Or you raise your kid (most of the time) alone because your partner works 3000 miles away.
Or, I suppose, one or both of you finds a job that can be done remotely. That’s a lot more of an option now than when I was in academia.
I’ve heard about the “Two-Body Problem” in academia before, but what I don’t get is how it’s different from any other couple with somewhat specific careers. It’s probably not so big an issue for people who do the sort of jobs that exist anywhere or that can be done remotely but if one person is a farm manager and the other is an urban planner it’s probably going to be a bit difficult to find somewhere where they can both work. Or is the only difference that academics talk about it more?
Yeah, I’ll have to second the request for a cite. To my understanding tuition costs have far outpaced inflation, minus a recent blip around the COVID pandemic (when a lot of things went wonky). A brief search for example spit out this article from Forbes: The average cost of attending a four-year college or university in the United States rose by 497% between the 1985-86 and 2017-18 academic years, more than twice the rate of inflation.
I mean, it probably isn’t. It’s just that only physicists, and those in related fields, are likely to use that particular term for it (since it’s a play on “three-body problem”, a famously difficult problem in physics). But academia is certainly a good example of a job specialized enough that there’s often going to be only one employer in any given city; I don’t know of any other examples of similarly-specialized jobs off the top of my head (aside from political positions, where your planning has to include the likelihood of losing an election wherever you are).
Here’s a quick cite I found, which explains the difference between net price and the usual average cost (sticker price).
Ignore the sticker price: How have college prices really changed? | Brookings
The sticker price is an increasingly poor indicator of college prices for all students, regardless of family income.
That study appears to lump all “financial aid” into one category, which is a big mistake. Some financial aid is in the form of grants and scholarships, which really do reduce the price of college. But some is in the form of work study, which still requires, well, work, and some is in the form of loans, which must still eventually be repaid.
I think the difference is that in academia, spousal hours are a thing, if one of them is desirable enough. I don’t think that happens much in other industries.
I am an academic, and my husband is not. I refused to apply for a lot of tenure-track positions because he wanted to be able to work in his field, too, which couldn’t happen in small-town Kansas. We found a city that works for us, we found jobs. It was a problem, and took years and years.
Yeah. I didn’t make it as clear as I intended in my prior post on topic, but my nephew & his wife are both academics.
Even a major university may only have one job opening per year for “tenure-track associate professor” in any given academic area. So even in a metro area with several universities there are not many open jobs.
In their case one of the two is sort of middle-of-the-pack among researchers and the other is evidently Destined for Great Things. And the middle-of-the-pack person is in a much smaller field overall with fewer appropriate universities, while DfGT is in a more popular mainstream field but really needs a fairly rarified school within their specialty.
I wish them well but I’m glad I don’t have their problem.
Ah, gotcha. But that does look to vary from individual to individual. My former co-worker owns a bit of rental property and has a decent but not lavish income - the value of the property is apparently what really kills him. He’s paying (or paid, for the eldest) essentially sticker price for three kids at varying schools, public and private.
…spousal HIRES… (too late to edit: stupid autocorrect)
When I was in college, two members of the faculty were a husband and wife, both tenured professors, both teaching in the Classics Department. Looking back, I’ve often wondered how they managed to find that kind of situation.
Yes, you are correct that inclusion of the word average in average net price implies a range.
How that often happens is the Classics department is allowed to make ONE faculty hire, but is in fact understaffed and could really use two. One pair of the couple is more or less what they’re looking for, and the existence of the spouse and the university’s spousal hire policy means they get another faculty member they wouldn’t ordinarily be able to hire. Academia has a glut of talent vis-à-vis available jobs and chances are pretty good that both spouses are excellent.
I guess it’s popular because how often does a farm manager meet an urban planner and fall in love? Where did they meet?
Whereas academics meet each other all the time.
That’s probably why it’s a known issue.
My husband left academia and went to a family practice and later started his own practice. He’s much happier overall. As for me, it’s hard to find non-profit jobs in anything other than an urban area. So we are kinda tied to HCOLA.
Most likely a university that offers both courses of study. Probably not a lot of such universities. Maybe undergrad studies that are more general, after which they pursue masters in their own areas? Blind date? Matchmaker?
Lol. I’m intrigued now…
It could be what @Dr.Drake described, or it could be that they were both hired separately through more or less the normal process, and then they met at work, fell in love, and got married.
Possible. I admit that I don’t know their backstory. By the time I was there, they had already been something of a fixture in the Classics Department for years. There were, if I recall right, a total of four Classics faculty, of which they constituted 50%.
Oh, it’s spread to the rest of academia as well – humanities faculty use the term all the time, regardless of whether they’ve ever heard of the “three-body problem” before.
As for the original topic of the thread – I feel like the answer is almost always “it depends on the young adult.” People, even young people, aren’t widgets, and abilities are spiky. For someone who has the interest and the aptitude, going to trade school instead of college can be a great choice. For someone like me, with terrible spatial abilities, not-great manual dexterity, and not much inherent interest in understanding how stuff works, it would have been a terrible choice, and a waste of the abilities I do have, which are mostly verbal. I probably could have completed a degree in a STEM field successfully, but I wouldn’t have stood out compared to other students – and it’s usually the standing-out, rather than the specific degree, that opens doors.
In my experience as a faculty member, the students for whom college really isn’t worth the money are the ones who either don’t want to be there at all, don’t want to be in that specific major, and / or are just not strong enough academically to succeed in any major (that happens, and as a society we probably need to be more honest with those students – but some of them also don’t have the ability to be successful in trade school either). There are also students who are not academically strong and struggle mightily in most of their classes, but are gifted enough in a specific field (at my institution, it’s often culinary arts or graphic design) to complete a degree successfully and find employment in that field. Ideally, I’d say the purpose of higher education is to figure out what you’re good at and get better at it, and it shouldn’t matter if there are a few missteps and wrong turns along the way (that’s what youth is for). Practically, I recognize that the soaring cost of tuition has made that an unaffordable ideal for many people, and that we need to find some solutions to that – but there isn’t going to be a one-size-fits-all solution, because one size just doesn’t.