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[kedves]

The Thomas H. Benton articles should not come as a revelation to anyone, especially to the disillusioned scholars who communicate with Benton.  The Big Lie has been going on for decades.  The admonitions about grad school in the Humanities are out there, and they have been out there since the "Golden Age" of of the profession. It's impossible to cover up the Big Lie, unless one refuses to see the obvious or one has no other choice but to believe.   I don't buy the notion that no one ever told these people about the lack of real job opportunities in the field. 

This is not my field and, apart from human decency, not my fight.  But empirically, you are wrong.  I have written two letters of recommendation for students applying to art history graduate programs in the past year--and in both cases, I was the first person to tell them, "Hey, what do you know about the job market when you're done?  Let's talk about that before I write the letter."  Their professors and advisers in their program had not bothered.  If you are a minimally trained  or experienced observer, you can't mistake that drop-jawed, wide-eyed expression for anything other than surprise.

[mended_drum]

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

Sure, but what blue collar family is proud of their daughter for achieving any degree in the humanities, much less advanced degrees?

I mean, they are proud and all, but my family never had any delusions about the great career I was making for myself. As a matter of fact, they were pretty sure I was deluded, but as long as I didn't ask them for money, they let me get on with it.

Well, mine was.  Ridiculously proud.  They forced me to do the whole hooding thing, which almost no one in my program did, because they were so bursting with pride.   It was even more intense than my BA commencement, and since I was the first in my family to receive a college degree, that was pretty powerful.

Maybe your family was more aware than mine, but it simply never occurred to my parents that I wouldn't have a great career after so much education.  And did nothing to disturb their illusions.

[watermarkup]

I told a group of students just today that anyone thinking of grad school, especially in the humanities, needs some trusted figure to tell them not to do it, and that I was prepared to be that person.

One big problem here is the failure to differentiate between grad programs. Graduates of the top 15 programs--even in the tightest MLA fields--have placement rates (3 years out) considerably better than the 30% figure cited above. Below the top 15, there are a number of programs who have excellent (60-80%) placement in tt, albeit mostly at teaching-intensive colleges. Blanket generalizations are simply misleading.

Unfortunately, in my MLA field, which I suspect is like many others, there are about 30 schools in the top 15, and just about all have similar, and similarly bad placement rates. The list of schools that have absolutely atrocious placement rates includes household-name and Ivy schools. To find out what schools have good placement records, you have to have completed a Ph.D. and taken a spin on the market a few times to even know what questions you should be asking. And then to find an answer takes several years of watching the market with much more than the average degree of obsession. The disciplinary organizations keep track of all kinds of statistics, but not the ones that are actually relevant for current or future job seekers. It's all well and good to say that adult college students should research grad programs and placement rates, but the level of work required to get meaningful data in my field at least is well beyond BA level. It's something even most faculty I've talked to know little about.

[fiona]

In case anyone hasn't mentioned it, there's also a raft of useful, heartfelt comments posted right after Benton's column on this site.

The Fiona

[gonehiking]

Just another science person talking out of my butt here, but I actually find this sort of thing to be the most fascinating aspect of these fora; i.e., field differences.  So...

It certainly does have to do with things like funding and teaching.  As I understand it (and please, note this careful qualifier), the time science grad students spend in the lab generally contributes directly to their own research.  In other words, there's a kind of seamless quality to the work of a science Ph.D. candidate that there often or usually isn't for a humanities Ph.D. candidate.

This certainly matters.  However, in my stint as a postdoc in a very strong program in my field, I was rather surprised that one of the two graduate students with whom I worked most closely spent nearly two years mostly working on a project unrelated to his diss (getting paid for it, of course).  He still finished in 6 years total, and an overwhelming majority of people in my field finish in 5-7.  He got publications out of the side project and presumably great letters of rec for postdoc positions from a leader in the field, so it was good for him.  Obviously, that's anecdata, so your supposition may be mostly correct (and you certainly have the experience to speak to this issue), but grad students often serve as inexpensive qualified labor to get major projects done that aren't going to be dissertations.

Mine isn't all that long--it's around 300 pp. all up (I can't find my bound copy so I don't know exactly).  It also physically takes a long time to write, edit, and proof something that long.  

My roommate from Jr. year in college earned his Ph.D. in genetics at Yale.  He certainly worked extremely hard, and I have no qualms whatever about the incredible rigor of his program.  However, it took him four years, and his diss was like 50pp. long.  Big difference in that area.  I get the impression that science doctoral programs are more compressed and intense than humanities programs.  There's a lot of sitting around reading in humanities Ph.D. programs.  

I don't doubt that there are short science dissertations out there, but I'm in a physics-related field and a 50 page diss would not be defensible in my field, unless maybe you had made a truly major discovery.  Mine was a bit longer than normal, but contained 100+ pages of my breathless prose and 100 pages of tables and figures, and the latter are worth 1000 words, non?  Heck, I had about 25 pages in journals by then and those are very dense versions (both formatting and content) of what went in my diss.  This post attests to the fact that I can be wordy, but scientific writing tends not to be.

I could have EASILY finished my Ph.D. in four years, including coursework, if I'd had 100% funding and didn't have to spend so much time grading those damned freshman essays.  But there you go.

This was what amazed me when I first started lurking here: how much time many of the humanities folks spend teaching while they are in grad school.  It was rather extreme in my field (and probably hurt my career) that I spent an overwhelming majority of my fall/spring semesters in grad school working as a TA, and the fact that I taught summers several times is almost beyond the pale.  I'm exaggerating a bit, but I happened to be at a "low-end" R1 where even in my well-funded field, there wasn't lots of graduate student research funding.

Granted, all I really know about grad school in the humanities I learned from lurking around these fora over the past couple years.  However, I suspect that other than funding, the main issue is that most dissertations in my field go something like this: get the specific data to answer a specific question, analyze the specific data, answer the specific question, graduate.  I.e., projects tend to be very well defined.  It's a lot more difficult (or maybe impossible) to fire up the expensive equipment or go to a site to get additional data than it is to read just a few more books, then just a few more books, and maybe just a few more books.  I think that's what dolljepopp is saying.  I do know that the people in my PhD program who took the longest were the theorists, and again that's an area where it's easier to do just one more calculation, or carry the mathematics just a little further, etc., since the only cost is time.

[larryc]

I'm sure folks in the Humanities could write a dissertation acceptable in the 1960s in 4 or 5 years.  But they can't write a dissertation good enough for today's job market, plus the additional 3 or 4 articles they need, in that time.  

Why not?

I am no powerhouse. I did two years of doctoral coursework and took my comps. Then I did the bulk of my history dissertation research in a year, and wrote 3 of the 5 chapters the next year. Then I got a 4/4 job and it took three years to write the last two chapters. I published the dissertation pretty much unaltered with the leading press in my field. So I got most of the PhD program including coursework and diss done in 4 years.

Why does it take some people ten years? I don't get it.

[t_r_b]

I'm sure folks in the Humanities could write a dissertation acceptable in the 1960s in 4 or 5 years.  But they can't write a dissertation good enough for today's job market, plus the additional 3 or 4 articles they need, in that time.  

Why not?

I am no powerhouse. I did two years of doctoral coursework and took my comps. Then I did the bulk of my history dissertation research in a year, and wrote 3 of the 5 chapters the next year. Then I got a 4/4 job and it took three years to write the last two chapters. I published the dissertation pretty much unaltered with the leading press in my field. So I got most of the PhD program including coursework and diss done in 4 years.

Why does it take some people ten years? I don't get it.

During how many of those semesters were you responsible for running discussions, holding office hours, and doing 100% of the grading for ~4 discussion sections of ~20 students each?

I think the key factors are funding (not just whether you're funded, but how much and what kind), teaching load (not just how many semesters you teach, but how heavy your load is each semester), institutional culture, and mentoring.

Within the discipline of history, at least, there is a whole lot of variation in time-to-degree among departments, and even among programs within the same department. In my own (very large) graduate department, some (small) programs made a point of admitting only as many grad students as they could fund, and were extremely conscientious about mentoring and professional development. Their PhD students typically finished in 6-8 years. Other (often larger) programs admitted more students than they could fund (so lots had to take out loans and work outside jobs). The style and quality of mentoring varied widely by mentor, with some taking a "sink-or-swim" approach and others being far more attentive. Students in those programs averaged 9-11 years. So within a single department, time-to-degree varied by 2-3 years depending on what program you were in.

I was in one of the larger, longer programs. My own mentor was excellent (and I finished more quickly than most), but there is a big difference between having an outstanding individual mentor and being part of a program where close attention to professional development, etc. is the norm. Among other things, a program-wide commitment to strong mentoring and professional development creates a much more constructive sense of intellectual community among grad students.

But I keep coming back to the incredibly rapid UK-based English doctoral degree-- a former student of mine just finished at Cambridge, and it took about 4 years, and that was pretty standard (ever notice how young UK academics are? and it's not just that I'm getting old and grizzled...).

Oxbridge-style doctoral programs differ so sharply from American ones because undergrad education in the US and UK differs just as (if not more) sharply. From what I can tell, those majoring in History and English, etc. in the UK do coursework roughly equivalent to (if not more advanced than) the coursework of US Masters degree programs. Because they get such a solid foundation in the discipline as undergraduates, UK grad students can skip much of the coursework that provides the foundation of US grad programs and jump very quickly to the dissertation. Hence the rapid time to degree.

So the key difference here is between US and UK undergrad curricula, not the graduate programs. The undergrad curricula differ so much in part because the UK system sacrifices breadth for depth (while the US system does the opposite) and locks students into a particular degree path more quickly (while US undergraduates often spend two or more years shopping around for a major). The system for admissions (not to mention funding) is also radically different in the UK, in ways that facilitate more intensive undergrad training. All of which means that "'let's emulate the Oxbridge PhD curriculum" really isn't a viable option here.

That's not to say that we should just throw up our hands and say, "it takes 10+ years to get a US PhD, and there's nothing to be done about it." As I suggested above, better mentoring and an institutional culture that really supports professional development can go a long way towards making things better, even at the same funding levels. Shrinking large (and unfunded) grad programs would help as well. And the first step is for faculty members (at both the undergraduate and graduate levels) to start taking more seriously their responsibility to do right by their grad students, not only in the classroom but also in the much more nebulous realm of mentoring and career counseling. And there I agree 100% with Benton's article.

It's often said that UK PhDs have some trouble navigating the North American job market, but I've always understood that to refer to an absence of the sorts of professionalization and pedagogy programs which have become increasingly common on this side of the pond-- not to any lack in the dissertation itself.

My take is that it's a mix of prejudice (the assumption that UK PhDs somehow aren't prepared for US teaching) and institutional culture and the relatively limited teaching experience of UK PhDs (a cost of those rapid PhD programs). And a lot of it has to do with networking and familiarity: American scholars are more familiar with other Americans, and so they are more likely to be impressed by your star-studded list of referees if those referees are American.

[renji]

This is not my field and, apart from human decency, not my fight.  But empirically, you are wrong.  I have written two letters of recommendation for students applying to art history graduate programs in the past year--and in both cases, I was the first person to tell them, "Hey, what do you know about the job market when you're done?  Let's talk about that before I write the letter."  Their professors and advisers in their program had not bothered.  If you are a minimally trained  or experienced observer, you can't mistake that drop-jawed, wide-eyed expression for anything other than surprise.

I believe you, but find this unbelievable... How could any reasonably intelligent human being embark on 1/2 a decade or more of graduate work without knowing anything about the job prospects at the end?

I have always assumed that all of you humanities folk were crazy, maybe even overconfident -- but not stupid.

At the same time, I am always shocked at your faith in the reemergence of a job market that has not existed in my lifetime.

BTW, it is still possible to find TT jobs and live a wonderfully exciting "life of the mind" -- if you get your PhD in accounting, engineering, computer science, or a dozen other fields that actually pay well.

The funny thing is that if you land an accounting or engineering TT position at an R1, they still let you go to the exhibits, plays and concerts on campus. And since you are teaching a 2-2 (or lighter) load with TA, you'll actually have more time to attend these events, or read for pleasure, than if you majored in any of the humanities.

In fact, I'd be willing to bet dollars to donuts that if you walk by your campus area coffee shop and see a man or women leisurely reading a book -- that person is not a humanities PhD. The person at the next table, the one frantically chugging their latte while trying to grade 427 essays, that is a humanities PhD.

[omelas56]

If there are any philosophers reading, I'd appreciate some input. I know the humanities job scene is terrible. However, the Philosophy scene seems, to my untutored eyes, quite good. For example, see Northwestern's placement record: http://www.philosophy.northwestern.edu/graduate/recent-placements.html. Northwestern isn't even a highly ranked department (though it undoubtedly has a certain cachet...). The placement records at NYU or Harvard are spectacular.

Based on placement records it would seem that Benton's articles don't really apply quite as accurately to Philosophy as to, say, English (TB's field), or History. Of course, it may be that the TT jobs the Northwestern grads have, are crappy. But they seem to be getting TT jobs, almost all of them! The stats are not that different at other schools I've checked (e.g. Umass, Ohio State, etc.); they have good placement.

So a few possibilities exist: (1) Philosophers get jobs, especially those from higher-ranked programs, (2) The departments are not telling us something, in their placement records, or, (3) I'm missing something important.

Full disclosure: I am a PhD applicant in Philosophy.

[janewales]

This is not my field and, apart from human decency, not my fight.  But empirically, you are wrong.  I have written two letters of recommendation for students applying to art history graduate programs in the past year--and in both cases, I was the first person to tell them, "Hey, what do you know about the job market when you're done?  Let's talk about that before I write the letter."  Their professors and advisers in their program had not bothered.  If you are a minimally trained  or experienced observer, you can't mistake that drop-jawed, wide-eyed expression for anything other than surprise.

I believe you, but find this unbelievable... How could any reasonably intelligent human being embark on 1/2 a decade or more of graduate work without knowing anything about the job prospects at the end?

I have always assumed that all of you humanities folk were crazy, maybe even overconfident -- but not stupid.

At the same time, I am always shocked at your faith in the reemergence of a job market that has not existed in my lifetime.

BTW, it is still possible to find TT jobs and live a wonderfully exciting "life of the mind" -- if you get your PhD in accounting, engineering, computer science, or a dozen other fields that actually pay well.

The funny thing is that if you land an accounting or engineering TT position at an R1, they still let you go to the exhibits, plays and concerts on campus. And since you are teaching a 2-2 (or lighter) load with TA, you'll actually have more time to attend these events, or read for pleasure, than if you majored in any of the humanities.

In fact, I'd be willing to bet dollars to donuts that if you walk by your campus area coffee shop and see a man or women leisurely reading a book -- that person is not a humanities PhD. The person at the next table, the one frantically chugging their latte while trying to grade 427 essays, that is a humanities PhD.

Renji, a humanities job at a good R1 can also be 2/2 (or less), and can pay very well. And you get to be in the humanities, which, if it's your kind of thing, is probably more congenial than some of the more secure options. It's not that there aren't great humanities jobs-- if there were absolutely none of them, then I think it might be easier to dissuade students from embarking on humanities PhDs. But though I tell my own undergraduate students what the market is like, including pointing to our own program's placement rate (hovering around 55% in permanent work), they look at the job I have, and decide it's what they want. They see us hire every year (and yes, we're still hiring-- even this year), and while what they should see is how insanely qualified, and lucky, one needs to be in order to grab the brass ring, I think what they actually see is newly-minted humanities PhDs getting great jobs. They've been exceptional all their undergrad lives-- so they imagine that they will continue to be so.

[jonesey]

I believe you, but find this unbelievable... How could any reasonably intelligent human being embark on 1/2 a decade or more of graduate work without knowing anything about the job prospects at the end?

I have always assumed that all of you humanities folk were crazy, maybe even overconfident -- but not stupid.

Some of us, (okay, me) knew nothing about the higher ed job market at all when we (I) got my masters. 

I went to a CC, transfered to a small, private college, and finished my English degree, all at night, all while working 40+ hours per week in my day job plus being in the National Guard.  I had no idea what a full-time college experience is like.  I'd never done it.  No clubs.  No football games.  Nada.  Post military, married, kids, grinding away at night.  When I'd finished my BA I looked at teaching HS but no one was hiring, so I thought about teaching at a college.  My undergrad advisor knew I like writing, so he recommended an MFA instead of a regular MA in English, and told me that all I need to teach at a CC was a masters.  He was also very upfront that I'd have to be willing to move anywhere (Alaska, Texas, Iowa, priosons...) if I wanted a shot at a job.  So I went, and was fortunate to get a job shortly after grad school, on the other side of the country.  : ) 

I didn't know anything aboug doctoral programs or higher ed practices or anything until I found this site *after* I had a FT teaching job. 

Not all of us came straight from HS to college to PhD programs without ever having lived a life outside of a college campus. 

[watermarkup]

If there are any philosophers reading, I'd appreciate some input. I know the humanities job scene is terrible. However, the Philosophy scene seems, to my untutored eyes, quite good. For example, see Northwestern's placement record: http://www.philosophy.northwestern.edu/graduate/recent-placements.html. Northwestern isn't even a highly ranked department (though it undoubtedly has a certain cachet...). The placement records at NYU or Harvard are spectacular.

Based on placement records it would seem that Benton's articles don't really apply quite as accurately to Philosophy as to, say, English (TB's field), or History. Of course, it may be that the TT jobs the Northwestern grads have, are crappy. But they seem to be getting TT jobs, almost all of them! The stats are not that different at other schools I've checked (e.g. Umass, Ohio State, etc.); they have good placement.

So a few possibilities exist: (1) Philosophers get jobs, especially those from higher-ranked programs, (2) The departments are not telling us something, in their placement records, or, (3) I'm missing something important.

I'm not in philosophy, and I hope a philosophy chimes in to answer your questions. Some additional factors you might want to look into are:

How many Ph.D.s are these programs completing each year? If they have 3 great placements but 12 graduates, that's not so hot. Often schools don't list people who just disappear. Does Philosophy have a disciplinary record of completed dissertations? That's one thing you'll want to compare.

What's the attrition rate among grad students? Personally, I don't think that students leaving grad study after a year or two, especially with MA in hand, is a bad thing. You tried grad school, found that you didn't like academia all that much, and moved on. But how many students are getting bounced at the prelims stage, because the department has unrealistic requirements for reading ability in Greek and Latin? How many ABDs are disappearing after years of dissertating because dissertation expectations and funding limits don't match? There's almost no way to get a good answer to these questions, by the way, short of knowing someone in the department.

What does the Philosophy wiki look like this year compared to last year, and the year before?

Probably the most important question is: what non-academic careers have philosophy Ph.D.s found? Because the more viable Plan Bs you have, the better your position will be at the end of the road, whether you find an academic job or not.

[larryc]

There are no jobs in philosophy.

[t_r_b]

So a few possibilities exist: (1) Philosophers get jobs, especially those from higher-ranked programs, (2) The departments are not telling us something, in their placement records, or, (3) I'm missing something important.

Full disclosure: I am a PhD applicant in Philosophy.

How about a qualified #1: some philosophers get jobs, and the success rate varies very widely by program, and by advisor. Though if you are considering a PhD program in philosophy, assume that #2 is true as well. If your research into career viability ends with what the programs recruiting you have to say, then you might as well take career advice from an Amway pyramid. Oh, and on preview, what larryc said.

It's the same point someone else made upthread: the overall average (20%, 10%, or whatever) tells only a small part of the story. When I started grad school, my advisor had within the last few years seen four newly minted PhDs get very good TT jobs. Past performance is no guarantee of future success, but my odds were a heck of a lot better than those with advisors who had seen maybe one or two PhDs get TT jobs in the last decade.

It's also not just a matter of program ranking. In my own field, for the last decade or so, the most impressive new PhDs (and the most exciting dissertation books) have come out of a program that wasn't even on the map, rankings-wise, just a few years ago. They just happen to have a really big name in the field who has recruited some solid asst. and assoc.-level colleagues and who does a kickass job of recruiting and training excellent scholars. If any student of mine got into their program with a multiyear funding package, I would have no qualms about encouraging them to attend. Yes, they are still rolling the dice, but if they finish their odds will be much better than 10%.

[pournelle]

This discussion has introduced some distortions. My own experience is that in the three years since I've had my phd in an MLA field I've had 3 offers from R1's (with 2/2 teaching loads and decent pay). I feel fortunate, but there are others from my graduate cohort who've done better. Of those who've had worse luck, two had serious personal issues that prevented their publication record from adequately representing their abilities. My detailed knowledge of a few comparable grad programs comes from close friends who went there, and suggest comparable results: 50-70% of grads with tt jobs 3 years out.

Again, if you go to a top grad program, your odds are likely to be significantly better than the numbers bandied about here (which may well reflect an aggregate across all hundred plus uni's with grad programs). Success from even a top program is by no means certain, and depends on publishing and publishing well. (Judging from my recent experience on a search committee, a publication in a top journal gets noticed, a pub in a third-tier place does nothing for you.)

At any rate, as I said above, the chances of success if you're talented and do your homework on prospective grad programs is a lot better than it is for other 'dream jobs,' actors, painters, musicians, etc. When I told my undergrad profs I wanted to go to grad school they told me I had about a 30% chance of getting a job. I found the prospect of being a humanities professor so much more attractive than the practical fields Renji mentions, that I considered the risk well worth it.