But 18-year-old kids are borrowers in the undergraduate student loan program, which you seemed to be omitting from your proposals to screen student loans for graduate students:
Doctoral students are definitely not getting any “couple hundred thousand dollars” from student loan program; it’s the professional school students who are borrowing sums in that ballpark (and some undergrad students are getting close as well).
And why are they going to college? To get a good job. No, I don’t think I’ve got the chicken and egg mixed up here: if employers offered more good jobs that didn’t require a bachelor’s degree, fewer young people would feel the need to go to college.
About half of doctoral students get somestudent loans at some point in their career, but it’s not what’s enabling their seven-plus-year education. The people who really depend on student loan debt for postgraduate education are the professional school students (over 80%) who borrow on average $15,000-$20,000 per year for their medical or dental or law degrees. Master’s students also have a high percentage of student loan borrowers, but since theirs are generally one- or two-year programs the total debt incurred is lower. The vast majority of postgraduate student loan funding in the US is going to future lawyers, doctors, dentists, other non-academic professionals such as pharmacists, and MBA’s and M.Ed.'s.
I have watched with dismay for several years as my department complained about lack of funding for graduate students, and excused their inability to support those of us who have been here a few years exactly on that basis–and yet continued to admit larger and larger numbers of graduate students each year.
I don’t think any individual prof is thinking “Yay, more slave labor!” but I think the system is sort of “unintentionally designed” to work that way, as the creation of more slave labor makes for better looking budgets in the end.
> We have too few engineers and too few scientists and too few doctors, but we
> have a glut of people with worthless degrees in the humanities.
You don’t seem to understand that non-economic incentives are more important than economic ones in this matter. Do you honestly think that college students are thinking to themselves, “I could get an art history [or whatever] Ph.D., even though it would mean a decade of just getting by on a mixture of jobs, loans, and scholarships and probably nothing better than teaching at a community college for the rest of my life, or I could go to med school, which will eventually lead to a solid middle-class (and quite possibly an upper-middle-class) life, although I might have to work hard initially to pay off my loans”?
Here’s what they actually are thinking, “Well, I could go to med school. It would be incredibly stressful decade in college, med school, and residency, never getting enough sleep or exercise because they have superstrict academic standards. I would spend the next decade paying off my loans. This would mean that I would have to work long hours and shuffle the patients in and out as quickly as possible so I make as much money as possible. Even when I’m middle-aged and living in a big house in an exclusive suburb and have a big car, I will have to put in lots of hours on the job. On the other hand, I could study art history [or whatever] in college and grad school, a field that I love. I would spend a decade barely scraping by with a mixture of jobs, loans, and scholarships. The chance that I would get a tenure-track job at top university is pretty small. Much more likely I would end up teaching community college. I would spend a decade paying off my loans in any case. There’s a reasonable chance that I won’t get a job in art history at all and will spend the rest of my life working as a bookstore clerk living in a tiny apartment where I have to take a bus to work because I can’t afford a car. But I will be a happy bookstore clerk struggling to get by who spends his free time reading about art history, instead of a miserable rich doctor with no free time. And if I get a job teaching art history or doing something important with art history, I would be even happier.”
Money is not the chief incentive of people. Happiness is. In some cases, people are willing to give up some happiness in the short term in exchange for money, because they know that later they will be able to buy more happiness with the money. Sometimes they decide the trade-off isn’t worth it. People choose their futures based on what they think will make them happy, and money is only a part of that decision. If you want to convince more people to become engineers and scientists and doctors, create a better image for those jobs so that they will be more desired. Even better, make the life of people with those jobs better. Giving them more money is only a tiny part of it.
I’m with you, though I think it’s entirely intentional. In the biological sciences, it would cost about 50K per year minimum to pay a technician to do the labwork, or you could “hire” a graduate student for 20K. Every graduate student admitted saves money, so why would they care that there are not nearly enough jobs to support those students? It’s something like 10% of graduate students that get tenure track positions.
And god forbid you mention leaving academia! When I ended up accepting an industry position, I had all sorts of meetings with members of the department where I got to hear about how this was a waste of the taxpayers money who had paid to train me. Balls to that. The taxpayers got their money’s worth, and then some, out of me for six years!
I know that the press likes to tout the looming shortage of scientists, but those of us in science are quite aware of the fact that there are not just too many scientists, but WAY too many scientists. It has required the invention, and the extreme prolongation, of the “postdoc” where a newly minted PhD must enter a holding pattern for 5-15 years (at unconscionable salary for their skill set) before even being considered for a real “scientist” position.
There are now enough postdocs in the biological sciences that if every tenure track scientist were to retire tomorrow, there are enough to fill those positions. Being that most of these tenure track scientists plan on keeping their positions for the next few decades, it stands to reason that there is the production of scientists with the complete realization that there is nowhere to put them.
And, it’s not sour grapes, as I’m actually one of the VERY lucky ones. But, I won’t be part of the problem. I left academia, and I won’t accept graduate students or postdocs in my lab.
I shouldn’t have implied that there are shortages of all scientists. There are shortages in specific fields. There are certainly shortages of doctors, but I’m not sure how much of that is the result of policies that are specifically intended to restrict the supply of doctors to maintain high wages.
There are also shortages of various kinds of tradesmen - not so much during the recession, but in the normal economy.
I don’t have the exact numbers, but a graduate student costs far more than their stipend. It’s not immediately obvious that a technician would be more expensive.
The number of MDs is set by the American Association of Medical Colleges by the number of schools that can grant an MD and the number of students that they can accept. Certainly, you wouldn’t want to accept just anyone into these programs, but no doubt many VERY good potential doctors are turned away every year because they are not allowed into medical school.
The incentive for the MDs is to keep their numbers low by limiting the number of medical students. More supply = lower demand and lower wages. The incentive for current scientists, myself included, is to have as many graduate students as possible as these are the people doing the lab work.
I don’t know about far more. Health insurance is lower for graduate students who generally are not on the same plans as “real” employees. There was some subsidization of housing, but not much. Classes are generally just a few hours a day, for one or two years, and taught by the scientists who generally just discuss their own research (and use the time mostly to advertise to get new graduate students), so classes don’t cost a whole lot either.
I’d like to see what money is being included in any calculation that would make graduate students more expensive than technicians. I’m guessing they include things like laboratory space and equipment, which would obviously be a false thing to add to the equation as that is required for a technician as well.
QFT. I am not a biologist/Ph. D. but I know a lot of them, and they are legion. The universities seem particularly cynical about accepting foreign-born students whose English and business skills are realistically sufficiently horrible that they could never hope to be a successful teacher OR administrator.
Someone asked whether post-docs live in squalor. The answer: not necessarily, if they land at the right institution and have a P.I. lab boss who is reasonably successful (P.I.s often have to be as much businessmen as scientists). Data point: a friend was a post-doc in bio. for about five years (the comments on remaining a post-doc or adjunct for too long are, indeed, correct, mutatis mutandis, in sciences and humanities alike, and she was beginning to worry at the five year mark). She made $42k, which was not great pay in any urban area, BUT had heavily subsidized (think 50%) nice student housing, great health benefits, child care, etc., and occasional “research travel grants” that could double as junket/vacation budget. And, her boss ran a fairly relaxed lab, so 9-5 was as much aspirational goal as an attendance requirement. But, she was at a very well funded school and was clear that the $42k number wasn’t going to change no matter how much more experienced she became.
These ridiculously long PhDs seem to be purely an American phenomenon. I have funding for three years (it runs out in September), but will hopefully finish before then. Either way, there’s a hard limit of about 5 years on how long the university here will tolerate my presence (and I’ll be on my own funding the last two years). The idea that I’ll be stuck here in eight years still working on a PhD is insane. What the hell are you doing in all that time?
Only what can be expected in a market where the time to produce a new specialist, given the recognition of a need, is 4 - 7 years. If Dell took that long to make PCs, there would be shortages of various types also.
I don’t buy the shortage of engineers and programmers. Computerworld has quoted CIOs as saying they only want to hire people with very specific specialties who don’t have to be trained. That is like saying there is a shortage of 11 inch boards because you don’t want to use a saw to cut an inch off a easy to find 12 inch one. When the market rewarded those with IT skills well, there was flood of IT students. When they all got laid off, the flood subsided. I’m sure you’ve read the angry letters about the so-called shortage in the trade rags you get. Even so, in Berkeley if you want to take engineering you have to apply to the engineering school as a freshman. It is almost impossible for someone with another major to transfer in. It is easy to transfer out to almost any other field.
I don’t know about Berkeley or their motives, but I can think of non-protectionist reasons it would be hard to join certain hard sciences/engineering majors mid-stream; many programs tend to have fairly rigid prerequisites/course regimens that sort of cascade from one year to the other. It’s not very feasible to just “double up” and take Calc I and II the same semester. If you haven’t had Calc. I and II, how are you going to take multivariate your third semester along with the rest of your peer cohort, etc.?
You don’t see a lot of tech majors doing the semester/year abroad, for similar “off-track” reasons.