VERMILLION, S.D. (AP) - She came to a community garden in Vermillion last summer looking for produce to feed her hunger. He stared at his pay stubs and realized, amazingly enough, that he qualified for food stamps.
You wouldn’t expect to find poverty where the highest learning in South Dakota takes place, in university classrooms and research labs where the best and brightest are pursuing their doctoral degrees.
But that is reality for some in this state - and across the country - who are being battered by heavy school debt and a job market that has grown increasingly tight during the past decade.
Despite public wailing over America’s place on the global educational stage and the suggestion that it’s not cranking out enough young science and other doctoral graduates, the jobs aren’t automatic after graduation.
In South Dakota, where 90 to 110 doctorates are accepted by the public university system each year, the science and engineering graduates do all right, what with medical research in Sioux Falls and the Sanford Underground Research Facility in the Black Hills.
But in the humanities and those areas where graduates aspire to tenure-track positions in academia, “it’s not good,” said Kurt Hackemer, chairman of the University of South Dakota Department of History.
“I would argue it might even be getting worse,” Hackemer continued. “What you’ve had for a long time is a classic supply-and-demand problem. The humanities disciplines have generally produced more Ph.D.s each year than there were jobs available. And it’s not a one-year problem; it just gets worse and worse.”
Or does it? Executive director Jack Warner of the state Board of Regents would argue that despite the anecdotal gloom and doom, Americans with doctoral degrees have among the lowest unemployment in the country at 2.5 percent, according to 2011 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. And their average yearly earnings trailed only the professional degrees in medicine and law, Warner said.
“If you focus too much on anecdotal reports, you sometimes get caught up too much in the exception to the rule,” he said. “And the rule is very clear. … Unemployment is going to be lower for those with doctoral degrees, and the pay will be higher.”
While that may true in the long term, Labor and U.S. Census statistics also reveal that the percentage of graduate-degree holders who received food stamps or some other aid more than tripled between 2007 and 2010. The number of Ph.D.s getting assistance rose from 9,776 nationally to 33,655.
Doctoral graduates who can’t land coveted tenured-track faculty positions - jobs that bring more security with them, the chance to do research and to be published, more professional development opportunities and higher pay - often end up in contingent or adjunct teaching positions that are paid considerably less.
Although many of them are good teachers, they don’t always earn the kind of money that supports a family and puts a dent in their loan debt, said Emily Haddad, associate dean of USD’s College of Arts and Sciences.
And in their limited teaching roles, they also can’t make the contributions to the university deemed so important to higher education movers and shakers, she said.
“The long-term cost is, these people aren’t able to contribute to other things the university does,” Haddad said. “They aren’t doing research. They aren’t creating and inventing and contributing to the long-term development in the state that the Board of Regents is so fond of talking about.”
In fact, South Dakota’s public universities have seen a significant decline in their percentage of tenured faculty in the past decade - from 51.3 percent in 2001 to 43.2 percent last year.
Warner doesn’t dispute that economics have played a role.
“That has been the trend,” he said, “with less state funding and a desire to keep our overall tuition increases to a minimum. All our campuses have had to operate more efficiently. That’s one way to do it, and that has been the trend everywhere and not just here.”
Of course, such trends don’t go unnoticed among doctoral candidates on the South Dakota campuses. At USD, 33-year-old Ellie Carr said it’s not uncommon for Ph.D. candidates to share concerns about finishing their degree, being unable to find a job and having to pay back their loans.
“The worry just kind of escalates for them,” said Carr, whose work in human development and educational psychology has her doing research on optimal parenting and resilency. “For many of them, a degree is literally just a piece of toilet paper if they graduate and can’t find a job.”
There’s less concern in areas such as science, technology, math and engineering, said Kinchel Doerner, dean of South Dakota State University’s graduate school. In those areas, “there’s very little problem getting a job somewhere,” he said.
That would ring true with Chris and Angela Chiller as well, a husband and wife who are pursuing their doctorate degrees in physics through USD while connected with the Sanford lab in Lead.
They developed a patent while doing their master’s work at USD and are in the process of bringing it to fruition. As such, they have little concern about finding meaningful careers.
“There are a number of disciplines in which a master’s is sufficient to guarantee future employment,” Chris Chiller, 58, said. “Physics is not one of them; you have to have a Ph.D. to be fully employed.
“But we’re excited about our prospects here in South Dakota. We could move into an academic setting. But also, we’re in a research lab that will have continued need for physicists and research scientists. And as the number of experiments expand, there will be opportunity for permanent, full-time employment, especially for us in physics.”
Across the state in Vermillion, optimism exists as well, but is mingled among concerns about job prospects and the reality of the struggle.
As part of an internship and class project, Carr brought volunteers together to help plant a garden at her children’s preschool. When the harvest was ready and the produce was being distributed, she encountered a friend and fellow graduate student at the garden.
“Are you here to volunteer?” Carr asked. No, said the friend, who had come for the produce.
“Turns out that was more of a norm than I would have thought,” Carr said.
Kyle Wockenfuss, 27, is pursuing a doctorate in counselor education and supervision. He expects to have $100,000 in loans when he finishes. “I’ll be paying a mortgage on a house I’ll never own,” he said.
As it is, based on his income while pursuing his degree, he can qualify for food stamps.
“It ran across my mind, something I considered,” Wockenfuss said of accepting such support. Then he quickly added: “Fortunately, I’ve been able to find extra jobs. I’ve been lucky.”
His degree will pay off for him, Warner at the Board of Regents insisted. It will pay off for all of them if they are willing to be flexible, he said.
If they don’t get that tenure-track job right out of school, they still have developed skill sets that will be valuable in any number of jobs, Warner said. No matter what the trends say about job availability now, and no matter what the statistics say about the poverty confronting some Ph.D. students, he thinks the end result will be worth it.
“If you are a full-time student, getting by on a research assistantship, you’re not earning a lot of money in that time period. And any given year might produce certain fluctuations and challenges in the job market,” Warner said. “But hold on. In the aggregate and over time, it’s a good bet to have a degree like those, to have a Ph.D.”
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Information from: Argus Leader, https://www.argusleader.com
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