There was a lot of data to sift through. In this post I’ll discuss the first survey, which had 285 total responses. We’ll start with the highest level of education attained. Thirty-four percent have completed their MA. Thirty-three have completed their PhD, fourteen percent have completed an undergraduate degree, nine percent have completed “some grad school,” six percent have completed between one and three years of college, and another six percent chose “other.”

Fifty-six percent of respondents said they are not currently enrolled in college or grad school. Forty-six percent are enrolled. Two percent chose “other” when asked if they are currently enrolled.

In terms of current employment status, forty-five percent have a full-time job, twenty-two percent have a part-time job, nineteen percent are unemployed, and fourteen percent chose “other.”

The majority of responses came from socio-cultural anthropologists (59%), followed by archaeologists (18%), biological anthropologists (13%), and linguistic anthropologists (3%). Eight percent chose “other” when asked about their disciplinary niche within anthropology.

Now we get to the subject of debt. When asked about current student loan debt, thirty-three percent of people said they have ZERO DEBT. Nineteen percent reported debt between $11,000 and $30,000, fourteen percent reported debt between $31,000 and $50,000, twelve percent have debt between $51,000 and $70,000, nine percent have debt between $1 and $10,000, five percent have between $91,000 and $120,000, another five percent have more than $120,000 in debt. A final three percent of people have student loan debt between $71,000 and $90,000. One issue with these numbers is that I asked about current student loan debt—the problem here is that some people who may have had debt in the past could have paid it down (in full or in part). A few respondents did note this issue in some of their comments.

When asked about the types of loans they have, the overwhelming majority reported taking out government loans (180 people or 58% percent). Another sixteen percent took out private loans, five percent took out personal loans, and a final one percent chose “other.” Twenty-one percent of people chose “not applicable” for this question.

Next I asked about credit card debt: “How much credit card debt did you accrue while pursuing your education?” More than half ( 55%) said they did not accrue any credit card debt at all. Sixteen percent reported credit card debt between $1,100 and $5,000, twelve percent were between $5,100 and $10,000, nine percent were under $1,000, and five percent are between $11,000 and $20,000. A total of three percent reported credit card debt of $21,000 and up.

This brings us to the more qualitative responses. Next we’ll look at 15 sample responses of people with student loan debt (approximately a 5% sample). I used a random number generator to choose representatives from the pool of 285 responses. I only included answers from people who submitted responses to every question. For each of these examples we’ll look at 1) education; 2) whether or not they are currently enrolled; 3) reasons why they went into anthropology; 4) student loan debt; 5) credit card debt; 6) thoughts about future career in anthropology; and, lastly 7) Any final thoughts or concerns. Here we go.

Response #216

Has completed PhD. Not currently in college/grad school. Unemployed. Last attended school 2007-2013. Focus: archaeology. Went into anthropology because they had a “passion for the field.” Their student loan debt is between 31 to 50k. No credit card debt.

Feelings about future career in anthropology: “Uncertain but still hopeful.”

Final thoughts: “I probably could have done without so many loans, but it certainly made things easier and sped-up completing the degree within the allotted (funded) time provided by the university.”

#84

Completed MA. Not enrolled. Full-time job. Last attended 2005. Socio-cultural anthro. Why anthropology: “loved anthro.” Has between 51 to 70k in student loans. No credit card debt.

Thoughts about future career: “While the experience I gained in grad school was critical to getting my full time job in so many direct & indirect ways, that job is unrelated to anthro. I do teach anthro courses at a community college.”

Final thoughts: “Anthro as a degree choice, much less a career, is a tough sell post-recession. The field needs to work much harder to sell its practical benefits, which are many.”

#133

Completed undergrad degree. Not enrolled. Unemployed. Last attended university from 2010-2013. Focused in biological anthropology, socio-cultural, and medical. Why anthropology: “I started out want[ing] to study archaeology, go to law school, and work for UNESCO. A biological anthropology class changed everything, I wound up falling in love with genetics, falling out of love with genetics, and falling into medical anthropology. Now I’m awaiting admissions decisions from 8 PhD programs in sociocultural/medical anthropology.” Has between 31 to 50k in student loans. No credit card debt.

Future career: “Slightly optimistic. I’m young, I’m told that I was pretty successful for an undergraduate, I’ve been scouted by top notch anthropology graduate programs, I have a lot of options and a lot of open doors. In the end though, I don’t know. My career in anthropology can be what I want it to be, I’ve learned. It’s my future career in academia that I’m worried about.”

Final thoughts: “Before I went to school, I was an executive chef, and well on my way to making a name for myself. (I quit because I never wanted to cook, I had always wanted to be an anthropologist, and that time came when I qualified for the loans.) As an executive chef, I made about $40,000 a year. I’m concerned that once I get to where I want to be (while I will have a job that I love infinitely more than cooking), I may not make much more money than when I left cooking. I don’t know if that’s as much an issue with anthropology, as it is with academia though.”

#229

Completed PhD. Not enrolled. Full-time job. Last attended 2009. Focus in Socio-cultural anthropology. Why anthropology: “Continue research, teach anthropology.” 31 to 50k in student loan debt. Between 5100 and 10k in credit card debt.

Future career: “In TT job, fearing tenure review, but otherwise stable.”

Final thoughts: “Took out a state government-sponsored loan (non-federal) to pay for four years of undergrad tuition. Loans were deferred over grad school, but they would not change term/duration of loan payback period, squeezing 15 year loan payback period into 5 years: now paying $1,500/month for past 3.5 years, for federal/state loans combined. Went from close to 100k to 40k. More than a third of my monthly salary goes to loan agencies. Pros: Will be done payments in 3 years; Cons: Still living like grad student. I don’t regret my undergrad school choice, but didn’t anticipate going straight into grad school, and having to pay so much over such a short period once finished. Very dodgy loan. High interest rates. Family and I did not know any better… Little college savings. Wish I had that too.”

#3

Completed PhD. Not enrolled. Full time job. Last attended 1988-92. Socio-cultural anthro. Reason: “I loved the field of anthropology, and could not imagine doing anything else. I had the goal of getting a PHD from high school.” 11 to 30k in loans. Under 1000 in credit card debt.

Future career: “Now that i have a full-time (non-TT) job, I feel quite good about it. But immediately after I completed my PHD I had no idea if I would actually ever get a full-time job, and the fact is that part of why I have the job is because I followed my spouse to his TT job, and was then in the right place at the right time when this job came up at our university. I filed my dissertation in 1992, and was not in a full time job doing anthropology until 2009.”

Final thoughts: “It seems to be a problem that is of a piece with student debt generally, not specific to anthropology.”

#4

Completed MA. Currently enrolled. Socio-cultural anthropology. Reason for going into anthropology: “To become an academic.” Between 31 to 50k in student loan debt. No credit card debt.

Thoughts about future career in anthropology: “Pretty good, but only because I can market myself to both STS and environmental studies jobs, which seem to be doing better than anthro.”

Final thoughts: “It is terrifying, and a disaster. None of my advisors have a clue how much debt I have.”

#7

Completed PhD. Not enrolled. Full time job. Last attended college between 2004-2014. Focus in socio-cultural anthro. Why anthropology: “I was interested in learning anthropological concepts and methods to do practical applied work. While I have ended up working in academia so far I thought my degree would help me have better and more expanded career prospects.” Has between 31 to 50k in student loan debt. Has between 5100 to 10k in credit card debt.

Thoughts about future career: “I feel a great deal of trepidation. I never set out to have an academic career but lost sight of that during my training. Now I am trying to find a way of the academic world but feel there are few guidelines or bridges to do so.”

Final thoughts: “I am the first person in my family to graduate from college as well as acquire higher education. As such everything I have learned about the system I have had to learn on my own. I am appalled at the very little guidance available on issues of financial management and debt. I feel that my debt mostly was accrued as a result of how long my degree took me. A shorter time-to-degree and making the process faster, more structured and stream-lined with warnings about hidden costs of graduate school would be tremendously useful.”

#42

Completed undergrad. Not enrolled. Unemployed. Last in school December 2013. Focus in socio-cultural anthropology. Why anthropology: “My last class for a 2 year degree was Anthropology, and I felt I’d found a career that was just being me. I went to university 6 years after that class for the sole purpose of being an applied anthropologist.” Has between 11 to 30k in student loan debt. No credit card debt.

Thoughts about future career in anthropology: “I am very excited to see how the field opens up and moves away from academia. I look forward to being a part of the movement and putting my debt to good work. The hope is that at least somebody will benefit… ‘cause I know I won’t be making my money back anytime soon.”

Final thoughts: “I am devastated that I feel I am being forced into greater debt in the form of a Master’s degree. I think that the field of anthropology should be more accepting of people with work experience or self-education who want to be identified as anthropologists. Thinking like an anthropologist is not just about the training one gets in school, and we all know that sometimes people get advanced degrees in the field who can’t seem to think like an anthropologist anyway.”

#273

Completed MPH. Not enrolled. Last attended college from 2005 to 2012. Focus: Biological anthropology. Reason for going into anthropology: “I was at the end of my freshman year deciding classes for fall and I found an anthropology course I thought would be fun. Half way through the semester I switched majors from psychology to anthropology. I graduated with a BA in anthropology. Then I studied public health focusing on community health education. I plan to go back after my AmeriCorps term is complete to work towards a PhD in applied medical anthropology. I already applied and am waiting. Hopefully, I will attend this fall.” Debt: 51,000 to 70k in student loans. Between 1100 to 5000 in credit card debt.

Thoughts about future career: “With a BA in anthropology, I feel I have little options. Not many people know what an anthropologist is and the few who know, ask me about Bones and Indiana Jones. With a PhD I will be able to conduct research and work for a government agency or teach at university level. a PhD combined with my MPH will open more doors for me.”

Final thoughts: “I am worried the years it takes to complete PhD will push my debt well into the six digits. It’s scary to think I can buy a decent house for the cost of my education. The interest rates are also scary. The lingering thought of employment prospects and a low salary is also concerning. Obviously I am not doing this for the money.”

#44

Completed PhD. Not enrolled. Has a full-time job. Last attended college from 2004–2013. Focus in socio-cultural anthropology. Reason for anthro: “I had spent several years in a well-paying but soul-sucking private industry job. I had done a BA in archaeology and decided I wanted to learn more about culture and representation, so I went back and did a second BA in cultural anthropology. After traveling in the Middle East and Asia, I started a terminal MA program in visual anthropology and went on to complete a PhD in cultural anthropology with a focus on the Middle East and economic development.” Has between 91 to 120k in student loan debt. Between 5100 to 10k in credit card debt.

Future career: “I am lucky because I was able to secure a VAP position while finishing my dissertation and then a TT position immediately after finishing. I am at a small state (teaching) school in an ideal location (in the south, minutes from the beach) and the cost of living is not too high. But the pay is not great ($50,000….I feel terrible complaining about this, though!). But childcare, credit cards repayment, and student loan take a big chunk out of that and my husband is still making very little. I have taken a second job (part time program creation that I can primarily do from home) which helps quite a bit. On paper, it looks like we are doing well but it is still very tight and I am putting in about 60 hrs a week and my husband works about 50–60 hrs/wk. This leaves very little time for writing/publishing and continuing my research can only be done during the summer. It leaves very little time to actually spend with my child or husband. OK, now I sound super whiny! I know I am a lucky one.”

Final thoughts: “There needs to be more of a focus on practical applications in graduate school. For example, in a methods class there should be time spent on M&E. This might increase chances of being able to secure contract work as a way to bolster one’s income. Departments also need to keep an eye on the increasing tuition costs and ensure funding covers this. It would also help to have committee chairs doing everything they can to get their students done and out of the program as early as possible.”

#27

Completed MA. Currently enrolled in PhD program. Full-time job. Socio-cultural anthropology. No reason for going into anthro. Has between 11 to 30k in student loan debt. Between 5100 and 10k in credit card debt.

Future career: “I actively pursued a non-academic career as soon as it became clear just how dire the job market is. Thankfully I’m well-positioned to pursue a career in applied research and should be able to pay off my debt relatively quickly. Currently, my salary exceeds that which is offered to just about any assistant professor.”

Final thoughts: “I hate to waste energy writing about it. We all know what the problems are. The onus is on faculty to reduce the number of admitted PhD students and to get off their asses and learn how to advise students how to pursue non-academic careers. We are also all well aware of the structural problems that will keep them from doing these things.”

#110

Completed MA. Currently enrolled. Unemployed. Socio-cultural anthropology. Why anthropology: “Entirely by accident, if I’m being truly honest. I started my MA in architectural theory (my former profession), and as part of that course read Hugh-Jones and Carsten’s ‘About the house’ which led to wider reading in anthropological theory. This was enough to make me transfer the following year.” Student loan debt: between 11 to 30k. No credit card debt.

Future career: “I feel it is unlikely that my PhD will lead to a career, in the sense of a post-doc/lectureship. It seems unlikely in the context of my home country (UK), and perhaps even more so in the US or Europe.”

Final thoughts: “As with all social sciences/humanities, it seems silly, on a practical level, to pursue even undergrad study without funding these days. It’s a shame that education is now subject to the logic of the market, especially with the social sciences as they’re the few subjects able to seriously challenge the notion of education having more than instrumental value.”

#219

Sixth year PhD. Currently enrolled. Part-time job. Focus in socio-cultural anthropology. Why anthropology: “passion for anthropology and for teaching undergrads.” Has between 91 to 120k in student loan debt. Between 11–20k in credit card debt.

Future career: “hopeful to stay in academia, hopeful that I will be able to finish my PhD.”

Final thoughts: “anthropology as a discipline needs to carve out its significance rather than remain an ‘outsider’ to more prestigious disciplines, this way, more government funds can be made available for anthropology grads. Also, more funds should be made available for anthropologists who study in North America.”

#29

Completed MA. In grad school. Unemployed. Focus in archaeology. Why anthropology: “Tried corporate stuff, hated it.” Has between 71 to 90k in student loan debt. Between 5100–10k credit card debt.

Future career: “I am optimistic, and have a few opportunities developing. I am confident that I will pay off my debt before I die.”

Final thoughts: “I don’t regret taking out the loans or entering this field. I absolutely love what I do, love teaching anthropology, and I have been able to travel and do research all over the world.”

#62

Completed PhD. Not enrolled. Full-time two year position. Last attended college in 2011. Focus in archaeology. Why anthropology: “I loved anthropology and couldn’t see myself doing anything else.” Has between 31 to 50 k in student loan debt. Between 5100 and 10k in credit card debt.

Future career: “Not particularly optimistic. I was always at the top of my field with full funding but my options are limited because we can’t afford to keep moving around while we wait for a tt position to come through. Taking my current position has seriously crippled us financially. Dual career couple makes it worse. Even if the best case scenario happens and both my husband and I get tt jobs, I don’t know that we’ll ever be ok. We’ll have to pay about $2000 a month for paying back debt alone.”

Final thoughts: “Academia is extremely elitist and anti-family. All of the people I know who made it either were either single or had financial support from families or spouses who could support them. Paying for childcare is impossible. As a consequence, I could not be as productive as my childless colleagues. These 1 year positions are ridiculously exploitative—they get cheap labor and put us further into debt just to be jobless again in a year or two. Create tt positions or hire someone locally, the current system is a joke.”

*Compare this post with some of the responses from those who were debt free, here.

As the not quite proud holder of around 100k in student debt, I’d like to offer a few different ways to think about debt, student debt, and a career in anthropology. The attention Savage Minds has been giving to student debt and paying for grad school is excellent. However, I’d like to push beyond focusing on whether or not a prospective grad student should or should not take on a lot of debt. Focusing on the individual gets us into a mindset where we portray the grad student as a patsy or a fool, and spares anyone else any responsibility or blame. So starting from the individual making a decision, here are some better questions we might ask:

1) Why might someone want to spend their life as an anthropologist? Say what you will about the state of the discipline, its skills at teaching, its accessibility. For all these issues of access and abstruseness, and despite the cost of tuition and the amount of adjuncts hustling out there, we still manage to convince a lot of people that they want to become an anthropologist. This is awesome. How and why do we this? What does this tell us about the folks (possibly you and definitely me!) who are willing to go into debt to chase this dream? We should work with this desire instead of saying it’s stupid.

2) How many jobs for anthropologists have people that make anthropologists made? Seriously. How many academic positions has a tenured professor or a prolific department actually made? Not how many of their people have found jobs and careers. How many positions that can support the livelihood of an anthropologist have fellow anthropologists that see no problem making PhDs endlessly, made? I suspect the answer to this question is disheartening. But investigating it would both move us away from victim blaming and to a place where we could explore whatever success there is at creating jobs for anthropologists to do research or teach.

3) How many jobs for anthropologists has the AAA created? Not posted to a job forum, but actually created for anthropologists.

4) Who is making jobs for anthropologists? When and why are deans and provosts keen to make full time anthropology jobs? When and why do professional schools think it’s great to have some anthropologists around? How can we accelerate both of those? Which consulting/marketing/PR firms or government agencies like what we have to say? Why? Why do we rely on non-anthropologists to create work for anthropologists?

5) If we think that all this debt is a problem, what would an anthropology debt forgiveness fund look like? What would it take to get anthropologists out of debt? Could we raise such a fund? Would the world be better or worse if we did?

6) And if the academy is the problem, if it’s rotten to the core, if it offers most of its young lives of privation and misery, in what ways can people become anthropologists outside of the academy? How do we work with that desire I noted up in the first question? How are departments and bona fide anthropologists offering training to people who are interested but can’t or won’t attend graduate programs? What viable non-debt alternatives are we making for people to learn anthropology? To take one very small example, I teach a weekly course in anthropology (some methods and a general overview) at a local high school. I volunteer. The discussion is great. And the students are starting to do a little bit of research. I’m sure there is and could be a lot more of this out there.

I think the key to a lot of these dilemmas is to not get mired in the rhetoric of individual choice. Often we say that student debtors, despite how romantically we portray the life of an anthropologist, make bad choices and are buying a one way ticket to debt peonage. Instead, we should look at the problem of student debt as a collective action problem for our discipline and perhaps the academic community as a whole. We’re already organized. We have professional associations and departments, listservs and meetings. We just need to decide that this is a problem for all of us, not just those poor fools in front of whom the discipline pulls up the ladder. And we have to decide to mobilize around it.

My dissertation work is on finance people–private equity and venture capital investors specifically. They often talk about skin in the game, or the amount of someone’s own money that a person has invested in a company as a gauge of how serious they are. The more of their own wealth and well-being they’ve sacrificed and gambled, the more serious investors take an entrepreneur. Assuming for a moment that people entering anthropology programs actually understand how debt works (since 2008 you’d have to be living under a rock to not have some idea), what might this borrowed logic tell us about those people amassing big piles of debt to become anthropologists? And what would happen if we stopped thinking of it as an individual choice to have skin in the game or to go into debt? We’ve trained people in such a way and shown life structured in such a way that they think becoming an anthropologist is worthwhile. Why would we want to blame them for believing what we say?

I had the opportunity to take a class in anthropology with a young Clifford Geertz when he was at the University of Chicago in the late 1960s.  I was nearing the end of my PhD, and I needed a “fun” course to blow off some steam.  I picked the right class.  Now, while Professor Geertz was indeed witty, frankly, after my rigorous studies in economics, I found anthropology to be slightly on the “soft” side.  That’s not to demean the discipline; I have no doubt it has its uses.  We all love dinosaurs and cave men, after all.  But I wanted to share my experiences to let you know, as readers of this anthropology “weblog,” that I am quite well versed in anthropology (I got a B plus in Mr. Geertz’s class).  Because of my deep familiarity with anthropology, I am not at all surprised by the slanted, misinformed, and, frankly, borderline un-American coverage of the student loan opportunity (it’s not a problem, let alone a “crisis”) on this site.

Frankly, back in the late 1960s anthropology was a hotbed of socialistic thinking and brazen anti-American thought.  So it’s no surprise to see that trend continue today, although it is disheartening for a lover of America like myself.  Only a bunch of Marxists could take the wonderful American institution of the student loan, which has helped generations improve their lives, and turn it into yet another blatant attempt to forgo personal responsibility and demand a free ride from the government.  I am here to set the record straight in three easy points that even those of you from the social sciences and humanities should be able to digest.

First point: Student loans are an opportunity.  They are not part of a government conspiracy to enslave the entire population.  The American government created the student loan program to help Americans pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, to propel future generations forward.  This system has worked wonderfully–nay amazingly–for decades.  The only problem arises when some individuals attempt to use the student loan opportunity to fund dubious, questionable majors–especially those in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.  While degrees in these fields have their place, they are obvious drains to the economic social good of the nation, and therefore would be better as “fun” electives taken along the way while students undertake more vigorous–and socially useful–fields of study.  Remember, readers of the Savage Minds “weblog,” it’s not the government’s fault that you decided to study a non-productive, non-lucrative field.  It was your choice to take the wonders of the student loan opportunity and waste it, so it’s your job to do the right, moral, American thing and pay your debts.  That is what good Americans have always done.

Second point: I see many people, including the “author” who put this “issue” together, complaining about the “lack of consumer protections” for student loans.  I will be straightforward here:  I was on the front lines during the battle to remove those “protections” from student loans, which we successfully accomplished more than a decade ago.  In my view, all of us who worked to create those positive, innovative changes should be thanked, rather than reviled.  Our reforms have helped save the American economy, and they have encouraged personal accountability and moral resolve in our student population.  Before those reforms, students could take the student loan opportunity and waste it, willy nilly, on degrees and fields of study that undermine America’s place in the world (not to mention here at home).  Today–thanks to me and many other hard-working American colleagues–students are held accountable for their fiscal and educational choices.  Yes, the transition period (which we are still dealing with) has not been easy, but in the long haul these changes will help propel us back into the limelight as the world’s top economic and educational leader.  Those who complain about these changes are simply trying to corrode our hopes for the future.

Third point: Freedom.  Rather than pessimistically viewing student debt as a burden, or a “trap” as the “author” Anderson calls it, we have to “turn that frown upside down” and see student loans for what they are: a chance for personal economic freedom.  As my former teacher and mentor once told me after class, “Give a socialist freedom and they’ll find a way to turn it into freeloading.”  Student loans have saved countless Americans, and they continue to do so this very day.  We should embrace these loans, and place faith in trusted, patriotic institutions such as The American Education Fund (AEF) to guide the American people into the prosperous decades of the coming century.  Trust me, I work for AEF.  At each and every meeting we remind ourselves who we work for, who we love, and who we want to see succeed: it’s you, the American people.  We are on your side.  Put down the Marxist literature, that pessimistic and warped lens, and help us build a better America.

My namesake, the great Thomas Jefferson, once famously said “To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.”  Jefferson was a great man, and a deep thinker.  But what this goes to show is that even great thinkers get it wrong.  Jefferson, as you may well know, was a founding father not only for the USA, but also for the budding field of archaeology, which isn’t far from the anthropology that is the focus of this “weblog.”  Jefferson did a great many things, and his ideas were often profound.  But when it came to debt, he was clearly overstating his argument, if not being an outright alarmist.  He was wrong.  This makes it understandable how so many in the humanities and social sciences can get it wrong today when it comes to debt.  They might have good ideas at times, but when they try to claim that student debt is a problem or a crisis, they are clearly, woefully misinformed.  Don’t make the same mistake.

In my experience, debt is only a bad thing when people make bad decisions.  People make bad decisions when they don’t take the time to educate themselves to find good information and learn about the wonders of the market system.  If only people took the time to educate themselves, they would not end up with dead-end degrees, endlessly complaining about a situation they helped create.  The good news is that it’s not too late to turn this ship around.  We can take responsibility, America.  There is still time to read up and to start making the right decisions that will create a better America.  Sometimes change starts with a change of heart, and I implore you, kind reader, to think carefully about your educational choices.  Think twice about studying questionable, non-productive fields such as Art History and Anthropology.  Use the student loan opportunity to propel yourself–and America–forward.  When you do take out loans, do what’s right for America: pay the debts you owe and be grateful.  Don’t ask the American taxpayer to pay for your lifestyle–that is a[s] un-American as it gets.  Finally, rather than demonizing wonderful institutions such as Sallie Mae (and the American Education Fund), you should be thanking them for handing you a world full of hope and opportunity.   If you need help turning your ship around, please feel free to browse The American Education Fund website.  We are here to help you be the great American you can be.  Thank you.

-Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass II

Well, it’s that time of year when prospective grad students around the country are anxiously pacing around their mailboxes waiting for responses from all the PhD programs they applied to.  Many are wondering who accepted them, who rejected them, and, of course, if they got funding.  That’s the big question.  Getting a full-funding offer is the highest mark of acceptance and application success.  It’s like getting the golden seal of academic and departmental approval.  It means you’re in.

Getting accepted without a funding offer is a not-so-wonderful middle ground.  Like getting a happy-face sticker that says “Great Job!” when you really needed a paycheck.  It feels sort of like acceptance, but there’s something hollow about it.  A lot of people decide to enter PhD programs without funding, thinking that at least it gets them in the door.  If they happen to have piles of extra money on hand, or family support, or a full-time job, or maybe even a partner who is working, it might be a reasonable choice.  Might being a key word there.  But many people simply don’t have access to those kinds of financial resources.  In these post-economic crash, disintegration-of-the-university-as-we-knew-it times, I think more students need to seriously reconsider entering PhD programs without full funding.  Why?  Because it doesn’t make any sense to go into debt trying to get a PhD in anthropology (let alone plenty of other disciplines).  Sarah Kendzior said it best on twitter not too long ago:

If the funding isn’t there, don’t do it!* Don’t get used.  Look at your options.  If you have been “accepted,” but without funding, think long and hard about the decision.  Pay close attention to the numbers of people in debt, the academic job market (a PhD is geared toward producing academics, after all), and other factors like rent and cost of living.  More importantly, think about how you are going to cover your costs.  If you’re thinking that student loans are a good option, think again.  Take the time to read up about student loans, and why accepting them might be a very, very bad idea.  One glaring issue is a lack of basic consumer protections for borrowers:

Student debt is treated more harshly than any other type of debt in America. Unlike your mortgage, business, credit card or even gambling debts, student loan debt cannot be discharged in bankruptcy and there is no statute of limitations on the collections of student loan debt. As a result, more than 40 Million Americans are buried under approximately $1.2 Trillion worth of student debt and more than 7 Million of those people have defaulted on their student loans, causing major financial hardships from which there is almost no escape.

Here’s what the lack of consumer protections means: You can go out and spend $50,000 on credit cards and file for bankruptcy.  You can run a massive, corrupt corporation like Enron and file for bankruptcy.  You can buy a house that you can’t afford and you still have consumer protections.  You can even gamble away thousands of dollars and still get those protections.  But if you go to school and amass thousands of dollars in debt, no dice.  You are stuck with those loans, thanks in part to the wonderful lobbyists (like folks from Sallie Mae) who worked hard to do away with consumer protections:

Sallie Mae’s lobbying efforts were recently described by The New York Times as “aggressive”ⁱ  spending $37,490,000 on lobbying from 1998 to 2012.ⁱⁱ  This year, Sallie Mae has already spent $1,230,000 on federal lobbying, working against several consumer protection bills, including the Private Student Loan Bankruptcy Fairness Act of 2013 and Fairness for Struggling Students Act of 2013.ⁱⁱⁱ  Both pieces of legislation call for increased regulation of private banks with a history of bad lending practices.

Even if you do get a full-funding offer, take a close look at the numbers.  Look at the amount of the stipend, the time expectations coming from the department, and travel expenses related to doing fieldwork (this last one is huge).  As Karen Kelsky pointed out with her PhD debt survey a few months back, full-funding often isn’t enough.  This is definitely the case in anthropology, which, due to fieldwork requirements, certainly isn’t cheap.  One of the issues with fieldwork is that many of your costs back home can’t be covered by fieldwork grants.  And trust me, it’s not easy to keep up with your costs while you’re away doing fieldwork, unless you’re some sort of roaming free-spirit without any possessions, connections, bills, or previous obligations.  Even students with funding often end up taking out student loans to cover those “extra” expenses.  Again, this warrants a deep look into the pluses and minuses of student loans (see above).  These are the kinds of things you don’t hear too much about until you’re well into the thick of grad school.  Better to know sooner rather than later.

At some point we might want to think about how all of this debt is affecting the actual practice and meaning of anthropology.  Think about this: if we’re graduating a flood of students who are deep in debt, what kind of “anthropology” are we really producing in the end, and how does that bode for all of our big talk about “public engagement”?  Especially since the students of anthropology are one of the discipline’s primary public audiences.  Teaching is, after all, on the front lines of what many refer to as “public anthropology”.  It is one way we get the message out into the world.  But what message are we sending?  What does it mean for anthropology when our institutions are burying a huge percentage of our own in debilitating debt, while the rest of us just stand by and watch?

That’s a discussion for another post.  In the meantime, don’t get used.  Avoid debt at all costs.

*Note: Some folks might respond to this by saying something like “But if the only people who get PhD’s are those who have the money or resources, then graduate school is going to become little more than an elitist institution for the rich!” My response: It already is. Encouraging more people to go into debt isn’t going to change that.

In order to make a real difference, you have to go deeply into “debt.” You have to take out a massive personal capacity-building loan to prepare yourself for the rugged terrain that is the world of international “development.” If you carry the heavier cross of wanting to entertain post-development notions – of deconstructing the way the North interacts with, represents, and perceives the South while “practicing” development – you must also drag along its corollary baggage: being a naysayer in an industry of entrenched professionals and experts. If you have had the misfortune of being trained beyond the capacity that is desired of a development professional – a reflexive applied anthropologist always willing to intervene with a “now, wait a second” – then you suddenly become less an asset than a perceived enemy or an implant.

In this academy-abandoned landscape of moving forward with a kind of loosely defined and intensively critical development philosophy, the very contours and nature of debt become something like a ghost. Debt becomes something that is difficult to believe in as a real entity. It is negative capital that must be plodded through to realize a sense of personal freedom. But at the same time it exists in a realm of voices, letters, phone calls, and news articles. One is constantly reminded of it – even distracted by it – but as it howls it is difficult to feel the substance of its howl. The wolves at the door appear to be more holograms than threats. Why throw your livelihood to these beasts when you have a child to feed? Why acknowledge their scratchings when your real task at hand is to co-create an agriculture program in Ethiopia or bring attention to indigenous adaptations to climate change in marginalized areas of Ghana? The ghost of debt becomes something like a joke. The voices, the letters, the phone calls, the news stories, the “bubble” – all of it collapses under the immensity of its absurdity. Of course, this is all wrong and unpatriotic. Right?

These rites of passage are all situated within the Western apparatuses that one must negotiate to free themselves from the epistemological, nationalistic, and economic constraints of Western society. The price one pays for good anthropological training, good field experience, and the multiple lenses through which to analyze the predicament of the “Other” is the need to constantly keep these wolves away from the door. One must slip in, amass knowledge, and slip out. But if I may expand on the above, the threat of a government intervention into your personal life or a dragnet that amasses all of our lost souls and claws into our paychecks seems improbable. We are taught to fear the wolves but to also not take them too seriously. The only fear becomes the fear of an alternate reality where one is linked in enough to weigh their debt against their household obligations.

I had an opportunity to reflect on this some time ago while hacking away some bunches of plantains from my agroforestry project in Ghana. The feeling of my machete connecting with the flesh of the plantain stock and the sticky juice leaking on to my hands was priceless. Afterwards, I was loading up a tricycle-truck with the equivalent of about $150 worth of plantains to help the project break even for the month. I was laughing with my workers afterwards and throwing back calabashes of palm wine. One of my workers asked me, in Ewe, what I did while I was in graduate school. I responded that I had learned how to examine the social world from multiple perspectives and how to analyze human-environment relationships.

“How much did that cost you?”

I simply laughed and looked over at the pile of plantains towering in the back of my tricycle. I thought of all the voices, letters, phone calls, and news stories. I thought of all the accusations of personal irresponsibility and my role in building the student doubt house of cards that looms over academia more ominously, apparently, than the aching and trembling scepter of environmental destruction and climatic chaos.

“$150.”

With total student loan debt over one trillion dollars, millions of students and families can never hope to repay what they owe, especially since there are no individual solutions to the problem. Student loans are not dischargeable in bankruptcy, and student loan lenders can and do garnish debtors’ wages and social security checks. The powers of lenders to collect are unprecedented in the history of creditor/debtor relations.

Yet, belief in upward mobility through education is still a profoundly American ideal. In the midst of the latest recession, politicians and elites have argued not for the redistribution of wealth but for making college “more affordable” in the belief that increasing access to education makes more fundamental social changes unnecessary. Forgotten, too, in the emphasis on college financing is that education is not just a path to a job. It’s a site of human desire, aspiration, and hope for the future.

As a former teacher and a student debtor, I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of higher education. And as an education activist, I’ve been coming to terms with what it means to fight for public education while mourning the death of the university. Before explaining what I mean by “the death of the university,” I will provide some details about my own political history and how it has shaped my current thinking.

In the early days of Occupy Wall Street, I was part of the Occupy Student Debt Campaign, a group committed to the idea that student debt is, by definition, illegitimate and that building the power of debtors through collective action is the only option. We also believed that refusing to pay illegitimate debts was a necessary and moral act. Starting in November 2011, OSDC asked student debtors to sign an online petition pledging to stop paying their loans once one million others agreed to do the same. We hoped, at the very least, to build solidarity and to chip away at the myth that debt is an individual failure, something people must suffer in isolation and shame. In fact, almost three quarters of Americans are in some kind of debt, and nearly six million student debtors were already in default when we launched the pledge of refusal.

The pledge was based upon four principles: 1) All public two- and four-year colleges should be tuition free. 2) Student loans, if they exist at all, should be interest free. 3) Private colleges must open their books so that students could learn how their tuition dollars were spent. 4) All current student debt should be written off in the spirit of Jubilee.

Unfortunately, the campaign was not as successful as we had hoped. It turned out to be very difficult for people to imagine not paying their loans, even at some point in the distant future. The idea that all debts should be repaid is a leash that keeps debtors working more and more hours and giving up many other life ambitions to make dreaded monthly payments. And, even though public college in the U.S. was free or low-cost for much of the 20^th century, it was difficult to convince people, especially members of the press, that the goal of ending tuition was anything more than a quixotic fantasy.

By spring 2012, OSDC was as committed as ever, but we needed a new strategy. We joined with others from the Occupy movement to start Strike Debt. We wanted to expand our analysis of the debt system. Parents, for example, might take out a second mortgage on the family home to send their kids to college. Someone without health insurance might rack up medical debt, while also putting some of the costs of health care on credit cards. A worker who loses a job might turn to payday lenders to make ends meet, leading to a negative credit rating. In some states, a bad credit score makes it more difficult to find a job. Strike Debt wanted to unravel the web of debt to understand the way it affects all of our lives in multiple, overlapping ways.

One of our first projects was to research and write a book about debt from an anti-capitalist perspective. In the Debt Resisters’ Operations Manual, we drew connections between different kinds of debt – from student loans to municipal debt – and offered individual tactics to keep creditors at bay while emphasizing that collective action is the only long-term solution. We gave away 5,000 copies of the DROM and made a free version available on our website. (The second volume will be released in early March. It will also be available free online.)

Another Strike Debt project was the Rolling Jubilee, which launched on November 15, 2012. RJ collected donations and used the money to purchase debt on the secondary market. But instead of collecting on that debt like a debt collector, we abolished it.  By the time we closed the Rolling Jubilee fund at the end of 2013, we had raised over $600,000 and cancelled $15 million in medical debt for people in 46 states.

From the beginning of the campaign, we hoped to help change the conversation about debt. As successful as the Rolling Jubilee was (we received attention from the press, including feature stories in the New York Times and The Guardian, among many others), we knew that abolishing individual debts was not a long-term solution to the predatory debt system or to the savageries of capitalism. As the saying goes: “if you owe the bank $1,000, the bank owns you. But if you owe the bank $10 million, you own the bank.” With that in mind, we have moved on to other projects and are strategizing new ways to develop the collective power of debtors.

As the next phase unfolds, I’ve been thinking about the early goals of OSDC, the group that served as my entry point into the debt resistance movement. A jubilee of all student debts (one of OSDC’s original principles) may still seem impossible. But, as Andrew Ross wrote in Creditocracy: The Case for Debt Refusal, advocates for debt cancellation in the Jubilee South movement “have had some success in delivering relief for some of the world’s poorest populations.” And in global North cities such as Detroit and in Eurozone countries, “the process of questioning which [public] debts are legitimate  ­– and deserving of repayment – and which are unfair impositions – to be rightly rejected – is already underway.”

One of the central questions raised by Ross and other theorists is: how can we determine which kinds of debts should be abolished? Marxian scholar George Caffentzis researched El Barzón, a debtors movement that was active in Mexico in the 1990s, and found that the group’s success in getting the Mexican government to cancel some mortgage debts had a largely conservative effect. Such “reformist jubilees,” Caffentzis explained,

relieve the pressure put on ruling classes by debtors’ movements, since the jubilee appears to have “solved” the problem and then dissipates the mass opposition to debt. Debts have been cancelled in these reformist jubilees, so that the oppressive machine could keep grinding on. However, some jubilees have a revolutionary impact and mark the beginning of new forms of social organization.

Some kind of jubilee is probably inevitable in the U.S. as well, since the current situation is unsustainable. What form it will take and who will ultimately benefit?

To answer that question, we can examine how the terms of the battle against student debt have shifted over the last few years. Incredibly, three years after Occupy, some members of the political class are now calling for free higher education. Tennessee’s Governor Bill Haslam (a Republican) recently proposed making all 2-year community colleges and technical schools free. The New York Times called the idea a “striking reversal” of the trend towards higher prices and speculated that the goal was to create “a better educated work force” in that state. In Wisconsin, state Senator Kathleen Vinehout endorsed a similar proposal. More people need to go to college, she wrote, because “education raises wages and the likelihood of employment.” Finally, in Oregon, lawmakers are exploring a proposal to provide “debt-free” education to students enrolled in public colleges. The program, called Pay It Forward, would allow the state to take a portion of students’ paychecks for up to 25 years. (I co-authored an essay critiquing PIF here.)

Though all of these programs are far from implementation, they can be read as responses from the political establishment to justified public anger and frustration at the high cost of college. They are attempts by elected officials to blunt the possibility of a real debtors rebellion that could challenge the social relations that undergird the creditor/debtor relationship. In other words, the “reformist jubilees” identified by Caffentzis may already be in progress.

What can the debtors movement learn from these transformations in the political landscape? Were OSDC’s original goals of tuition-free education and a student debt jubilee wrong because they may eventually lead to conservative reforms? Is the goal of helping to change the way we think about debt misplaced if it does not explicitly reject such reforms from the outset? I think the answer is no. I interpret the fact that politicians felt compelled to respond to public outrage as an important early victory for the debt resistance movement, of which OSDC and Strike Debt are only a small part.

Now the crucial question: what’s next? What if the solutions we seek can’t be found within the current political system? How can we re-tool our tactics and re-imagine our goals in the interest of progress towards a re-distribution of wealth and public resources like education? It seems clear that accepting the Oregon state legislature’s definition of “debt-free” college or allowing some politicians to earn points for eliminating tuition at those institutions that were already relatively inexpensive (such as community colleges in Tennessee) will not lead us to the paradigmatic shift in social relations that we seek.

The next phase of our work requires a deeper analysis of how debt traps us in quicksand, desperate for any form of relief. If you study hard and earn a degree, we’ve all been told, you will have a competitive advantage in the job market, which will then lead to a middle-class standard of living. We should reject this myth, once and for all. According to recent data, of the 20 occupations expected to add the most jobs over the next ten years, only one will require a four-year degree. Most jobs of the future will be low-wage jobs in areas like health care, retail, and food service. Paying workers as little as possible to create wealth for owners is the definition of capitalism, and more college degrees can’t change that basic equation.

The next phase of the debtors movement must confront the idea that the higher education system we have is not ultimately the one that we want, even if it’s free. A diploma is no longer a path to upward mobility. Maybe it never was. And it’s easy to forget in an era of austerity that education is supposed to be much more than a path to a paycheck. Unfortunately, these days, most colleges operate on vast supplies of cheap labor, including adjunct faculty. They are run as private corporations for the benefit of the investor class. In California, which is leading the trend, universities already pay $1 billion per year in interest alone to Wall Street banks. Could such places ever be reclaimed for the public?

Of course, we should not relinquish our (formerly) public spaces without a fight. At the same time, those of us who care about education must acknowledge that the institutions we have are quite possibly beyond saving. “The question to ask now,” wrote David Graeber, “is not, how do we bring [higher education] back? . . . The question is what new forms of genuinely democratic self-organization might rise from its ashes?”

In that regard, the OSDC pledge of refusal may have been before its time. In those days, many critics asked: “you oppose student debt, but what are you for?” We felt pressured to come up with a positive program and to articulate a vision for the world to come. Yet, we were just a few volunteers who had met for the first time a few weeks earlier in Zuccotti Park. The fact that we rarely had a satisfying answer felt like a weakness. But perhaps our lack of a blueprint for the future was actually a strength that suggests a great deal about the work still to come: we didn’t know what the sites of teaching and learning we really wanted would be like because no one had invented them yet.

Ryan Anderson: How serious is the student debt problem?

Karen Kelsky:  NSF data shows us that almost 50% of all Ph.D.s in the Humanities and Social Sciences are finishing with debt. In the Social Sciences, almost 10% of all Ph.D.s are finishing with over $90,000 debt.  Over 13% have $50K-$90K.  So almost a quarter of all Ph.D.s in the Social Sciences have more than $50K of debt just from graduate school alone, not including the debt carried forward from college.

In the Humanities, while only 6.8% have debt above $90K, almost 13% have $50K-$90K debt, and a whopping 33.2% have debt of $10K-$50K.  Again, these figures do not include undergraduate debt, which is usually higher than grad school debt, since so many Ph.D. programs carry some form of funding.

I’m using NSF data here because it’s “scientific” and harder to deny than the entries on my informal and unscientific Ph.D. Debt Survey.  But the Survey, an open source Googledoc spreadsheet that is now well over 2200 entries (and still open to more!) gives the human stories behind these numbers.

What the stories tell us unmistakably is that so-called “full funding” packages are simply inadequate to support the actual expenses of adult lives in most cases, especially in major cities, or where the Ph.D. student has dependents, or an ongoing health issue.  Funding is also inadequate because if generally doesn’t cover student fees (often $1000 annually nowadays), nor is it adequate to cover summer expenses or the expenses associated with essential professionalization, such as travel for research and conferences.

What the stories of the Ph.D. Debt Survey show most clearly is that many of those who finish without debt draw on family resources–either an inheritance, parental contribution, or a working spouse.  Those without such resources are at a grave disadvantage.  Advanced degrees are once again becoming a perquisite of the upper classes.

RA: What’s your basic advice for anyone looking to start a PhD program these days?  Is it worth it to take out loans to finance a PhD?

KK:  This is the advice that I keep in a file as a boilerplate response to all of those who write asking me whether they should do a Ph.D. in the humanities of social sciences:

I generally advise caution about applying to phd programs. Make sure you are fully funded, and that the so-called ‘full funding package’ is actually adequate for your real-life living expenses in the location of the program.  Go only to an elite or high ranking program, and take on absolutely no debt to do the entire program start to finish.  If all those are possible and you are under 40, then it’s not a bad choice.  While there, firmly strategize for the job market from your first year, by reading my column, Graduate School Is a Means to a Job, and doing what it says.

I elaborate on this in my blog post, “Should You Go To Graduate School?”

The Ph.D. in the Humanities or Social Sciences is an extremely bad financial decision for many people at this point in time, certainly for those without a working spouse or family wealth. The reason is not simply the inadequacy of most full funding packages, which have not even remotely kept place with rising costs of living, but that the years in the program are — or should be — a person’s prime earning years when they could otherwise be earning a full-time income,  paying into social security, perhaps accruing the funds to buy a first house, and otherwise laying the financial foundation for later years.  All of those things are out of the question for most Ph.D.s in the humanities and social sciences (as opposed to Engineering, the hard sciences, etc.).  So the financial repercussions of the decision do not stop at the years of “grad student lifestyle” [ramen noodles, etc.] in the program, which may seem like a reasonable and even appealing sacrifice when you’re in your twenties. Rather they extend outward into a person’s thirties or forties and beyond, when the stakes become urgent of having massive debt, no job, no security, and no financial cushion.

RA: When the subjects of student debt and the bad job market come up, one response I hear going around is a version of “Well, everything’s fine in my department, so I don’t see the problem.”  What’s your take on this kind of response to the situation?

KK:  Denial is not just a river in Egypt.  Graduate students seem determined to willingly delude themselves about the neoliberal financial foundation of graduate education; I’ve found that they are the most deeply invested in the myths of the academic cult.  Then they finish their programs and hit the job market.  The job market reveals the total insupportability of the entire system.  But until graduate students confront the job market, they often remain in a state of hostile denial to any discussion of the financial repercussions of graduate school.  They are of course usually encouraged in this by complacent and out of touch tenured faculty, who continue to push canards like “the best people always find jobs,” or “just focus on your dissertation and it will all work out.”

RA: A lot of the commentary about student debt tends to focus on how individuals manage their personal finances.  Has student debt gotten so out of control because student borrowers are being irresponsible with money?

KK:   Look at the stories in the spreadsheet and you won’t see anyone who was gambling away their rent money or traveling to Aruba.  Stipends of $15-$18,000 a year are simply not enough to cover modest and frugal expenses.   A stipend of $15,000 range yields an income of $1250 a month.  It is not a stretch to imagine a modest budget (rent: $500, gas: $100, food: $300, utilities: $200, books and research: $200, misc: $200 = $1500) that immediately exceeds this, and note that this does not include car insurance or health care co-pays, let alone any unexpected expenses.

RA: In your view, what are the key driving forces behind all of this debt?  What it is about our current educational system that has contributed to this problem?

KK:  It can be traced to the defunding of higher education, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, and the shifting of money away from the educational mission and toward ancillary expenses like athletics and administration.  “Full funding” stipends would average something like $30,000 or more if they were keeping pace with actual rising costs of living (note the new Johns Hopkins plans to reduce graduate admissions but support those admitted with $30K stipends).  In the neoliberal university, however, that is organized around an ethos of permanent scarcity, cost-cutting, and downsizing (except in the ranks of upper administration and athletics), the funds for this are nowhere to be seen.

RA: What’s your take on groups like Strike Debt?  Is the solution going to be some sort of widespread debt cancellation?

KK:  Thomas Frank has an amazing piece from 2012 in Harper’s, called the “Price of Admission.”  You can find it here.  He quotes from anthropologist David Graeber’s pathbreaking book: Debt: the First 5000 Years.  He talks about the effectiveness of debt in turning young people into “profit-maximizing machines.”  Here’s a longer quote:

“Without indebtedness to sharpen the point of the stick (and make the carrot seem that much juicier), students will just sit around in their quadrangles as they always have, wallowing in pointless disciplines and tossing frisbees.

Massive indebtedness changes a person, maybe even more than a college education does, and it’s reasonable to suspect that the politicos who have allowed the tuition disaster to take its course know this. To saddle young people with enormous, inescapable debt— total student debt is now more than one trillion dollars—is ultimately to transform them into profit-maximizing machines. I mean, working as a schoolteacher or an editorial assistant at a publishing house isn’t going to help you chip away at that forty grand you owe. You can’t get out of it by bankruptcy, either. And our political leaders, lost in a fantasy of punitive individualism, certainly won’t propose the bailout measures they could take to rescue the young from the crushing burden.”

I do support the work of Strike Debt.  But in my work I am more directly concerned with warning individuals not to go to graduate school at all if it entails any debt.  Graduate school in the humanities is not worth mortgaging your future over.  Yes, it’s unjust that this career option was available (and not financially ruinous) to previous generations, and I hope it will be again. But for those who contemplate graduate school right now—don’t allow the fantasy of the ivory tower to blind you to the reality of the neoliberal economy of higher ed: stagnant stipends/wages and systemic unemployment result in the bank owning your future.

RA: What are the solutions?  What kinds of changes do we need to make to truly address this student debt problem?

KK:  Again, I’m not a macro-economic thinker (or an economist of any stripe!).  I am not qualified to propose institutional solutions to the scandal and tragedy of 1 trillion dollars of student debt.  I just want everyone who is in, or contemplating entering, a graduate program in the humanities and social sciences to understand the risks, and to resist the Kool-Aid poured out by most tenured members of the academic cult that the life of the mind somehow exists outside of the real economy.

Sometimes I feel as though I’ve been swindled. Not by anyone in particular but by an institution that is relentlessly trying to prop itself up despite its progressive decline. That institution is the academy – once a public good devoted to the free production of critical knowledge, it has become in the last few decades a corporatized factory for the production of capitalist consumers and wage slaves. More than that, it has become itself a product for consumption where what’s for sale is the facsimile of intellectual freedom and integrity. Like so many extravagant island resorts, universities offer manicured landscapes, leisure activities, freedom from the wage clock – all for a price and all safely sectioned off from the harsh realities outside. But the price is going up, and students – the consumers of this image world that they are being sold – are taking on increasing amounts of debt to pay it. What’s more, they’re told this is “good debt” – like buying a house, right? Remember when owning a home was the “American Dream” – a symbol of financial security? Now that bubble has burst – the academic bubble, I believe, is not far behind it.

Bubbles happen when a sector of the economy becomes delusional – when those who take part in it believe it to be free from the economic rules upon which our world is constructed. Academia has become such a delusion. But bubbles are not accidents – they are an inevitable part of a system that seeks the maximization of profit as the ultimate value. Speculators dive in, drawn by promises of wealth and freedom only to be crushed by the inevitable collapse of the delusional space. The speculators are consumers themselves, buying into a vision sold to them by the real beneficiaries – the banks, insurance companies, and, in the case of academia, the Universities. In this case, the speculator-consumers are the students – drawn in by the lure of “good debt”, stipends, the image of freedom and intellectual engagement, and the promise of a good job when it’s all over.

The academic bubble is a particularly tricky one for several reasons. First, it is housed within institutions that are ostensibly public. The corporatization of the University has proceeded as a vampyric draining of public resources, replacing them with the spirit of capital accumulation. Thus the monster maintains an outwardly appealing form. Second, what’s being consumed is not a product or even a lifestyle, but a livelihood. Students enter with the intent of finding a career path, and often get sucked in to a long-term commitment because they find upon graduating that they can’t do anything with their degree and need another degree to supplement it. Third, this isn’t one large bubble waiting to burst. It’s more like putting bubble bath in a hot tub. What you get are thousands of bubbles piling on top of one another moving up and up and then outward. The result is not one all-encompassing burst, but thousands of tiny bursts as students move out into the world and find themselves unable to find jobs, and unable to pay their debts.

I am not as bad off as some – it could be worse. My parents have always made a reasonable living, but never enough to set aside a college fund for my brother and me. I worked for five years as a child care assistant before going back to undergrad. In order to make that transition, I had to take out a private loan because I earned too much (about $25k) the year before to qualify for financial assistance, but too little to have a significant savings. I spent two years at a community college, paid for by a combination of that loan and federal and state grants. When I switched to the University, I began taking out federal loans to cover my cost of school (I was out of state, so tuition was high for the first year) and living. I worked, but didn’t earn enough to live. I received one small scholarship thanks to a helpful professor at the University, but mostly I paid for my BA through loans. For my Master’s degree I was offered one year of funding, and then was lucky enough to get the second year covered by a grant that my professor was working on. Neither of these covered the cost of summer courses that I was required to take, so I took out more loans to pay for those. Furthermore, the stipend in our department is roughly $16,000 per year (for a 9.5 month GAship – the 12 month GAships are hard to come by), which is not nearly enough to live on in the DC metro area. As an example, I pay half of my income in rent for a small room in a shared house; food, bills, and other common expenses quickly eat up the rest of my paycheck. If it weren’t for loans and the extra work I do on the side, I wouldn’t be able to make it, and I don’t lead an extravagant life by any means.

Currently my student loan debt is in the five-figure range, but edging close to six. In addition, I have a few thousand in credit card debt (the result of a couple of unexpected expenses, including one medical issue that wasn’t covered by my insurance). I dread the day I have to begin paying those loans off – in part because I’m not sure I’ll have a job with the income to make the payments and still have enough to live on. Frankly, I’m terrified, and I can only hope that things work out when the time comes.

Did I make the wrong choice? Should I have stopped at the BA or Master’s degree? I don’t think so. I believe strongly that everyone should have access to the education that they want. I knew from the moment I returned to college that I was going to pursue a PhD, and I don’t regret that choice at all in spite of my accruing debt. Maybe I should have taken time off in between degrees to work and achieve some kind of financial stability. Perhaps, but there’s no reason to think that I would have found that stability in the current economic market, so it might have been years before I was able to pursue my intended career. I certainly could have tried other routes and made better financial decisions. However, if the result of these discussions about academic debt is merely to blame the students for not making the right choices, then something is seriously wrong.  If we condemn students for going to grad school when they can’t afford it, then the only people who will go to grad school and get PhDs are those who can. This will only exacerbate the inequalities that have become increasingly apparent in our current economic system (see here for an interesting breakdown of the inequalities of academic debt). Instead, I think we have to turn our attention to the much larger (and much more difficult) issues that make students go into debt, that encourage departments to take on more students than they can fund, and that make finding adequate employment on graduation difficult.

I don’t pretend to understand all of what’s going on, but here are some of my own observations. First, there are probably too many students going into graduate school. They simply cannot all be funded, but who gets in shouldn’t come down to those who can afford it – graduate school and funding should be available to anyone who wants to pursue an academic career. However, I think that many of the students would be content to stop at the BA or Master’s and pursue other careers, but instead they go into and remain in graduate school beyond what they feel necessary in part because they don’t feel like they can get jobs with anything but a PhD. They graduate from undergrad and find that they have no choice – the only way to get a decent job with the degree that they have is to get another degree. Second, I think departments feel compelled to accept these students (those who meet the academic qualifications, at any rate) because of a moral obligation to provide students with education, but also because they themselves are under economic pressure to demonstrate their value to the universities. Taking on graduate students – funded or not – is one way to do this. Regardless of the motivation, finding funding for the students that they accept should be a top priority for every department. Finally, all of this takes place within an economic system in which the universities themselves are increasingly driven by corporate, profit maximizing logic (in spite of the fact that many of them are not for profit institutions).

What are the solutions? I’m not an expert on this issue – but I have a few ideas.  First, we can (as my friend Michael says) militantly defend the university as a public institution whose benefit is more than just the production of laborers who fit an economically prescribed niche (e.g. pushing engineering, computer science, business, etc. as the only worthwhile disciplines, the only ones students should consider taking on debt to pursue) – an institution that produces a critically informed public, which benefits everyone. Higher education should be freely available to everyone who wants or needs it. That would address some of the larger economic issues that underlie the debt bubble. Second, we can work on making it easier for people with BAs and MAs in anthropology to find economically stable jobs. This would make it easier for people to take time off and achieve some degree of financial stability before entering graduate school, and would also give those students who don’t want or need to attend graduate school an outlet to pursue another kind of career – not because they can’t afford it, but because they’re not interested in becoming academics. Finally, we can focus on giving students at every level the tools they need to be successful in the current economic system (this is a weak solution since it plays into the flawed economics that cause this mess, but it is still a viable option and should be considered). That means less focus on teaching exotic topics and more on teaching useful and marketable skills. To me that means more methods education at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Ethnographic methods are highly sought after right now despite the decline of interest in anthropology and ethnographic subject matter, and teaching them will help students find the jobs that will give them a solid start in life after college.

I know that I haven’t been swindled. I made my choices, I knew what I was getting into (though not necessarily the extent or intensity of the problems), and I’m glad that I’m working towards the PhD that I always wanted. I hope that someday I will come out of school, find a decent job teaching and doing research, and that I will be able to gradually pay off my debt while living a reasonable lifestyle. That’s all part of what I signed on for. Still, I think many students come into and remain in graduate school unnecessarily and without full recognition of the costs they might face. We all need to work on making it easier for people to pursue the education that they want without accruing massive debt. Deflating this academic bubble will make all of us better off in the end.

So what’s going on with the folks who reported no student loan debt?  What do these responses tell us?  My first question when I saw these results was whether the “zero debt” segment would be overwhelmingly positive in terms of their outlook about anthropology and their academic career.  I also wondered if this segment would be more dismissive about the student debt issue, since they don’t have any debt themselves.  As is often the case, however, the actual results offer quite a lot more than the story the raw numbers seem to tell.

First of all, look at how I worded the question in the survey.  I asked “What is your current student loan debt?”  My goal was to get an understanding of how debt relates to attitudes about: 1) individuals’ careers in anthropology; and 2) the student debt problem as a whole.  But the issue with my wording is that a “zero student loan debt” answer on the survey can mean at least two things.  First, it can mean that someone never took out student loans (whether due to grants and fellowships, family assistance, working during school, etc).  Or it can mean that the respondent had loans at one time, but has since paid them off.  There are clear instances of both cases in this survey (this comes out in some of the open-ended questions).  This is important to keep in mind.  Survey #2 asks about total student loan debt people had to take out to finance their education.

Second, I wanted to know if the number of debt free responses could be explained by when people went to school.  Perhaps some people did not have to take about student loans because they went to school in the 1930s when life was free and easy (well, except for that whole Great Depression thing).  A look at the numbers, however, reveals that 53% of respondents last attended college and/or graduate school between 2010 and 2014.  Another 20% attended between 2004 and 2009.  So, nearly three quarters of the responses came from people who have attended college/grad school since 2004.  The lack of debt clearly can’t be attributed to going to college in some more affordable period of time.  A majority are recent grads and current students.

Then I wondered if maybe the responses could be explained by how much schooling people have completed.  Maybe I was getting all of these debt free folks because a high percentage of respondents had only attended a few years of college, and therefore did not accrue much debt.  That possibility seemed plausible.  But it’s not the case.  About 50% of people who said they have no student loan debt have their PhD in hand; another 28% have their M.A. in hand.  That’s 78% of the total.  The majority of these debt-free folks have made it quite far in academia.  We’re not looking at a group of people who have just 1-2 years of college here.

Ok, so what about attitudes toward a career in anthropology?  I asked “How do you feel about your future career in anthropology?” First of all, 14 out of 75 people didn’t answer the question.  I broke down the remaining 61 responses into seven categories for a relatively quick assessment.  Please note that this is just a preliminary analysis based upon the results I have so far.  I categorized 26 responses as “positive/confident.”  These were people who responded that they felt good, confident, or optimistic about their career in anthropology–often with little to no qualifications.  Some expressed positive sentiments about their career but also said they feel lucky or fortunate about their situation.  Still others said they feel positive/optimistic about their career, but also noted that they are no longer in anthropology.  So the “positive/confident” category was certainly internally variable.  A total of 10 people have what I categorized as “mixed feelings,” since they expressed both positive and negative sentiments about their career outlook.  Additionally, I categorized another 20 as “uncertain/worried” because they said they felt unsure, tenuous, concerned, or stressed about their future career.  Finally, I put five people in the “negative” category because their answers were unquestionably NOT positive.  One person in this category simply wrote: “Dire.”  Another said they feel their prospects are “bleak.”

Of course, a lot is lost when we take open-ended responses and reduce them to basic categories for the purposes of statistical analysis.  A lot of meaning gets mangled when we transform stories into numbers.  It’s already bad enough when we reduce stories to short, open-ended answers for online surveys!  So let’s look at a few case studies with as much context as we have on hand.  For each individual case, I’ll list the answers to some of the basic questions, and then highlight how each individual answered the last two open-ended questions.  Please note that this selection is biased toward people who answered BOTH of the last two questions.  Here goes:

1. Socio-cultural anthropologist.  Completed PhD.  Last went to school in 1998.  Currently has a full-time job.  Reason for studying anthropology: “Fell in love with the discipline as an undergrad and went straight through to graduate school to get PhD.”  Received a three-year, un-endowed fellowship, FLAS grant for coursework, and Fulbright IIE for fieldwork.  Family support: “My parents gave me $5000 because I had graduated early as an undergrad. No additional family support.”  Work during college/grad school?: “Yes, after returning from the field, I taught a course for another department (not where I was doing my degree) and then picked up an appointment that I held for two years in terminal masters degree program. I also picked up some consulting work for a local design firm.”  No current student loan debt.  Between $1,100 and $5,000 in credit card debt to finance education.  Reason for loan and/or credit card debt: “Even though I lived very, VERY frugally (large, share apartments or house sits), living expenses were still sometimes more than I could cover.”

How do you feel about your future career in anthropology?

I feel very positively. I love my career choice and am very glad to have become an anthropologist. However, because of success in business (especially in sales and consulting), I never felt trapped in the field, nor did I feel bitter about choosing to make less money. Finally, I moved to Australia about eight years ago, out of the US tenure-track system and into a much more humane, reasonable system with no tenure and collective bargaining for good working conditions.

Final thoughts/comments:

I think undergraduates should be advised to NEVER pursue a PhD unless a scholarship is on the table. I watched colleagues start at the U of Chicago without scholarships, and I simply have no idea how or if they ever were able to get out of debt. Although I did not have much family support (a one-time gift equivalent to what I had saved them by graduating early), with a scholarship and very careful financial management and a significant amount of luck (including fieldwork scholarships and jobs when I desperately needed them), I was able to finish with no debt. It was a precarious balance though, and without the luck, or with children or medical expenses or any number of other things, it would not have worked out.

Clearly, departments need to be more aware of this and to do things like providing safety [net] fieldwork funding or cost-of-living RA positions if there are not other opportunities. Students also need to be encouraged to avoid debt, even if this means NOT attending graduate programs in high cost-of-living cities.

***

1. Socio-cultural anthropologist.  Completed M.A. Has a part-time job.  Currently in school.  Reason for studying anthropology: “interesting, practically relevant in the right contexts, applying holistic thinking.”  Funding: “yes, university support for the first few years, also advisor found grant funding. would not be in a PHD program without this funding. not worth the debt.”  Family support: “undergrad, yes. Master’s, no- took out my own loans (now repaid with working years in between). Phd- no.”  Work during college/grad school?: “yes, all the way through of course. $15,455./ year doesn’t really cut it living in a city.”  No current student loan debt.  No credit card debt to finance education.  Reason for loans and/or credit card debt: “Other than the loan for my master’s ($18,000- now repaid) I have deliberately lived so as not to incur debt. I don’t agree with the mentality that you can dig yourself this hole and expect for it to disappear later on.”

How do you feel about your future career in anthropology?

Tenuous at best but I’m doing what I love so I’ll keep working at it till I cannot.

Final thoughts/comments:

It is extremely unwise to go into a lot of debt to do Anthropology. This means that those without family resources or stellar career prospects are probably likely not to live comfortably after spending so long incurring debt to go to school. We, as a field, should find ways to support those who do not have these resources to follow us into the field BUT at the same time we should think critically about how many Master’s and Phds that we grant. We should not just have PHD programs so that faculty feel better about their own individual intellectual legacies.

***

1. Socio-cultural anthropologist.  Completed PhD.  Has a full-time job.  Last attended school in 2013.  Reason for studying anthropology: “I wanted to teach in post secondary education.”  Funding: “Yes. I based my decision to go to grad school on the availability of funding. If I hadn’t gotten these fellowships, I am not sure what I would have done, but I definitely wouldn’t have been able to go back when I did.”  Family support: “For undergrad, yes. For grad school, no.”  Work during college and/or grad school?: “Yes. I was a half-time TA for four semesters, an instructor for two summer sessions, and worked in a research center for 10 hrs/week for three years. ” No current student loan debt.  No credit card debt to finance education.

How do you feel about your future career in anthropology?

I feel like any career in academia is an uphill battle these days. I am also geographically limited because honestly, a tenure track job in anthro is less important to me than loving where I live. The salary and the stress wouldn’t make it worth it to me to live somewhere I didn’t want to be. And as a two-career couple (my partner is not an academic), we have to balance the considerations for two jobs. That said, I think that my personal choices and my professors’ advice have helped me to build an interdisciplinary skill set and to hone my research interests so that I can have multiple career paths–both within and outside of academia. Right now, my outlook is pretty optimistic: I am currently a postdoc with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Not a traditional anthro career track, but since it is a research position at a university, I am hopeful that I will at least be slightly more competitive for the tenure track (or applied, if I decide to stay in research) than I was before this position. But do I think that I will go on the job market in two years and land a stable, tenure track job (any job, not just one in my geographical limit)? No. I honestly don’t think that I will. I think the market is that tough.

Final thoughts/comments:

I could not, in good conscience, advise someone to take on loads of debt for an anthropology degree. I would tell people to work for a few years before going to grad school, have a moderately clear idea of what you want to do and where (i.e. women’s human rights in the MENA post Arab spring, to use a friend’s example, not just global women’s issues) and have a really clear exit strategy (i.e. this is how I am going to fund myself and my research, and here are my backup plans A, B, C, etc.). The sad thing about the debt to future earnings ratio in disciplines like anthropology is that it will turn some really brilliant, and diverse, people away because it is simply too expensive. Anthropologists can make such vital contributions to the world, and the debt load is crippling our ability to receive the training necessary to make that difference.

***

1. Socio-cultural anthropologist.  Completed PhD.  Has a full-time job.  Last attended school in 2012.  Reason for studying anthropology: “Because I hated my last two jobs in CRM archaeology, had a bit of a crisis about turning 30 and hating my life, and decided a switch to soci-cultural and pursuing a PhD was what I needed to do for myself.”  Funding: “Yes. I received a New Zealand International Doctoral Research Scholarship (fees, insurance, book allowance, small relocation allowance, stipend) for the first 3 years, then a six month extension. I got a Wenner Gren to cover my fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, supplemented by the University of Auckland faculty of Arts research funds. At Auckland each PhD student also gets several thousand dollars of research money that can be used at the student’s discretion.”  Family support: “Only a little bit back when I was still an undergraduate, but every penny I borrowed, I paid back.”  Work during college and/or grad school?: “Yes. As an undergraduate, only starting in my 4th year, but as a master’s student I TA-d (a requirement of my funding), but not outside the university. And through my first two degrees I always worked full time in the summers. As a PhD student, I TA-d, lectured, and did research assistant work.”  No current student loan debt.  No credit card debt to finance education.

How do you feel about your future career in anthropology?

Positively. I got a 3-year, research only postdoc as soon as I finished my PhD, which required another relocation  to Europe. This means new networks, and lots of time for publishing. I am on track to have a strong publication portfolio by the end of this postdoc.

Final comments/thoughts:

I recognize that I am lucky to have spent 12+ years in university and have zero debt load! And even some considerable savings. I think I have also made responsible decisions and used the opportunities presented to me wisely. That said, I did NONE of my education in the US (though I worked there for several years, for 3 different universities). My undergrad and MA were in Canada, much cheaper than American schools, and my PhD in New Zealand, where international students in the PhD pay domestic fees. This has not hurt me in terms of competition for grants, awards, or jobs, and has helped considerably in terms of my financial well-being.

***

1. Medical anthropologist.  Completed PhD.  Has a full-time job.  Last attended school in 2008.  Reason for studying anthropology: “It is a profession I have loved since the moment I first learned about it, and which continues to completely take up all my interests.”  Funding: “Yes — I received multiple graduate fellowships, scholarships, bursaries and grants throughout the course of my undergraduate and graduate studies at two Canadian universities. Subsequent to my PhD degree, I received a two-year postdoctoral fellowship to continue my research and professional development at a third Canadian university.”  Funding: “Yes.”  Work during college and/or grad school: “Yes, during every year of my undergraduate and graduate studies and in positions related to university clerical, administrative, and teaching activities.”  No current student loan debt.  More than $30,000 in credit card debt to finance education.  Reasons for loans and/or credit card debt: “As a single mother of one child during my undergraduate studies, and then as a married mother of four children during my graduate studies, I had no other option but to augment my employment earnings with student loans so as to be able to fully cover my tuition and living expenditures.”

How do you feel about your future career in anthropology?

I have only recently been hired for a tenure-track position in medical anthropology at a small Canadian university, and prior to this worked for four years as an instructor at private and public universities and as a consultant for the private, public and non-governmental sectors in Pakistan.

Should I not have been hired for my current position, I would have had serious concerns for my ability to continue to support myself and my family and, as importantly, continue my research activities (inclusive of conference attendance and publications) as a medical anthropologist.

Final comments/thoughts:

As critical as the issue of student debt, an equally important issue relates to our post-graduation employment. Should reasonably secure and well-paid positions exist for professional anthropologists, then the issue of student debt could be reasonably expected to be resolved through the course of employment and regular earnings. But in the absence of job security and stability, student debts quickly become unwieldy, unmanageable, and potentially detrimental to our financial standing and credit histories (which then has serious consequences for our everyday ability to survive and care for ourselves and our families).

***

1. Biological Anthropologist.  Completed PhD.  Full-time job.  Last attended school in 2010.  Reason for studying anthropology: “I wanted to be a bioarchaeologist.”  Funding: “Yes. University merit fellowship for MA (tuition, insurance, stipend), five years of university funding for PhD (tuition, insurance, stipend), one year of fellowship (national competition). Also grants for fieldwork (NSF, Wenner-Gren, and several small internal grants).”  Family support: “Yes, housing and tuition for undergrad (public, in-state R1).”  Work: “Yes, both: part-time typing and data entry in undergrad, editing and teaching in grad school.”  No current student loan debt.  No credit card debt to finance education.

How do you feel about your future career in anthropology?

Great. I have a TT position and am happy with it and with my contributions to the discipline.

Final comments/thoughts:

I don’t think I would willingly have taken on debt to go to grad school. I was raised to never take on any debt except a mortgage, so I had to go to the cheapest college I could, work a lot, and apply for as many fellowships and assistantships as possible.

***

1. Medical anthropologist.  Completed PhD.  Self-employed consultant.  Last attended in 1992.  Reason for studying anthropoogy: “Fell in love with the field in high school and kept at it.”  Funding: “I got some grants and financial aid through the university but mostly I paid for it by working part time as I studied.”  Family support: No.  Work during college and/or grad school: “Yes.”  No current student loan debt.  Between $21,000 and $30,000 in credit card debt to finance education.  Reason for loans and/or credit card debt: “Could not pay for my daily expenses without credit cards and loans.”

How do you feel about your future career in anthropology?

I am nearing retirement now and am setting up a consulting firm to train others to do what I do.

Final comments/thoughts:

School is ridiculously expensive now and I don’t know how graduate students manage. I did my undergrad in 1970s and grad work in the 1980s when it was still cheap to attend UC Berkeley. NOW?  Whew?!  And the job prospects are much worse so am not sure how those coming up in the field will manage.

***

1. Socio-cultural anthropologist.  Completed M.A.  Full-time job.  Last attended in 1988.  Reason for studying anthropology: “I love the discipline – it meshes with my nature as a person.”  Funding: No.  Family support: No.  Work during college and/or grad school: “Yes, full-time.”  No current student loan debt.  Between $5,100 and $10,000 in credit card debt to finance education.  Reason for loans and/or credit card debt: “Couldn’t pay for classes.”

How do you feel about your future career in anthropology?

Have worked as an adjunct 13 years at community college, employed elsewhere full time (not in anthropology).

Final comments/thoughts:

Tragic that students end up with so much debt before they even start.  Anthropology jobs are DIFFICULT to find, the likelihood of working in the field is pretty low unless you have a PhD and publish.  I could not afford the PhD process – had to work and couldn’t do both.

***

1. Socio-cultural anthropologist.  Completed PhD.  Full-time job.  Last attended in 2003.  Reason for studying anthropology: “Saw teaching as a secure profession (wow- was I wrong) – interest in foreign travel and people – was a good student.”  Funding: “Yes, but not a full ride – reduced tuition and various grants for research.”  Family support: “No–not substantially.”  Work during college and/or grad school: “Yes–both.”  No current student loan debt.  No credit card debt to finance education.

How do you feel about your future career in anthropology?

I feel lucky to have gotten out when I did – although I found it difficult to get a job, I believe each year it becomes more difficult for students.

Final comments/thoughts:

There are generational disjunctures that many senior faculty are insensitive or unaware of the debt and challenges faced by many students.  I also think attention should be paid to the different challenges faced by those going through graduate school at elite universities versus mid-level PhD programs.  The former often incur more debt and while they have chances at high paying, tenure track jobs – they are often shut out of less prestigious positions, with the assumption that they would not be good at teaching at a community college (true in some settings) or that they are just looking for a better position (isn’t everyone).  Mid-level program graduates have difficulty getting jobs at the prestigious institutions, but my have a better chance at many jobs.  Just worth thinking about both sets of challenges.

***

10.  Biological Anthropologist.  Completed PhD.  Full-time job.  Last attended in 2000.  Reason for studying anthropology: “I decided to go to graduate school when I received a fellowship. I was all set to go to veterinary school (which would have really put me in a load of debt), when I learned that I was accepted to a PhD program with a fellowship. This was a bit of surprise (note that I had broken my lease and was planning on moving the following month to the town where the vet school was).  I had an abiding interest in human evolution and chimpanzee/primate behavior from the time I was about 5 years old, so grad school seemed a natural thing to do. I was just too poor to be able to attend anything but a funded program.”  Funding: “Yes, full fellowship through quals. Mellon funding and Fulbright for dissertation. Some write-up fellowships too.”  Family support: No.  Work during college and/or grad school: “I taught the bejesus out of a lot of undergrads. My wife and I also lived in an undergrad house as resident fellows for four years. In addition to being RFs, I took on a number of administrative tasks associated with the house for extra pay.”  No current student loan debt.  No credit card debt to finance education.

How do you feel about your future career in anthropology?

Meh. I am pretty disillusioned by anthropology right now and am contemplating leaving my department. It seems that we are doing everything possible to make ourselves irrelevant to the academy of the 21st century. It’s discouraging to teach in a department that is hemorrhaging majors. I find the questions driving the field uninteresting at best, often trivial, and, at worst, undermining the very people for whom anthropologists are supposed to be advocates (despite lots of fancy rhetoric to the contrary).

I really don’t see much of a reason to stick with anthropology institutionally and see myself moving to an interdisciplinary department/program where applied problems are taken seriously and people fret far less about whether what other faculty are doing should count as anthropology.

Final comments/thoughts:

Student debt is a major problem. Too many idealistic students get sucked into crushing debt with little real chance of getting a job. Unfortunately, many of these students also don’t acquire skills that would allow them to move into the private/public sector.

A troubling trend I have seen is that a very small club of schools get the jobs at the elite programs and this club has a disproportionate effect on shaping the field overall. Schools like Chicago, Harvard, Stanford, and Berkeley appear to actively discourage students from acquiring portable research skills and are disdainful of applied work. I think that this is extremely bad for the large number of students who graduate from these institutions — and others influenced by them — who will not themselves get jobs at elite universities.

More departments like ASU and Florida — and graduates from these programs getting jobs — are necessary for the health of the field and for the financial well-being of anthropology graduates.

***

1. Socio-cultural anthropologist.  Completed PhD.  Full-time job.  Last attended in 2006.  Reason for studying anthropology: “After college, I worked for a year in the corporate world and realized that pursuing anthropology would be much more interesting.”  Funding: “Tuition waivers for my first three years of classwork in grad school, and then two fellowships through the university for the next 2 years. I worked 4 jobs the last year while finishing up. I remembered that my undegrad advisor told me / warned me ‘do not pay for anthro grad school’.”  Family support: “No, never.”  Work during college and/or grad school: Yes.  No current student loan debt. Between $1,000 and $5,000 in credit card debt to finance education.  Reason for loans and/or credit card debt: “In my final year of grad school I could barely pay rent.”

How do you feel about your future career in anthropology?

I’m not in academia. There are a lot of prospects today for cultural anthropologists if you know where to look. I work for a design firm, which, combined with my anthro background, will hopefully create even more opportunities for me in the future.

Final comments/thoughts:

It’s unethical, I feel, for anthro departments to bring on grad students that they cannot either fund or help find funds for. My one bitter note is that my PhD dissertation was not nearly as strong as I felt it should’ve been because I was under so much stress financially to finish in my last year. Partly, this was my fault yes. But I feel that when a person is under financial stress, it is very difficult to have the peace of mind to think big, to think theoretically or to think broadly and globally. I’m very grateful for the financial support I did receive however, and I’m happy and proud to call myself an anthropologist.

***

12.  Socio-cultural anthropologist.  Completed PhD.  Part-time job.  Last attended school in 2010.  Reason for studying anthropology: “Because it was an intellectually stimulating and socially engaged career path.”  Funding: “I received a five year graduate opportunity grant and stipend for graduate school which was complemented by a three year NSF fellowship.”  Family support: “My family payed for my undergraduate education, but not my graduate education.  However, they did help make up some of the difference when my stipend did not meet all my living expenses.”  Work during college and/or grad school: “I had a small part time job in the library system.”  No current student loan debt.  Between $11,000 and $20,ooo in credit card debt to finance education.  Reason for loans and/or credit card debt: “I took out credit card debt during graduate school when I realized I was not really making enough to live on with my stipend and I became embarrassed asking my parents to bail me out a few times a year.”

How do you feel about your future career in anthropology?

I was initially optimistic, but after spending 4 years as a practicing anthropologist after grad school without landing a TT job, I am starting to look outside the academy for a new career path.

Final comments/thoughts:

I have since paid off my credit card debt, but this was in part because I got married and my spouse’s full time job allowed for me to more rapidly get rid of that debt than I would have been able to on my own as a contingent faculty member.  My spouse is fond of pointing out that it is families and partners that end up bearing the financial burden of student and contingent academic careers, and he is concerned that my lack of financial independence will hurt my self esteem going forward.  I have to agree with him.

***

As I mentioned at the start, a lot of the folks who reported being free of student loan debt have positive attitudes about their careers in anthropology (26 out of 75).  This is undeniable.  But even among those who said they feel positive about their own career, a surprising number took the time to express their thoughts and concerns about the overall student debt problem.  While there were some dismissive and, frankly, somewhat condescending responses about student debt, those kinds of answers certainly did not dominate (there weren’t many that were outright dismissive–maybe this is a testament to the general empathy of folks who end up in anthropology?).  Although it might seem safe to assume that anyone who is debt free is also free of any worries or concerns, keep in mind the fact that more than 1/3 of them reported feeling uncertain/worried about their career, the job market, etc.

As the selections above illustrate, many of the people who have either avoided debt–or found ways to pay it off–are still quite concerned about how debt is affecting the wider discipline of anthropology.  It wasn’t what I expected.  But then, that’s the whole reason for going out and asking more questions about these kinds of issues.  I also think some of the personal thoughts and concerns that people have shared above remind us that while stats are valuable, it’s often the stories that people tell that truly help us understand issues like the current student debt crisis.  Not a shocking conclusion, coming as it does from a cultural anthropologist!  After reading through all these responses I want to hear more, in-depth stories about debt–and also how people have avoided debt.  Anyway, if we’re getting this level of concern from folks who are debt-free when it comes to student loans…well, more soon.

UPDATE I 1/25/14: There is more to look at with this data as well, of course.  Like the question about family support.  I asked “Did your family help you with any of your educational expenses?”  For people who reported no student loan debt, 66% (48 respondents) said they had some form of family support.  Often this was help during undergraduate programs.  31% (23 respondents) said they did not get any help from family.  Three percent (2) did not leave an answer.

As of about 7:30 PST on 1/20/14, the anthropologies/Savage Minds student debt survey has 191 responses.  Thanks everyone for taking part in that first survey!  The point of the survey was to get a general understand about debt as it relates to the broad community of people who identity themselves with anthropology.  This includes people in the US, of course, but also beyond it.  But one of the flaws in the survey is this openness.  As readers here on SM and Facebook pointed out, I should have included a question about the country in which people studied anthropology to help parse out the numbers.  Thanks for the input.  That was a pretty big omission on my part!  So, in an attempt to answer this question, I have written up a very short follow up survey that attempts to get a better understanding of debt by country/institution.  Please note that you will be able to see everyone’s answers to the survey once you hit the “submit” button at the bottom of the page.  Once I close both surveys I will compile everything and share the results here on Savage Minds.

Please click here to take the second survey.

Thank you for taking the time to take this follow up survey.  If you have any questions, comments, or concerns please email me anytime: ethnografix@gmail.com

UPDATE 1/20/14 at 4:41 pm PST: We already have 47 responses for this survey!  Thanks everyone.  ONE IMPORTANT NOTE: If you have no student loan or credit card debt, please enter a ZERO instead of leaving answers blank!! Thanks!!

Click here to take the survey!

UPDATE 1/17: As of about 8:45 pm PST, there are already 60 responses!  Thanks!!  When the survey closes I will compile everything and post the results here on Savage Minds.  In the mean time you can see an overview of all responses after you click the submit button.

UPDATE II, 1/20/14: Based upon a few reader comments about the lack of a question about the institution/country in which people have studied anthropology I have created a short follow up survey: Student Debt in Anthropology Survey #2 (Debt by country/institution).  Thanks for all of your help and input everyone!