Living in Your Uptown World

Let me come back to the weird bad faith I was talking about in the last post. The basic idea is, you look at the top-10 or top-20 departments in the US, you see most of their grads getting jobs, and then you conlcude that the job market's not so bad, even if it's not awesome.

The more I think about it, the more I can't shake the sense that the profession's extreme status consciousness is partly to blame here. What would make someone think it makes sense to just discount the existence of candidates from lower-ranked or non-ranked departments? Well, maybe it's the same thing that at the APA makes them look at those candidates more like they're ugly furniture than real human beings.