Leaving Academia for K-12 Teaching, Part 6
by Russ Mayo
Welcome back to my series Leaving Academia for K-12 Teaching for Ethical ELA, in which I present K-12 education as a viable alternative for those unsatisfied with the increasingly limited career options in academia. By sharing relevant aspects of my own journey from K-12 to academia and back, I also aim to offer readers a guide for how and why one might make such a career shift. In Part 4, I wrote about what brought me to K-12 teaching, what ultimately led me to earn a Master’s degree in Education, and the impact that graduate studies had on my career. In Part 5, I wrote about the financial constraints for many teachers who are paid significantly less than similarly educated peers. Feeling underpaid, burned out, and intrigued by a possible career in academia, I decided to leave the K-12 classroom and pursue a career as a college professor.
This move started in 2014, when I relocated from Chapel Hill, NC, to Chicago to begin a full-time doctoral program studying English at The University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Before making this decision, I consulted with many of my former UNC professors and friends who were familiar with PhD programs. Their support and guidance were invaluable for me, and opened my eyes to many of the challenges involved in this career change. The first choice I had to make was choosing a specific direction for my degree. Though I wanted to study English Education, few programs exist that allow you to study both humanities and education at the same time. Having to choose, I decided that I preferred to focus on English, specifically writing.
Along with that, I decided I would only apply to programs that were fully funded, meaning that accepted students were guaranteed a teaching and/or research assistantship that fully covered the tuition costs and came with a small stipend. My stipend ended up paying around $20,000, about half of what I earned as an underpaid teacher in NC. I soon discovered that while Education programs accept more PhD students, they rarely guarantee funding for all incoming students, as it’s common for Education doctoral students to be full-time educators who will attend part-time. This is one of the reasons that English doctoral programs are far more selective than those in Education: at UIC, for example, the English Department accepts 2% of PhD applicants annually, whereas the College of Education accepts approximately 50%. I could have pursued a PhD program in Education part-time and continued teaching, but I believed that my chances of shifting toward a career in academia would be greatly improved if I committed to college teaching full-time. It also allowed me to finish my degree more quickly.
Additionally, it was important to find a program and a location that would be an ideal fit. Chicago already felt like a second home to me, so that was appealing, and I was fortunate enough to be accepted into UIC’s incoming class of English PhD students in 2014. While UIC’s English Education program was quite small, I found tremendous support from my advisors, colleagues, and peers. I was able to pursue my unique interests while making the most out of the coursework and teaching opportunities. I was able to teach a wide array of courses, from First-Year Writing and various upper-level English methods courses for pre-service teachers to serving as a field instructor for English student teachers at area schools. I also served as Assistant Director of the Writing Center on campus, and this experience led me to focus my research on how writing center tutoring offers transformative learning experiences for peer tutors. A synopsis of my dissertation research can be found in my 2024 article, “Deschooling (and) the Writing Center.”
I have nothing but wonderful memories of my time at UIC. That said, from the moment my cohort arrived on campus, we heard nothing but horror stories about the academic job market. It turned out that the vast majority of graduate students completing their PhD in English—not just those at UIC—were virtually unable to find a quality job. Some were defeated by these future prospects and left the program entirely; others pushed on, hoping to beat the odds. Unfortunately, the math was not in their favor—for starters, student enrollment in humanities majors continues to stagnate or decline. This has correlated with the cost of college skyrocketing over the past 50 years. Higher-paying careers that can help recoup the cost of college are more commonly found in fields such as medicine, law, engineering, or computer science. Nursing and education majors can also reliably find plentiful work, albeit lower-paying. Shedding humanities majors, in turn, leads to fewer humanities courses offerings, and fewer professors needed.
According to the most recent Modern Language Association jobs report, there were only around 400 tenure-track jobs in English listed in the 2021-22 school year. For comparison, this is roughly 50% of the English jobs posted in 2008, and about 30% total jobs posted in 2004. In other words, most universities have simply stopped hiring tenure-track professors. Some anecdotal evidence from UIC’s English Department illustrates this point. In his beautiful, resonant recent piece for n+1 Magazine, department head Peter Coviello, laments the incredible austerity currently imposed on the department and the university. More than ten tenured UIC English professors have left the department since I graduated in 2020, mostly retirees, with even more expected to retire in the coming years. Though enrollments at UIC remain stronger than ever, the university has refused to support the department in hiring one single tenure-track professor to replace those departures. The job market crisis for humanities majors is thus a product of the cold calculus of austerity.
The brutal realities of the academic job market mean that more highly-qualified candidates compete for fewer jobs. Not only are the job listings far fewer these days, but demand for academic jobs continues to exceed the supply as a surplus of unemployed candidates grows. This is why many of my peers in English, struggling on the job market and many unwilling or uninterested in leaving Chicago, feel obliged to work as adjuncts at UIC and other area universities, continuing to work in academia and publishing with the hopes of landing a future tenure-track job. Given the dearth of high-quality jobs, willingness to move anywhere for an academic job is often a prerequisite. From my experience, those who don’t look for jobs nationally often doom their prospects from the start. In the hopes of finding one of those exceedingly rare tenure-track jobs that aligns with one’s actual expertise, applicants must be willing and able to make a cross-country move. I certainly was…at first.
Have you ever considered graduate school or working in academia? What were your experiences with the academic job market? How might continued austerity measures impact universities moving forward? Please share your thoughts and questions, and I will do my best to respond here or in future posts.
*Note: The name of this piece comes from one of my absolute favorite bands playing music today. Fiddlehead is a post-hardcore band from Boston, and their 2021 album Between the Richness is absolutely worth a listen, and they are incredible to see live.
Russell Mayo is an English Language Arts teacher at Burley School, a public K-8 school on the northside of Chicago. Previously, he worked as an assistant professor of English at Purdue University Northwest, where he served as Writing Center Director and Writing Program Director. Russ completed his doctorate in English Education from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2020. His research centers on writing studies, critical pedagogy, and the environment. Most recently, Russ co-edited and contributed to the Teaching Writing in the Age of Catastrophic Climate Change, (Lexington Press, 2024).