HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, QUIT LIT EDITION: “A few years ago I quit my Ph.D. program. It was the second best decision I’ve ever made.”
Plus:
To be honest, I’ve found the for-profit world to be far more supportive of me as a person than academe ever was. Rather than being soul-crushing, working for “the man” has been liberating and allowed me to be who I want to be in the world. Plus, my parents aren’t terrified anymore, which is a nice perk.
Yes, academia portrays the outside world as harsh, cruel, and exploitative, but in fact it’s usually the reverse, because in the outside world few people exercise so much unchecked discretionary power over others’ careers as they do in academia.
And note this from the comments:
I’m a professor in an engineering discipline, and it’s a familiar canard that STEM Ph.Ds easily get jobs. They don’t, and we’re overproducing as well. Further, we’re sacrificing the quality of undergraduate education by channeling money to support these students, which are often from a very small handful of countries, with minimal potential to contribute to ours, or the world’s economy, because our professors need their slave labor, and realize their positions are tenuous without continued research productivity. It’s a very sick system, it’s justified all different ways to Sunday, and it is going to break.