Joseph Stieb

This post was raw and difficult to write, but I get this question every year and I think honesty is important. Does our country (and the world more generally) need humanistic scholars? I'd argue the answer is yes!

But we can't ask students to spend the next 7 years living within shouting range of the poverty line in high costs towns while delaying life milestones working 80 hour weeks under conditions that induce anxiety/depression at 6 times the rate of the general population...

...all to train for a job that mostly likely does exist! I said this in the post but I also want to reiterate it here: this isn't an overproduction problem (PhDs granted per-year in history have been flat for two decades).

They are also systematically transferring resources away from the humanities, which are inexpensive to teach on a per-student basis, to STEM, which is very expensive to teach on a per-student basis.

The grad school experience needs to be improved in a lot of ways (better mental health resources would be a start) but its all pointless of the jobs it is training for increasingly don't exist - or rather exist in the form of underpaid, overworked adjuncts.