Monday, September 6, 2010

7. Labor demands are increasing.

If academic expectations are dropping, why does it take so long to earn a degree? Part of the explanation has to do with the labor demands that have become a part of the typical graduate student experience. As tuition rates rise, making it increasingly imprudent to go into debt for the sake of earning a graduate degree, it has become increasingly important for graduate students to self-finance their way through graduate school. And as the job market becomes more competitive, it becomes increasingly important for graduate students to be able to demonstrate that they already have ample teaching experience upon graduation.

In order to secure tuition waivers, earn enough money to live modest student lives, and acquire teaching experience, graduate students hold teaching assistantships. These assistantships can include total responsibility for courses (designing classes, designing and grading all assignments, preparing lectures, and teaching up to five days per week, i.e. doing what professors used to do) or being responsible for grading the work submitted by students in large lecture courses taught by professors. Whatever form these assistantships take, they tend to require a great deal of time. Grading 100, 200, or 300 papers multiple times per term is time-consuming, especially for someone trying to be a conscientious evaluator of student work. Add to that the time required to sit in on lectures (if you don’t happen to be giving the lectures yourself) as well. And don’t forget office hours. And answering emails from students. And the occasional make-up exam. Then there are your own classes, assignments, and that little thesis or dissertation that you are supposed to be working on.



6 comments:

  1. ... but who doesn't LOVE teaching?!

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    1. It's not about loving teaching. It's about the labor market. People get accepted into graduate programs because they are needed as low paid teachers. They are promised a path to an academic career but the real reason they are there is because of the teaching needs.

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    2. And the promise is often false.

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  2. And no matter which way you slice it, the structure of incentives in academia privileges publishing and original research way over teaching and student ratings. Begin with the end in mind and you can save yourself a lot of trouble.

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  3. ^Very much so, which is part of the reason it takes so long to finish. You need many publications to get a job, but (especially in the humanities) you need to teach classes to survive. So then when you get to year 6 or 7, your professor says that maybe you should stay in the program a year or so longer so you can get more publications...which you could've been working on in year 2 or 3 if you weren't teaching a 200-person intro comp class by yourself! (And if they were doing their job and teaching it instead of you.)

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