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[fiona]

Another brave column by Thomas H. Benton. I wish my colleagues who blithely encourage students to go to grad school would read his columns and take them seriously. Telling students to go to grad school is dooming them to a life of despair.

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Big-Lie-About-the-Life-of/63937/

The Fiona

[daniel_von_flanagan]

Telling students to go to grad school is dooming them to a life of despair.

Depending on field, of course.

But is it really such a scam?  If you get a PhD from a top-20 department, you have a small but nonzero chance of ending up in a TT academic job, even at an R1 if that is your goal.  If instead you go to work at Office Max you have a small but nonzero chance of becoming assistant manager.  If you go to law school, you might or might not end up in a stable firm.  (Two of my good friends with law degrees from Ivy League schools have been struggling for decades.)

Few career training paths have guaranteed jobs at the end, and it is not so obvious to me that the grad school path is the worst path to follow.  I propose that whenever Benton or anyone else writes about what a bad choice grad school is/was, they be required to discuss the other choice or choices with which it is being contrasted, along with a realistic evaluation of the odds of attaining the terminal level in that career. - DvF

[joeroberts]

To be fair, Benton is careful to restrict his comments to graduate school in the humanities, not graduate school in general. 

[spyzowin]

Another brave column by Thomas H. Benton. I wish my colleagues who blithely encourage students to go to grad school would read his columns and take them seriously. Telling students to go to grad school is dooming them to a life of despair.

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Big-Lie-About-the-Life-of/63937/

The Fiona

I think that his columns have been excellent. And I agree with you: telling students to go to graduate school is almost always irresponsible (if they're not rich or well connected or fortunate enough to attend a different Ivy for each degree).

But there is another class of student: the idiot.

Surely I wasn't the only romantic self-destructive idiot in graduate school. Until I got prematurely married and stupidly had a gaggle of children, I was completely prepared to live in an appliance box under a railway bridge as long as I could continue to groove on Wordsworth.

I always give students the speech about unemployment in the humanities, but I always tell them that the romantic and self-destructive search for pure knowledge for no real reason at all is admirable, but that if they end up living in their parent's basement, it shouldn't surprise them too much.

[i_heart_bulldogs]

As Benton's discourse seems directly entirely at those folks in Humanities, I think an important discussion is why there is such a cross-sectional difference in the demand for professors. Professional colleges continue to have a relatively strong demand, though the recession put a wee damper on that. Social sciences are not as well off as professional colleges, but they and the natural sciences are sort of in the middle of the whole operation. And then humanities has a really ugly demand for profs relative to the supply.

Benton focuses on the supply side: the incentives (I guess) for senior faculty is to maximize the labor pool of RAs and TAs, thereby putting a floor on the supply of profs.

The demand side is, what? Going down? Stable? Either was, the intersection of demand and supply spell low price for labor. Which is why the continuing (and growing?) use of adjuncts. They are available and willing to work for low prices.

It seems to me that the big important thing to do for the long-term health of wages for those in humanities is to develop external (to academia) professional engagements. For example, a marketing Ph.D. can be a prof or can go be a marketing professional (a reasonably high-level one too). That external job market lends a lot of support to the wages paid in the academic market.

It is well known that historians, theologians, English...ians, etc. are very good writers (relatively speaking to other majors) and patient researchers. Some are good teachers, although that ability may not be systematically higher in humanities.... Unfortunately, a lot of work pursued by, say, historians, in professional markets also tends to be low-paying until much higher up in the firm structure. For example, editors - this pays badly at low levels but pretty well at the senior level.

The long and short of all this is the following: there is an abundance of labor in non-technical fields, and a stable of declining supply of work. This plays out in wages offered to workers in the area. And it's why technical fields have to import a lot of talent from outside the U.S. (although this is generally true in Canada too).

The (really) unfortunate part of this is there probably is no short-run fix for all this. Only in the long-run, and only if full information about job prospects is disclosed, and only in the absence of the false premium put on higher education, will the imbalances in labor markets be sorted out.

[janewales]

I actually wrote to Benton/ Pannapacker about the last one, suggesting that some comparative analysis would be really helpful. I was thinking, for example, about the fact that it seems to take 10 years to complete a humanities PhD in the US. It takes far less time in Canada and in the UK, for example (6 years and 4, for the PhD, typically after a 1-year MA). The debt load is also smaller, because these systems, while not free, are public. But there are of course commonalities too, including the grim job prospects. I thought it would be interesting to see a column that reflected about what's going on in places other than the US.

[i_heart_bulldogs]

I thought the UK had a quite different Ph.D. granting system than U.S. or Canada. Time to completion, in my field, is about the same between U.S. and Canada. In the U.K., maybe it is just my field, but I remember there being no course work, so that the degree was granted in about 2/3 of the regular time. I thought maybe they loaded the courses into a Master's degree, but maybe not? I'm confused.

[janewales]

In Canada, time to degree is about 5-6 years, and usually there's an MA first-- 1 year, normally, though there are 2-year programs. Between MA and PhD, then, that's 2-3 years coursework. The UK takes as little as 3, because there's no coursework in many programs. There is the expectation of an MA, but again, it seldom takes more than 2 years, and a year is normal. So in both systems, we're talking about a significantly shorter time to completion, in my field at least, than in _some_ US schools, where one frequently hears of 10-11 years (a figure Benton uses frequently). It may be that the teaching expectations are much higher in US schools. Doctoral students tend to be teaching assistants, rather than having primary responsibility for courses, in both Canada and the UK, and in both systems, they often don't teach as much, at least in my field.

[i_heart_bulldogs]

In Canada, time to degree is about 5-6 years, and usually there's an MA first-- 1 year, normally, though there are 2-year programs. Between MA and PhD, then, that's 2-3 years coursework. The UK takes as little as 3, because there's no coursework in many programs. There is the expectation of an MA, but again, it seldom takes more than 2 years, and a year is normal. So in both systems, we're talking about a significantly shorter time to completion, in my field at least, than in _some_ US schools, where one frequently hears of 10-11 years (a figure Benton uses frequently). It may be that the teaching expectations are much higher in US schools. Doctoral students tend to be teaching assistants, rather than having primary responsibility for courses, in both Canada and the UK, and in both systems, they often don't teach as much, at least in my field.

I think you may have the right of it re: teaching requirements. After all, in the U.S. private schools, we have to justify those tuition waivers somehow.

[jonesey]

This (below) is exactly true, which is why I get so upset at folks on the fora who say things like "You should just get a PhD because you love to study" or somesuch:

Graduate school may be about the "disinterested pursuit of learning" for some privileged people. But for most of us, graduate school in the humanities is about the implicit promise of the life of a middle-class professional, about being respected, about not hating your job and wasting your life.

[fiona]

This (below) is exactly true, which is why I get so upset at folks on the fora who say things like "You should just get a PhD because you love to study" or somesuch:

Graduate school may be about the "disinterested pursuit of learning" for some privileged people. But for most of us, graduate school in the humanities is about the implicit promise of the life of a middle-class professional, about being respected, about not hating your job and wasting your life.

This is exactly my point. It's all very well to say that Benton should do statistical comparative research (why should he? do your own research if you have to know), or that Canada is better, or that the sciences are better.

His point is that in the humanities, the chances of getting a tenure track job these days are practically nil. It takes on the average 10 years to get a Ph. D. in English (the biggest field), after which only about 20-30% of Ph.D.s will ever (that's EVER) get a tenure-track job. That means hundreds of them will NEVER get a tenure track job. They will have spent their youths (and, often, reproductive years) learning stuff, sure, but they'll be in debt and unable to use most of the skills they've gained.

If you start out as part of a leisure class, sure, it's great. But most of us have to earn a living. And many of our colleagues simply are not telling students the truth.

The Fiona

[jonesey]

+1, Fiona. 

It's why my doctorate (when I'm finished) isn't going to be in English, even though I'm an English professor.  While I like teaching, there's just no money in it.  I learned (thanks to this site) not to drop everything to try to whittle away at a PhD for the next decade in hopes of getting a teaching slot at an R1 somewhere, especially when I can make a whole lot more in other areas. 

Now, if only someone had told me this before my MFA...

[locutus]

Few career training paths have guaranteed jobs at the end, and it is not so obvious to me that the grad school path is the worst path to follow. 

I think one issue is that grad school isn't as good as people think it is. In my experience a lot of potential graduate students think graduate school and further academic options are going to be just like their previous experience with school. Very well laid out expectations and somewhat deterministic links between work and reward. Read this book, take this test, get an A. Well it's not really like that, things are much more open ended and probabilistic, as they are in most career paths. This may be obvious to experienced academics, but how many students who are considering the academic career path really get this?

[pink_]

The part that gave me pause was this:

<quote>
Some professors tell students to go to graduate school "only if you can't imagine doing anything else." But they usually are saying that to students who have been inside an educational institution for their entire lives. They simply do not know what else is out there. They know how to navigate school, and they think they know what it is like to be a professor.
</quote>

Thank you, Dr. Pannapacker, for another honest and thought-provoking piece.

[daniel_von_flanagan]

I think one issue is that grad school isn't as good as people think it is.

Sure.

However, neither are the alternatives, especially for a humanities BA.

I think one really significant issue is that of who pays for the graduate degree.  In STEM fields it is practically unheard-of for a grad student to pay for his or her education; they are generally supported as TAs or RAs with tuition waivers.  While this pay is usually low low low, for someone who loves their field the idea that they can be earn a subsistence living while being given a shot at the prize is not a terrible one.  If degrees in the humanities came with a similar kind of support guarantee, that would defuse much of the ethics argument.

The other issue is time-to-degree.  We've talked about this in other threads, and I think I understand why those fields with fieldwork (eg, Anthropology) take 10+ years to a PhD.  I don't understand this at all for, say, English.  The teaching requirement doesn't explain it, as many fields have heavy teaching requirements.  (I taught for all but one semester of my 5 year MA+PhD program, and back then 5 years was considered a bit on the long side in my field.) - DvF