For Ph.D.'s who want to remain in higher education but don't want faculty positions, working in administration is an attractive option.
"I like the balance that I have in my job as an administrator," says Alix Schwartz, who received a doctorate in English from the University of California at Berkeley in 1990 and now works in the undergraduate-affairs office there. Ms. Schwartz's job is to analyze academic problems facing undergraduate students and to propose and carry out solutions.
One of her projects was developing a freshman-seminar program with small, intimate classes designed to alleviate the sense of alienation facing Berkeley's 3,500 freshmen. As a part of her job, she teaches one of the seminar sections each year. "I still have a personal connection to students," says Ms. Schwartz, "and I value that a lot. But since I don't have overwhelming numbers of students, I can see the big picture, and work on projects that have a larger scope."
Administrative structure varies greatly from institution to institution, and "administrator" is used to refer to everyone from secretaries to deans, so perhaps it's unsurprising that the workings of the administration remain a mystery to many students and some faculty members.
For Ms. Schwartz, the benefits of her work in the administration far outweigh its drawbacks. "I love that it's so collaborative," she says. "Being a graduate student in English was isolating, and to a certain extent graduate students and junior professors are always in competition with their peers." As a university administrator, by contrast, she has productive relationships with colleagues who are working toward common goals. "Whatever I do, I don't do it alone," she says. "Other people want my projects to work."
Administrative jobs also offer certain continuities with graduate student life: involvement with students, being a part of higher education, belonging to a campus community with its intellectual events and library resources, being in a familiar, noncorporate environment. Some administrative jobs involve working directly with graduate students or teaching assistants.
"I have a strong tie to the graduate students who are teaching," says Lynn Rudloff, who supervises the computer writing and research lab at the University of Texas at Austin. "I can advocate for the grad students and support them by teaching practical skills like how to run workshops or write abstracts."
What does Ms. Rudloff's job entail on a day-to-day basis? "I do purchasing, I do budgets, I schedule who's going to use which rooms when, I train on how to incorporate the computers into teaching, I make sure that maintenance gets done, and I answer lots of questions," she says.
Ms. Rudloff defended her dissertation in June, but she plans to keep her job instead of seeking a faculty position. The only thing she misses is teaching, and she plans to remedy that by taking on an evening course starting in the fall. "Once I'm teaching, I'll have the ideal work," Ms. Rudloff says. Even with teaching a course on top of her 40-hour-a-week job, Ms. Rudloff says she doubts she'll put in more hours than a junior professor trying to get tenure.
Staying on campus has its drawbacks. To a greater degree than Ph.D.'s who leave campus for careers in different environments, college administrators are constantly reminded of the professorial life they could have had. "Most of the faculty members I work with respect me and my work, but there is some elitism here," says Ms. Schwartz.
"Faculty members have a certain cherished prestige and do not, as a body, appreciate administrators," agrees Virginia Steinmetz, of the Duke University Career Development Center. "Unless you keep teaching and doing research as an administrator, you're excluded from that inner circle." Ms. Steinmetz received a Ph.D. in English from Duke in 1979, and for almost a decade she held a three-quarter-time job teaching at Meredith College. She rejoined Duke in 1991 and now counsels graduate students on career issues.
Like Ms. Schwartz and Ms. Rudloff, Ms. Steinmetz encourages graduate students to spend some time thinking about their career priorities and what they really like to do.
"Graduate students who think they might be interested in administrative careers can use their university as a testing and training ground," she says. Campuses offer many opportunities for part-time work, which can be used to test out one's likes and dislikes as well as to get valuable experience to put on a résumé.
In addition, she suggests that people interested in administrative work browse job ads and notice what positions exist, what responsibilities they list, and what skills, degrees, and experience are required.
For jobs in career services, for instance, some institutions require candidates to have degrees in human resources, while others want candidates with experience in higher education. "I had to have a Ph.D. to get my job counseling graduate students," Ms. Steinmetz says, "not because the content was relevant but because they wanted someone who had been through the process and could relate to the graduate students."
Ms. Schwartz agrees that to be successful, administrative job candidates need to familiarize themselves with how universities operate. "See what the different titles are at the campus you're interested in. Make it clear that you know what the job is and how your skills apply," she says. "If it appears that you're just applying as a stopgap measure until a 'real' job comes along, your résumé will be thrown in the NO pile instantly."
Besides working as career counselors, assistant deans, computer-writing lab coordinators, and student-affairs analysts, people with arts-and-sciences Ph.D.'s find work in admissions, campus publications, alumni relations, development, institutional research, academic institutes, tutoring centers, libraries, and other niches on campus.
Pay and hours for administrative jobs vary according to job, state, and institution. Administrators interviewed for this article generally reported salaries about equal to or a little below faculty salaries at comparable ranks. (See a an article from The Chronicle on administrative salaries, February 25.)
It's a good time to be looking for a job on campus, Ms. Schwartz says. The strong economy means that there are fewer candidates for each position, and universities are more willing to consider slightly unorthodox candidates who may not have exactly the qualifications specified.
David Pickens, who started in May as an assistant dean at the graduate school at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, says that the search committee that hired him originally was looking for someone with a Ph.D. Mr. Pickens is A.B.D. in English at Rutgers. "For whatever reason, they couldn't find just the right person with a Ph.D.," he says, "so they made an exception."
Ironically, taking the position means that Mr. Pickens must now defer finishing his doctoral program. His job responsibilities include writing about faculty-research activities for a campus magazine and working on graduate-student issues, so being a student in the graduate school would present a conflict of interest. He may decide to return to finish his degree in a few years, Mr. Pickens says.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that many Ph.D.'s working in administration find jobs on the same campuses where they attended graduate school.
Ms. Schwartz took a job as an administrative assistant at Berkeley while she was finishing her dissertation, and she worked her way up to her present position in undergraduate affairs. Ms. Rudloff also got her job while still working on her dissertation. It was a new position, "cobbled together," she says, when the division of rhetoric and composition got its new computer facility two years ago. Mr. Pickens was on a year's leave from the English department when he heard about the assistant deanship.
"It was serendipity," Ms. Schwartz says. "I didn't know enough to know that I wanted this kind of job, but it's perfect for me."
ALSO SEE:
A guide to Web resources on careers in academic administration
