Studies show that the percentage of young, college-educated adults moving between states has fallen from 12.7 percent in 2005 to 10.4 percent in 2015, of a piece with the nation’s larger reluctance to move. Nearly 1 in 3 recent grads are moving in with mom, up from 1 in 5 in 2005. Those who do move out of state aren’t likely to move far.The article:
https://slate.com/business/2018/05/college-graduates-are-moving-out-of-state-less.html
From the title alone I thought this would be about proffies.
ReplyDeleteMe, too. Mr. Penny and I did in fact go to very selective colleges, and we've lived all the hell over the place since then, including two foreign countries, but it's entirely because of the inhumane academic job market. We would have happily returned to the part of the country where we grew up and attended college. You know, where our families were? Where we knew our way around? Where we'd liked it just fine all those years? Sorry, it doesn't work that way in academe.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Penny. Reason 16 of "100 Reasons NOT to Go to Graduate School" (http://100rsns.blogspot.com/) is:
DeleteWhere you live will be chosen for you.
With the way we expect young academics to do multiple postdocs and a VAP before even being eligible for a tenure-track job these days, academia has become about as family unfriendly as any profession can be. Just about the only profession that's even more family unfriendly is being a Catholic priest.
Here in the Central Valley of California, many of our graduates tell us that they don’t like to move away after they graduate. Before anyone jokes that the air quality is clearly affecting their brains, keep in mind that many of our physics graduates become prosperous engineers, in the fields of water and renewable energy. There are good jobs for our graduates right here, thanks to this being one of the poorest and least-educated parts of the country, not to mention the insane cost of real estate elsewhere in the state. If our students don't want to traipse around the world like the Flying Dutchman, in the manner of so many academics these days, I wouldn't knock it!
"Family unfriendly" is the word, all right. Both of our children suffered from our frequent moves while they were growing up, and from the absence of their father when he took a job overseas during their final years of high school. (We had sworn we wouldn't make them move again while they were still in school, so Mr. Penny went to work across the ocean while the kids and I stayed in the Midwest for two more years.) They're both reasonably happy and productive adults now, thank heaven, but their peripatetic upbringing has not always been for the best.
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