Well, yeah, since I don’t have access to anyone’s head, I can’t really prove their motivations. All I can do is compare my experiences with others and make inferences from broad trends.
In the case of that particular job, I had ample experience with the company, knew their pay scales well, and knew they could negotiate up to 10% without any formal process. I also knew the value of my specialized skill set pretty well. It wasn’t my first rodeo, so to speak.
So yeah, maybe my experiences were a quirk. But when I look at my peers with similar experiences, it seems like something is going on. Again, all of us know our market well, and in DC most jobs are priced in relation to the federal pay scale. All of us had specialized and in-demand skills, and all make pretty solid salaries. But none of us managed to negotiate even a few thousand extra.
Where the hell does this attitude come from? Do you think you can spend seven years in grad school, watching one cohort after another finish their degrees and vanish off the face of the earth, while still feeling entitled to a job afterwards? How is it that people somehow believe that aspiring academics are unaware of the odds? What grad student peed in your cheerios to merit such disdain and hostility?
I’d be skeptical of both the family and the philosophy grad. Both investments are insane. I imagine W here was fully funded, as am I. I am paid to do my job, and when it’s finished, I aspire to a better one like anyone else.
A PhD is more like an apprenticeship than anything else. It’s not just another seven years of college.
I’m skeptical of them both as well. I’m responding to the idea that there should be fewer PhD candidates, because their are fewer jobs once they finish. The idea that getting a PhD somehow entitles you to your chosen career because you made the investment in the PhD - and that we should be more protectionist on the entry side. People make huge investments in time and money to do all sorts of things - many of which don’t pan out in the end - and the general (not you, I think you are one of the smartest and most realistic people I ‘know’) academic who pooh poohs the investments made by an athlete or an artist as short sighted in terms of career potential and doesn’t see his own investments as such has a blind spot - and a huge bias that comes off as snobbery.
And no academic peed in my Cheerios, I just find this to be an annoying blind spot from any end. And it can be annoying in “practical” fields as well - it just occurs somewhat less often to get an Accounting or Engineering degree and find yourself jobless - but when there are down economies and it happens, the howling is annoying. Hell, I participated in a discussion that was a lot like this with a Radiology Tech last week…“They should graduate less people, the market is flooded and they don’t pay us enough.” Its a common enough complaint across fields and it doesn’t seem to me that the complaint is much different from a PhD than from a Radiology Tech - except in the scale of time and effort it took to finish school.
A friend of mine is applying to get an MFA in Ceramics - its fully funded - which is how she’ll be able to afford to do it. But an MFA in Ceramics is not a guarantee to a job. Its an MFA in Ceramics - she knows that. She’s doing it because its her passion - and she hopes to teach - if not, she hopes studio work (and a very supportive spouse) will make ends meet. There are few opportunities to get the MFA in that field, should even fewer people be permitted to follow their passion and learn because there aren’t jobs at the end? Few enough get the chance for years of study now.
Fair enough, Dangerosa. I am a bit bummed about my work lately but have no business taking my crankiness out on other people.
I do disagree here for a variety of reasons. Departments really ought to limit the number of PhDs produced every year, and some especially brave institutions are doing just that.
The problem is that not all PhD programs are created equal. It is not the arts, where anyone who makes a good youtube video has a shot at making it big. It is a general tendency that you will never get a job at a school more prestigious than the one you graduated from. Top tier schools hire people with even more rarefied credentials. Second-tier schools hire top tier graduates. And so on. All research universities rely on grad student teaching and research assistance. Departments at low tier schools train doctoral students, with minimal financial support, because they need the cheap labor. Their students will not likely get jobs with benefits. Many who manage to stay in the profession struggle as adjuncts without insurance. Professionals willing to teach for food provide further low-cost contingent labor.
This situation is not good either for undergraduates or for the profession. Arguably more gates are needed. If you can’t get into a top program that funds its students, then you are already starting off way behind people who do. Those programs probably shouldn’t be training PhDs at all, and often wouldn’t be if it weren’t for the teaching and research assistance loads they bear. Top programs have no business accepting students that they can’t fund.
Think about it this way: a PhD granted from university X should be a sufficient credential to get hired at universities like X. If you are a low-ish tier university and would not be willing to hire a candidate with credentials equivalent to the one you grant yourself, then perhaps something is deeply wrong.
It is hoped that controlling the supply will help reduce some of the addiction to contingent labor and correct some of the dysfunction in the industry. It is a step that one or two institutions cannot take alone. I also admit that I come from a pretty rarefied environment but I would welcome the perspective of people who live in different corners of the academic world. Though my aspirations are a little different. I’ve spent ten years of my life in elite institutions. I want to teach at a state school, especially in the city university system where I live.
I know jack and shit about radiology and jack left town. But I would ask whether there are just too many radiology graduates for current demand or whether there is something deeply dysfunctional about the industry.
A fully funded MFA? Hot damn, I am going to have to learn how to make pots. That’s amazing.
This isn’t just a matter of permitting people to follow their passions. This is correcting some of the major issues with an industry supported by the efforts of a large academic underclass.
This could be explained by the 2007 economic collapse / recession - the fallout has made many organizations a LOT more picky and gunshy about hiring new people.
I suspect that its a function of technological change - its tech work - being an XRay tech - as that sort of thing becomes more automated, fewer people are needed, but tech schools are graduating techs at the same rate.
In the case of the person I was having the conversation with, she’d gotten the certification because she’d been laid off previously - and had been told this was a good field where she could make a decent income. She got out and there were fewer jobs than she was led to believe there would be. She will find something, it might just take a bit and not be the ideal job.
A friend graduated in Nursing this Winter and is discovering the same thing - despite a “nursing shortage” she isn’t going to be able to be as picky as she hoped and may end up doing work that she didn’t really want to do to get a foot in the door.
She probably won’t get it. They’ll accept TWO applicants from hundreds of applications. And when those two applicants get out - they’ll hope they can get jobs teaching in Community Colleges or High Schools. So I wouldn’t invest a lot of time or money into learning how to throw pots - it has all the same frustrations of your current program - plus you spend your time loading and unloading thousands of pounds of pots from the kiln
I guess I still have this dream of study for the sake of study - without all those tawdry financial considerations. I still sort of want to go to grad school, and get the History PhD, not to teach, but because I want to spend a few years in serious study. For me, its a pipe dream, I realize I’m way better off being a complete dilettante and I’m 47 years old with no patience for academic politics - but my local University closing its doors to History PhDs - or seriously reducing the numbers - because its just a way for them to provide cheap labor for 1xxx coursework without those grad students having hope for a future is sad - but from a philosophical perspective - not a market one.
That’s exactly it: people imagine getting a PhD as just an extension of the kind of study they do in college or on their own. This is not entirely incorrect but it misleads a lot of people into thinking they want to get their PhD.
Imagine you really like driving. A lot. You might even be an excellent driver. Then someone tells you that if you like driving, you really should give making cars a shot. It sounds like a great idea, so you enroll as a carmaking apprentice. You find out pretty quickly that your driving skills don’t actually transfer over to carmaking all that well. And that instead of making a finished Ferrarri at the end if your studies, you will produce one single engine sub-part that you will struggle over for years. By the end, you might come to hate engines entirely and wish that you had just stuck to driving. Except now that you know something about making cars, even driving is less fun because you are so aware of all of the flaws in every car you try to drive.
I’m sure you get the idea. All of this said, I take enormous satisfaction from my work. Far greater than anything I experienced elsewhere. I love teaching and scholarship, and there is no one who can do the work I do (in part because it is so oddball). Getting this degree wasn’t a choice; it is something that I had to do, no matter how much it might blow up later. I say this as someone who supports a disabled wife and a disabled child. I did not take leaving my previous career lightly. A great deal of who I am is wrapped up in my work.
I can accept not being good enough to make the cut. That’s far better than getting burnt by institutional dysfunction. Even though I think my odds are not good, I still love what I do and my work will be the mark, however small, that I leave on the world. They’ll put that on my tombstone.
You’re not making inferences from broad trends, you’re drawing conclusions from a narrow swath of anecdotes.
I’ll again point out that, based on what you’ve said, this was the same company that met your shoot for the moon opening position in the negotiation for consulting salary. Were just as disadvantaged by being a woman back then? By any chance did the the subsequent negotiation take place after the economy turned into a smouldering crater.
I assume by peers you mean female peers – how much info do you have from your male colleagues? How well have their negotiations been going?
all of this is spot on. and why do the parents spend all this money on coaching and sports with hopes of getting a scholarship rather than simply sock the money away?
To continue the “invest in sports” analogy - a year ago or so I was talking to a young coworker who had played college baseball. I was saying my son was pretty good - was there anything…you know.
He said don’t try - don’t encourage it. Playing ball in college was horrible. You play ball because you love to play ball - but when you are in a Division I school on a scholarship - you play ball because you have to play ball - they control your life. The control what you eat, when you sleep, what your course load is like. When you aren’t practicing, sleeping, eating or going to class you are in the weight room. Most of these guys would be the 493 pick into the minors - this wasn’t a viable career for them - but they weren’t being permitted to treat it as anything other than their career. He played for two, then dropped the program and finished his degree on his own without the scholarship.
(And that mirrors a lot of what I’ve heard about Division 1 athletics - it should be a way for kids to get an education while playing a sport - too often its about playing a sport and making sure the minimal requirements for being a student don’t get in the way).
If there is something you love, sometimes the best way to learn to hate it is to have to do it - and in such a way that you need to “build the car.”
He’s not asking for a peer-reviewed study, he’s just asking for some basis of comparison. Being treated badly doesn’t necessarily mean you’re being treated worse than someone else, any more than being treated well automatically means you’re being treated better than someone else. If we don’t have even one single anecdote about a guy in that place and field attempting to negotiate, how on earth do we know that you and your friends don’t just work for a pack of equal-opportunity bastards?
Can you understand why some people might think that is a terrible thing to do? If I’m a hiring manager and I reject a candidate (or her counter offer) should I be responsible for the biases of other hiring managers? Racism or sexism is a terrible thing to accuse someone of doing. Shouldn’t such a strong charge be backed up with some sort of individualized proof?
Men don’t usually share their failures. They get turned down negotiating too…but men don’t share. Women do…my female group of bookclub shares this sort of thing - my gaming group - where me and my fourteen year old daughter provide all the estrogen - never does.
I shared my husband’s example above, and I’ve slammed men - in particular men - down hard when they’ve asked for too much. I doubt the went back to their male friends with “I asked for a 15% raise and she gave me 3%.”
That’s very true and it skews statistics for any number of things. Yes, studies show that 98% of domestic violence victims are women. But did those studies take into account that when a man is slapped by his wife that he likely doesn’t call the police or check himself into a domestic violence shelter?
If anything, this young woman in the OP likely received a benefit from her gender. She probably got a “let’s look at this one more time so we aren’t accused of discriminating against her because of her maternity leave request.”
