Tuesday, June 3, 2008
The Graduate
Heres's a picture that sums up the past weekend. My "little" brother graduated from college. We were all so proud! He's pictured here with mom and dad. I made it to MN for only two nights (since I'm saving vacation for later in the summer too) so it was a whirlwind but wonderful trip. Stay tuned, more thoughts and pictures to come...
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2 comments:
Wow, looks like a great weekend, Lissa! So glad you got to go, even if it was rushed.
Good that your brother got a job right away. It does make you wonder about we artsy grad students and our less-than-practical degrees. I was reading a pessimistic assessment of graduate programs in the last 20 years that said that the number of PhDs granted admission to a PhD program has nothing to do with what the academic market can support, and everything to do with universities securing cheap teaching labor for themselves in order to support the tenured salaries of older faculty.
Currently, the number of admissions to graduate school keeps going up across the board, but given that only about half find work in academia (again - sorry for the gloom and doom) I wonder if there is a point at which the applications will fall off. It would serve the universities right with their bloated upper-echelon salaries, combined with increasing enrollment and class size pressure, etc.
I wonder if, just as with the "correction" to the housing market (which is very painful for many Americans) whether there will be graduate education "correction" whereby universities have to seriously restructure themselves if applications to M.A. and Ph.D programs start to go down.
I guess I feel that being here is not "worth it" financially - probably all of us could make more money if we weren't here. (Though some of us might kill ourselves with the dreariness of what we ended up doing in the "real world"...) But I know that I'm mostly here for the knowledge and thinking skills... really I feel it's a giant privilege to devote myself to the arts and get any money for it.
Sorry for a heavy-handed response to your feel-good post. Welcome back!
Thanks Sarah, it was a really fun weekend. Employment options for non-business folks are depressing. I am just glad my brother doesn't have to endure what I did.
I do feel like you are all privileged to be studying such specialized things that you are interested in. And so far so good, all the Ph.D.'s have gotten positions!
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