The End of "Good Jobs" and the Rise of the First-Person Industrial Complex

Photo by Fausto Sandoval on Unsplash

Around the time I left higher ed, in 2021, I started lurking around LinkedIn to sniff out what other recovering academics were doing. I interviewed several of them for my podcast and learned about work I’d been completely clueless about as a professor, such as user-experience research (UXR), product management (not to be confused with project management), instructional design, medical communications, and more. It was difficult for PhDs to pivot to industry roles, but there was a general playbook to follow, and the ultimate goal was to land one of those so-called good jobs, preferably with a six-figure salary and benefits.

There were a few of us who decided to take our chances with entrepreneurship, launching coaching and consulting services, but these ventures typically required minimal overhead and a buffer of at least three years to get established. Nobody coming out of academe had much of a war chest to invest in a new LLC.

Tech offered the poshest gigs, and several of my podcast guests worked for behemoths like Amazon and Meta. Then the layoffs hit. UXR went from being a hot ticket for PhDs to a total dead end. The upshot seemed to be that as soon as you landed a good job, you lived in fear of a pink slip. The rise of AI, the economic stress of tariffs, and corporate downsizing have all contributed to a seemingly impossible job market. And this isn’t just for mid-career people like me — even recent college graduates who seemingly did everything right can’t seem to find entry-level positions.

The reality is that the recent college graduate, the young professional, and the mid-career professional are all in more or less the same boat, trying to be seen in disembodied digital spaces, trying to tell the ghost jobs from the real ones, trying every hack imaginable, but ultimately losing faith that even the bird in the hand is a safe bet.

This is strange to me, having lived through a cultural shift in higher ed away from belief in a well-rounded education that prepares people for meaningful lives, with enough self-knowledge to choose their work wisely and adapt to a changing marketplace, to a belief that college only makes sense if the investment pays off in a predictable way. My former employer spent hundreds of thousands on consultants to help with branding (the college mascot changed twice in four years) and market positioning. A new engineering major was developed at huge expense, and people in the humanities increasingly had to justify their majors and curriculum by metrics foreign to their mission. All presumably so our students would go on to get good jobs.

If there are increasingly fewer good jobs to be had, why does the American university system continue to contort itself in this way? The degree guarantees nothing. It’s just the beginning of a new cycle of trying desperately, to the point of burnout, to satisfy a new set of gatekeepers.

Entrepreneurship has emerged as the only reliable option left to many people as traditional employers grow increasingly unpredictable and unreliable. This has led to what some call the first-person industrial complex, which can be used to describe both confessional writing and personal branding. It used to be that a personal brand was useful in catching the eye of recruiters, which made side hustles and regular content streams worthwhile even for those who weren’t actively looking for work. My colleague Gertrude Nonterah, a medical communications professional, often preaches in her LinkedIn feed that everyone ought to build their own life raft long before they need it. But now we’re all hanging out our own shingles in the digital commons, trying to capture the perfect Ikigai: the sweet spot between what we love, what we’re good at, what the world needs, and what we can expect to be paid to do.

For much of the twentieth century, the creative person relied on institutions to handle the business end of things. In my case, this meant finding an employer who saw value in my expertise as a writer and as a scholar of the medical humanities. But this only made sense so long as the college believed — and could persuade parents and students — that the goal of higher ed was to produce a well-rounded individual with advanced literacy, breadth of cultural knowledge, and a capacity for independent critical thinking. Once a college concedes to the marketplace that the world does not need people capable of reading and comprehending Shakespeare or Willa Cather, or speaking a second language, then the scholar cannot expect to be paid for what they excel at and love.

Substack is the best option going for solopreneurs in the digital commons. But the two practical branches of Ikigai remain perennially elusive for creatives: what the world thinks it needs from us and what we can expect others to pay us to do. I’ve found a narrow lane as a book coach who also takes on college essay clients. It’s been gratifying to learn that the creative economy isn’t driven solely by results, that “thought partnership,” as one of my clients put it, can be the most valuable service I offer. But whenever money changes hands it’s reasonable to expect proof of impact, such as admission to a competitive school.

As I gear up for another season of coaching talented young people on how to tell their life stories more powerfully in their college applications, I’m mindful of the irony. I left higher ed because the enterprise had stopped valuing what I loved and the particular areas where I excelled. Yet those strengths (skillful storytelling, nuance, persuasion, concision) are true difference-makers in crowded applicant pools where everyone’s test scores and resumes glow in the dark. So my Ikigai now is only possible outside the ivory tower, helping others find their way in.

I genuinely enjoy helping students think about the importance of fit and how to communicate their values. And I’m confident that everyone I’ve coached will enrich the intellectual communities they choose. But I’m also aware that there isn’t much room in the first-person industrial complex for a traditional literature survey. I’ve dreamed at times of reviving some of my fifteen-week courses as offerings for lifelong learners, yet I’m well aware that no one has time to read 150 pages a week, or not in the rigorous way that study demands. Perhaps the world has never felt it truly needed that kind of experience, except when it was required.

What the Substack world needs, and what people are willing to pay for, is the read-along — a leisurely stroll through the classics — or lite reviews of classic literature, often with rage bait about which authors are “good” and which are not worth your time. John Pistelli might be right that writers and scholars ought to aim for smaller coteries, such as his “Invisible College,” and that “education in the humanities…may have to happen largely outside the university walls, invisibly, disseminated in online channels, subscribed to voluntarily, without official ‘homework’ or grades…and attended at leisure by those of any age wishing to fortify their minds with knowledge or augment their experience with beauty.” Gone is the sense of a cohort, of struggling through difficult material alongside other ambitious peers. Gone is the art of teaching as moderating, as synthesizing, as nudging a conversation toward novel insights.

I’m not ready to concede that the future belongs to the autodidact and entrepreneur, but with institutions crumbling everywhere, that solitary road — for the time being — is as firm a path as any.

Joshua Doležal

writes

The Recovering Academic

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