More E-Book News...and Also, Take the Ph.D Debt Survey!

Hey friends!

I promise...now that this e-book craziness is all but over for me, I will get back to updating this blog more regularly. I have missed writing here!! And with postacademia and problems of academic labor blowing up all over the internet and the blogosphere, there are certainly a lot of topics I could discuss!

But, today I have two quick things to tell you about.

First ... for those of you who have e-book devices other than a Kindle, our book ("Moving On: Essays on the Aftermath of Leaving Academia") is now available for purchase in EPUB format on Kobo.com. Here's the link.

Again, the book is value-priced at $2.99, and all proceeds will go toward the maintenance of the HTLA site. (Including the forums, which we are still working on!)

As before ... we kindly ask you to leave reviews of the book on either site or on your blog, and to tell your friends about our book if you think they would benefit from it!

In news not related to me or my blog..............

Yikes!!

So I just filled out my online consolidation application for my graduate student loans. EEK! Time to pour myself a drink, I think. Seeing all of those huge numbers thrown together and filling out all of those forms was necessary, but ....... eeeeeek. Why was I so stupid, to keep taking out more and more loans???

Oh wait, I know why I was so stupid. We all were. Lauren lays it out perfectly here.

Anyway, I digress. What I actually wanted to do tonight was to post a quick PSA for anyone here in the US who will be facing student loan debt (from either undergrad or grad school) after they finish - whether they graduate or quit early like yours truly.

My advice is: Consolidate your loans. 

Do it. Go here and fill out the application.

Obviously, it won't reduce your total balance due. (If only there was a web application that would do that, huh?) But it will get your payments under control - both by bringing them into one monthly payment to one vendor rather than multiple, and most likely by lowering your monthly payments.

(In my case, it looks like I will be cutting my monthly payments at least in half by consolidating. From there, of course, I can pay more every month if I want to get it paid off sooner ... but the minimum is so much more manageable than it would have been if I didn't consolidate.)

So if you weren't aware of this possibility, bookmark that link now. We regretful academics can't turn back time and take out fewer loans, but there is something you can do to minimize the fallout going forward.

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Now that that ugly financial business is out of the way ... I thought my readers might enjoy the latest Ph.D. comic, which can be found here, and which draws on recent headlines quite amusingly.

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I hope everyone has a wonderful week, and I'll write more later...

On Compensation

Postacademic in NYC wrote an interesting post last week, where she discussed the somewhat disconcerting feelings she's been having as an hourly wage worker in the world outside of academia. In this post, she wrote that the lump sum payments she received every month or so in academia were fine with her, while the hourly pay she gets now is causing her to have some uncomfortable feelings about how her work is "quantified" in dollars.

More specifically, she's been calculating how many hours of work at the temp agency she needs to put in in order to earn enough money for the things she likes to buy - a sandwich or a coffee or a bottle of booze. This, in turn, is (I think) making her feel a bit discouraged. I got the feeling from her post that her pay in academia was lower, possibly ... but that despite that, she felt less exploited/dehumanized because it wasn't as easy to translate her work hours into a dollar amount.

I enjoyed the post, and some of it definitely rang true to me. Until I got my promotion and raise this spring, I was also an hourly wage worker at my current office. And while I was paid fairly well and could afford a decent quality of life as an hourly worker, I would occasionally catch myself thinking "if I buy those concert tickets, I'll have to work a full day to pay for them," or "damn, I'm working 4-5 hours for a tank of gas? Ridiculous."

So, I've definitely done the "quantifying what I'm purchasing in work hours" thing, and it did feel a little weird. Now, I never found myself calculating the amount of work that would "pay" for a sandwich or coffee - I really never got down to the nitty-gritty of what, say, 15 minutes of my labor was "worth" in terms of consumer goods. But if I wanted to spend a decent chunk of money? Yeah, I'd sometimes find myself calculating the number of hours I'd need to work to earn that money back.

And I agree, it's kind of an odd feeling to be able to directly calculate how much money your work time  is "worth," in such concrete, calculable terms.

But looking back on my time in academia and then on my time as an hourly wage worker outside of academia, I can honestly say that I preferred being paid hourly to the pay I got in academia. And I'd still go back to hourly work any day before I'd go back to academia. With absolutely no hesitation.

Now, PAINYC's outlook on her job is totally valid. Her job is far different from mine, and her work environments sound challenging, to say the least. I'd have a hard time not feeling like a cheap cog in the wheel of my workplace if I was working in buildings that have butlers (WTF?), doing basic tasks for the top 0.1% of wage earners in this country, alongside miserable and exploited support staff. There's absolutely no question in my mind that I'd feel pretty damned exploited and underpaid if I were in that position.

But I wanted to put up a post here that explains the outlook that I had on my life and my compensation as an hourly worker. Because my outlook and my experiences have been different from PAINYC's ... and while I don't think there's anything wrong with her outlook, I want readers of both blogs to understand that there's no guarantee of how you will feel about a job that pays hourly until you have one. Perhaps you will feel like PAINYC ... but perhaps not.

So as food for thought ... here are three reasons why I found hourly pay to be preferable to my academic salary.

Workin' and Schoolin' Together ... A Good Idea?

In the comments at one of her terrific recent posts about the economics of graduate school, Lauren and I got into a bit of a discussion about money and academia. Lauren's post was about the tendency among grad students (including the two of us!) to take on more and more student loan debt as they progress through school, simply to help pay for life's necessities. In her post, she notes that this seems to be an accepted part of grad school for many students ... and she thinks this is a really big problem.

I agree on both counts. Taking on additional debt isn't seen as an irresponsible thing to do among most grad students, and there is little concern about how much we're accruing or how we're actually going to pay all of it back. That's ridiculous. And this is all done with the full blessing of our advisors and departments, who are either deluded about or deliberately ignoring the bleak academic job market that lies ahead for us. That's bordering on criminal. (I'm exaggerating, but only slightly).

So in the end (as I've alluded to in my series on privilege in academia) you wind up with a bunch of students who graduate with massive piles of debt ... many of whom will be unable to find jobs that will pay enough to allow them to pay off the debt before they retire. In other words, a whole lot of graduating Ph.D. students are starting their careers off in dire financial straits and saddling themselves with debt loads in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, with no idea of what job prospects await them (hint: not good ones).

So this is a problem that requires a solution, because this system is unsustainable. With the collapsing job market, students cannot keep taking on more and more debt as their job prospects become more and more bleak. Something needs to change.

Can You "Just Quit?" Sure ... If You're Rich!

After a few days/weeks of thinking of nothing other than my current job and my future career plans, a recent post at Postacademic in NYC's place got me thinking, yet again, about privilege in academia. You may recall that I started a series on privilege a few months back, in which I argued that grad school and the immediate post-graduate period is far, far easier to navigate for people who come from lives of privilege, while those of us from more modest backgrounds are often forced to juggle work-intensive assistantships and "side" teaching positions in order to stay in academia while also being able to pay our rent. 

In other words, academia exacerbates privilege. And based on the way it's structured, it places more value on students and faculty who come from privileged backgrounds, who are able to pursue academia as a sort of interesting intellectual exercise with Mom and Dad (or a wealthy spouse) footing the bill when things get financially tight, rather than as an actual career that pays a decent salary in exchange for concrete work like teaching.

Once I got those two posts out of my system, I was feeling a little calmer about the whole privilege thing. Fine. Rich people get ahead in academia, as they do everywhere else. Time to move on.

But as I read PINYC's post the other day, I suddenly got inspired again.

Let's Talk about Privilege and Inequality

So ... privilege in academia. I want to write about it, but to be honest? I'm not sure how to start. ... and I'm kind of nervous about writing about it.

Something I've always heard from my fellow grad students (and sometimes still see pop up on Facebook and in other places) is that grad students are very, very privileged people. Jokes about "first world problems" like being at a coffee shop at noon with no laptop charger were common, as were observations about how lucky grad students were to be reading and writing and teaching for a living rather than doing some kind of backbreaking manual labor or working for a tyrannical boss.

"We're so lucky," they'd say. "Our lives are so privileged. We have no right to complain. We're lucky."

So part of me does feel odd starting this series. I feel like I'm going to get a bunch of comments and emails telling me how crazy I am -- that this is the best job in the world and I'm insane to try to argue that there's anything like "inequality" or "unfair working conditions that segregate people by class" in it. Because, did I forget? Grad students and academics are privileged.

So let me start this series out by saying that to some extent, I agree. Having the kind of job where you're free to come and go as you please, and where your work duties require no physical labor and where you have the freedom to sit in a coffee shop or a park all day "working" (when in actuality no one would be able to prevent you from playing on the internet all day long) is a privileged lifestyle. A lot of people would kill for that kind of flexibility and freedom.

But in other ways, I don't think that academia is a life of privilege ... unless, of course, you come from a privileged background. That's right ... I'm talking about salaries again. (But grad student salaries, this time).

Now, there are certainly other things to discuss with regards to privilege and social class in academia (I've already talked about conference travel, and later I plan to write about the divide between students who are paid through fellowships and those who are "teaching fodder" for the department because they are desperate for some type of funding). But let's start out by talking simply about grad student salaries ... and how they often exacerbate preexisting class differences between incoming grad students.

Policy Changes

So it appears that per our new federal debt deal, graduate students may no longer be able to obtain subsidized student loans to pay for grad school. In other words, if you take out a federal loan to fund your graduate studies, you will be charged interest during the time you are in school rather than having it accrue only once you've graduated. Long-term, then, graduate students will pay more in student loans than they currently are.

Hmm. I'm of two minds about this. First, I think graduate students get screwed enough as it is, between the lack of job training and the horrifying job market and the shift toward adjunct/temporary faculty in higher education. So this just seems like one more kick in the rear to anyone who decides to go to grad school without realizing all of the potential downsides.

On the other hand, though, I really oppose people taking out more than a nominal amount of student loans to pay for graduate study (I'm speaking from experience, here), so I'm having trouble getting too worked up about a change in policy that may prevent graduate students from taking out more and more student loans to fund their studies.

Thoughts, anyone?