One evening a few weeks ago, after a couple of medicinal whiskeys (self-prescribed), I came to terms with the fact that I wouldn’t be able to continue in my Ph.D. program. I simply couldn’t afford it. Each semester had been growing in financial difficulty, but I never wanted to admit that I might not make it to the end. While there’s relief in not having to test the nearly nonexistent job market, what I mostly felt in the moment was failure.
I then aired my frustration, embarrassment, and sadness on Twitter, and similar stories quickly emerged in response. Some recounted their own reasons for leaving a Ph.D. program; others admitted they were considering a departure. Their rationales were medical, familial, financial, and emotional. Some were parents in situations like ours — no child care and not enough food stamps. All were valid.
Over four years in my English Ph.D. program, I’ve taught 132 students as the instructor of record, a total of 396 credit hours, and so, at my college’s stated tuition rates, helped it bring in something on the order of $575,000. While those funds aren’t entirely profit, the minimal overhead of my class means I’ve more than paid my way. In addition, I’ve served as a research assistant and worked in the writing center. In exchange, my institution paid me a stipend averaging $17,000 per year.
For piteously paid Ph.D.s like me, accumulating debt is like breathing. We pay off what we can during the semesters, then slide back into debt over the summers — not due to frivolous spending but because of everyday expenses and family care. When I moved to my current city for graduate school, in 2015, I had no credit-card debt. Seven years later, despite aggressive payments whenever possible, we have more than $20,000. My wife and I met in a master’s program and collectively hold almost $200,000 in student loans. What’s another $10,000 in loans this semester to pay for our daughter’s preschool? Four years into the Ph.D., it became clear this couldn’t continue.
The financial reality — and what it means for our future — is devastating. I spent four years on coursework and then teaching, capped off by praise on my written and oral comprehensive exams. I then prepared to write my dissertation. But then, slowly, the life jacket of “available credit” became a weight, and the risk of drowning increased.
The stipend at my Midwestern university is one of the lowest in the city, and it doesn’t include benefits like health care or child care. My teaching-assistantship letter forbids outside employment. And the meager funding comes with a four- or five-year cap. That means my summers have been packed with courses, cramming for comps, and writing so as not to run out of funding too soon. At such points, everyday occurrences like a chipped tooth, a new car battery, or a surprise trip to the ER (because my daughter had stuck a bead up her nose) felt like extreme financial crises.
My wife and I are a single-income household, with my stipend covering us and our 4-year-old daughter. There is no affordable, available child care that would allow us both to work, and familial responsibilities bar both of us from holding simultaneous full-time jobs. Complicating matters further, even a slight increase in pay would disqualify us from receiving food stamps.
According to MIT’s Living Wage Calculator, a household with two adults (one working) and one child in my area would need to have an annual income of more than $60,000 in order to make a “living wage.” But even if I were single and had no dependents, the living wage for my city would be $33,331 per year, nearly double my stipend.
I have been encouraged to help form a union. Personally, I would love to, but such efforts at my university have been met with fierce litigation. Then there is the sheer difficulty and time unionization would entail. Courageous past and present graduate students and contingent faculty members have repeatedly struggled for better conditions. The results have been sobering.
On my campus the odds would not be good. The administration has closed similarly “valueless” (in its eyes) departments for less. If the budget cuts, closed tenure lines, denied sabbaticals, and Ph.D.-admission freezes are any indication, many universities, including my own, might welcome union drives as an excuse to finally swing the ax.
One of the hardest parts of admitting my Ph.D. defeat is the guilt. Over the past four years, I’ve been the recipient of generous mutual-aid donations from friends and from the academic community. Fellow graduate students pooled money to help me with a household emergency. Friends donated an air-conditioner so my daughter wouldn’t have to sleep in the heat. My non-wealthy parents ate into their retirement savings to help when the car inevitably fell apart. Strangers on the internet sent support when our utilities were shut off. Others made meals when they heard we were in a particularly rough patch. And it was only through all this overwhelming solidarity that I’ve accomplished anything.
I’m happy and hopeful that networks of solidarity and compassion still exist. That there are enormous numbers of us who recognize things ought to be different, and who truly want to bring about that change.
But I also feel great sadness. Many of us will not make it to the end of our Ph.D. programs. I fear scores more will be pushed out, cut, fired, or financially strangled out of our fields for the sake of administrative austerity or padding the bottom line. And I feel anger for those of us who have already lost and the damage that has done to our fields.
Fixing the university as an institution and keeping one another afloat in the process will require the type of selfless compassion my family and I have received. It will require dealing with the overwhelming and uneven salary distributions among coaches and top administrators. It will also require the recognition that academic and graduate work is work, and we should therefore all have the benefits of unionized representation.
In one of my favorite photos of my daughter, she’s propped herself on the couch where I’d left a book, put on my glasses, and declared, “Look at me, I’m Daddy!” At this point, I was studying for comps religiously, so she’d seen me do that many times.
In James Joyce’s Ulysses, there’s a scene in which the protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, worries about his sister Dilly when she picks up one of his old schoolbooks. He fears she may be following him on a similar path to poverty and unhappiness. “She is drowning. Agenbite. Save her. Agenbite. All against us. She will drown me with her, eyes and hair. Lank coils of seaweed hair around me, my heart, my soul. Salt green death.” In the same vein I fear for my daughter’s dreams and her ability to realize them.
The author is enrolled in what may be his last semester at a Midwestern university. The leftover loans used to pay for his daughter’s preschool will hopefully be enough for him to reach ABD.
