Blog

Get to know me better through my blog. While I write on general HR and workplace inclusivity topics from time to time, most of my essays are aimed at educating and preparing my clients who are seeking help navigating graduate school admissions and the academic job market.

A Lifetime of Low Wages and Student Debt

A Lifetime of Low Wages and Student Debt: The Economic Pitfalls of Academic Life, Even on the Tenure-Track

My son is graduating high school in May. He’s a smart, hardworking kid and wants to be a high school history teacher. I’m pleased that he’s planning to attend a small public school known for its teaching programs and its cheapest-four-year-degree-in-the-state distinction. Like my own parents, I have saved nothing for his or his younger sister’s education. I hope to contribute where Pell Grants and scholarships fall short, but they will probably need to take out some loans. By far the most valuable thing I can offer my kids is not the tuition dollars they deserve but the imperfect advice not to become a college professor.

When I finally gave up my tenure-track position at a small private liberal arts college in Minnesota in 2020, I was earning an annual salary of $56,000 as co-director of an entire program. (None of the figures I report in this essay are adjusted for current value.) To show for a career spanning seven years, I had a small 401k, $30,000 in unsecured debt, and over $140,000 in student loans. I also had a divorce and severe depression. Had I stayed a few months and been granted tenure, I would have received a salary increase of merely $1,000 and, in short order, a request to accept a temporary 6% pay cut to help my employer weather the pandemic. A year into a higher paying job, my debt still rendered me ineligible for a mortgage. Around the same time, my car broke down, and my mom had to co-sign my loan for another clunker.

Recent social movements in higher education have called attention to the looming unsustainabilities we now know as the student loan and adjunct crises. This is my story of becoming one of the “lucky” ones who finished a PhD and found a tenure-track position but still did not survive. And this is my plea for fair and straightforward reforms that could prevent a similar fate for thousands of others. Because when it comes to fixing a broken academic job market, telling kids not to get PhDs is like telling millennials to make coffee at home; it can’t hurt, but it does nothing to address the inequality that rigs our economy and threatens our democracy.

I earned my PhD in sociology at the age of 29 in 2013 and promptly received my first notice about student loan repayment. Dated August 2013, it stated that I owed $120,000, that I had a year to begin repayment, and that my monthly bill would be over $1000 unless I enrolled in an income-based repayment plan.

It also said that the U.S. government had formed an assumption about the salary I was earning at this point in accordance with its plan to get all its money back within about 10 years: $98,000. I had just moved 850 miles with my then-husband and our two young children, on our own dime, for my first job - a nine month appointment at a small public school in eastern Pennsylvania. For my efforts, I would receive $45,000 and the privilege of adding “Visiting Assistant Professor” to my curriculum vitae.

I knew a letter like this was coming, but I had not expected it to inform me that I was earning less than half what my loan holder thought I should be. I was aware that as a liberal arts professor I would never make as much as, say, a physician, but it had never occurred to me that I would not make enough to repay my debt.

Let me pause here to say that low salaries are not the only reason that employment in academia, specifically in the liberal arts, sets so many up for failure. Rather it’s the way these wages are compounded by huge expenses that aren’t part of the price to play in other industries. The first is the opportunity costs incurred by effectively removing yourself from the labor economy for at least four years longer than peers with bachelor’s degrees, but usually upwards of seven or eight. Then there’s the cost of the degree itself, which reputable programs try to mitigate by accepting only students they are willing to award tuition waivers and small paid assistantships. Most students still pay out of pocket for huge fees and expensive textbooks.

From 2009 to 2013, I couldn’t make do with my $12,500 annual stipend, and neither could most students with dependents - or anyone who wasn’t sending some of their bills home to the folks. Having children, I qualified for the maximum in Stafford loans each semester (graduate students aren’t eligible for Pell Grants), and I took it. Earning a masters and doctorate in a nearly unheard of four years, I did not max out my borrowing capabilities, but I have met far too many PhDs, with and without children, who did.

The expenses don’t stop once you’ve earned the degree. For most, several moves are now part of the package, and most won’t receive any pay during the summer months between one position’s end date and the next one’s start. Postdocs are one to two year appointments that pay very little but allow new PhDs to work on their research and become more marketable. Visiting positions are also increasingly common layovers on the way to the tenure track. You’d be hard pressed to get moving costs covered in either scenario, and many tenure-track jobs offer allowances that won’t quite cover a U-haul.

While living in college towns, new PhDs face sky-high rents and landlords who are used to charging undergraduates by the bedroom. When my family couldn’t stand the $1300 apartment we lived in when I started my tenure track position, we moved in 2015 into a run-down 3-bedroom house for $1650 a month. Meanwhile, other people in their thirties are investing in home ownership and maybe moving closer to their parents for free babysitting. By the time a liberal arts professor lands anywhere long enough to own property, their student loans often make them ineligible for much of a mortgage.

If you make it this far in academia, you are far from being in the clear, especially if you’ve been jostling a spouse around with you. A high dissolution rate for academic marriages has the quality of an urban legend in the industry, and it’s something I can’t verify empirically; professors usually get lumped in with other advanced degree holders whose salaries insulate them from relationship stressors rather than make them a target. But I can tell you what I saw.

Things fall apart pretty quickly when a couple realizes that the reward that has been awaiting them on the other side of two cross-country moves and years of near poverty is an initial monthly paycheck for less than $3200 - after taxes, a 401k contribution that won’t be matched for another year, and a pricey family health plan that comes with $50 office copays and no couples counseling. This is what welcomed me to the tenure track in 2014.

The early career divorces that I observed on my tiny campus tended to include a professor and a partner who did not yet have solid employment history or maybe even a full-time job, an artifact of catering for years to the whims of someone else’s chosen profession. The lack of money in these relationships contributed to their deterioration, and when the professor ended up shouldering more of the financial fall-out in their divorces, the results were ruinous. My own split custody divorce saddled me with all of our unsecured debt and the responsibility of covering everything from daycare to braces, which I couldn’t do without taking out a shady personal loan from a lender banned in several states.

In graduate school, I didn’t think I’d be accumulating more debt once I earned my degree, and I didn’t think I would get divorced in my 14th year of marriage. I’d gone to graduate school to earn a better income than I received as case manager in a human services field. I tried to accommodate new information as I received it, deciding when I got my repayment notice that my temporary position was not my formal introduction to academic employment after all. It was more preparation, and I would find real salaries in the tenure track.

Accepting that temporary position in Pennsylvania now seems moronic. But I dragged my family across the country and back for peanuts, relying on a couple of high interest credit cards to cover what my income could not, because I knew that one year appointments and even lower-paid postdocs are now typical starts to an academic career. I was warned about “academic decay” and the risks of graduating and not taking a job.

We didn’t know it then, but the decay had already set in for my ex, a political scientist who earned his PhD a year before I did. Starting during his dissertation year, he spent four years on the job market, paying $25 to a portfolio service to send confidential recommendation letters and other materials each time he applied for a job.This is an industry standard and something we both did 30-40 times each per year on the market. In four years, my ex never so much as landed a phone interview, and during the entirety of my nine month visiting appointment, the only income he earned was $3,000 for a single adjunct course. Later on, he had better luck cobbling together a contingent course load, but he never made more than $20,000 in a single year before giving up on academia entirely.

While my ex joined the ranks of the adjunct crisis, the tenure-track job offer in Minnesota I ultimately received corresponded to the only on-campus interview I ever got, taking place early in the second semester of my visiting gig when most candidates strive to have an offer before winter break. Two small public schools invited me to interview a week or two later, and, for reasons I will soon explain, I think a lot about how my life may have been different if they’d acted more quickly.

In 2014, my tenure-track job started at under $53,000 and saddled me with about $1,000 of uncovered moving expenses. I thought of my impending loan repayment and tried to remain optimistic. I began applying for consolidation, income-based repayment, and the public service program that forgives student debt for those with public and non-profit jobs after 120 qualifying payments. (To date, I have made 21 of those, placing my loans in hardship deferment more often than not.)

I shared very little with my extended family about the acute sense of doom that I was trying to suppress. They didn’t get why we were moving two little kids all over the place in short succession or why two hard-earned and expensive degrees weren’t leading to an easier life in any way, shape, or form. They had long assumed I’d get a job close to home when I finished, not realizing that most academics can’t simply work in the schools -or even in the cities and states - they wish to.

To make sense of the academic job market, it helps to think of it as a tree. Graduate programs are situated upon higher and lower branches according to their prestige, which itself is determined by the alma maters and research activities of individual faculty members. When you graduate and hop off your branch, you can only fall down. Depending on your discipline, you might begin your freefall within a market that has a 2:1 ratio of job seekers to open positions (e.g. sociology) or it might be more like 5:1 (history). (Or maybe you get a completely made-up interdisciplinary degree, like a “Doctorate of Lifecourse Development,” in which case there is absolutely no market.) While there really aren’t any “sellers’ markets” in the social sciences and humanities, the particulars of your descent are also determined by whether and how well you publish in graduate school.

For a person like me, the academic job market is overrun with identical, good but not great, new PhDs and more than enough really excellent ones to fill the most coveted positions. Coming from a solid but not highly prestigious program, I would have needed to have an article or two in a decent journal, maybe even with a well known co-author, in order to be considered for a job at a main campus of an average state university system. Instead, when I started my visiting position a month after graduation, I shared in common with a slight majority of new PhDs at the time that I had yet to publish anything.

I was of absolutely no interest to big universities whose faculty salaries are supported by state budgets and research grants, so I looked further down the tree where my resume was more appealing. Hanging around the middle branches are tenure-track posts at small public universities, regional private schools, and community colleges.

These positions tend to emphasize the instruction of undergraduates over publishing incessantly, and their income ceilings are much lower. Salaries are particularly low in regional private schools because their operations rely entirely on donors and the tuition dollars of an ever-declining student body. The average 2,000 student liberal arts college, with its $50,000 price tag and prestige confined to a 200 mile radius, is struggling to stay afloat, and their faculty feel it in their paychecks.

By winter break of my visiting year, with a forthcoming publication and a visiting position on my C.V., my odds looked better, and my best case scenario was a job on a small public campus. These jobs start low too but benefit from routine pay increases that are set by lawmakers who would be shortchanging themselves if yearly raises didn’t at least keep up with inflation. They are also home to me. I attended such an institution as an undergraduate and loved teaching in this setting as a grad student and visiting professor. In the end, I succeeded in neither landing a secure public gig nor returning to my home state and the family support that might have helped us get on our feet. What I found instead was a position in the private sector 450 miles from anyone I knew.

As employers, small private institutions are selective in their own ways, preferring applicants with strong teaching backgrounds that contribute to their superior instructional reputations. But they pay terribly, and their faculty tend to have one of two orientations to their employment as a result. They either prefer to work in these schools and have other resources that allow them to accommodate a tiny salary (i.e. generational wealth and/or a partner with a serious paycheck) or else they lack better options. Both groups contain a good number of big shots, including a lot of alumni in the first contingent and victims of extremely soft humanities markets in the second.

Contrary to my every sociological instinct, I did not approach these observations systematically in the beginning. In an effort to avoid a complete mental breakdown, I refused to focus too much on what made me different from colleagues who were thriving. Not noticing that my favorite coworker and his wife seemed to have trust funds until I had been a regular dinner guest in their home for two years was a self preservation strategy. So was dodging send-offs for disgruntled colleagues with whom I had far more in common.

In spite of my best efforts to ignore reality, my money woes fully took over by the end of my first year. Rather than focusing on the scholarly activities that would keep me marketable pre-tenure, I pursued as many summer courses and other paid opportunities as I could. When low enrollment threatened summer school earnings, I spent the next year planning a study abroad seminar that only six students ultimately signed up for, taking home less than $1,500 for a month spent away from my kids and countless hours of planning and promotion.

I became resentful of the pressure that my ex’s underemployment placed on me and envious of the time he spent with our children. It had never been our plan to divide responsibilities unevenly, yet he clung to an absurd narrative of having given up his own bright future to support my career. We separated before we had been in town three years.

Once I knew the terrible truth about academic employment and found myself in the company of others who did too, both at my college and in a couple of online support groups that showed me that the public school set aren’t always doing a whole lot better, I still never encountered a story like mine reflected in a place where it might do someone some good. I hope my account helps others achieve better outcomes, but I refuse to believe the best solution to a widespread structural problem is telling people who don’t come from wealth, including my own children, to leave the intellectual pursuits to the rich kids.

The onus of disaster prevention should not fall to students or job seekers - or even to professors who might now wonder if they should pry into the personal finances of their grad students. When institutions conspire to provide employment “opportunities” where the upfront costs of getting into business are impossible to repay with industry salaries alone and the number one financier of this scheme appears, at least according to its own repayment notices, completely aware that the math doesn’t work - that is a scam, not a personal shortcoming or a failure of mentorship.

The solution is systemic change, and the first step is rightsizing the graduate landscape. Too many programs simply should not be offering terminal degrees, and the U.S. Department of Education has already proven its abilities to identify which ones. Using the same logic it has applied to fraudulent for-profit programs when extending complete loan forgiveness to students who were promised opportunities that did not exist, it could identify underperforming graduate programs as well.

If degree conferment does not result in relevant full-time employment for a majority of graduates who are actively seeking it within a few years, that program should not be eligible for public dollars, including the Stafford loans that individual borrowers bring to them. Contingencies on public funding are what make Title IX and other educational policies enforceable even in private schools, and they should operate in the same way to prevent students from obtaining worthless graduate degrees.

For the programs that remain, strict transparency needs to replace an overreliance on advising. Programs have at their disposal the numbers that prospective students, and anyone else affected by their choices, truly need to make informed decisions. Graduate programs should be required to publish, according to a standard formula that enables fair comparisons, their attrition rates, average time frames for degree completion, and rates of tenure-track job placement - including the types of institutions in which graduates are finding work and the median early and mid-career salaries typical of each. Prospective grad students should submit an affidavit affirming their understanding of these statistics when they apply.

Rightsizing and transparency will do a lot to fix the pipeline issues that allow higher ed to run on low wages and adjunct labor, but another reckoning must take place in colleges and universities that struggle to stay afloat year after year amidst declining enrollment. An industry’s wages should reflect the true cost of its human capital - a simple measure that any employer can use to decide if it can truly afford to be in business. At a minimum, this means fulfilling the reasonable expectation - reiterated in letters like the one I received from the Department of Education itself - that a worker’s monetary investment in requisite credentials be recoupable within ten years.

At the sub-2,000-student liberal arts college that I called home for six years, the only people who could accommodate their wages without falling deeper into debt relied on some other benefactor to finance their degrees and their lifestyles, making their paychecks more honoraria than salary. Accordingly, I no longer view these little colleges as employers so much as humble sponsors of America’s last true aristocratic pastime - knowing things that could liberate people who can’t afford to learn them. The effect of this persistent upholding of privilege and damning of all others is the declining relevance of the liberal arts and the disappearing potential of its civic promises.

There are people who might say that I shouldn’t have gone to graduate school when I already had adult responsibilities not associated with what has traditionally been a prolonged adolescence for smart rich kids. And it is becoming increasingly common for conservatives to answer the student loan crisis with the stance that only those whose parents can spot them should enroll in certain programs. It’s advice I’d encourage anyone to modify to their particular goals and circumstances and at the same time fodder for terribly unjust policymaking. Not only does this mindset contribute to academia’s already serious problems with elitism, but we simply should not be ok with an entire industry routinely sentencing workers to a lifetime of debt over something like a divorce.

I can also imagine critics, maybe even professors with posts nearer the top of the tree, who would say that what I encountered was a result of my poor scholarship or preparation. But my outcomes were squarely in line with what other graduates of my program found from the mid-2010s onward, usually after spending several more years in school. And at the small private school where I landed, I worked alongside colleagues who were on the whole smarter than me, harder working, more pedigreed, and more accomplished. While some chose to work where we did, more would have left for a fair salary. Each time a colleague graduated to something better, we regarded them with admiration. But more often, when we said goodbye, we were parting ways with a talented friend who could no longer afford to do the work that they loved.