“I was so upset and disappointed in myself because growing up, I was told that if I get an education, if I go to college, then I’ll be successful,” Santos told Business Insider—and she’s not the first Gen Zer to complain about feeling tricked into pursuing further education.
Just last month, 27-year-old Robbie Scott similarly went viral on TikTok for insisting that Gen Z isn’t any less willing to work than generations before. Instead, he said, they are “getting angry and entitled and whiny” about the prospect of having to work hard for the rest of their adult life, only to “get nothing in return.”
Every time a promising student tells me they’re thinking about pursuing a PhD in philosophy, I do everything in my power to convince them to change their mind. Unless you’re simultaneously incredibly lucky and among the very best in your field, you almost certainly will get stuck in adjunct hell forever. Capitalism has almost completely hollowed out higher education.
Yeah, I have family that ask sometimes when I’m going to get into being a professor, they don’t seen to understand that’s not a thing anymore. I make more doing manual labor I only needed a GED for than I would make teaching in a university.
To a certain kind of liberal the idea that you can’t meritocracy your way into a job you find fulfilling is genuinely impossible to digest.
The only time you should pursue a PhD with the intention of becoming a professor is if you literally cannot see yourself being happy doing anything else for a living. Even then, you have to realize that it’s highly likely that you’re going to spend years to decades of your young adult life working in terrible conditions for very low pay. If you literally can’t see yourself happy unless you’re teaching philosophy (or whatever) maybe that’s ok, but nobody should go into this thinking that they’re going to come out with a tenure track job offer at the end.