"That cyclical component accounts for a lot of the short-run variation in hiring, but if you’re estimating the response to a demand shock, longer-term supply trends matter too and often they matter a great deal.  If Ph.d. programs were stricter about enforcing standards of quality and relevance, rather than stringing along students to maintain the flow of revenue to the graduate program, the short run negative demand shocks would lead to a much less severe queuing problem.  That’s simple microeconomics, and it should be macroeconomics too."

"…For all its pretensions to public importance (every professor secretly thinks he’s a public intellectual), the professoriate is awfully quiet, essentially nonexistent as a collective voice. If academia is going to once again become a decent place to work, if our best young minds are going to be attracted back to the profession, if higher education is going to be reclaimed as part of the American promise, if teaching and research are going to make the country strong again, then professors need to get off their backsides and organize: department by department, institution to institution, state by state and across the nation as a whole. Tenured professors enjoy the strongest speech protections in society. It’s time they started using them."

Until any of this becomes commonplace, it is up to prospective graduate students to enter a science PhD with their eyes open to the opportunities — or lack of them — at the end. Not all mushrooms grow best in the dark.

"The economy has started creating jobs—albeit at a slow rate—in recent months. But those with new master's degrees often aren't at the front of the line to get them, say experts. One reason: They frequently compete for jobs that require those advanced degrees with older workers who have the advantage of more work experience."

"Some feel powerless because they have no control over their lives and are doing poorly at their own classes and need to demonstrate power (and their self-belief of their superior mathematical skillz) in the only venue they have, their class. Some of the rest were picked on by business majors when they were undergrads. Some of the rest really don't believe that it's possible for an educated person to be as bad at algebra as the students who attend this university."

"WITH A FIVE PERCENT P MOTHERFUCKER"

"right?"

"I’ve heard a variation on Benton’s phrase “good people get good jobs” in a number of venues, some from clueless, privileged wankers who said it in earnest, sometimes from professors who said that the phrase was the extent of the advice they got from their grad school advisors shortly before being turned out to the wolves of the mid-70s job market. Don’t believe it. Sometimes good people get bad jobs or no jobs at all; sometimes terrible people get great jobs. Not only is there a shortage of jobs, the search process is totally capricious and inscrutable."

"I also am still unable to shake the sense that I am somehow responsible for my failure, that it was about something lacking in my character or skills, rather than about the market and the odds. If only... I had published more. If only... I had taken that job instead of that other one. If only... I was better at writing cover letters. If only... my interests were more marketable. If only, if only, if only.

I feel like I was crippled, and that I still struggle with the effects of that now.

What kills me, particularly, is that the experience of that career trauma is what has made it so challenging to move on. In some essential way I feel damaged, and it carries over into all of my subsequent efforts to remake myself and my career. An unfriendly market becomes a personal career failure becomes a personal failure, period."

So funny you will cry

Shorter form: DO NOT BECOME A GRADUATE STUDENT AND EXPECT A LIFE. EVER, ANYWHERE, NO MATTER WHAT YOU THINK, YOU'RE NOT THINKING ENOUGH.

"... yet Nature still thinks it's okay to publish a four-paragraph article containing two paragraphs of unsupported speculation about ways in which unions might or might not harm students."

"Give a damn. Your students are not fungible data-production units..."

This reminds me of Clay Shirky's recent "good entrepreneurs are young", and the common "mathematicians do all their best work before 25" tropes. Life and school are opposites. Age brings life; it kills school. Unless you're faculty already....

Seminar Bingo

Why is what we teach in graduate school so often reduced to <i>what it's "supposed to be" like in the University</i>?