"The Ph.D. Now Comes With Food Stamps"

Submitted by David on Thu, 2012-05-10 15:31

That was the title of a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. One thing that's not too surprising reading the article is the list of areas of study of those with Ph.D.s mentioned in the article who are on food stamps:

  • medieval-history
  • humanities
  • English (4x)
  • film studies
  • communications, performing arts, and the humanities

Basically they seem to be more or less jobs whose employment prospects seem largely limited to working within the academic world.

Then there's the note about the composition of the group - "most of whom are women with children" - which seems to be code for not-science-and-engineering. (Amongst female-majority departments it seems fairly reasonable to exclude biology Ph.D.s from the list of the impoverished).

How bad are things for those with graduate degrees?

Last year, one in six people—almost 50 million Americans, or 15 percent of the population—received food stamps. ... Of the 22 million Americans with master's degrees or higher in 2010, about 360,000 were receiving some kind of public assistance

Converting that later line to a percentage works out to 1.6% of graduate degree holders being on something like food stamps, about 1/10 of the rate in the general population.

I'd guess that a lot of the problems are to do with the change in breakdown of college populations over the past few decades:

Over the past 25 years the total number of students in college has increased by about 50 percent. But the number of students graduating with degrees in science, technology, engineering and math (the so-called STEM fields) has remained more or less constant. Moreover, many of today’s STEM graduates are foreign born and are taking their knowledge and skills back to their native countries.

Maybe there is a limit to the number of English professors a country can realistically support? And with college tuition in the states continuing to climb, it might be enough to get potential English majors to reconsider going to college and stop that cycle, thereby resulting in a glut in the market.