"enjoy grad school and don't let it bum you out when you don't get a job" is not the correct response to all this, but it's a good clue to the dynamics that we still won't really talk about: that class background/family resources matter, and that grad funding disparities between universities matter.

One or my brothers earned several degrees through military service. He constantly gets on my case about how I "should have given up that writing shit" and got a master's degree. Easy to say when Uncle Sam foots the bill, whereas it would have ruined me financially.

I've run across a handful of people (and been one myself) from working class backgrounds who always have to be 'on' in academia. I think a big part of that is that academics are rarely willing to communicate directly, like working class people usually do; no one ever says what they really mean here.

I think I heard you talk about this on a podcast once, Erin, but grad school is teaching you how to be a professor, though it doesn’t have to be. But until grad school (for a humanities PhD) is set up very differently, you don’t need 6 to 8 years to learn the skills applicable to your next job.

Whether a person has $$ or not (though it is much, much worse if not), this is an insane approach to advocating a six- or seven- or eight-year program. if you’re rich, it’s a vaguely sane approach to a vanity terminal master’s degree.

genuinely feeling unhinged during this discourse as I go to my hooding next week and then probably file for unemployment as substitute teaching is done the week after

also that your ability to "hang in there" is often predicated on having a partner who also has a job but boy is that one a real third rail