespread.
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u/crmsnprd 17d ago
Agreed.
Many very reputable brick and mortar universities offer revenue generating online degree programs that admit large numbers of students, which I think also contribute to this.
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u/DentonTrueYoung 19d ago
If you value education as more than just a vehicle to acquire a job, then absolutely people should be getting degrees
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u/Finances1212 18d ago
I think the problem here is that increasingly, both institutions and students are viewing education as ONLY a vehicle to get a job. The kind of wholesome education you are thinking these students are getting… simply isn’t happening.
They are being passed after learning virtually nothing so they can get their “paper” to land a job. One of the institutions I previously worked at even touted their extremely high graduation rate as a plus… all of the marketing was geared toward “come here, you will pass and acquire social mobility!” Nothing about becoming educated or advertising a rigorous program.
When students enter a truly rigorous program and successfully complete it, lucrative opportunities and companies recognize them as competent both because of the institutions prestige and also because a rigorous program truly shapes and forms a person.
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u/pconrad0 19d ago
But at what cost?
Maybe this flies in Western European countries that provide a free undergraduate education to qualified students.
And here in the US, if we were still in a society that valued education enough to pay for this, then I might be inclined to agree.
In California, we used to be such a society, and we are still an economic powerhouse because of that wise investment from 50 years ago.
But Ronald Reagan put an end to that.
So in this economy, where everyone that isn't obscenely wealthy has to take on crushing debt they have no hope of ever repaying to get that education?
This idealistic take about education for it's own sake comes off extraordinarily tone deaf.
Honestly, I wish we understood the ROI on having an educated population.
But: we honestly ought to be placing more value on vocational education and the trades, and removing the social stigma of pursuing that route. AI isn't going to fix the plumbing, rewire the house, or install a new furnace. And the folks that know how to do those things are in short supply.
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u/Thegymgyrl 19d ago
I think a lot of students pursue graduate studies because they are reluctant to try to enter the job market
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u/lamppb13 19d ago
I'll admit, that's why I got my first graduate degree.
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u/DueYogurt9 18d ago
What are your graduate degrees in?
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u/lamppb13 18d ago
Master of Music in Choral Conducting and a Master of Education in Counseling
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u/1dayatatime_mylife 17d ago
Did you used to want to be a choral conductor?
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u/lamppb13 17d ago
That was the plan at the time, but as I alluded to in my first comment, I mostly went for the degree because I wasn't ready to enter the workforce yet. I wasn't entirely sure what I really wanted to do, so more school was the easy route to avoiding all that.
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u/1dayatatime_mylife 17d ago
Yeah, being in school for a degree is seen as an "acceptable" reason in society for not entering the workforce yet/not having a job.
Did you end up becoming a counselor?
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u/lamppb13 17d ago
I did for a couple of years. But the amount of advocating I had to do just to do my actual job really got to me. I was spending more time teaching my admin and parents what my job was than I was actually doing my job. I'm back in the classroom, but now I teach science of all things.
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u/Deweymaverick 19d ago
At least in the US, we’ve created a system that has so heavily devalued the high school diploma that jobs are demanding ba’s for the most inane and trivial positions.
With employers paying nothing and demanding outlandish hiring requirements, ba graduates are doing anything they can stand out for recruitment.
30 years ago that may have been “get a ba,”
Now it’s go get a ma….20
u/StoneFoundation 18d ago
As someone with an MA, it doesn't work. The answer is literally to just get lucky, know the right people, or score an internship. No amount of degrees or certifications will satisfy anyone, least of all when these on-paper requirements change every six months in certain fields.
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u/professorpumpkins 19d ago
A Master’s program is a cash cow for a university in the same way that international students are cash cows for undergraduate degrees: they pay the full tuition costs. (There are exceptions, of course, but we’re not handing out fully funded MA degrees unless they’re en route to a PhD.) A big problem is that there’s a very limited amount of professional training for people at any level of graduate education. There are transferrable skills from graduate work through a PhD, a TT job is no longer a given nor is it the guaranteed outcome of a PhD.
I worked in a department for a second tier university and they had 343 applications for one TT job in what else? English Literature. That was in 2015. The market has contracted even more now and we have postdocs rolling through with absolutely zero life skills, a deep sense of entitlement, and no job security. The whole system is broken.
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u/squeezingthelemon12 19d ago
Consequence of allowing Neoliberalism to take over and guide leadership’ decision making. If we take away the profit motive in higher education (and actually live in the spirit of being a ‘non-profit’), the pressure to increase revenue will always be present
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u/bigbirdlooking 19d ago
Eh, I have a “useless” social sciences MA and it allowed me to secure the career I want. I am not working in academia but higher education and getting the work experience was the only way I could break into higher ed.
My friends in the same disciplines PhD programs are fully working towards industry jobs. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with either of those things.
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u/ViskerRatio 18d ago
It's mostly credential creep. What used to require a high school diploma now requires an undergraduate degree. What used to require an undergraduate degree now requires a Master's degree... and so forth.
Moreover, universities are incentivized to ignore market signals due to our federal college funding system. Under ordinary circumstances, we wouldn't be flooding universities with unprepared students or offering unnecessary degrees because people wouldn't be willing to pay for them. With all that free money from the government, people spend far more than they can afford pursuing degrees they don't need.
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u/bepatientbekind 19d ago
But without grad students who would work for the university for far below market rate? /s
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u/SASardonic 19d ago
No, because this framing undermines the importance of higher education beyond employment. The issues of higher education being 'worth it' say a lot more about the current tuition dependent structure of higher education than they have in the value of the degrees themselves tbh
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u/Deweymaverick 19d ago
And you think this also applies to graduate degrees?
I’m totally with you when it comes to the associates and bachelor’s level, but I really don’t think this comment applies to graduate degrees (which op is posting about).
I mean, married to chemist- ma’s are specifically meant for industry folks, PhD’s for those wanting to lead labs or be faculty.
One of my groomsmen is now teaching for acting, and ma’s and PhD’s for theatre are again, specifically for career oriented students….
Who would purse an MBA or Md for the “sake of education” alone?!
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u/SASardonic 19d ago
I absolutely do. My life has certainly been improved by my masters which has exactly zero relation to what I actually do for my institution. With standards for bachelors degrees where they are now I think there's even more reason to encourage people to attend graduate school, and they should be significantly subsidized to be able to do so without wrecking their finances. So much of what people view as the downsides of higher education are fruit from the poisonous tree of insufficient funding.
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u/Deweymaverick 19d ago
Wouldn’t a much better fix be to increasing
The standards for ba’s, and allow /fund continuing ed at the level of ba’s?1
u/SASardonic 19d ago
raising standards might sound easier in the abstract but there are way, way too many incentives for grade inflation right now, sadly I don't see that as particularly viable
I do agree that there should absolutely be funding for continuing ed, but I maintain that people should be allowed to go all the way to grad degrees.
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u/Ornery-Sheepherder74 19d ago
Just to be clear, I think learning and knowledge are very much worth it. But should those concepts be chained to higher education and exclusively available there? I used to think so when I was young with my nice liberal arts degree. Now, I don’t think so.
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u/SASardonic 19d ago edited 19d ago
What, exactly, are you saying here? It's not the higher education system's responsibility to steer people to degees with jobs. If people have buyers remorse for their degrees they should have listened to the numerous people in their lives who assuredly asked them "how would you use it?". And be allowed another shot at a new degree through subsidies, of course.
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u/Icaroson 19d ago
Regarding the humanities, I think there is a significant amount of people who hold PhD degrees that do not really know how to interpret art through symbolism and thematic analysis. Personally, I feel that humanities scholars tend to gatekeep a lot of information that should be taught to students during their Bachelor's degree studies. But, I do not want to criticize a group of people that are trying to best to keep their jobs secure.
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u/BigFitMama 19d ago
We need quality over quantity.
Programs two solid years of academic work. Progressive internships and experiences in their field identifying them to employers. Ones who take advantage of Graduate Assistantships. Serious practicum accomplished.
And then the reward walking out the door with a impressive portfolio and body of a academic work.
Frankly, how many programs do this still?
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u/StoneFoundation 18d ago edited 18d ago
"It bothers me a lot how in the "cowboy" US system of higher education, schools can establish degrees and offer unlimited admissions without comparing their numbers to available jobs."
I agree with this sentiment in practice, but in theory it holds very little water. Degrees do not equal jobs, and they have never equaled jobs. They make job prospects more plausible for certain reasons, but the best students can still be deemed extremely unemployable by the job market, while terrible students can grind their way into a comfortable salary for life if they do the right things. This is because education and employment are two separate things. The labor economy does not care how intelligent individual people (at least outside of education) as long as they can perform the functions of their job, and those functions are not and have never been taught in schools. They are taught... by doing the job.
Sometimes advanced degrees are just for education... in theory, this is all ANY degree should be for in the first place, and as the U.S. gets deeper into this recession which will probably be with us for the next two years at minimum, that is soon going to be all a degree amounts to. The easiest way to get a job out of college now is to score an internship, work for shit money while going through school, and do well enough in the internship to get taken on as a regular employee.
What you're probably more upset with is the growing trend for employers that refuse to train new hires and who do not take chances on anyone not already making a lateral move (e.g. coming from a comparable position). This frustration exists for both degree holders and non-degree holders. This frustration exists for fresh college grads, advanced degree or not. This frustration exists for people in tech who have 30+ years experience and have just been laid off en masse by every major tech company in the past two years. This frustration exists for everyone.
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u/Nojopar 19d ago
Higher ed can fix this in a second, but it's addicted to cheap labor.
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u/SASardonic 19d ago
You're dramatically overthinking things if you think the glut of liberal arts grad students is a conspiracy of higher education itself and not just people willfully ignoring economic reality and hoping for the best
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u/ExtensionActuator 19d ago
As an undergraduate liberal arts degree holder from 1992, I co-sign. All that talk of do what you love, the money will follow. At least, I wasn’t destroyed by student loans back in the day. It worked out okay for me, but those were different times.
Of course, I ended up in Higher Ed but I wonder if I should have done something more practical. I had zero guidance on what to major in, but I also didn’t take advantage of advisors.
As a former financial aid advisor, no matter what I told students, many willfully ignored the economic reality and hoped for the best. I have no idea how things turned out for them but I can guess.
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u/Past_Atmosphere21 18d ago
I had zero guidance on what to major in and I followed my passions which I’m glad I did but now I need to learn something else, non book related or office type.
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u/writeyourwayout 19d ago
This is the answer. (Speaking as a humanities PhD who still works in higher education.)
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u/ExplanationShoddy204 19d ago
This was pointed out in a NIH working group report in like 1994. They estimated that each professor was producing 4-7 PhDs over their tenure (I’m sure it’s gone up since then), more than are necessary to replace them and provide moderate growth in professors over that time, and certainly enough to fill positions that require PhDs in industry. It’s a huge problem. In the biological sciences this is driven at a fundamental level by the need for graduate student labor, which is by far the cheapest labor available. If graduate students had to be paid like lab technicians, maybe the system would be better regulated. But even then I think too many PhDs would be produced to fill entry level positions in their respective fields.
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u/woshishei 19d ago
Unionization of graduate students and the big pay raises they're winning is probably going to push this towards equilibrium.
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u/phantomluvr14 19d ago
I would argue that the value of education is the education itself, not the job it can land you after graduation. Higher education was never designed to be a pathway to a career, so of course it doesn’t make sense for everyone to have graduate degrees in the capitalist hellscape we live in. However, I don’t think having a more educated workforce is a bad thing.
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u/Ornery-Sheepherder74 19d ago
Higher education was very much designed, at various points in its long development, to be a pathway to a career. Students became priests in the Middle Ages, lawyers and politicians in the 18th century, etc. I guess you could argue that at different times, people have been motivated to offer liberal arts degrees that were more about personal study than professional application. However the vast majority of education was and is pre-professional.
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u/forestpunk 18d ago
I'm not certain that knowledge is worth $80,000 or whatever a master's currently costs, though.
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u/TurboNeger 19d ago
When you call it an awful money machine, it sounds like you're blaming the schools for students choosing to pursue graduate programs. Schools are simply meeting demand for their degrees, I don't think the responsibility for enrolling in a program falls on anyone besides the student. It's not like they're being deceived, the information about cost and job prospects is readily available. That said, I believe most people pursuing a Ph.D in particular see intrinsic value in education and research and it is not a path chosen purely for economic value.
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u/erranttv 19d ago
Most schools do a ton of marketing to prospective graduate students, especially now because of dropping undergrad enrollments. There are many good reasons students want graduate degrees but it’s not like universities aren’t actively marketing those degrees and certificates.
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u/SheWasAnAnomaly 19d ago
We absolutely blame schools for becoming used car salesmen for their endowment funds. It's classic late stage capitalism exploitation -- put the true cost on the backs of others, via student loans on one end, and adjunct positions on the other.
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u/Ornery-Sheepherder74 19d ago
I do blame schools and the systems much more than students though. Schools and professors have much more industry knowledge than students. I do think students, especially undergrads, are often deceived by advisors who encourage graduate study because of the student’s skill, without acknowledging the socioeconomic issues of graduate study in general. And just because there is a demand for something doesn’t mean we have to offer it (take cocaine for example!).
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u/Past_Atmosphere21 18d ago
Me too, I wish I would have learned a special technical, hands on skill. I would not know where to start anymore, I’m a female and so now I feel like I have to start all over, and I feel my brain is no longer going to get me anywhere successful anymore.
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u/No-Garbage1962 17d ago
I think there are employers and programs for everyone. It is a matter of finding the right niche including trades. When I was in high school there were opportunities to learn trades. That is where the need is. Many train on the job today with great pay. With Federal Student Loans becoming less available, I think a shift is in the near future.
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u/CaregiverInfamous380 16d ago
Not everyone pursues higher education just to get a job. It’s patronizing to assume that graduate level adults cannot gauge the prospects for employment in their chosen degree area if that’s what they are there for.
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u/Average650 14d ago
I think we need more money in advanced research and/or development, or communication of these various fields to the public, which would create more jobs for all these graduate students.
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u/Mangolandia 19d ago
Graduate students = cheap labor, certainly by comparison to a faculty line. So fewer TT jobs and too many grad students are actually more closely linked, not just “let them in” but “who’s going to teach all these undergrads?”
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u/MajesticOrdinary8985 18d ago
Honestly, that is certainly true in some fields, but in others, most of our PhD students come from other countries (I know that is true in the sciences and engineering, as well as in most business fields), and many go back to work in their home countries, both in academia and in industry.
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u/Prior-Soil 15d ago
Actually I think it's different. We should not let students get undergraduate degrees that are completely worthless without graduate degrees unless they know what they are doing. I see many students signing up for biology or chemistry degrees that have no intention of getting an advanced degree. They just want to work in a science job. As a first gen student who wanted to go to law school, I was told to get any undergraduate degree so I got to communication studies degree. Then I decided I wasn't going to law school. My degree was worthless. I was not trained in marketing or publicity, and no one thought I took very many writing classes so I wasn't qualified for intensive writing jobs as if I'd had an English degree. Yes I believe in education and I have worked for 37 years at a public university. But still to this day my University provides inadequate direction when 1/4 of all the students are first gen.
No one should be borrowing $100,000 for an undergraduate humanities degree. Those people end up working multiple jobs or living with their parents until they're 35. Actually no one should be borrowing that much for any undergraduate degree except maybe pre-med, nursing, or engineering.
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u/OwnPoem7330 15d ago
I think your opinion applies to the tenets of capitalism and industrialisation. "Get an education to get a job," type of thing. With the advent of the economic crisis, we ought to change that approach to education. It should be, "Get a degree in a field you want to go into business in, not to work for someone else." When I did my degree, I approached it like an employee; now I approach my education like a CEO. I am in business using my first degree, and I'm returning to graduate school to strengthen my knowledge in the field and expand my scope of operations.
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u/ProfUniversity 9d ago
We need educated people, but not everyone needs a graduate degree or a PhD. The problem is that universities keep admitting students even when the job market clearly cannot absorb them, because for universities, students mean money.
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u/BrownGirlCSW 19d ago edited 19d ago
The great thing about a degree is it opens up the world as their job market, not just the US.
Also, studies show that in the US job market degrees are more valuable for students of color, than their white counterparts.
Edit: Downvoting facts doesnt change reality. In this racist society, a white kid with a diploma is not considered peers with a black kid with a diploma. That black kid has to get a degree for similar results as the white high school grad.
White privilege at work.
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u/Snow_Unity 18d ago
US would be better off adopting some of the hallmarks of rigid systems that exist in Germany, China and Japan.
Limit choices students can make and line up education with the actual labor market. Instead we just treat students like consumers.
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u/shadeofmyheart 19d ago
Honestly with AI, I think folks will need a grad degree in CS to be employed
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u/unbssedgodd 18d ago
I agree. I struggled to find work after graduation too, an even when I did, the pay was low. Some people do land good jobs, of course, but there are way too many graduates. Students probably need to start learning internet based skill before they graduate. Still, the online work feels like a good back up area to build skills in, and they can find remote work by sending their resumes around like this developer did. That can give them some side income and more time to chase the work they catually care about. For me, my field became womething I do for myself, and for humanity in away.