Newly-minted anthropology PhD Sarah Kendzior has written a chilling piece for Aljazeera on what things are really like in academia these days:

The closing of American academia

It is 2011 and I'm sitting in the Palais des Congres in Montreal, watching anthropologists talk about structural inequality.

The American Anthropological Association meeting is held annually to showcase research from around the world, and like thousands of other anthropologists, I am paying to play: $650 for airfare, $400 for three nights in a "student" hotel, $70 for membership, and $94 for admission. The latter two fees are student rates. If I were an unemployed or underemployed scholar, the rates would double.

The theme of this year's meeting is "Traces, Tidemarks and Legacies." According to the explanation on the American Anthropological Association website, we live in a time when "the meaning and location of differences, both intellectually and morally, have been rearranged". As the conference progresses, I begin to see what they mean. I am listening to the speaker bemoan the exploitative practices of the neoliberal model when a friend of mine taps me on the shoulder.

"I spent almost my entire salary to be here," she says.

My friend is an adjunct. She has a PhD in anthropology and teaches at a university, where she is paid $2100 per course. While she is a professor, she is not a Professor. She is, like 67 per cent of American university faculty, a part-time employee on a contract that may or may not be renewed each semester. She receives no benefits or health care.

According to the Adjunct Project, a crowdsourced website revealing adjunct wages - data which universities have long kept under wraps - her salary is about average. If she taught five classes a year, a typical full-time faculty course load, she would make $10,500, well below the poverty line. Some adjuncts make more. I have one friend who was offered $5000 per course, but he turned it down and requested less so that his children would still qualify for food stamps.

Why is my friend, a smart woman with no money, spending nearly $2000 to attend a conference she cannot afford? She is looking for a way out. In America, academic hiring is rigid and seasonal. Each discipline has a conference, usually held in the fall, where interviews take place. These interviews can be announced days or even hours in advance, so most people book beforehand, often to receive no interviews at all.

The American Anthropological Association tends to hold its meetings in America's most expensive cities, although they do have one stipulation: "AAA staff responsible for negotiating and administering annual meeting contracts shall show preference to locales with living wage ordinances." This rule does not apply, unfortunately, to those in attendance.

Below poverty line

In most professions, salaries below the poverty line would be cause for alarm. In academia, they are treated as a source of gratitude. Volunteerism is par for the course - literally. Teaching is touted as a "calling", with compensation an afterthought. One American research university offers its PhD students a salary of $1000 per semester for the "opportunity" to design and teach a course for undergraduates, who are each paying about $50,000 in tuition. The university calls this position "Senior Teaching Assistant" because paying an instructor so far below minimum wage is probably illegal.

In addition to teaching, academics conduct research and publish, but they are not paid for this work either. Instead, all proceeds go to for-profit academic publishers, who block academic articles from the public through exorbitant download and subscription fees, making millions for themselves in the process. If authors want to make their research public, they have to pay the publisher an average of $3000 per article. Without an institutional affiliation, an academic cannot access scholarly research without paying, even for articles written by the scholar itself.

It may be hard to summon sympathy for people who walk willingly into such working conditions. "Bart, don't make fun of grad students," Marge told her son on an oft-quoted episode of The Simpsons. "They just made a terrible life choice."

But all Americans should be concerned about adjuncts, and not only because adjuncts are the ones teaching our youth. The adjunct problem is emblematic of broader trends in American employment: the end of higher education as a means to prosperity, and the severing of opportunity to all but the most privileged.

In a searing commentary, political analyst Joshua Foust notes that the unpaid internships that were once limited to show business have now spread to nearly every industry. "It's almost impossible to get a job working on policy in this town without an unpaid internship," he writes from Washington DC, one of the most expensive cities in the country. Even law, once a safety net for American strivers, is now a profession where jobs pay as little as $10,000 a year - unfeasible for all but the wealthy, and devastating for those who have invested more than $100,000 into their degrees. One after another, the occupations that shape American society are becoming impossible for all but the most elite to enter.

The value of a degree

Academia is vaunted for being a meritocracy. Publications are judged on blind review, and good graduate programs offer free tuition and a decent stipend. But its reliance on adjuncts makes it no different than professions that cater to the elite through unpaid internships.

Anthropologists are known for their attentiveness to social inequality, but few have acknowledged the plight of their peers. When I expressed doubt about the job market to one colleague, she advised me, with total seriousness, to "re-evaluate what work means" and to consider "post-work imaginaries". A popular video on post-graduate employment cuts to the chase: "Why don't you tap into your trust fund?"

In May 2012, I received my PhD, but I still do not know what to do with it. I struggle with the closed off nature of academic work, which I think should be accessible to everyone, but most of all I struggle with the limited opportunities in academia for Americans like me, people for whom education was once a path out of poverty, and not a way into it.

My father, the first person in his family to go to college, tries to tell me my degree has value. "Our family came here with nothing," he says of my great-grandparents, who fled Poland a century ago. "Do you know how incredible it is that you did this, how proud they would be?"

And my heart broke a little when he said that, because his illusion is so touching - so revealing of the values of his generation, and so alien to the experience of mine.

Some thoughts

Not so long ago, academia was both fairly wide-open and a pretty nice life. Get a PhD from a good school in an interesting discipline and there was probably a spot for you at a decent university. Work hard and publish prolifically for a few years and you'd be offered tenure, after which life was idyllic by most standards. You teach a bit, study a subject you love and hang out with like minded intellectuals - all while making acceptable money and building up a generous pension. It wasn't always this smooth and agreeable, of course, but in many cases the reality matched ideal.

As the article above makes clear, today's academia is a very different place. The reasons are many, but four stand out:

1. State and local governments have grossly overspent and overpromised, and are now almost universally broke. They can't cover their pension obligations but can't scale them back without declaring bankruptcy. So they're cutting other things, one of which is aid to state schools. This widens the gap between tuition and actual per-student cost, which forces universities to cut costs to make up the difference. And "labor", i.e. non-tenured faculty, is a juicy target.

2. Schools themselves have made the same mistakes as local governments, overspending on state-of-the-art sports facilities and luxurious dorms and rec centers. The resulting debt can't be managed under the current cost structure, which adds another impetus for cuts in areas where cuts are possible.

3. The idea that a college education is a ticket to a better life is so ingrained in the middle-class mind that students and their parents are willing to pay pretty much anything for a degree. But they haven't learned to differentiate between degrees that actually lead to good jobs (like computer science) and those that lead, in today's world, to dead ends (like history, philosophy and minority studies). A decade ago you could get a PhD in one of the latter disciplines and hope for a job teaching the same subject. Now you're either a fast food worker, an office temp, or - maybe worst of all - an adjunct "professor" who is effectively a serf in a suddenly-feudal system.

4. The federal government's student loan program offers kids more money each year, which encourages colleges to raise tuition by a comparable amount, which is increasingly pricing their product out of the market. The US is full of middle-class families with kids who are accepted at Purdue or the University of Washington but who, even with loans, can't cover the $30,000 - $40,000 annual tuition and instead opt for the home town junior college. The result is a shrinking pool of students willing to pay to attend a given high-priced school.

Add it all up, and what used to be a privileged group in a rich country - US academics - is suddenly an exploited Third World minority. The life they thought of as a birthright for being smart and American is gone, with nothing on the horizon to replace it.

The macro cause, as in all the other "Welcome to the Third World" columns published here, is debt. We've kept interest rates too low for too long, which encouraged too many people to borrow too much and expand too aggressively, and now that we can't borrow as freely the choices made in easier times are blowing up. Universities that spent billions to expand are rapidly going bankrupt. Students who borrowed tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for degrees that aren't in demand are crushed between high debt service and low income. Parents who thought they'd saved enough to put their kids through college now find that their interest income is miniscule while tuition is soaring - and that their college graduate kids still need help with health insurance and rent. The college bubble and the death of academia, in short, are playing major roles in the elimination of what's left of the middle class.