Every January, I calculate my total personal debt and compare it to the amount of the previous January. This is an act intended to foster fiscal responsibility and self-awareness. It invariably ends up throwing me into a deep depression, as hopelessness and fear overwhelm me.

For, dear readers, The Bittersweet Girl has a dark secret. On the surface she is a respectable member of society, a successful professional, someone who appears to Have It Together, and to whom students and friends turn for advice. But, the truth is that she is a debtor who hovers on the verge of bankruptcy and is only solvent because she relies financially upon her partner.

Enough of the cagey third person: I am in debt. My personal debt exceeds my yearly income, a very injurious statistic known as the “debt to income ratio,” a phrase I’ve heard numerous times as I’ve been turned down for loans. In the past year, I’ve managed to pay the tiniest fraction of my total debt, and, at this rate, I will only pay off my debt after many, many years — if ever.

I am a thrifty individual. I hate shopping. I don’t have a penchant for $300 shoes. I live modestly. I don’t take extravagant trips. I spend my money more or less wisely.

So, why am I so completely fucked? Graduate school, of course. Coupled with many years adjuncting at below-poverty-level pay before I landed a tenure-track job. Even now, after many years of as a tenure-track professor, the debts I acquired during that dark time are with me.

I know that, in the scheme of the “academic job market crisis,” I am one of the lucky ones. At least I have a full-time job with benefits! But every year I have a reckoning with the fact that if I ever want to be debt-free, I have to get another, higher paying job (unlikely, for a variety of reasons) or leave academia altogether.

During the years I was struggling to get by on loans and adjunct pay, I was convinced that if I could just get a regular salary, I would be OK. I never realized that, because my “regular salary” would be embarrassingly low, it would not suffice to pay off my debts.

Every year I think, this is the deep, dark secret of academia — at least, within the humanities.* Education costs money and the better the education (conventional wisdom tells us) the more it will cost. So, graduate students happily take out loans to finance their higher education and, particularly if they’re lucky enough to go to a Big Ivy, they believe that it’s worth the expense.

But, what’s not generally acknowledged is that the cost of education is not balanced by a reasonable paycheck. Our skills as teachers and researchers are so devalued that we are must settle for poorly-paid jobs (if we even get one). This is the circular screw job that many of us face: we will never be compensated for the work that we do to the extent that we will be able to pay off the debts we accrued getting the education that enables us to do this work.

I could go on and on about my own fears and frustrations but instead I would like to offer some unsolicited advice to those readers who may be considering a life in the gloried halls of academia:

Get the cheapest education you can get. I know that it seems that if Harvard comes knocking you should jump at the chance, even if it means taking out a few extra loans, but I strongly believe that it’s not worth it. In the field of literary studies at least, a Harvard degree is no guarantee of future employment. Far better to pay as little as possible up front for your education — go to a state school, go locally, go someplace where the teachers are passionate and committed but where there’s less name recognition, fewer on-campus latte stands, and no rock-climbing facilities in the gym.

Get a job during graduate school — and I don’t mean a job as a teaching assistant. Despite the standard line that “experience as a TA is crucial to being a successful job candidate,” the truth is that most TA positions are pure exploitation. We all know that TA pay is so terrible that it is virtually impossible to live without also taking out student loans. So, rather than TA-ing for years and years, get a “real job” as a waitress, a bartender, a high school school teacher, whatever — just as long as you are supporting yourself. Then, at the very end of your grad. school education, do some TA-ing so you can put it on your CV. But, I guarantee that no fresh-out-of-grad-school job candidate ever got the job because someone said, “gee, she’s really TA-ed a lot.”

Don’t adjunct. I know this is a heartless piece of advice because it presupposes that adjuncting or part time teaching is a choice when, for many, it’s a necessity. It also suggests that adjuncting is always a shit choice, while for some it’s a viable career.** The spirit behind this anti-adjuncting stance is: don’t put yourself in debt for a shot at the academic high life. Even if you can cobble together several teaching gigs at several institutions (and those of you who managed this kind of life deserve to be dipped in gold, as far as I’m concerned), it’s likely that the rewards will be meager — both financially but also spiritually and intellectually. Finally, the promise that you’ll one day land that full time, salaried position may not be as promising as it seems.

Be heartless, be ruthless, be a warrior-bitch-from-hell but get the highest possible salary you can get. If you do land a full time or tenure track job, you must negotiate for more money. Anyone who’s been in academia for a while can tell you that raises are a rarer than the ivory-billed woodpecker; your starting salary is as good as it’s going to get for a very, very long time. Chances are you’ll still make less than your high school friends who don’t even go to college.

For those who are professors, it is your ethical duty to accurately represent the financial realities of academia to your students. You cannot simply encourage your promising young students to apply to Harvard or Yale, tell them that they would make great PhDs, and portray the academic life as one long meeting of the salon over cigars and cognac. You’ve got to tell the truth about how much education costs and how little it pays. Naturally, your students will choose to believe (as you probably did) that they’ll be the exception to the rule, but it’s your responsibility to try to set them straight.

On these few rules might the grinding cogs of academic exploitation be halted. I only wish someone had warned me so many years ago — right before I signed that first student loan promissory note.

* Of course, all my characterizations of the academic life refer to one narrow slice of the pie, the little quivering piece left in the pan after all the big boys have had their helpings: the humanities. Could a more worthy and more devalued area of academia exist? I understand that in the sciences and other “hard” disciplines, they drink from jewel-encrusted goblets, sleep on mounds of dollar bills, and put what’s left over in Swiss bank accounts — but I could be mistaken about that.

** I wanted to link a few blogs about adjuncting here, that would more fully represent this complicated issue, but I stumbled across the Invisible Adjunct’s farewell post and now I’m too depressed to look further. Okay, it’s almost four years old but it’s still tragic.