Here in the US, we prefer to have our lecturers live in their cars, even when they aren’t students. (Which they need because e.g. they’re teaching single classes at multiple universities spread across several hundred miles. Yes, I know teachers who did this.)
I think you misspelled “college football coach.” Oh wait, you said “do well,” not “make obscene salaries,” nevermind.
I’ve been meaning to post this. It won’t be news to you but others will find it an interesting perspective on the current situation for liberal arts grad students.
[tl;dr: as things stand now, don’t.]
PhDs … the work internship you go into debt for!
But the real problem are us overprivileged part timers… We do it by choice and education can be done by anyone, so why are we whinging about not getting a living wage or some sort of job security… /s
Read the article. She was a lecturer. Many PhD students are.
I thought that too, but I also know that “lecturer” has a different meaning in UK higher Ed, so. 
Since there seems to be lots of folks here who have no real understanding of how this stuff works (but they seem to have lots of opinions on what those of us who do “deserve”), a position like that is primarily how people pay for their phd program. You are paid to teach (or sometimes to be a research assistant) on top of what you’re supposed to be doing, which is research and writing of the dissertation. A dissertation is essentially a book length work. Writing a book is actual labor.
For me at least, part of the grad school contract was a clause saying we weren’t allowed to take an outside job. I taught every semester to pay the bills, but the pay was just enough to live on and I wasn’t living anywhere nearly as expensive as London.
The main difference between this story and thousands of others is that she chose to live in a tent rather than go into debt. It would be nice if being paid a better wage was given as a third option
That wasn’t the case with my program, but it was made abundantly clear by the tenured faculty that doing so was frowned upon - even though the phd package was not remotely a living wage.
That SHOULD be the only option.
This is a great read.
I am so grateful that my undergraduate advisor talked me out of pursuing a career in Academia (Classics) and really encouraged me to evaluate why I even wanted to in the first place. She was also brutally honest about the employment landscape post-PhD. I graduated in a bit of a tailspin and it took a few years to figure out what to do with my life, but I feel like I got the better end of the deal.
I don’t think that’s the case if the job isn’t related to academia. And it even can be related to academia as long as the university gets a cut.
Besides, I was talking about whole ass PhDs, not students.
Neither was I. I was at one of those Midwestern US mega universities surrounded by nothing but cornfields and meth, far removed from anything worth spending money on. I didn’t go out much and I cooked my meals at home, and I received a full fellowship and stipend, and it still kinda sucked.
I’m glad. You’re lucky in that far too many of the tenured faculty have been blind to the realities of what it’s actually like out there… They just keep pushing people through and trying to band aid the problem with “job diversity” programs.
I think what’s happened is that the algorithm that decides what the full post is has determined that the actual post is useless fluff that can be ignored and has instead decided that the text of the related article partway down the page is what we’re really interested in.
“Alternative career paths”! 
Just to clarify, from Wikipedia:
Teaching fellows may also sometimes be referred to as lecturers—for example, Exeter named some of that group as education and scholarship lecturers (E & S) to recognise the contribution of teaching, and elevate the titles of teaching fellows to lecturers. Some universities also refer to graduate students or others, who undertake ad-hoc teaching for a department sessional lecturers. Like adjunct professors and sessional lecturers in North America, these non-permanent teaching staff are often very poorly paid (as little as £6000 p.a. in 2011-12). These varying uses of the term lecturer cause confusion for non-UK academics.
Many grad students in the USA take on the most onerous parts of teaching – addressing giant lecture halls, grading endless papers, keeping office hours – without tenure, union representation, or a living wage. If they protest, they’re fired.
That’s pretty much the take of my professional organization - programs for job diversity… My department already had a section for people interested in historic preservation, mind you. I have no idea what things are like now, though, if people in the program are being trained for jobs outside of academia… I was certainly not given any other options in reality.
But it’s their choice, right? After all, people with phds are doing “real” work! /s
The neolibs will never see that because in their view this “historic prosperity” happened because of behavior like theirs. It’s a twisted fantasy (like most neolib ideas) that whatever positive economic conditions exist today surfaced despite constantly being dragged down by the dead weight of safety regulations, campaigns for social justice, the fight for fair wages, etc. ad infinitum. With wider application of neoliberal ideals prosperity will just get better and better. For them, of course, as neoliberalism is basically about supporting the annointed few on the backs of the hoi polloi.
Thank you for the clarification on nomenclature in Engliand, that is helpful. As I said, there definitely needs to be reform about what is expected in return for teaching stipends, but in the end, PhD candidate isn’t a job description.
One is doing actual labor as a phd candidate. It’s work that benefits the university and the field, and ultimately, society in general. It’s ACTUAL work, over and above the work you’re asked to perform as an instructor.
If you don’t pay attention at school, you may end up in an underpaid gig and find yourself living in a tent. /s
Edited to add /s
