3.09.2011

Pondering Ph.D.?

From Inside Higher Ed, in support of getting a PhD...pretty funny article:
To get at the smugness factor we have to reframe the income question. It is true, as the Economist clucks, that people who earn doctorates rarely see their earnings potential increase enough to offset the cost of the degree. But no research has as yet adjusted the data on non-doctorate earnings to account for the amount of income people without doctorates ("nondocs") devote to generating the same level of self-satisfaction that the Ph.D.-holder comes by as a matter of course. She who holds a doctorate might look with envy upon her nondoc neighbor with the car that has working power windows. After all, the doctorate’s car has plastic sheeting duct-taped to the door frame (thanks, $24,000-per-year postdoc!). But that nondoc neighbor has spent some incomprehensible sum — perhaps as much as $20,000 — to buy a car in search of self-approbation. His vehicle is an artificial attempt to show he deserves a full life. So is his seasonally appropriate coat and balanced diet.

Meanwhile, the person with a doctorate need not build such psychological campfires against the cold darkness of the universe — we are self-warming, self-justifying creatures. Nondocs see burning in us what they will forever struggle and fail to purchase — the blaze of smugness. One may be poor (or at best shabby-genteel middle class), but there is a P-h-bleepin’-D after the name, a distinction that owning a home espresso machine can’t touch. The way to get at this issue, data-wise, is to consider all the things a Ph.D. will never have in relation to the reasons nondocs get those very items (and it is mostly items, like beds that aren’t futons and those flat TVs I keep seeing on "The Big Bang Theory"). The consensus seems to be that the master's degree is worth something, but that the doctorate is not a reasonable investment. That consensus counts the wrong beans. 
I don’t spend much time on The Outside, but I meet nondocs in the grocery, and at church, and at unavoidable family gatherings, and I see them struggle to achieve the smug. So much alcohol, so much philandering, so much striving for promotion to V.P., attachment to sports teams and political parties, time lavished on soup kitchens and animal shelters, on raising kids and caring for the aged, so much windsurfing and cross-training … so many airy castles designed to prove that there are good lives to be lived without that ne plus ultra of credentials. We were acquainted with those people before we went to graduate school. As Bob Dylan (honorary doctorate, Princeton) put it, "All those people we used to know /they’re an illusion to me now." The nondoc trades thousands of dollars and hours for an uncertain shot at self-satisfaction. The person with a Ph.D. has a lifetime supply.
Needless to say, I don't have big Ph.D. plans...

No comments:

Post a Comment