Sometimes women choose to postpone their academic careers until after they start a family. Some of my best friends have had success doing that. It's not necessarily a bad life choice.
You know what can be a bad life choice? Trying to get through grad school, and then finding a job, and then getting through tenure, all while your biological clock is ticking, ticking, ticking, waiting for that day when you can settled down and have kids, a day that in the end may never come.
But as a single mom or dad? I can see doing grad school on my own or maybe with a kid and the support of a partner, but not with a kid and no supporting partner.
Life comes at you and you have to deal with it. However I can say CS grad school was really hard just with me. I don't know how I would have handled a kid. We should support each other in life whenever possible.
My Postdoc advisor at Berkeley was a single mom raising 3 kids as a grad student at UCSC. It definitely wasn't easy, but she lived in Faculty/Student Housing (subsidized) and managed to make it work (later, she worked on the industrial version of the human genome project and eventually become a prof at Berkeley).
This was in mid-90s, at a time when Santa Cruz was already getting expensive (the story in the article is nothing new!)
I remember living in a house in Santa Cruz in '93 and seeing how much the owners paid for it- $250K, which seemed absurd (houses where I grew up were $100K). Now that house would sell for $1.5M.
Seriously? I did my post-graduate in my late 30s and it was a stellar move. Some of the most brilliant people I know were just busy doing other things and having families before they knew what they wanted to focus their post-grad studies on. I am strongly in favour of returning to academic life at any stage of a person's career, especially when the study is in the field you are already working in as it elevates you to a new level of expertise.
Doing an anthropology Ph.D. is not bettering yourself through education. It is extremely costly consumption, taking six to ten years of your life that you could be earning real money and developing skills that would help you in your post academic career. Maybe it would be worthwhile if there was at least a 90%+ chance of a job with tenure at the end of it. But there isn't. Most people who start an anthropology Ph.D. drop out. Over three quarters of those who graduate with Ph.D.s never get a tenure track job[1], i.e. they never spend a single day doing what they trained to do.
Doing a Ph.D. in Anthropology is for people with parents or spouses willing to support them or who have independent means. It is not for people who will be even slightly put out financially if they don't get a job afterwards.
To be honest this rings pretty true. My wife studied anthropology and it was remarkable that _every single one_ of the people she knew working in the field were either desperate starving debt-ridden recent grads who hadn't given up yet, or people with rich partners or parents who could fund their hobby.
Hell, I ended up supporting her through her master's but we finally had a good "forcing us to stay in a high COL area so you can make $28,000 a year at a job with no security is not helping the family" chat.
Well she's sharp enough to realize it, it was fine to be honest. One of the problems is that full-time museum jobs tend to be in the middle of expensive cities.
It wasn't me just saying "you need to quit", it was "we have things we want to do with our lives and we can't do them if we're both working just to pay for housing in the middle of an expensive city". We knew we wanted kids ands definitely did _not_ want the kind of mortgage where it dictates what you can do with your life, and when you look at the cost of childcare, or imagine yourself saying "we'll I'd like to have a stab at starting my own business but with a $5000 a month mortgage payment it's just not practical", you realize that if you're not careful it's really easy to build a life for yourself where you _have_ to make tons of money.
I do all right, but I'm not in the extremely high income brackets a lot of people on this site seem to be in. So I got a remote job, we moved to the country, and we had a couple kids. The house is paid off (no rent, no mortgage - we emigrated too, which helped). There are definitely downsides but avoiding the housing debt trap has had a lot of upsides.
> Over three quarters of those who graduate with Ph.D.s never get a tenure track job[1], i.e. they never spend a single day doing what they trained to do.
Doing a PhD isn't training to get a tenure track job, and going into industry or teaching or whatever else you want in life is not a failure.
> Doing a Ph.D. in Anthropology is for people with parents or spouses willing to support them or who have independent means.
Yeah, all these millionaires are lining up to work in anthropology between trips on their yachts.
Do you not value studying where we've come from at all?
> Doing a PhD isn't training to get a tenure track job, and going into industry or teaching or whatever else you want in life is not a failure.
Would you say the equivalent to someone who spends six years trying to break into acting and gives up after that with very little to show for it? An Anthro Ph.D. is necessary for teaching Anthro. There are a very small number of other jobs in "industry" for which having one would be helpful but most of the people with those jobs got them through on the job training, not spending 4-10% of their lives studying. And a Ph.D. will not help you get a teaching job any more than a B.A. will.
You may not think that doing something other than academia after a Ph.D. is failure but career academics disagree and if you're doing a Ph.D. you're going to be surrounded by career academics for four years.
Doing a Ph.D. in Anthropology is like spending six years of your life trying to break into acting, or trying to go pro as a video gamer. Almost everyone will fail to get what they wanted after expending enormous time and effort to do so.
I am currently studying myself. I don't value studying and I despise credentialism. I value learning. I don't see why people should be lied to about there being jobs when they don't exist. I don't support pyramid schemes. I don't think encouraging people to do something as damaging to their mental health as doing a Ph.D. in Anthro is moral when the cost is so high and the chance of a good outcome is negligible.
This online community is filled with perochial assholes. Studying the origins of human assholes might one day help us deal with the asshole in us, or at least the asshole in the other.
For instance, does confronting asshole behavior diminish or enflame the behavior.
> they never spend a single day doing what they trained to do
They are trained to independently do research, i.e. manage their work, learn new skills, discipline to work on an enormous multiyear project etc. . There is a reason consulting companies value a PhD highly even if it is in reindeer studies (I think it was BCG who always points to this example and a pianist).
A tenure-track job is by far not the only and not even the main job this qualifies you for.
> Doing an anthropology Ph.D. is not bettering yourself through education.
It is bettering themselves in the sense that you (on average) become a better, more developed person thanks to it. However, I agree that it's not helping your job prospects and bettering yourself is higher on Maslow's hierarchy than securing food and shelter (through job) for you and the child.
Anthropology PhD's aren't training their mind. Much less so than people who are starting their first job in sales. They're just studying man. It's very interesting, I'm sure, but as a matter of self-betterment, utterly replaceable.
In fact, anthropology PhD's don't seem any better than non-PhD's to me. They're about the same as other people their age, maybe worse. This is with a sample size of one.
On the other hand, if you've got a scratch handicap, you are better than me. I played with a +3 handicap once (better than scratch). Never have I seen something more beautiful. And scratch golfers must have a much better trained mind than some median anthropology PhD, or they wouldn't be able to hit the ball so consistently.
"Bettering yourself through education" in a field such as anthropology is (or at least can be) great and enriching experience but unless you've got some research grant paying you an appropriate salary as an 'apprentice researcher' it is pretty much an expensive luxury, not an investment. So if you can afford it and think that this will make you happy, by all means, more power to you, but if you can't afford to spend these years doing self-fulfillment instead of working on something that people are willing to pay for, then you should rather pick something else; the world already has more qualified anthropologists than there's available funding for them to do research.
If you think in terms of "what kind of society would I like to live in" rather than "what do I estimate that this person deserves in our current society" then it becomes a lot easier to see why they're striking.
right now my tax dollars already seem to be going towards supporting universities who then turn around and not only waive tuition for grad/phd students, but actually pay them a substantial fraction of my salary to go to school and get a higher degree than I hold. and these students want even more money.
obviously I can see why they are striking (I also want more money), but why would I want even more of this?
I totally get where you're coming from, and from the perspective of "I'm busting my gut so that these people can loaf about reading books" it makes a lot of sense.
The other perspective is "I'd prefer to live in a society where people feel comfortable taking time out to educate themselves and contribute to human knowledge". We live in a social contract whereby the state funds people in higher education. It feeds into both practical research and aids the higher goal of progressing knowledge. Maybe these things aren't very important to you, but I think enough people find them important (or not enough find them distasteful) that this is the way things have evolved to be.
Besides, what actual fraction of your tax is going towards PhD students specifically? would be interesting to know the average figure.
There are limits to what the state can and should fund individuals which chose this path. Those choosing to take time out to educate themselves and contribute to human knowledge should consider those limits and their own person financial situation when choosing a graduate program. Those now striking could have chosen to pursue their studies at a school where the cost of living was lower and the combination of state contributed funds and their own personal finances were a better match.
There are limits of course, but I wouldn't have thought you're getting near to them yet when it comes to graduate funding in a strong economy like the US. In the UK it's common for graduate stipends at London universities to be significantly higher to take the cost of living into account. Even the minimum wage is higher for jobs in London.
30-year olds should not be starting anthro PhDs in almost any circumstances.
Many grad students and adjuncts have made and are making bad life choices: https://jakeseliger.com/2016/02/25/universities-treat-adjunc...