Leitourgeia kai Qurbana: Contra den Zeitgeist

So, grad school was going to be one thing when I would be able to start this fall, as a funded student, with roughly half of the coursework done. I could finish a Masters in 2-3 semesters, do so without having taken on a ginormous amount of debt, and be set up to move on to a PhD program, theoretically being able to have that done before age 40, depending on how long it took to complete my dissertation. Obviously, this scenario has not panned out, and from what I was told after the fact, was nowhere near ever being the realistic possibility which it was presented as by those giving me counsel (who, in theory, should have known what they were talking about, which is why I trusted them in the first place).

The possibilities which have been presented to me as my best bets from here are St. Vlad’s, Yale Divinity School, and Princeton Theological Seminary. What it boils down to is, as one person put it, “You’re going to have to go someplace where they aren’t freaked out by a music degree,” said degree evidently being seen as maybe slightly better than a G. E. D. in terms of preparation for a humanities graduate program. And, as reported here before, I’ve spent some time at St. Vlad’s and had some really encouraging conversations with their faculty.

However, the fact is that the options open to me from here are essentially “pay-to-play” venues. To use St. Vladimir’s as an example, tuition there is $10,000/year, and then housing for a married student is going to be in the ballpark of another $10,000. The maximum award St. Vlad’s gives out in-house (at least according to their materials) is a 50% tuition waiver, which still leaves one on the hook for $15,000 per year just to be there, to say nothing of books or other living expenses. Yes, I could go as a sponsored seminarian and bring that number down significantly, but the honest truth is that I cannot honestly acknowledge any particular call to the priesthood at this point, and would be going that route just to get somebody to pay for my education. Nope, no can do.

Another fun fact is that right now I’ve got somewhere around 30 graduate credits. By the end of this next year I’ll have close to 40. Guess how many of them will be transferable, wherever I go? Basically zero. I will have to start from scratch, which at St. Vlad’s at least will mean three years. Getting back to the financial aspect, that means potentially coming out of there with around $60,000 – 90,000 of additional debt — just for the Masters degree. Considering there’s a $120,000 cap on federal student loans for graduate students, that doesn’t leave a lot of wiggle room for the PhD. At all. Plus there’s the matter of the $38,000 I already have from my undergraduate days, plus the loans Megan has taken out as a graduate student.

The final nail in the coffin is that, while Megan in theory will be ABD after this coming year, we’re looking at the strong possibility of spending perhaps as much as two years in Germany for research purposes after she reaches ABD status. After that, there’s the likelihood that she would need to come back to Bloomington for another year to be able to spend some quality time with her advisor. This means even being able to start a program someplace is as much as four years off, meaning I’d finish a Masters at 38, perhaps. Depending on how long it takes to finish the dissertation, that would mean having the PhD done roughly in my mid-40s sometime. Maybe I’d be up for tenure by 50. That doesn’t exactly spell a long, fruitful working life as an academic.

I think the inescapable conclusion is that my only options from here for graduate school, given the way things have worked out (or not worked out, rather), are those which are going to be the most expensive in every way. This is simply not reasonable, rational, realistic, or responsible given my present circumstances, particularly not with the possibility of children in the near future being in the mix. Rather, the limitations which I have encountered, and which do not seem to be able to be overcome, make me wonder if it wouldn’t be more responsible for me to start saving now for the education of our children, even before they are conceived. I find myself in largely the same place where I was when I had to acknowledge that singing wasn’t going to work out — the options I’m left with would be far more feasible for a younger man with no attachments. The idea of being a scholar of Late Antique Christianity and liturgy was a nice fantasy and seemed to make sense given other factors, but I think the hard truth is that at some point, you’re either well set up to play the game or you’re not. The conclusions I reached in 2005 about what my strengths and interests actually were came about five to ten years too late to be able to go this route with any particular success — the irony being that I would have never come to those conclusions had I not gone after singing as long as I did. It just wasn’t meant to be, and I am at a point in life where I have to be honest, perhaps brutally so, with myself about what I can and cannot do from here. Batman may have no limits, but I sure do, and I can’t afford to not know them. Perhaps I could have been an academic, and a good one, but the tough reality with which I am faced is that it doesn’t seem possible to get there from here.

So, having established what I can’t do, what can I do? I have a degree which nobody really cares I have, including the institution which granted it, basically qualifying me to push papers, giving me a pretty low earning capacity in general. I have a background that demonstrates within five seconds that, depending on how you spin it, either I’ve failed pretty spectacularly at virtually everything I’ve tried to do, or I’ve had pretty spectacularly bad luck. I have obscure interests which don’t exactly set the world on fire. In many respects it seems like the best bet from here is to do what I have to until Megan’s PhD is done, she is gainfully employed, and we have kids, at which point I try to be the best stay-at-home homeschooling dad I can possibly be.

It’s hard to say; I guess we watch this space for details.