“I was so upset and disappointed in myself because growing up, I was told that if I get an education, if I go to college, then I’ll be successful,” Santos told Business Insider—and she’s not the first Gen Zer to complain about feeling tricked into pursuing further education.
Just last month, 27-year-old Robbie Scott similarly went viral on TikTok for insisting that Gen Z isn’t any less willing to work than generations before. Instead, he said, they are “getting angry and entitled and whiny” about the prospect of having to work hard for the rest of their adult life, only to “get nothing in return.”
Plus the environment is full of people with an incentive to lie to you or engage in wishful thinking to validate their career choices.
In undergrad my profs would regularly distribute all this literature about cool jobs you could get in history. I always planned to go for a PhD so I knew those other things weren't actually that realistic and teaching was your best shot but a lot of my classmates didn't know.
Of course after getting my MA abroad I realized that nobody in the states is gonna get paid to teach about obscure history when the Humanities are dying wholesale. No one told me that they're not hiring professors anymore except as adjuncts. I was lucky to get a full ride and not have debt but to actually have a career in history I would have had to live abroad forever.
No one in the dying field has any incentive to tell you the field is dying.
Every time a promising student tells me they're thinking about pursuing a PhD in philosophy, I do everything in my power to convince them to change their mind. Unless you're simultaneously incredibly lucky and among the very best in your field, you almost certainly will get stuck in adjunct hell forever. Capitalism has almost completely hollowed out higher education.
Yeah, I have family that ask sometimes when I'm going to get into being a professor, they don't seen to understand that's not a thing anymore. I make more doing manual labor I only needed a GED for than I would make teaching in a university.
To a certain kind of liberal the idea that you can't meritocracy your way into a job you find fulfilling is genuinely impossible to digest.
The only time you should pursue a PhD with the intention of becoming a professor is if you literally cannot see yourself being happy doing anything else for a living. Even then, you have to realize that it's highly likely that you're going to spend years to decades of your young adult life working in terrible conditions for very low pay. If you literally can't see yourself happy unless you're teaching philosophy (or whatever) maybe that's ok, but nobody should go into this thinking that they're going to come out with a tenure track job offer at the end.
heh someone's never heard of youtube
Nah you don't need a history degree for that. Just a degree in plagiarizing Wikipedia.
They said "have a career in history" not "have a need for a degree" tho