Over at Longreads, University of Maine tenure track professor Josh Roiland admits to selling plasma for money multiple times last summer. He uses this experience to propose that a career in academia comes at a high cost, and that pursuing it racks up often insurmountable debt for PhDs.
“I have more than $200,000 in student loans and $46,000 in credit card debt,” Roiland says, after summarizing his experiences at the BPL Plasma Center in Lewiston, Maine. “My annual salary translates to a little more than $3,000 in monthly take-home pay,” and his regular expenses include “$800 a month in rent, $1,100 in credit card bills (paying only the monthly minimums), $350 in student loans, and [a] $285 a month car payment.”
The student loans and credit card debt piled up during the course of his undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral studies, and increased when he was finally out of school and looking for a tenure-track job. Three years into his search, he was hired as a visiting professor at the University of Notre Dame, and worked so hard in pursuit of tenure that his marriage fell apart. When he didn’t get tenure, Roiland says he “faced the sudden reality of all the ways that I had mortgaged my future for some elusive—and illusory—present.”
Roiland’s story is not unique. In a 2014 report titled “Doctorate Recipients from U.S. Universities,” the National Science Foundation reported that 35 percent of humanities PhDs have have more than $30,000 in student debt, and 17 percent have more than $70,000. Tenure-track jobs aren’t easy to find, and they aren’t always lucrative; according to the NSR’s report, the median salary of humanities PhDs in academia is $55,000. That’s respectable until you consider the expense of getting there, as noted above.
After reading all that, the fact that one of Roiland’s professors told him “if there’s anything worth going big-time in debt for, it’s education” seems almost cruel.
—RealClearLife Staff
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