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September 07, 2007, 05:31 PM ET
The Labor-Shortage Hoax and the Invisible Hours
Meanwhile, Thomas H. Benton, an associate professor of English at Hope College who writes under a pen name, cautions graduate students to be skeptical about claims of looming labor shortages in his latest Careers column.
Anyone who was in graduate school in the 1990’s recalls the promises that there would be more jobs than Ph.D.‘s, as aging professors retired, he writes. As a result, universities were flooded with graduate students willing work for next to nothing but “the promise of a real job after a few years as a teaching assistant,” Benton writes. And with “all of those potential apprentices around — still believing that more education always meant more opportunities — it turned out there was no need to replace retiring faculty members,” he writes. Problem solved. Goodbye labor shortage, hello labor surplus.
Benton, who completed his Ph.D. in 1999, with no academic job in sight, was lucky enough to eventually land the tenure-track position that he still holds, but he learned a valuable lesson from those days about “the unspoken alliance between labor-shortage predictions and the opportunists of postsecondary education.”
That’s why when students tell him they want to “major in something because of a looming labor shortage,” he tells them, “Sorry, there are no good jobs out there going begging, and there never will be. It is hard to find good work in any field.” And then he sends them to career services. Read more.
And, elsewhere on Chronicle Careers, Carolyn Foster Segal, an associate professor of English at Cedar Crest College, describes the work professors do when nobody’s watching. To outsiders it may look as though she leads “a life of luxury” — after all, “my four courses combined mean a total of just 12 hours in the classroom,” she writes. But much of her work is performed outside the classroom during what her first department chair called “invisible” time, she explains. Read more.
Categories: Faculty-hiring
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