Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited bestseller list was full of books with titles like “Apricot bar code architecture” and “Jessica’s Attention” earlier this week.
My title might be a bit hyperbolic, but stuff like this worries me. I love to read and I love reading on a kindle. This has been going on for a while, but it has now reached absurd levels.
I guess the silver lining is that academic creative writing is a bit of a pyramid scheme, so if she goes the route of writing “literary” stuff that gets published by her university press, she will probably be able to get work teaching creative writing…
As someone who’s been there done that, this is the worst time to try and get into academics in the humanities. English departments are downsizing everywhere. There’s an incoming “demographic collapse” coming to higher ed by 2026 - i.e. birth rates went down between 2008-2011 by a large degree and that cohort is 25-30% smaller than previous years. A lot of small, tuition dependent colleges are going to fold. In preparation, non-essential departments are cutting people like crazy. STEM and business are money makers, English and History aren’t.
Best thing you can do with a creative writing degree is go into corporate communications/marketing. Find a gig at an agency and do creative writing on the side.
I quit a PhD program in a social science and this is absolutely true of basically any field about which you cannot say “You need a degree in X to get that job”.
Additionally, colleges and universities are increasingly not hiring tenure-track professors and instead relying on adjuncts to teach their classes. Adjuncts make almost no money, get no benefits, have no job security from one term to another, and often have to adjunct at multiple institutions simultaneously to make ends meet. It’s basically the gig-ification of post-secondary education and it’s awful.
I quit my PhD because I loved the field but it was very clear I wouldn’t be able to live comfortably working in that field. Now I’m a programmer and I made more money at my first non-academic job than my PhD supervisor did with tenure and a decade of seniority.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !technology@beehaw.org
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
I guess the silver lining is that academic creative writing is a bit of a pyramid scheme, so if she goes the route of writing “literary” stuff that gets published by her university press, she will probably be able to get work teaching creative writing…
As someone who’s been there done that, this is the worst time to try and get into academics in the humanities. English departments are downsizing everywhere. There’s an incoming “demographic collapse” coming to higher ed by 2026 - i.e. birth rates went down between 2008-2011 by a large degree and that cohort is 25-30% smaller than previous years. A lot of small, tuition dependent colleges are going to fold. In preparation, non-essential departments are cutting people like crazy. STEM and business are money makers, English and History aren’t.
Best thing you can do with a creative writing degree is go into corporate communications/marketing. Find a gig at an agency and do creative writing on the side.
I quit a PhD program in a social science and this is absolutely true of basically any field about which you cannot say “You need a degree in X to get that job”.
Additionally, colleges and universities are increasingly not hiring tenure-track professors and instead relying on adjuncts to teach their classes. Adjuncts make almost no money, get no benefits, have no job security from one term to another, and often have to adjunct at multiple institutions simultaneously to make ends meet. It’s basically the gig-ification of post-secondary education and it’s awful.
I quit my PhD because I loved the field but it was very clear I wouldn’t be able to live comfortably working in that field. Now I’m a programmer and I made more money at my first non-academic job than my PhD supervisor did with tenure and a decade of seniority.