A former student asked for advice on choosing a grad school on FB and I felt compelled to expand and expound. I've edited it up from FB style to blog standard. ("Bog standard?")
Enjoy:
The best advice I got before starting a PhD was that you should only start a research PhD program if you can think of nothing better to do with your life for at least six years. This doesn't apply to master's degrees. But it was very good advice for my PhD.
The other thing I'd mention is that there is an enormous glut of qualified people in some job fields for which advanced degrees are needed, and employers are finding ways to bid down the wages. Generally they do this by re-categorizing the work, so downgraded the job from from assistant professor to adjunct, or from full-time to part time, from on-staff to on-contract, and so on. They pass the burden of getting the initial qualification back to the employee in this way, leading to massive student loan debt if you are not competitive.
Apart from a few unions that have successfully organized graduate students, the only effective push-back against this and the general dumbing-down of higher education in the online age has been the accreditation agencies. This is why the "new" Unity College may be shopping around for an easier accreditor.
But employers and HR professionals are generally wise to the difference between a six-year land grant PhD and a two-year "plastic" one from the online and for-profit organizations, and this is calculated into the hiring process.
This means you have to be prepared to compete academically, but also by taking additional research and other assignments. I helped win various grants for my advisors, grants that paid living expenses, research expenses, and tuition for my thesis projects, but I also did an enormous number of other projects for them that were on the face of it nothing to do with my actual thesis topics.
For example, I set up and ran summer programs and a conference, I started a land trust, and I wrote many grant proposals. Distractions, for sure, and they slowed me down in my course work, comprehensive exams, and thesis projects. But the experiences stood me in very good stead afterwards in the world of work when I was finally hired as an assistant professor. They were exactly the kinds of things I found myself doing as a professor, they all paid part time salaries, and several came with tuition remission.
These kinds of opportunities are generally limited to the land grant colleges and universities. The notion that a quick one-year MS online is cheaper fails when you go to bat for a job and the competition from the land grants have these kinds of experiences on their CVs and less student debt.
No comments:
Post a Comment