In librarianship we have the concept of "vocational awe" [0] which also applies to professions such as EMTs, nursing, and teaching. It's a combination of guilt, the idea that bringing money into something 'holy'/moral is crass, and that if you leave you're to blame for the difficulties that your patrons/students/patients experience in the wake of having less access to resources (rather than blaming those who set salaries + staffing levels who are well aware of the correlation between low salaries and poor work conditions and high turnover).
This can contribute to being psychologically hard to leave, but doesn't explain why people get into these professions.
I agree money is only one form of compensation. Some jobs focus on status or honor. But I don't see that in the areas you mentioned.
- nurses do make a lot of money and it's accessible without an incredible academic aptitude
- EMT is almost always a stepping stone job for young people
- a lot of women and moms want to be librarians partly due to flexibility
I mentioned staffing in addition to money because that's how the issue shows up in nursing - nurses are paid a living wage but often expected to deal with horrendous working conditions such as working with far more patients than is safe.
> a lot of women and moms want to be librarians partly due to flexibility
Source? It's not a particularly flexible job, and in my program none of my peers ever mentioned that being why they were here. The concept of vocational awe also comes out of academic librarianship which is a whole other ball game to public librarianship. But maybe my network + program is an outlier so if you have reading on that I'd welcome it!
> EMT is almost always a stepping stone job for young people
And? They're still doing valuable, dangerous work and are literally in charge of keeping people alive. They're also paid barely enough to live on, which is batshit crazy if you consider that chronically stressed people (like those who are living poor) make worse decisions and EMTs are required to make very important decisions on the fly. The only reason it's maintainable is that they have new young people to dazzle.
> But doesn't explain why people get into these professions.
Speaking for librarianship, most people who get into it do so for a few reasons that I've seen(some of them are stupid):
* They like reading and want to be around books and just like libraries. This is a very bad reason to become a librarian and go to graduate school.
* They want to be an academic but can't hack it in/don't want to try to become a professor. Your odds of landing a library position are much better than getting a decent teaching/research job in much of the humanities. So lots of people with grad degrees in things like English and History who realized that they need a career. (This is also a bad reason.)
* They really, really like organizing things. Or are really into niche areas like preservation that can pretty much only be explored professionally in this particular sector. Particularly for people in those interest areas who either have no interest in coding or who went into the profession before there were viable tech career paths to indulge those interests.
* They have several years of library work experience and want to move up the ladder because often you can't get even a basic full time job without the grad degree. This is a version of sunk-cost fallacy (as is the 'wants to be an academic' reason); if you've worked in one field/area for a long time it's hard to consider leaving to do something else.
Yes my experience is with public librarians, not the academic side.
I agree with your post and I'm not clear what our disagreement is. My point is that people are choosing these jobs because they are ok with the tradeoffs. They are being compensated, even if it's not with money. You describe benefits of being a librarian.
For example:
> They're still doing valuable, dangerous work and are literally in charge of keeping people alive
Yes and somehow people still sign up, so it looks like the wages + intangible benefits package is working.
> my program none of my peers ever mentioned that being why they were here
These kinds of life tradeoffs are rarely articulated. In fact I would argue that the savior/sacrificial narrative you describe is likely a polite screen to hide motivations like "I'm afraid of jobs where I can lose my spot if I perform poorly".
[0] = https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-...