Message-Id: <3.0.3.32.19971007215305.008a9b50@email.rci.rutgers.edu>
Date: Tue, 07 Oct 1997 21:53:05 -0400
To: socgrad@csf.colorado.edu
From: wayne brekhus <brekhus@rci.rutgers.edu>
Subject: The cognitariat (new overeducated underclass)
In-Reply-To: <971007.104247.EDT.DAVIDSON@UConnVM.UConn.Edu>
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I encourage people to pick up the latest copy of SPIN and read this article
on the "new overeducated underclass" or the "cognitariat" as I've heard
us/them called elsewhere.  The article is quite well written, has some
compelling anecdotal tales (e.g. a Berkeley History PH.D. now with a U of
California book contract who has been teaching high school for three years
while on the job market hoping for something better to come along), and
addresses additional issues (i.e. the virtual job market suicide of being
"too creative," the lack of concern among those already established to do
anything about the problem, affirmative action etc.) not discussed in the
review. The actual title is "Sucker Ph.D's" and primarily deals with
History Ph.D's who have it even worse than us folks in the social sciences.


Wayne Brekhus
Rutgers University
brekhus@rci.rutgers.edu 


At 10:42 AM 10/7/97 EDT, you wrote:
>
>
>----------------------------Original message----------------------------
>Date: Sun, 5 Oct 1997 14:28:03 -0700 (PDT)
>From: owner-doc-talk@quake.net
>To: doc-talk@asgs.org
>Subject: doc-talk CHE Chronicles Grad Woes
>
>===================================================================
>                        DOC-TALK
>===================================================================
>
>            On Tue, 30 Sep 97 The Chronicle of Higher
>            Education reported a review of an article in
>            the September issue of Spin Magazine,
>            entitled, "Meet the New OverEducated
>            Underclass." We pass it along FYI--rdt
>            =========================================
>
>
>Graduate school, once contemplated by nearly every idealistic
>undergraduate, now has become "an invitation to purgatory,"
>writes Eric Weisbard, one of the magazine's senior writers. More
>than 40,000 students will receive their doctorates this year.
>Few have illusions about what awaits them: a handful of good
>jobs, each sought by hundreds of applicants; university presses
>that are increasingly unwilling to publish the academic books
>needed to gain tenure; and protracted separations from loved
>ones, the author says. Mr. Weisbard writes that what galls
>today's unemployed is that they were encouraged to enter
>graduate school, amid forecasts of an expected wave of faculty
>retirements beginning in the mid-1990s. Instead, universities
>have chosen to replace retiring professors with a cadre of
>graduate instructors, who work cheap, and often with no
>benefits. Mr. Weisbard concludes that the old professorial
>apprenticeship has become "a way to cloak the creation of an
>academic underclass."  (The magazine can be found at
>newsstands.)
>
>===================================================================
>DOC-TALK SPONSORED BY THE ASSOC FOR SUPPORT OF GRADUATE STUDENTS
>===================================================================
>
>