An article in today's Washington Post announces that for the first time, women are now earning doctoral degrees in greater numbers than men. We've reached this point in a trend that has been developing for decades. There have long been more undergraduate women than men. It just took a few years for the female majorities to move up the educational ladder.
It takes an average of seven years to earn a Ph.D.
Men are now underrepresented in higher education for several reasons: they are less likely to finish high school, more likely to join the military, and more likely to go to jail. Although at seven years, jail wouldn't be a bad place to earn a Ph.D. It's that or lifting weights.
Once in an academic position, women's salaries lag men's, mostly because careers conflict with having children. Pursuing tenure takes a full six years, and those are the prime childbearing years. (The actual pursuit of childbearing takes only nine months, which is well-known.) But while men are busy doing research and publishing articles and books, women are changing diapers, though I know a few women whose careers have left their male colleagues far behind.
The average salary for male tenured professors is $89,000. For women, $70,000. It's hard to persuade a public whose average salaries are closer to $30,000 that faculty are underpaid, but compared to other professions, many of which require less education, those salaries are on the low end. At Oregon Institute of Technology, where I taught for twenty years, it wasn't uncommon for new graduates just entering the workforce to earn higher salaries than faculty at the peak of their careers. I thought we should earn a small percentage of each graduate's salary for their first five years of employment. That would only be fair.
We should also get a company car. I always wanted a Porche but ended up driving a Mitsubishi. I mean, come on.
I never earned more that $50,000, a member of the lowest-paid department at the lowest-paid institution in the lowest-paid system in the nation. Still, I never felt much resentment about salary. In my field when I started, there were on average over a hundred applicants for every new position. I felt lucky to break into the field at all. Talk about landing on your feet.
Today, there are on average three applicants for every position, and two of them still have a year or so to go in jail before they complete their Ph.D. We try to hire candidates with the fewest felony convictions, though it takes more than just one assault to get seven years. Not to mention time off for good behavior.
Despite relatively low salaries, Mary and I were both able to retire at 55. Chances are high that this benefit will become completely extinct starting about next Tuesday, what with the aging population, worries about Social Security, and shrunken retirement savings resulting from the implosion in the value of investmens.
Again we were lucky based on a few happy circumstances, like double-income/no kids (DINKs). This is the quickest path to early retirement. For every baby you don't have, you can retire five years earlier. If you don't have only nine babies, you never have to work at all. And because of compound interes, the earlier you start not having babies, the earlier you can retire
Also, we lived in about the least expensive housing market in the country. When we moved here in the early eighties, they would just give you a house. You had to agree to keep the lawn mowed.
And we had a generous state pension system (Gone now: one of the reasons I retired early was to minimize major cuts in pensions that are now in place). Finally, modest personal savings that sounded like a lot of money at the time. Once you do retire, though, you remember that you have to divide those savings by the rest of your life. You realize it's not all that much money and start saying things like, "I'm living on a fixed income!" Most people would kill today to be able to live on a fixed income.
The main factor in a happy academic career is a congenial department, which means that few to none in higher education are all that happy. My own department consisted of two or three members with diagnosed major mental problems, including myself, and all the rest who needed to get to the mental-health emergency room right now but never did because they were convinced they were the only sane person in the department. Some of them were also convinced they could fly.
I've now been retired eight years, which amazes me to think about it. I'm glad I got out early, though. My remaining mental health required it, and my current condition has recently been upgraded to just "eccentric." I'm very happy, relatively.
Also, my former colleague Jim Etchison just died of a heart attack while on vacation in Maui. His wife was taking his picture and he fell over dead. Jim was sixty-two; I am sixty-two.
It saddens me. Jim was a sweet guy who was always laughing. If there's an afterlife, I picture him laughing at the irony of dying on Maui at age sixty-two while your wife is taking your picture. This is how I would like to go, too, but in maybe twenty years. Or thirty. I'll try to give Mary a heads-up a minute or two before.
If I had it to do over, I wouldn't change a thing.
Yes I would. Who could ever say that? They must have bad memories.
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