Category: Academia

The Decline of American Liberal Education

LInda Chavez here reports on a study, What does Bowdoin Teach? put out by the National Association of Scholars a few days ago. Chavez:

Bowdoin College is a small private "liberal arts" school in Brunswick, Maine. Its admissions standards are demanding. Bowdoin accepts fewer than one in five who apply (though the school admits about a third of black and other "underrepresented" applicants to satisfy its commitment to "diversity"). The cost of tuition, room, board and fees for the school's roughly 1,800 students is hefty: $56,128 for the 2012-13 academic year, a sum that exceeds the annual income for half of all American households.

[. . .]

Bowdoin requires all freshmen to take a first-year seminar, which is supposed to provide the gateway to the "critical thinking" skills the college purports to value. Among the 35 courses from which students must pick, easily half are either frivolous or, worse, tendentious exercises in identity politics. The titles alone tell the story: "Fan Fiction and Cult Classics," "Beyond Pocahontas: Native American Stereotypes," "Racism," "Fictions of Freedom," "Sexual Life of Colonialism," "Prostitutes in Modern Western Culture" and "Queer Gardens," to name a few. The latter course "examines the work of gay and lesbian gardeners and traces how marginal identities find expression in specific garden spaces." One can only infer that the college deems such knowledge a necessary building block to every student's intellectual development.

[. . .]

The study also looks at the college's implicit promotion of sexual promiscuity and the "hook-up" culture among students, which begins during first-year orientation. A play called "Speak About It," which all incoming students must attend, includes what its authors say are autobiographical sketches from current and former Bowdoin students. The play depicts graphic on-stage sexual encounters between heterosexual and gay couples — complete with simulated orgasms. Paradoxically, the Bowdoin community also seems obsessed with preventing sexual assault, which administrators seem to believe is rampant on campus despite the low incidence of reporting alleged attacks.

If Bowdoin were unique in its abandonment of traditional liberal education, this study might be of no more than passing interest. What the authors found at Bowdoin, however, exists to some degree at many if not most elite colleges and universities. This study deserves widespread dissemination and discussion — first among Bowdoin's alumni, donors and the parents of current and potential students. But anyone interested in the future of higher education in America should take note.

Our colleges and universities shape the next generation of leaders and citizens, for better or worse. And the country's most elite schools will influence disproportionately who we become as a nation and a people in the future. What has happened to Bowdoin College should matter to all of us.

Imagine paying $225,000 or going into debt for such garbage. 

A trifecta of corruption: government, the universities, business.  The federal government makes irresponsible student loans.  The universities respond by  greedily inflating tuitions and fees while ignoring the traditional purposes of the university. Businesses demand bachelor's degrees for jobs high school graduates could do. 

It Takes a B. A. to Find a Job as a File Clerk.

Related: Has College Become a Scam? 

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Subprime College Educations
Bowdoin responds

Has College Become a Scam?

I am afraid it has, for many if not most.  It will depend on your major, of course.  Here is a list of seven institutions at which total annual costs hover around $60,000.  You read that right: annual costs.  What do you get for that $240 K?  It is obvious that you do not get an education in any serious sense of that term.   (It is also obvious that most attendees have no interest at all in an education in that sense.)  Nor do you get what most people (mis)use 'education' to refer to, namely, a ticket to a high-paying job.

I went to a private college, but in my day one got value for money.  I worked part-time, received a California State Scholarship, and borrowed $2,000, a debt that was quickly discharged.   Those were the early days of the federally-insured loan program.  The program was set up with good intentions, but it had a serious unintended consequence: it provided an incentive for administrators to hike costs for no better reason than that naive students were able to pay exorbitant tuitions by floating loans.  Part of what the administrators did with all this excess money was to hire more  useless overpaid administrators.

Talk of a 'scam,' though harsh, is not inaccurate.  There is lot to be said on this topic.  But I've got to get on to other things.  So I hand off to John Stossel.

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Is College a Lousy Investment?

The Abysmally Ignorant Jerry Coyne

Jerry Coyne complains:

Another problem is that scientists like me are intimidated by philosophical jargon, and hence didn’t interrupt the monologues to ask for clarification for fear of looking stupid. I therefore spent a fair amount of time Googling stuff like “epistemology” and “ontology” (I can never get those terms straight since I rarely use them).

This is an amazing confession.  It shows that the man is abysmally ignorant outside his specialty.  He is not wondering about the distinction between de dicto and de re, but about a Philosophy 101 distinction.  It would be as if a philosopher couldn't distinguish between velocity and acceleration, or mass and weight, or a scalar and a vector, or thought that a light-year was a measure of time. 

Despite his ignorance of the simplest distinctions, Coyne is not bashful about spouting off on topics he knows nothing about such as free will.  Lawrence Krauss is another of this scientistic crew.  And Dawkins.  And Hawking and Mlodinow. And . . . .  Their arrogance stands in inverse relation to their ignorance.   A whole generation of culturally-backward and half-educated scientists does not bode well for the future.

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The Academic Job Market in the ‘Sixties

Robert Paul Wolff tells it like it was:

. . . I reflect on the ease and endless rewards of my career, moving from comfortable position to comfortable position, and compare it with the terrible struggles of young academics trying to gain some sort of security and time for their own scholarship in an increasingly hostile job market.  The sixties, when my career was being launched, was a time of explosive growth of higher education in America.  Spurred by the G. I. Bill and the post-war economic boom, and fed by an endless stream of young men avoiding the Viet Nam draft, colleges and universities virtually metastasized.  State universities, which had existed ever since the Land Grant Acts of the 1860's, suddenly sprouted satellite campuses.  State colleges plumped themselves up into universities, and Community Colleges became State Colleges.  There were so many new teaching positions to be filled that in the sixties and seventies graduate students were being offered tenure track positions before they had become
ABD.

BV: I'm  a generation younger than Professor Wolff.  By the time I began applying for jobs at the end of the '70s things had become grim and the gravy days of the '60s were a thing of the past.  But I lucked out and got a tenure track job in '78 right out of graduate  school at the University of Dayton.  Lucky me, I had no other offer.  I later learned that in the '60s there were four philosophy hires in one year at UD, some of them sight unseen: no interview.  One of these gentlemen couldn't even speak English!  And of course the quality of the people hired was relatively low.

It is also worth pointing out that the '60s and early '70s were also a time when what William James in 1903 called the "Ph.D Octopus"  acquired many more tentacled arms.  New graduate programs started up and new philosophy journals as well.  Another Harvard man, Willard van Orman Quine, cast a jaundiced eye on the proliferation of journals in his delightful "Paradoxes of Plenty" in Theories and Things (Harvard UP, 1981):

Certainly, then, new journals were needed: they were needed by authors of articles too poor to be accepted by existing journals.  The journals that were thus called into existence met the need to a degree, but they in turn preserved, curiously, certain minimal standards; and so a need was felt for further journals still, to help to accommodate the double rejects.  The series invites extrapolation and has had it. (196)

At the same time, the Cold War and the Sputnik scare triggered a flood of federal money into universities. Most of it, of course, funded defense-related research or studies of parts of the world that America considered inimical to its interests [Russian Research Institutes, East Asia Programs, language programs of all sorts], but some of the money slopped over into the Humanities, and even into libraries and university presses.  For a time, commercial publishers found that they could not lose money on an academic book, since enough copies would be sold to newly flush university libraries to enable them to break even.  Those were the days when a philosopher willing to sell his soul [and who among us was not?] could get a contract on an outline, a Preface, or just an idea and a title.  The professor introducing me at one speech I gave said, "Professor Wolff joined the Book of the Month Club, but he didn't realize he was supposed to read a book a month.  He thought he was supposed to publish a book a month."  Well, we all thought we were brilliant, of course.

Then the bubble burst.  First the good jobs disappeared.  Then even jobs we would never have deigned to notice started drying up.  Universities adopted the corporate model, and like good, sensible business leaders, started cutting salaries, destroying job security, and reducing decent, hard-working academics to the status of itinerant peddlers.  Today, two-thirds of the people teaching in higher education are contract employees without good benefits or an assured future.  Scientists do pretty well, thanks to federal support for research, but the Humanities and non-defense related Social Sciences languish.  The arts are going the way of high school bands and poetry societies.

The truth is that I fell off the cart onto a nice big dung heap, and waxed fat and happy, as any self-respecting cockroach would.  My career happened to fit neatly into the half century that will, in future generations, be looked back on as the Golden Age of the American University.  There is precious little I can do for those unfortunate enough to come after me.  But at least, I can assure them that their bad luck is not a judgment on the quality of their work.  And, of course, I can write increasingly lavish letters of recommendation in a desperate attempt to launch them into the few remaining decent teaching jobs.  I would have liked to do better by them.  They deserve it.

Is College a Lousy Investment?

This piece by Megan McArdle is required reading.

The role of government in causing the college bubble cannot be gainsaid.

On my view, government is practically necessary.  Anarchism is for adolescents.  Some of what government does is good, some bad.  Governments in the free world defeated the Nazis; communist governments murdered 100 million in the 20th century. (Source: Black Book of Communism.)  Some of what is bad are unintended consequences of programs that were set up with good intentions.  Federally-insured student loans made it possible (or at least easier) for many of us to finance our educations.  (It is of course a debatable point whether it is a legitimate function of government to insure student loans.)  But lack of oversight on the part of the Feds, and the greediness of university administrators coupled with the laziness and prodigality of too many students has led to the education bubble.

What has happened is truly disgusting.  The price of higher education has skyrocketed, increasing out of all proportion to general inflation, while the quality of the product delivered has plummeted in some fields and merely declined in others.   There are young people graduating from law schools today with $150 K in debt and little prospect of a job sufficiently remunerative to discharge the debt in a reasonable time.  For the painful details, see Paul Campos' law school scam blog.

Can we blame the federal government for the education bubble?  Of course, if there had been no federally-insured loan program the bubble would not have come about.  But there was no necessity that the program issue in a bubble.  So we are brought back to the real root of the problem, human beings, their ignorance, greed, prodigality, and general lack of moral and intellectual virtue.

Compare the housing bubble.  Government must bear some of the blame through its bad legislation.  But no bubble would have occurred if consumers weren't stupid and lazy and greedy.  What sort of
fool signs up for a negative amortization loan?  Am I blaming the victim?  Of course.  Blaming the victim is, within limits and in some cases, a perfectly reasonable and indeed morally necessary thing to do.  If you are complicit in your own being ripped-off through your own self-induced intellectual and moral defectiveness, then you must hold yourself and be held by others partially responsible.  And then there are the morally corrupt lenders themselves who exploited the stupidity, laziness, greediness and general lack of moral and intellectual virtue of the consumers.  A fourth factor is the
corruption of the rating agencies. 

Observations on the Joys of Teaching

Teaching is the feeding of people who aren't hungry.

Teaching philosophy is the feeding of people who are neither hungry nor know what food is.

Teaching is like agitating water in a glass with one's forefinger. As long as the finger is in motion, the water is agitated; but as soon as the finger is removed, the water returns to its quiescent state.

Philosophy, like a virgin, is wasted on the young.

The classroom is a scene of unreality. No one takes it quite seriously. Not the students, from whom little is expected and less demanded. Not the teachers, who waste their time in discipline and remediation.

According to an apocryphal story about George Santayana, one day, while lecturing at Harvard, he suddenly intuited the absurdity of teaching. Stopping in mid-sentence, he walked out of the classroom never to return. The truth is less dramatic: he dutifully finished the semester, turned in his grades, resigned his professorship, and embarked for Rome where he spent the rest of his life in cultured retirement.

"I would rather eat dry bread than teach." Franz Schubert, quoted in Maurice J.E. Brown, Schubert: A Critical Biography (New York: Da Capo, 1988), p. 233.

"I would rather sweep the streets than teach children!" Ralph E. Hone, Dorothy L. Sayers: A Literary Biography (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1979), p. 24.  Hone is quoting Sayers. 

The quotations borrowed from Dr. Gilleland, antediluvian, bibliomaniac, and curmudgeon.

Academic Philosophy (with an addendum on Human Corruption)

Academic philosophy too often degenerates into a sterile intellectual game whose sole function is to inflate and deflate the egos of the participants.  But this is no surprise: everything human is either degenerate or will become degenerate.

……………………..

Addendum: 2:45 PM

Long-time blogger-buddy and supplier of high-quality links and comments, Bill Keezer, comments:

Academic anything eventually degenerates either into ego battles or battles for status as grant securers.  In addition to tuition inflation the big money-maker for universities is the administration overhead awarded within grants and the supplement to salaries in some cases that allow them to forego raises or to reduce their portion of the payroll.   

Government corrupts all that it touches.

I agree with Bill's first point, but not with his second.  The source of moral corruption is not government, but the human being, his ignorance, his inordinate and disordered desires, and his free but wayward will.  Everything human beings are involved in is either corrupt or corruptible, and government is no exception, not because government is the unique source of corruption, but because government is a human, all-too-human, enterprise.

On my view, government is practically necessary.  Anarchism is for adolescents.  Some of what government does is good, some bad.  Governments in the free world defeated the Nazis; communist governments murdered 100 million in the 20th century. (Source: Black Book of Communism.)  Some of what is bad are unintended consequences of programs that were set up with good intentions.  Federally-insured student loans made it possible (or at least easier) for many of us to finance our educations.  (It is of course a debatable point whether it is a legitimate function of government to insure student loans.)  But lack of oversight on the part of the Feds, and the greediness of university administrators coupled with the laziness and prodigality of too many students has led to the education bubble.

What has happened is truly disgusting.  The price of higher education has skyrocketed, increasing out of all proportion to general inflation, while the quality of the product delivered has plummeted in some fields and merely declined in others.   There are young people graduating from law schools today with $150 K in debt and little prospect of a job sufficiently remunerative to discharge the debt in a reasonable time.

Can we blame the federal government for the education bubble?  Of course, if there had been no federally-insured loan program the bubble would not have come about.  But there was no necessity that the program issue in a bubble.  So we are brought back to the real root of the problem, human beings, their ignorance, greed, prodigality, and general lack of moral and intellectual virtue.

Compare the housing bubble.  Government must bear some of the blame through its bad legislation.  But no bubble would have occurred if consumers weren't stupid and lazy and greedy.  What sort of fool signs up for a negative amortization loan?  Am I blaming the victim?  Of course.  Blaming the victim is, within limits and in some cases, a perfectly reasonable and indeed morally necessary thing to do.  If you are complicit in your own being ripped-off through your own self-induced intellectual and moral defectiveness, then you must hold yourself and be held by others partially responsible.  And then there are the morally corrupt lenders themselves who exploited the stupidity, laziness, greediness and general lack of moral and intellectual virtue of the consumers.  A fourth factor is the corruption of the rating agencies. 

So, contra my friend Keezer, we cannot assign all the blame to government.  We need government, limited government.

Political Correctness and Left-Wing Bias in the Universities

Liberal profs admit they would discriminate.

Captive Minds: Conformity and Campus Intellectuals  Excerpt (emphasis added):

Working for four years at this prairie college, I had many opportunities to see political correctness in action: in our so-called “equity” hiring practices, in changes to our course offerings to highlight racial and sexual diversity, and in the unfailing faux-reverence with which all aspects of Aboriginal literature and culture were treated, even down to a discussion about whether, in a job advertisement, we should refer to Canada by its indigenous name of Turtle Island.

But this was not a matter of political correctness alone: it was collective thinking in its most blatant form. There were striking parallels to what Czeslaw Milosz in The Captive Mind analyzes as the intellectual’s not-unwilling accommodations to Party orthodoxy. Milosz was interested not only in the compulsions of totalitarianism but in the significant emotional and psychological attractions of the Communist system: the reassurances and rewards of ceding responsibility for judgment, and the manifold reasons why an intellectual could find himself at home in conformity. Can it be that, even free of threat or compulsion, many intellectuals will choose to surrender their independence of thought? C.S. Lewis wrote about the seductive pleasures of belonging in “The Inner Ring,” brilliantly highlighting the desire planted deep in the heart of every human being to be approved, acknowledged as “one of us” by people we admire. To get into that charmed circle, Lewis warned, many of us will assent to nearly anything.

No matter the reigning orthodoxy — in our department it was, as in the vast majority of English departments across North America, Leftist, anti-Western, feminist, and multiculturalist — the desire to fall in line, and to compel or outlaw those who do not, seems to be an enduring fact of human nature.

Milosz's Captive Mind is essential reading.  Your humble correspondent has of course read it, but he has yet to blog it.  He really ought to. 

Philosophy is a Useless Major; All Praise to Philosophy

Here is a list of the most useful and useless college majors:

The top 10 most useful college majors:
1. Nursing
2. Mechanical engineering
3. Electrical engineering
4. Civil engineering
5. Computer science
6. Finance
7. Marketing and marketing research
8. Mathematics
9. Accounting
10. French, German, Latin and other common foreign languages.

The top 10 most useless college majors:
1. Fine Arts
2. Drama and theater arts
3. Film, video and photographic arts
4. Commercial art and graphic design
5. Architecture
6. Philosophy and religious studies
7. English literature and language
8. Journalism
9. Anthropology and archeology
10. Hospitality management

Philosophy comes in at #6 of the useless.  Those who fill their belly from teaching philosophy (or rather from conducting philosophy classes, which is not the same) will be strongly tempted to defend philosophy by arguing that it really is useful after all.

I say that's a mistake.  I take the classical line.  Of course philosophy is useless, and therein lies its nobility and dignity.  The merely utile is ancillary to the non-utile.  Failure to appreciate this shows a lack of nobility of soul.  What follows is the meat of my Should One Stoop to a Defense of Philosophy?

What I object to . . . is the notion that philosophy needs to justify itself in terms of an end external to it, and that its main justification is in terms of an end outside of it. The main reason to study philosophy is not to become a more critical reasoner or a better evaluator of evidence, but to grapple with the ultimate questions of human existence and to arrive at as much insight into them as is possible. What drives philosophy is the desire to know the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters. Let's not confuse a useful byproduct of philosophical study (development of critical thinking skills) with the goal of philosophical study. The reason to study English literature is not to improve one's vocabulary or to prepare for a career as a journalist.   Similarly, the reason to study philosophy is not to improve one's ability to think clearly about extraphilosophical matters or to acquire skills that may prove handy in law school.

Philosophy is an end in itself. This is why it is foolish to try to convince philistines that it is good for
something. It is not primarily good for something. It is a good in itself. Otherwise you are acquiescing in the philistinism you ought to be combating. Is listening to the sublime adagio movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony good for something? And what would that be, to impress people with how cultured you are?

To the philistine's "Philosophy bakes no bread" you should not respond "Yes it does," for such responses are patently lame. You should say, "Man does not live by bread alone," or "Not everything is pursued as a means to something else," or "A university is not a trade school."  You should not acquiesce in the philistine's values and assumptions, but go on the attack and question his values and assumptions.  Put him on the spot.  Play the Socratic gadfly.  If a philistine wants to know how much you got paid for writing an article for a professional journal, say, "Do you really think that only what one is paid to do is worth doing?" 

Admittedly, this is a lofty conception of philosophy and I would hate to have to defend it before the uncomprehending philistines one would expect to find on the typical Board of Regents. But philosophy is what it is, lofty by nature, and if we are to defend it we must do so in a way that does not betray it.

It might be better, though, not to stoop to defend it at all, at least not before the uncomprehending.  It might be better to show contempt and supercilious disdain. Not everyone can be reasoned with, and part of being reasonable is understanding this fact.

Jonathan Haidt Awakens from his Dogmatic Liberal Slumbers

Conservatives have broader moral sense than liberals.  All praise to Haidt for having the openmindedness and courage to change his view, but I marvel at how incurious and bigoted he was before his metanoia.  What sort of person ignores whole swaths of the intellectual terrain without any desire to explore at first hand?  That sort of narrowness among supposed intellectuals has always amazed me.  Analytic philosophers are a particularly bigoted bunch.  Not all, of course, but far too many.  Some even  brag of their ignorance.  "I have never read Hegel and I have no intention  of reading him." 

Then get out of here you contemptible bigot!

Before stumbling across the Muller anthology, the popular former University of Virginia psychology professor thought of conservatism as a “Frankenstein monster,” he says — an ugly mishmash of Christian fundamentalism, racism and authoritarianism.

So without any first-hand acquaintance with conservative thought, Haidt bought into an ugly misrepresentation.  But, as I said, he has come around and ought to be praised for that.

At Yale, Mr. Haidt majored in philosophy to find some answers. Discovering that academic philosophy had abandoned the big questions of human nature, morality, and the good life, Mr. Haidt turned to psychology — and found his calling.

It is simply false to say that academic philosophy has abandoned the Big Questions.  That was true in the '30s, '40s, and '50s for the logical positivists and some of their successors and fellow travellers, but by the time Haidt went to college in the '80s the Big Questions were securely back in the saddle even in the mainstream.  To give but one example, consider Thomas Nagel 1979 collection of essays entitled Mortal Questions.

 

Subprime College Educations

Another chapter in the decline of the West.  Excerpts (emphasis added):

In his Encounter Books Broadside "The Higher Education Bubble," Reynolds says this bubble exists for the same reasons the housing bubble did. The government decided that too few people owned homes/went to college, so government money was poured into subsidized and sometimes subprime mortgages/student loans, with the predictable result that housing prices/college tuitions soared and many borrowers went bust. Tuitions and fees have risen more than 440 percent in 30 years as schools happily raised prices — and lowered standards — to siphon up federal money. A recent Wall Street Journal headline: "Student Debt Rises by 8% as College Tuitions Climb."

[. . .]

The budgets of California’s universities are being cut, so recently Cal State Northridge students conducted an almost-hunger strike (sustained by a blend of kale, apple and celery juices) to protest, as usual, tuition increases and, unusually and properly, administrators' salaries. For example, in 2009 the base salary of UC Berkeley's Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion was $194,000, almost four times that of starting assistant professors. And by 2006, academic administrators outnumbered faculty.

The Manhattan Institute's Heather Mac Donald notes that sinecures in academia's diversity industry are expanding as academic offerings contract. UC San Diego, while eliminating master's programs in electrical and computer engineering and comparative literature, and eliminating courses in French, German, Spanish and English literature, added a diversity requirement for graduation to cultivate "a student's understanding of her or his identity." So, rather than study computer science and Cervantes, students can study their identities — themselves. Says Mac Donald, "'Diversity,' it turns out, is simply a code word for narcissism."

She reports that UCSD lost three cancer researchers to Rice University, which offered them 40 percent pay increases. But UCSD found money to create a Vice Chancellorship for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. UC Davis has a Diversity Trainers Institute under an Administrator of Diversity Education, who presumably coordinates with the Cross-Cultural Center. It also has: a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Resource Center; a Sexual Harassment Education Program; a Diversity Program Coordinator; an Early Resolution Discrimination Coordinator; a Diversity Education Series that awards Understanding Diversity Certificates in "Unpacking Oppression"; and Cross-Cultural Competency Certificates in "Understanding Diversity and Social Justice." California's budget crisis has not prevented UC San Francisco from creating a new Vice Chancellor for Diversity and Outreach to supplement UCSF's Office of Affirmative Action, Equal Opportunity and Diversity, and the Diversity Learning Center (which teaches how to become "a Diversity Change Agent"), and the Center for LGBT Health and Equity, and the Office of Sexual Harassment Prevention & Resolution, and the Chancellor's Advisory Committees on Diversity, and on Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Issues, and on the Status of Women.

Are we in Cloud Cuckoo Land yet?

The Case of Morris Starsky

Quite by chance this morning I stumbled upon materials relating to one Morris Starsky, a professor of philosophy at Arizona State University who was fired from a tenured position for his political views in 1970.  Here is the Wikipedia article; here is something from the Phoenix New Times; this is from The Militant.  All of these sources to be consumed cum grano salis. 

A search at PhilPapers turned up nothing on the man, which says something.  Some commentary later, perhaps, once I know more about the case.

Addendum (7:05 PM):  The ever-helpful Dave Lull reports that Morris Joseph Starsky earned the Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1967 with a dissertation entitled, "On the Ontological Problem of Oratio Obliqua.

Addendum (5 April):  Lull informs me that the Morris J. Starsky archives are housed at the ASU library.

Is Graduate School Really That Bad?

100 Reasons NOT to Go to Graduate School is now at #79.  Despite its unrelenting negativity, prospective applicants  to graduate programs may find the site  useful.  I cannot criticize it for being negative since that is its implied purpose: to compile 100 reasons not to go.  But there is something whiny and wimpy about it.

Suppose you are paid to spend five years, from age 22 to age 27, studying in depth a subject you love and have aptitude for in the idyllic environs of a college campus.  You have been give tuition remission and a stipend on which to live.  You really enjoy reading, writing, thinking, and studying more than anything else.   You have good sense and avoid the folly of assuming debt in the form of student loans.  You live within your very modest means and have the character to resist the siren songs of a society bent on crazy consumption.   A little monkishness never hurt anyone. You spend five years enjoying all the perquisites of academic life: a beautiful environment, stimulating people, library privileges, an office, a flexible work schedule, and the like.  At age 27 you are granted the Ph. D.  But there are few jobs, and you knew that all along.  You make a serious attempt at securing a position in your field but fail.  So you go on to something else either with or without some further training.

Have you wasted your time?  Not by my lights.  Hell, you've been paid to do what you love doing!  What's to piss and moan about?  You have been granted a glorious extension of your relatively carefree collegiate years.  Five more years of being a student, sans souci, in some exciting place like Boston.  Five more years of contact with age- and class-appropriate members of the opposite sex and thus five more years of opportunity to find a suitable mate.  (But if you marry and have kids while a grad student, then you are a fool.  Generally speaking, of course.) 

Of course, if your goal in life is to pile up as much loot as possible in the shortest possible time, then stay away from (most) graduate programs.  But if the life of the mind is your thing, go for it!  What's to kvetch about? Are you washed up at 27 or 28 because you couldn't land a tenure-track position?  You have until about 40 to make it in America. 

For more on this and cognate topics, see my Academia category.