When I was in grad school, my advisor was a prominent congressional scholar, genuinely well known in the field. Everyone knew who he was, and he was, for the record, a lovely person and a wonderful advisor.
But I remember the moment it hit me that literally no one outside of congressional studies had any idea who he was. You could call him a huge figure in our field, and that was true, and good for him. Step outside political science, though, and nobody had a clue. The fame was real and it was also insignificant.
I’m not telling that story to take anything away from him. I’m telling you this because it was the first time I noticed the strange currency academia runs on, and how small it looks the moment you hold it up to the rest of the world.
Tory Wobber said something about this on my podcast: she did her undergrad at Harvard, and she remembers students protesting for a living wage for the campus workers. One of the signs has stayed with her for years. It read: Workers can’t eat prestige.
That describes something academia does to all of us, not just the workers on a campus.
Academia is very good at paying you in prestige. You take less money than your training is worth. You move across the country, or the world, for the job. You miss the weddings and the holidays and the ordinary weeks of your life, and you tell yourself it’s worth it, because look where you are. Look what you get to call yourself. The prestige is supposed to cover the difference.
And it does feel good. I want to be honest about that, because pretending it doesn’t is how this conversation usually goes wrong. The status is genuinely pleasant. Being the person with the title, the person who got the fellowship, the person whose name carries weight in a room of the right people, that is a real reward and it is doing something for you.
But Tory asked something that matters: how much is the prestige doing for you? Not whether it feels good. We know it feels good. But how much is it actually doing, when you weigh it against everything you handed over to get it.
I don’t know about you, but the trade was never laid out for me plainly. Did anyone sit you down and say: here is the salary you could have, here is the city you could live in, here is the version of your life with the weekends in it, and you can have prestige instead? It’s handed over to you, slowly, over years, and you were taught to treat it as fair payment for everything else.
Did you ever actually consent to a deal like this?
I think when you start asking how much the prestige is really doing, something opens up. You begin to see that there are kinds of work, and kinds of identity, that aren’t measured in prestige at all. Where your paycheck comes from stops being the thing that tells you who you are. The title stops being the thing that grants you permission to take up space.
None of this means the prestige was worthless or that you were foolish to want it. You weren’t. It’s seductive by design, and you were handed it by people who genuinely believed in it too.
It just means you’re allowed to ask what it’s actually buying you. And if the honest answer is less than it used to be, that’s worth knowing. You can’t eat prestige. At some point it’s fair to ask what you’d rather be served instead.