(Image credit: rickz)

Per­haps get­ting my hack­les raised on the reg­u­lar about disin­gen­u­ous­ness in  jour­nal­ism reflects poorly on my level of sophis­ti­ca­tion as a reader/consumer. But this recent arti­cle on The Daily Beast (Slate junior in terms of those godaw­ful “provocative” tabloid head­lines) about job woes for Ph.D. hold­ers still makes me sigh and drum my fin­gers impatiently.

Of course a spe­cial­ized market niche will face greater chal­lenges during a sweep­ing eco­nomic melt­down across the coun­try. Things can be dis­turbingly com­pet­i­tive even during the best of times in the aca­d­e­mic job market, espe­cially, as the arti­cle notes, for Ph.D. hold­ers in the human­i­ties. But this isn’t news; plenty of pixels have been pop­u­lated with lamen­ta­tions over the dis­par­ity in supply and demand for higher ed posi­tions. It’s also not news that hold­ers of grad­u­ate degrees in human­i­ties go on to careers in fields loosely related or not at all to the human­i­ties, another rev­e­la­tion we get on page two.

The article’s not really about what the title claims, either, since there’s no eval­u­a­tion of whether or not a GED is actu­ally more valu­able than a Ph.D., unless you take it implic­itly that the Rebekah char­ac­ter of the story lede has decreased the value of her skill set by spend­ing six years writ­ing a dis­ser­ta­tion. No, of course her market value has increased, and after invest­ing the better part of a decade in edu­ca­tion, she knows she’d better stick out the job search more than eight months. Trying to make this a news story has brought out all the rein­force­ments of embell­ish­ment–people with grad­u­ate degrees may find it hard to find jobs for any number of rea­sons, but there’s no reason to think that the intrin­sic value of Ph.D.s has bot­tomed out once and for all. More impor­tantly, there’s no indi­ca­tion that teach­ing as a pro­fes­sion is going the way of the dodo.

So why was this arti­cle written?

There’s a lot of anec­do­tal evi­dence and parad­ing around of giddy num­bers of resumes sent out and paltry num­bers of replies. There’s also a lot of grim sta­tis­ti­cal data show­ing plum­met­ing num­bers of job post­ings on online indus­try mar­ket­places. But wait for it, and you get the money shot, cour­tesy of “a human­i­ties PhD stu­dent and mother of two”:

“Every single aca­d­e­mic, espe­cially in the human­i­ties, has a tinge of buyer’s remorse” about their PhD, she says. “You see your peers in law or busi­ness school make down pay­ments on homes and buy cars and go on vaca­tion. But as a PhD stu­dent, you’re in your 30s, still rent­ing an apart­ment and dri­ving a ’84 Corolla. It’s not cute.”

Ah, for­give me for being so engrossed in your tale of woe that I forgot to cue the showtune-​playing singing saw to heighten its emo­tional freight.

This arti­cle, like so many others about the personal-stories-of-real-Americans-weathering-the-recession-of-2008-2009, is a public pity party about the ice­berg crunch and slow sink­ing of George Bush’s own­er­ship society.

Sim­i­larly, David Sirota at Open­Left points to a New York Times arti­cle in which a Wall Street head­hunter bemoans the harsh new real­ity facing new job searchers from failed banks and invest­ment firms:

“These bonuses are down, and the salaries are not enough for these people. They can’t live on $150 to $180,000, so they haven’t saved any money. They put it on credit lines and at bonus time, they thought they’d pay it off.”

Ahem.

Let’s leave the macro­eco­nomic stuff to the pol­i­cy­mak­ers, and at least for the moment hope that four-​fifths of a tril­lion dol­lars can mas­sage con­sumer con­fi­dence and loosen credit lines over the rest of the year. But we all know that to con­tinue into per­pe­tu­ity, a rad­i­cal par­a­digm shift in the con­sumer spend­ing as GDP model as well as the atti­tude of an easy-​credit soci­ety must needs take place, a shift that will affect the macro­eco­nom­ics of it all but also the glar­ing prob­lems at the level of the indi­vid­ual con­sumer. E.g., the com­plete lack of per­sonal savings.

But the grass-is-greener hand-​wringing about the per­fect lives of MBA grads who have houses, cars and vaca­tions already seems out of touch as unem­ploy­ment num­bers steadily march upward in all seg­ments of the pop­u­la­tion. Good Lord, we might just have to con­de­scend to *gasp* ser­vice indus­try posi­tions, like half of the Amer­i­can pop­u­la­tion. Look for a host of sim­i­lar arti­cles over the next few years shin­ing flash­lights at hereto­fore unmen­tioned seg­ments of the pre­vi­ously priv­i­leged having histri­onic fits when they sud­denly real­ize that life’s not fair, and the econ­omy owes them nothing.

In the mean­time, this human­i­ties PhD stu­dent and father of one, com­fort­ably hiber­nat­ing in a den of guar­an­teed fund­ing (for now, *gulp*), is hun­ker­ing down for a long winter. But he will give the old col­lege try not to get so bent out of shape during that time about the mis­de­meanors of the Fourth Estate. We’re all gonna have to get used to this together, and maybe we need the public sup­port group.