Me and
this one Italian grad student I know who studies Italian lit went out for a
drink the other week.
He
graduated recently and is piecing together jobs and having a really tough go of
it; his 2 main job prospects for the year are on way opposite sides of the
city, and for one of them he’d have to travel 45 min. one-way by car four times
a week to hold a one hour class, all for like $4000 for a 16 week semester.
He also
was frustrated since pretty much all of the open positions in his field this
year were taken by people who already had professorships somewhere else.
He still thinks, though, that the U.S. is still better for job prospects for professors than in Europe,
but “not by much”.
He was
also reflecting on the greater economy and said that way back when when he came to
the U.S. when he started his doctoral program, degree escalation was going on
in Italy – positions that once needed a bachelors needed a masters, positions
that once needed a masters needed a doctorate, and so on.
“And the
people who got the jobs were already connected or well off,” he was like.
“Then,
the same thing started here, five years later,” he said. ‘Everything in the U.S. has become
Italianized, five years later.”
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