Welcome to the American Dream!
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I feel the same way.
I did community college instead of my last year of high school and my first two years of college. My grades were horrible as I didnāt care, was chasing girls, learning to drink, etc. By the time I barely got into a four year school as a transfer, I then did well and graduated cum laude. I would have been better served by two years in the military and then college. Of course, I probably would have been in the first Gulf War then too. I didnāt learn to focus until I was 20 to 22.
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And a PhD isā¦ the newā¦ er, postdoc? Wait.
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I understand that, but what if they didnāt WANT to pursue a trade? What if they wanted an English or philosophy degree?
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My argument about that is do we really want the people producing our knowledge to only be from the upper classes? Thatās going to get you a very skewed base of knowledge, I think.
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This is a side rant, but we should do away with adjuncting altogether. Itās highly exploitative. Not everyone has to be on a tenure track, but fill those teaching positions with full time employees with benefits, not poorly paid, desperate, angry people under a mountain of debt.
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Or the whole publish or perish thing. When I took a semester as well as summer classes at a community college I found that a lot of teachers there were specifically there to not be always publishing/researching/etc and actually wanted to teach first. They were a lot better than the TAs I got for the same level classes in regular college.
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I think itās, āthe new PhD is a second PhDā?
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Yes. I think thatās a fine trade off. Make it something like a couple of journal articles. Donāt punish people who want to teach over research.
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Iām supposed to get a second PHD!?!?
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The question is, will the job market want them then?
Iām supposed to get a second PHD!?!?
Yes, didnāt you get the email?
And if youāre hoping to get on the ever-accelerating tenure treadmill, TWO books too.
Chin up!
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You thought āPiled Higher and Deeperā was supposed to be a joke?
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As long as you need to produce knowledge and better understand the world, then yes. Besides, the market shouldnāt arbitrate all things. Education is an example where letting the market deal with it has proven a terrible idea, more often than not. Iāll gladly trade some of my paycheck to know that all children and young adults in my community are receiving a good education in all fields, not just in trades.
And outside of education/academia, a historian, for example, can be useful in a number of capacities - city planning, public museums, public historians, archivists, preservationists, even corporate historians/archivists. Additionally, historians sometimes go into writing fields (journalist, editing for a publishing house, etc).
Again, in my field, writing a dissertation shows more than āI know my topicā, it shows you have project management skills, can work independently, and know how to process and sythesize large amounts of information. These are not useless skills by any stretch of the imagination.
Yes, @shaddack, I am not a completely useless human being. 
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School counselors are paid by the school. The schoolās success is measured by the proportion of its students which go on to college. Get the picture?
I definitely think so. I work at an institution where adjuncts are about 70% of the faculty. They fight tooth and nail for the limited full time positions and work at multiple institutions to patch together a living. It keeps costs down for the school, but adds a chaotic and patchwork experience for students. A lot of adjuncts donāt know a lot about the institution itself and only teach online so theyāre even more disconnected from the school they so rarely visit in person.
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A young person considering college is going to get a lot of advice, from high school guidance counselors to college admission representatives to financial aid advisors. In most cases those people will all be pushing the same message: āYou need to go to college, and you should take out loans to pay for it if necessary.ā Itās hard to blame a teenager for believing them.
Kids today arenāt lazier or less hard-working or more naive than their predecessors, but the rules of the game have changed for the benefit of the people handing out loans and the detriment of the people taking them. Itās basically the same kind of situation that created the subprime mortgage lending crisis.
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Thereās a wall in my office where Iāve nailed a collection of ears from the people I had to defeat in a cage match to get my current gig. It helps keep the students from getting too pushy during office hours.
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Thatās probably because youāre not a sociopath working in Wall Street.
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Itās certainly another example of the US government inserting a wholly pointless middle-man into what should be a simple government program so that my tax dollars can be hoovered up by worthless sociopathic grifters. Speaking of surplus human beingsā¦
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