Like Dr. Kane, I am a retired (emeritus) professor now approaching the ripe old age of 80. After working for a number of years in non academic settings, I was prompted to consider a PhD by one of my M.A. advisors. It wasn't just any old PhD program, though, it was a very specific one under two spectacular advisors (a husband and wife pair). My M.A. advisor knew me and felt that this program, in particular, was one I should consider. She felt it was a "fit" for me and it was.
I subsequently entered the program. My time as a doctoral student and the years thereafter when I worked on "soft money" as a research associate in a grant funded research center that my advisors had founded were some of the very best years of my life. My advisors/center co-directors expected the highest level of rigor from everything we did, but we celebrated successes and staff milestones, both personal and professional, on a weekly basis. We were supportive of each other as we knew there was plenty of meaningful work and plenty of "credit" to go around. I authored a textbook chapter, for example, in my first year as a doctoral student, gave presentations at national/international conferences and published numerous tier one journal articles in subsequent years. I loved working as part of this team and became life-long friends with my advisors and fellow staffers. In short, I experienced the very best academia had to offer.
As long as I stayed at this research center at this R1 university, my advisors shielded me from the childish pettiness that I experienced when I left for a tenure track faculty position at a smaller non-Phd granting state university.
Why did I leave? I asked myself that very question for some years after discovering the pitfalls, Dr Kane clearly outlines in his message. In the first years I found myself pouring over the Chronicle of Higher Education in search of other positions that would have been a better fit for me. I left the R1 and stayed for 20+ years at the second university for largely practical reasons. I had two little girls and needed both a good benefit package and a tenure track position with a life long retirement plan. Most importantly I wanted time with my young daughters, time I simply would not have had, had I stayed at the R1. A 40 hour work week simply did not then and does not today exist. So there were the trade offs....I was keenly aware that I had committed to a position that was for me an academic dead end.
As my youngest daughter is now in a STEM Ph.D. program at a R1 institution, Dr. Kane's piece is especially meaningful. She currently has two wonderful advisors and is living the optimal life, the same sort of life I led as a doctoral student.
I concur, though, with everything Dr. Kane mentions and would advise prospective doctoral students the same way I am advising my own daughter. Be aware that a Ph.D. is but a means to an end, not the end itself. Know that if you are lucky enough to find a supportive yet intellectually stimulating academic position with advisors who treat you as a person, this situation may remain constant for a number of years. Don't, though, be so naive as to think it will remain so forever. Think ahead. In this light, "beginning with the end in mind", think "what do I want to accomplish"? From day one, network with other professionals both within and outside of academia who are "heading in your (professional) direction."
Many thanks for your insights and for sharing your extensive professional and personal experiences with the "game" of "PhD-Land" (as I call it) and with higher education in general. Your two daughters are very lucky to have you as their dad, and in particular your youngest daughter pursuing her PhD, who has her own excellent doctoral advisor at home! BTW, congrats on what a successful academic career you had and how much value, credibility and warmth you brought to an R2 campus. In my view, your students received an R1 education at an R2 because of you!
Dr. Kane, this article popped up on my LinkedIn feed and drew me to your Substack. We seem to have similar backgrounds (I am a Counselor Educator of 15 years and specialize in career development and mental health). I really appreciate the practical honesty of this article. The American Counseling Association just published the findings of their decennial workforce survey and found that the average counselor (most are Master's degree level, some PhD) makes 8% less than the national average income (with a 60 credit Master's degree!) while carrying a huge debt load compared to other degree holders. Our universities and professional organizations must, in my opinion, be held more accountable for their complicity/ responsibility in driving students to graduate programs without providing what you do in this article, a balanced and practical analysis of cost and benefits.
One technical observation/ clarification. The citation provided to support the claim that 21% of all faculty are tenure track actually states that 21% are tenured. It is not clear to me whether this statistic includes pre-tenured faculty who are "on the track." Anecdotally, it seems to me that more and more universities hiring for tenure track positions are moving towards Assistant Professor, tenure track jobs versus Associate and Full Professor tenured jobs. The online sector, where I moved during the pandemic, seems to largely have eliminated tenure and rank.
I look forward to reading your other work and hopefully a collegial dialogue. Brian
It's great to hear from you - and thanks for reaching out! And wow, this article has drawn a LOT of interest (all via Gmail, DM, etc., which validates many of my points when you think about it 🙂).
Regarding your comment - great catch so thanks for that. IMHO, note the reference/text I added describe the situation as actually worse than my original comment.
As you can see from my bio, LI, website, etc., I too have extensive experience as a psychologist and have been a career counselor in several of the world's most diverse colleges and universities. And of course, I have been a full prof/and now a recent emeritus so I have been "inside the circus tent" - the future is bleak for higher ed - straight up. The hard part for me is advising students who want badly to be a prof or counselor. It was my grad students who wanted me to write the article. (Related side note: I had a career coaching client who amassed $300K in student loan debt while attending Walden - ugh).
In any case, let's keep the conversation going. Again thanks for reading!
Best,
Steve
PS: Rich Feller and I have been dear friends for 30 years and before he passed, Dick Knowdell and I did some work together "back in the day." It's a small world 🙂
I was just with Rich in Egypt last year and expect to see him at NCDA at the end of the month. I got to know Dick well the last 10 years of his life, particularly through the Asia Pacific Career Development Association as we both attended those annually.
$300k is obscene. Walden struggles like the two other brick & mortar institutions I worked for, all focused on marginalized student populations. The model for serving these pops is too similar to more "elite" universities and thus is not adaptive to the real life experience of precarious working class folk who often do not matriculate from strong educational institutions and have not been educationally raised within that education culture. Outcomes of these problems are stupefying. For example, the average graduation rate for Black students at the Univ of Missouri-St. Louis when I left was the highest it ever had been at 29%. That means 71% of black students, in a city that was 50% black, got the debt of going to college without the asset of a degree. And this "achievement" of 29% was celebrated.
This is why I keep working at marginalized population serving institutions. The potentially positive intentions of the system are not meeting the knowledge and skills of providing education equitably. It is a very complex problem.
Like Dr. Kane, I am a retired (emeritus) professor now approaching the ripe old age of 80. After working for a number of years in non academic settings, I was prompted to consider a PhD by one of my M.A. advisors. It wasn't just any old PhD program, though, it was a very specific one under two spectacular advisors (a husband and wife pair). My M.A. advisor knew me and felt that this program, in particular, was one I should consider. She felt it was a "fit" for me and it was.
I subsequently entered the program. My time as a doctoral student and the years thereafter when I worked on "soft money" as a research associate in a grant funded research center that my advisors had founded were some of the very best years of my life. My advisors/center co-directors expected the highest level of rigor from everything we did, but we celebrated successes and staff milestones, both personal and professional, on a weekly basis. We were supportive of each other as we knew there was plenty of meaningful work and plenty of "credit" to go around. I authored a textbook chapter, for example, in my first year as a doctoral student, gave presentations at national/international conferences and published numerous tier one journal articles in subsequent years. I loved working as part of this team and became life-long friends with my advisors and fellow staffers. In short, I experienced the very best academia had to offer.
As long as I stayed at this research center at this R1 university, my advisors shielded me from the childish pettiness that I experienced when I left for a tenure track faculty position at a smaller non-Phd granting state university.
Why did I leave? I asked myself that very question for some years after discovering the pitfalls, Dr Kane clearly outlines in his message. In the first years I found myself pouring over the Chronicle of Higher Education in search of other positions that would have been a better fit for me. I left the R1 and stayed for 20+ years at the second university for largely practical reasons. I had two little girls and needed both a good benefit package and a tenure track position with a life long retirement plan. Most importantly I wanted time with my young daughters, time I simply would not have had, had I stayed at the R1. A 40 hour work week simply did not then and does not today exist. So there were the trade offs....I was keenly aware that I had committed to a position that was for me an academic dead end.
As my youngest daughter is now in a STEM Ph.D. program at a R1 institution, Dr. Kane's piece is especially meaningful. She currently has two wonderful advisors and is living the optimal life, the same sort of life I led as a doctoral student.
I concur, though, with everything Dr. Kane mentions and would advise prospective doctoral students the same way I am advising my own daughter. Be aware that a Ph.D. is but a means to an end, not the end itself. Know that if you are lucky enough to find a supportive yet intellectually stimulating academic position with advisors who treat you as a person, this situation may remain constant for a number of years. Don't, though, be so naive as to think it will remain so forever. Think ahead. In this light, "beginning with the end in mind", think "what do I want to accomplish"? From day one, network with other professionals both within and outside of academia who are "heading in your (professional) direction."
Dr. Ruef,
Many thanks for your insights and for sharing your extensive professional and personal experiences with the "game" of "PhD-Land" (as I call it) and with higher education in general. Your two daughters are very lucky to have you as their dad, and in particular your youngest daughter pursuing her PhD, who has her own excellent doctoral advisor at home! BTW, congrats on what a successful academic career you had and how much value, credibility and warmth you brought to an R2 campus. In my view, your students received an R1 education at an R2 because of you!
Dr. Kane, this article popped up on my LinkedIn feed and drew me to your Substack. We seem to have similar backgrounds (I am a Counselor Educator of 15 years and specialize in career development and mental health). I really appreciate the practical honesty of this article. The American Counseling Association just published the findings of their decennial workforce survey and found that the average counselor (most are Master's degree level, some PhD) makes 8% less than the national average income (with a 60 credit Master's degree!) while carrying a huge debt load compared to other degree holders. Our universities and professional organizations must, in my opinion, be held more accountable for their complicity/ responsibility in driving students to graduate programs without providing what you do in this article, a balanced and practical analysis of cost and benefits.
One technical observation/ clarification. The citation provided to support the claim that 21% of all faculty are tenure track actually states that 21% are tenured. It is not clear to me whether this statistic includes pre-tenured faculty who are "on the track." Anecdotally, it seems to me that more and more universities hiring for tenure track positions are moving towards Assistant Professor, tenure track jobs versus Associate and Full Professor tenured jobs. The online sector, where I moved during the pandemic, seems to largely have eliminated tenure and rank.
I look forward to reading your other work and hopefully a collegial dialogue. Brian
Hi Brian,
It's great to hear from you - and thanks for reaching out! And wow, this article has drawn a LOT of interest (all via Gmail, DM, etc., which validates many of my points when you think about it 🙂).
Regarding your comment - great catch so thanks for that. IMHO, note the reference/text I added describe the situation as actually worse than my original comment.
As you can see from my bio, LI, website, etc., I too have extensive experience as a psychologist and have been a career counselor in several of the world's most diverse colleges and universities. And of course, I have been a full prof/and now a recent emeritus so I have been "inside the circus tent" - the future is bleak for higher ed - straight up. The hard part for me is advising students who want badly to be a prof or counselor. It was my grad students who wanted me to write the article. (Related side note: I had a career coaching client who amassed $300K in student loan debt while attending Walden - ugh).
In any case, let's keep the conversation going. Again thanks for reading!
Best,
Steve
PS: Rich Feller and I have been dear friends for 30 years and before he passed, Dick Knowdell and I did some work together "back in the day." It's a small world 🙂
I was just with Rich in Egypt last year and expect to see him at NCDA at the end of the month. I got to know Dick well the last 10 years of his life, particularly through the Asia Pacific Career Development Association as we both attended those annually.
$300k is obscene. Walden struggles like the two other brick & mortar institutions I worked for, all focused on marginalized student populations. The model for serving these pops is too similar to more "elite" universities and thus is not adaptive to the real life experience of precarious working class folk who often do not matriculate from strong educational institutions and have not been educationally raised within that education culture. Outcomes of these problems are stupefying. For example, the average graduation rate for Black students at the Univ of Missouri-St. Louis when I left was the highest it ever had been at 29%. That means 71% of black students, in a city that was 50% black, got the debt of going to college without the asset of a degree. And this "achievement" of 29% was celebrated.
This is why I keep working at marginalized population serving institutions. The potentially positive intentions of the system are not meeting the knowledge and skills of providing education equitably. It is a very complex problem.
Best, Brian