Warm and Fuzzy Statistics

“The average student takes 8.2 years to get a Ph.D.; in education, that figure surpasses 13 years. Fifty percent of students drop out along the way, with dissertations the major stumbling block. At commencement, the typical doctoral holder is 33, an age when peers are well along in their professions, and 12 percent of graduates are saddled with more than $50,000 in debt.”

Pretty picture, isn’t it?

These statistics are quoted by the NYTimes from the National Science Foundation; ordinarily I would check up on the original data, since the NYTimes has proved itself unreliable every single time Sydney and I have bothered to check it out, but these facts are the same ones we have heard throughout graduate school.  This is the point where my parents start to think really hard, “Try not to faint.  Try not to faint.”  But I wanted to offer a few reflections:

1)  Sydney and I attend one of the few institutions in the country that will fund us.  Fully.  Although it’s still true that the researchers on the science side of campus may get something like $10,000 more each year than we do, Cornell has promised us full tuition coverage and a living stipend for five years, as long as we keep up our end of the bargain.  Plus, being married, we can pool our resources and . . . buy lots of books 🙂  Just kidding, but not really.

I applied to a few graduate schools that were well-ranked, but that didn’t offer great funding, and I remember thinking, “Okay, you let me in just to hit me with the fact that you would expect me to live on nothing but an I’m-in-graduate-school high for a year, and then have me teach three classes each term until I graduated while paying me below-poverty-level income?  So much for this being a moment of celebration!”

The funding enables our departments to expect us to graduate in five or six years.  Without that kind of support, I’m not sure how you’re supposed to graduate in a reasonable amount of time, barring those with independent income.  That’s why there’s so much pressure on getting into good grad schools: we need them to have enough prestige to offer us funding while we study.

2)   Full funding aside, it’s important that we teach while we’re here, not simply so that the university doesn’t see us as a financial black hole, but because we need to have teaching experience on our resume to a) prepare us for our future job and b) convince colleges of all kinds that we will be useful to them in addition to our research skills.  Most places that have job openings in this country are very small, undergraduate-oriented colleges that don’t, frankly, care if we can do research.  They need someone who can teach, and teach well.  Without spending some of our time teaching, we would have a resume that would be useful for only about 5 jobs in the country, and for which there are smarter applicants.  I also think it’s important to confront the teaching/researching tug-of-war early in our career so that we can start trying to juggle them now, rather than later in life when the pressure is on to do really important research work.

All of that aside, Sydney and I have each had a classmate drop from the program in their first year here.  I also don’t want to be too smug about success, since the dissertation is the big hurdle and it’s the one part we haven’t done yet.  But I intend to be ready to graduate in five years, barring unexpected health issues and such.  The question then, of course, will be whether we can move on with a job or whether we will need to stick around for a sixth year to take a second shot at the job market.  The numbers from the New York Times don’t scare me because they pale in comparison to the job market hurdle.  But more on that as we get there 🙂

Erin