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I Miss The Old Days
My oldest daughter still lives with us. Though she has a doctorate in Musical Arts, she struggles to make a living. She’s a the assistant director of a local and successful children’s choir, directs the music program at a local church and has a small platoon of private students, all this while juggling a plethora of gigs and auditions. We figured out the other day that — accounting for time spent in meetings, music selection, and preparation — she’s not making even $10/hour in her directing jobs. That was a sobering realization given how hard she works. Recently, a new job came up: music director for a 50 voice choir at a large retirement community. They meet twice a week for one hour, and perform six times a year. She will likely take it if she can squeeze it into her schedule.
I provide this biography as something of a backdrop. All of her friends — smart and successful academically, most with graduate degrees — are struggling to get started in life. Some are married. Some are living with a would-be spouse, but remain uncommitted. Only a few have children. This weekend, there was a party for one such friend, a nice young man, a counsellor with an MS who works on the reservation as a psychologist. He’s the only counsellor in the federally-funded tribal health center. My daughter says it is a very sad and stressful job, though he doesn’t talk about it much. But now he’s moving to Atlanta! His live in girlfriend is entering a PhD program at Emory. He’s going to work in private practice.
This young man is of Indian descent, not American Indian, but Asian Indian. The irony of this was something that was never mentioned on the reservation, at least not in his presence. It was not lost on me though, so when my daughter was discussing his going-way party and the need for a gift, something to remind her friend of his AZ roots (he was born here) I suggested a cowboy hat. Reservation Indians love a good straw Stetson or a Resistol; it’s a status thing. So we went to the local Sabas in downtown Chandler and bought the young man a straw Stetson, the Cattleman style popular on the reservation.
Before she headed off to her church job on Sunday, I asked her how the party went. The hat, she said, not only fit perfectly (we guessed on the size) but was a huge hit. Everyone at the party wanted to wear it and her friend was very pleased. Then, I asked her if she had a good time. With this question I saw her face relax as a frown developed. The boyfriend of another friend, a young man who knows of my daughter is Christian and of a conservative bend, tried to turn the hat into political symbol of some kind, a representation of Indian repression and white racism. The fact that the recipient was the wrong kind of Indian made no difference; this gift was just more evidence of white ignorance and thoughtlessness. The young man making this point was, of course, white.
I’d like to say that my daughter emasculated this jerk with the torrent of logical lucidity expected of a doctor of the arts, but she didn’t. She tried — as I’m sure everyone else at the party did, and often must when this guy is present — to ignore him. But he’d built his speaker’s corner box and he wanted to lecture, which he did until he realized that no one wanted to listen.
But the waves of party fun were flattened by this scold.
Back in the day, jerks like this would be told to shut up or leave, in hopes that they would keep talking. The days of that kind of satisfaction are over.
I sure miss those days.
Published in General
Had I known I was destined to marry in my mid-twenties, I could have happily chosen a similar career path – choral and liturgical music is a passion of mine, just one I know requires an insane schedule to pursue if you expect to be the sole or primary breadwinner. Instead, I “did the sensible thing” my parents recommended and went STEM.
One of my childhood church-choir friends is a little old lady who lived just as you described in her twenties and thirties – with her parents, being a good daughter to them, just one who wasn’t out of the house yet, and making music. She’s a little eccentric, sometimes to the amusement of those around her, but she has had a happy life. I wish your daughter many blessings, and that her life may be equally as happy as my friends, or happier!
Thank you, Midge. You are too kind.
The scourge of overqualified graduate degree holders marches on, I see.
A family friend with whom I grew up has a doctorate in Ethnomusicology, (whatever the hell that is.) Along with infinite student debt. His parents drone on about how smart he is and all that jive, meanwhile I’m over here with my lowly Bachelors of Science in Engineering.
Don’t get graduate degrees, kids. Just don’t do it, unless you’re going to become a medical doctor.
Ahem. A MA in Psychology it not such a bad thing if you are going to be a therapist. Not a path the riches, but a decent income.
Huh. We just heard, don’t get graduate degrees if you must go into debt to do it. Either find an affordable one likely to boost your career prospects (some master’s degrees, for example), or make sure to get into a program (specifically PhD program) where they pay you, else don’t go. I agree there’s too much credentialism, though.
Many are using it to avoid entering the job market. Of course the delay makes their job prospects even less attractive because of their debt load.
I’m being perfectly serious about this – low-scale fighting had its place. That’s why sports referees don’t go crazy when fights break out … it lets off the steam.
It’s not that I’d advocate punching people out all the time. It’s simply a realistic assessment of what’s happened to public social interactions now that fist-fighting has been essentially rendered taboo. To be blunt, in the past, when a jerk got out of line, somebody dislocated his nose. That created a balanced equation: [jerkiness] = [low-level fighting]. If you take away one side of the equation, and do nothing about the other side, it simply unleashes the other side. Jerkiness has gone undeterred.
The current social mechanism for combating rude public behavior is “political correctness.” Or as someone once pointed out, it’s how little girls fight rather than how little boys fight. It’s not that we’ve gotten more mature … we’ve just switched genders with our immaturity..
“whoever desires to fight under the sacred banner of the Cross…”
I’m not a fan of the sucker punch, but I think asking someone to step outside to settle a dispute has a certain poetry about it. It places risk on someone who decides to be rude and dissuades impertinent behavior. Defense of honor is no longer allowed, so we can’t tell the cowards and blowhards from those who will defend principle. All defense is now bullying. It’s a sad state of affairs.
In all seriousness: don’t get a graduate degree if a bachelor’s will do. Perhaps this is my cranky engineer coming out, but I overlook the resumes of recent grads with any sort of graduate degree.
They know no more than their lesser-credentialed counterparts when it comes to the industry and are going to be more costly to the bottom line because they have the gall to expect to be paid more for adding little or no value. They’re also older than most folks with a bachelor’s degree and if you’re looking to mold a young person in the ways of a job, older is not better.
I believe this qualifies… but part of the trick here is that a bachelor’s in psychology is worth approximately a warm bucket of spit, no? It’s “Graduate Degree” or “fishing from a bridge” in that industry, right?
In my experience, the guys with the 2 year night school degrees, such as DeVry, tend to be better at getting the work done than the Ivy League guys.
I graduated from an elite college, but I worked for peanuts for a while, and deservedly so because I was learning the ropes. I felt a great deal of anger towards the institution because it seemed to me they’d done a poor job of preparing me for actual work and I felt guilty for being so useless.
It was only after about 10 years or so that the conclusion sunk in that the whole thing was a monstrous, 4-year IQ test. Of course, they did transmit information to me that is useful in the abstract – I don’t have to wonder at the inner workings of most mechanical devices – but at the same time what engineering college prepared me for was… passing the EI and PE exams. Which I did. On the first try.
So at least there’s that.
Could wash windows too.
Makes sense.
I know a few whose bachelor’s – even in very “practical” fields – were so focused on the abstract (big ambitions, like wanting to be the next Albert Einstein) that, when life turned out to have non-PhD plans for them, it made sense for them to return to school for a little, more practical, training. For example, getting an MEng, after having lived in theory-land four years as an undergraduate.
True, more students should probably have more modest ambitions to begin with, and not think of themselves as potential Nobel Prize or Fields Medal winners. But… a few scientific dreamers with their heads in the clouds are probably a good thing to have around, and you only get that few if many more than those few try. It would be nice, though, if folks were more open about the fact that big-league ambitions, even in the “practical” fields of STEM, are by nature more high-risk. I mean, I think most of the more ambitious students know this at some level, but…
I certainly found that the cover of having chosen a “practical” major (math) gave me license to focus on the least-practical aspects of it. In some ways, I don’t regret it, because that’s the part I was really good at. In other ways, I sure could have done with a smack or two.
Yeah. The math majors at my school had this figured out by junior year :-)
We tell our kids to make sure they get a degree in something that can pay the bills and also live with so they can enjoy their hobbies… like music.
It’s a lot easier to enjoy something like that when it isn’t your job.
When, exactly, were these “olden days” when a PhD in musical arts guaranteed one a living?
I’m betting it was before Ethnomusicology existed.
Some of the happiest folks I know were those organized enough (starting Freshman year) to pull off double majors well – they managed to earn a fine-arts major with a technical major, without sacrificing too much loss in technical preparation. Very hard to do at a school with many liberal-arts requirements (like mine). And a few of them did find more success with their fine-arts rather than technical background after graduation – still, they had the technical credentials to fall back on if the fine-arts gamble didn’t pay off (as it often doesn’t).
Hmm, if you read the post again, you might see that the olden days were the days when a jerk like the hat-complainer would be told to get off or get out. Not about the education thing.
See?
Hey Doug, a few points:
Hope she gets the retirement community job!! (And mention the ‘support’ button to those seniors, yessiree.)
From what I can tell, there are only three classes of remunerative bachelor degrees:
Not saying all degrees in these classes are remunerative. Just saying the remunerative ones are in these classes.
Agree? Disagree?
When I walk into a casino I go in with the mindset that if I lose my bankroll I’m done. Gambling is entertainment only, not a way of making money. It becomes fun then. I certainly wouldn’t want to make a living out of gambling.
I prefer “Shooting fish in a barrel” when it comes to earning money, to be honest.
Basically.
These degrees are the most highly remunerative (positive EV-wise) degrees available. If you were to remove these degrees from the pool, College I think becomes much less of an income enhancement as it is a liability.
You might be able to add law in there as well.
To be fair, the post has several threads going on at once. Not everybody is going to pick out the same one to respond to.
Not sure about that overall. Vast numbers of people go to law school*. Many, many, many do not finish. Of those who do, large numbers do not pass the bar and even more never practice.
*It’s a fairly standard meme that there are more people in law school than practicing attorneys.
It’s false consciousness unless they stopped being math majors then.
Fair enough. The people I know who attended law school seem to be doing alright for themselves… after a fashion.
I think the point remains however, removing the couple of majors at the top of the heap that skew the salary averages upwards would probably reveal that college for most liberal arts subjects is a scam.