by Russell Mayo, PhD
As I wrote in a previous piece, “In Casino, Out (of Academia),” the vast majority of graduate programs that prepare students for academic careers are long-shot bets akin to those of the craps table.
For many recent graduates with a masters or doctorate—particularly those in the humanities—the most likely future is to find a job as contingent faculty. As I described in “Steady Diet of Adjuncting,” these jobs offer low pay and no job security. How did things get to this point in higher education? And how might a job K-12 offer a better option for graduates?
There are more people with graduate degrees than ever before—currently around 14 percent of all Americans 25 and older. And while graduate programs continue to churn out would-be professors, academic jobs are incredibly scarce. As Leonard Cassuto, author of The Graduate School Mess writes:
Thousands of professors are currently in the business of preparing thousands of graduate students for jobs that don’t exist—or more precisely, those graduate students are being taught to want academic jobs that only a few will get, and in the process, they are learning to foreclose the prospects that actually exist for them. (2)
One of the prospects that actually exists—K-12 teaching—is not seriously considered by most graduate students outside of colleges of education.
Cassuto’s book explores the troubling state of academic careers today, and he proposes that graduate education is broken beyond repair—“fractured all through,” in Cassuto’s words (2). Anyone with intimate knowledge of higher education will agree. Since the activities of most graduate schools, at least from students in the arts and humanities—coursework, advising, exams, research, theses—is meant to prepare students to become professors, then this system had been “untenable” for generations (Cassuto 2). Doctoral students and their professors and advisors are at an impasse. While they may pursue a degree is a specialized field that they are both knowledgeable and passionate about, the investment of time, money, and energy rarely sets them up for career success in higher education. Sometimes, the opposite is the case—leaving them feeling “overqualified” but without the necessary skills to find a good job inside or outside of the academe.
But how can this be? University enrollment at an all-time high. The number of Americans with graduate degrees is also higher than ever before, so there is no shortage of qualified instructors. Indeed, this is not a problem of demand for academic jobs; rather, it is a supply problem. The scarcity of job prospects has led some doctoral programs pause new enrollments, thinking it to be unethical to enroll students into training programs for jobs that simply no longer exist. Others have begun to promote “Alt-Ac” (Alternative Academic) careers for their students, helping them develop a set of skills that is perhaps more fitting for industry or nonprofit work outside of academe. I am attempting to make the case for K-12 teaching as an ideal Alt-Ac career for many who are passionate about their content and enjoy the art of teaching.
This idea may be growing. In a since-deleted post to X (formerly Twitter) on December 24, 2024, Alex Colston posed a provocative question about for those who work in academia today. Colston is a doctoral student of clinical psychology, co-director of The Psychosocial Foundation, and an editor of Parapraxis Magazine. I highly recommend his work. Colston writes:
“It’s kind of crazy that an overproduction of graduate degrees could, with the right priorities, easily be funneled back into, like, primary age public schools—resocialize academics out the monasteries into k-12 schools.”
My aim is to offer a supportive path for those who agree with Colston and want to pursue this path.
Whether you are a current, former, or prospective graduate student, you have no doubt wondered if there will be a good job available for you after earning your graduate school degree. Good teaching jobs do exist across the country, but most are not found in higher education. As I have been arguing in this series for Ethical ELA, one of the best fields for graduate students and contingent faculty to find work that relates to their skills and expertise is in K-12 teaching.
In my next posts, I will talk about my own career path as an educator: how my work as a K-12 teacher led me to graduate school and a job in academia, and how that the experience and credentials earned in academe helped me to land a high-paying, secure teaching job as a public school teacher. For those considering a career in K-12 teaching for the first time, I will offer guidance on where, when, and how you might make such a move.
Please share own thoughts and questions in the comments. If you’re curious about moving from college teaching to K-12, what sorts of considerations are you making? I will do my best to answer your questions here and in future posts.
*Note: The name of this article is borrowed from the title of the 1998 album The Shape of Punk to Come by the impressive Swedish hardcore punk band Refused. Their title is borrowed from the groundbreaking free jazz Ornette Coleman album from 1959, The Shape of Jazz to Come.
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).