I can certainly see this as a contributing factor.

My own experience is that during the first year of the pandemic I was just cooling my heels in a stable position. Later, the prime factor for me moving on was the whole return to office narrative. I've embraced fully remote and now demand it.

As such, I found a new job in Q4 and moved on, for a 25% pay increase as well.

I went the opposite direction; I was at a cool hipster startup, but since I decided to re-pursue academia part time, I switched to a stable megacorp [1] so I would have a consistent bit of funding for the degree for the next 4-6 years. Roughly the same base pay, but way better stock package.

I feel like for me, the boredom of COVID made online education about 10x more appealing, and with the articles about WGU popping up, I decided to finally finish my bachelors.

[1] I made sure they were ok with me doing a half-time PhD before I joined.

Completely off topic from the main thread but would you be comfortable sharing how you found and/or convinced an advisor to take you on for a part-time PhD?

Completely comfortable.

I spent a not-insignificant amount of time emailing professors (roughly two professors per state) across the US asking if they had part-time PhDs. Most didn't respond to me, the ones that did gave me a polite "no".

I then look up "online part time PhDs" and found basically two places that offer a doctorate online, which was Purdue and University of York (England). I inquired about Purdue, and it seemed more managerial than technical, which I wasn't interested in.

I find a program that seems interesting at University of York and ask them if they have any openings for a remote part time PhD. They responded back with basically "well not if you want funding." I then replied with "What if I fund myself?" Two professors working together decided to give me a shot, so they asked me to write a research proposal, which I did. I guess it was good enough, because when I emailed them back, instead of saying "thanks but no thanks", they gave me tips on how to refine it. After a few months of back-and-forth working on the proposal (and finishing my undergrad), we got the proposal into a state we were happy with.

After that, I just applied on their online portal and managed to get an intake interview. The intake interview was basically "<x> is involved with this PhD. Are you OK with that?" or "What if you encounter <y>?" I guess I did well enough because I got an offer the next week. I start in April.

----

Sorry for the life story, but I figured you might be able to be able to save yourself a few steps.

Thank you, this is very helpful.

Not parent, but part-time PhDs aren't entirely uncommon (at least in the UK, where I am) and I'm currently supervising one.

There are two major difficulties and one major advantage over the full-time version. The advantage is that you can work, so students aren't dependent on external funding or an ever-shortening runway of their own funds. This isn't a small thing. On the other side, though, it doubles the length of an already lengthy process (do people really want to be spending 7-10 years of all of their spare time unpaid and lonely?) and increases the chance the the candidate will drop out (in that they keep an alternative on-hand, rather than burning their employment bridges to do it full-time). Given how hard the PhD process can be, simply saying 'sod that' is always a temptation.

Anyway, it'll depend on the supervisor and the university. Some have policies against it, others are happy to consider.

Yup. I was working in recruiting during the early part of the pandemic, and it felt stupid reaching out to people. Even if you hated your job were you going to leave and take the chance on a new company? Who knows what could go wrong and next thing you know you don't have healthcare or unemployment during a global pandemic.

But I bet everyone who hated their job before, and then suffered through who knows what god awful shit during the pandemic, starting looking as soon as they felt it was more safe.

This is exactly it. The so-called "great resignation" is just pent-up delayed demand for normal job switching that didn't happen during the pandemic.

It's framed this way as click-bait. Of course people click on stories about quitting work because they dream of doing that themselves.

It also feeds into a narrative that everybody is doing fine, and the ones who aren't are just lazy and don't want to work.

>I suspect a lot of people were afraid to move on to new opportunities for a while due to the uncertainty of the pandemic. Once enough confidence was restored, the job hopping we'd expect to play out over the course of a couple of years all happened in a few months.

yep that's me. I wanted to quit over a year ago but I kept putting it off due to pandemic circumstances.

but now that everyone sees omicron is a wet fart and things are going back to normal, I put in my notice yesterday.