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[renji]

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.

Thank you for this reply.

You are correct, if there were ZERO jobs for humanities PhDs, no one would go to grad school. But as long as there is even 1 good job, you will have dozens, or even hundreds, trying for that brass ring.

However, even at great schools, humanities PhDs are paid significantly less than business faculty.

My larger point was not to dis' humanities PhDs, but to point out that there are other options for folks wanting an academic career. Options which have most of the same benefits, but greater chances of success.

BTW, I am the first of the 'ji's to go to college. I did not even start going to school until after my second kid was born. I worked a full time job all the way through my BS and MS. I went to CC (at night) then transferred to a big state school (still at night). I did my MS (again at night). By the time I started my PhD program, I was in my 30's and had a houseful of kids. So, I needed to know exactly which degrees paid and which degrees had the best job prospects.

I chose a field that paid well and had high placement levels, not because I loved that field, but because I had a ton of mouths to feed. Thankfully, I have grown to love the work over the years.

Again, my point is not to say that humanities PhDs suck, but to encourage those considering a PhD to carefully research all of their options.

[yellowtractor]

This report from The Journal of Higher Education seems relevant to our discussion:

Between 1995 and 2003, the median accumulated federal loans for doctorates increased from $14,927 to $44,743, according to a study in The Journal of Higher Education. The study examines the increase and various factors that contributed to it, and to some subsets of doctoral students seeing debt increase at faster levels than was the case for others.

It does not say anything about the circuses, however.

[ianelay]

Barbara Lovitts' research, recounted in her book Leaving the Ivory Tower: The Causes and Consequences of Departure from Doctoral Study, relates that one apparently significant difference between humanities and hard science graduate students is the type of socialization that occurs. Hard science grad students typically work in peer groups in lab settings, whereas humanities grad students conduct their research in a more solitary fashion. The hard science students complete in about half the time the humanities students take.

I was wondering about this. Graduate students in the sciences are encouraged to publish first-author research papers, and contribute as authors on other research papers. The supervisor also gets listed as a research author on the paper, so it's in the supervisor's best interest to keep their students working productively in the lab. Grad students can have TA-ships, but in my experience, these are limited to an official load of 10-12h per week. Supervisors who don't want student research disrupted by teaching responsibilities can be required to make up the difference in support.

Granted, that leads to a system that recruits graduate students for cheap research labour, instead of cheap teaching labour.

How does the system work in Humanities? When you work on a dissertation that could be published later, do you become the sole author? Or does your work also contribute to the work of your supervisor?

[marigolds]

Barbara Lovitts' research, recounted in her book Leaving the Ivory Tower: The Causes and Consequences of Departure from Doctoral Study, relates that one apparently significant difference between humanities and hard science graduate students is the type of socialization that occurs. Hard science grad students typically work in peer groups in lab settings, whereas humanities grad students conduct their research in a more solitary fashion. The hard science students complete in about half the time the humanities students take.

I was wondering about this. Graduate students in the sciences are encouraged to publish first-author research papers, and contribute as authors on other research papers. The supervisor also gets listed as a research author on the paper, so it's in the supervisor's best interest to keep their students working productively in the lab. Grad students can have TA-ships, but in my experience, these are limited to an official load of 10-12h per week. Supervisors who don't want student research disrupted by teaching responsibilities can be required to make up the difference in support.

Granted, that leads to a system that recruits graduate students for cheap research labour, instead of cheap teaching labour.

How does the system work in Humanities? When you work on a dissertation that could be published later, do you become the sole author? Or does your work also contribute to the work of your supervisor?

Completely sole-authored work is the norm in my field (English); collaborative authorship is very rare. 

Advisees' work can contribute to advisors' work; most often only to the extent that they receive an acknowledgment or footnote in the next monograph thanking the student for ideas or refinements of ideas.  Often one can tell someone's "critical lineage" by the type of work they do and the emphases they put on particular or idiosyncratic things.  Generally, though, humanities scholarship is a very solitary endeavor.

I wish collaborative work was more the norm, to be honest.  I love collaborating with people, and I think it would be really instrumental in easing the transition to completely independent work for many graduate students.

[t_r_b]

Barbara Lovitts' research, recounted in her book Leaving the Ivory Tower: The Causes and Consequences of Departure from Doctoral Study, relates that one apparently significant difference between humanities and hard science graduate students is the type of socialization that occurs. Hard science grad students typically work in peer groups in lab settings, whereas humanities grad students conduct their research in a more solitary fashion. The hard science students complete in about half the time the humanities students take.

I was wondering about this. Graduate students in the sciences are encouraged to publish first-author research papers, and contribute as authors on other research papers. The supervisor also gets listed as a research author on the paper, so it's in the supervisor's best interest to keep their students working productively in the lab. Grad students can have TA-ships, but in my experience, these are limited to an official load of 10-12h per week. Supervisors who don't want student research disrupted by teaching responsibilities can be required to make up the difference in support.

Granted, that leads to a system that recruits graduate students for cheap research labour, instead of cheap teaching labour.

How does the system work in Humanities? When you work on a dissertation that could be published later, do you become the sole author? Or does your work also contribute to the work of your supervisor?

In addition to what Marigolds said, a few more points:

1. TAs working 10-12 hours a week? Sounds dreamy. For us (in history), the "official" load was around 20, and the real load was often well above that. Granted, that varies widely by institution, with the better-endowed privates requiring much less. But it's probably a safe bet that in more writing-intensive disciplines, the actual TA workload is much higher.

2. In history, the main perk that supervisors obtain from their grad students' publications is in reputation, and even that only applies when the reader of the publication looks at the acknowledgments. Faculty list theses and dissertations supervised on their CV, but not grad students' publications. If a grad student spins off a dissertation chapter as an article, that's their own affair: the dissertation supervisor is not officially involved. Of course, the supervisor may well help the grad student with writing articles as well as writing the dissertation (mine certainly did) but won't get any official credit for it.

3. For history, this system makes a good deal of sense, since the dissertation supervisor is almost never directly involved in a grad student's research. For all I know, my own mentor never looked at any of the primary sources cited in my dissertation, except for the passages I quoted. As in, never looked at them at all, either in supervising my work or doing other research. Our individual research projects have zero overlap. The supervisor supervises and does not participate, kind of like a long-term peer reviewer. The resulting scholarship is the result of a single person's intellectual labor, created with the support of others (like all human work) but authored by just one. Including a graduate supervisor as co-author of a dissertation book would be similar to a novel listing as co-authors the members of the novelists' writing group.

And yes, I think all this does contribute to the long duration of PhD programs. In history, most dissertations really start from scratch. They don't build off of a broader research program already underway in a shared lab. So it takes longer. We need to figure out ways to reduce time to degree, but trying to be more like the lab sciences probably won't cut it. It's a totally different kind of work.

Mind you, it's also possible that I wrote this entire post just to give myself an excuse to use the phrase "better-endowed privates" on the fora.

[aandsdean]

SNIP

In addition to what Marigolds said, a few more points:

1. TAs working 10-12 hours a week? Sounds dreamy. For us (in history), the "official" load was around 20, and the real load was often well above that. Granted, that varies widely by institution, with the better-endowed privates requiring much less. But it's probably a safe bet that in more writing-intensive disciplines, the actual TA workload is much higher.

When I was in grad school at UVa, the Board of Visitors and the Provost made a similar claim about TA working hours in English--10 hours/week to teach a section of ENWR 101 (3 hours in class, 2 office hours, and 5 hours of prep and grading).

We declared that we were going to work-to-rule, and we got more money, pretty much instantly (a beginning teacher will spend 20 hours/week, minimum, on a single comp course; the second can be added for maybe 18 more hours, since you only do one prep).  Not long after, the Provost (the odious/infamous Paul R. Gross of Social Text fame, inter alia) was gone.  Schadenfraude to the max.

[locutus]

Barbara Lovitts' research, recounted in her book Leaving the Ivory Tower: The Causes and Consequences of Departure from Doctoral Study, relates that one apparently significant difference between humanities and hard science graduate students is the type of socialization that occurs. Hard science grad students typically work in peer groups in lab settings, whereas humanities grad students conduct their research in a more solitary fashion. The hard science students complete in about half the time the humanities students take.

I was wondering about this. Graduate students in the sciences are encouraged to publish first-author research papers, and contribute as authors on other research papers. The supervisor also gets listed as a research author on the paper, so it's in the supervisor's best interest to keep their students working productively in the lab. Grad students can have TA-ships, but in my experience, these are limited to an official load of 10-12h per week. Supervisors who don't want student research disrupted by teaching responsibilities can be required to make up the difference in support.

I think they're saying that 10-12 hours for science TAs. Is it the case that humanities TAs are much more likely to be grading papers and other time intensive work? When I TA'd classes without papers my time per week was much much much less than when papers when involved.

[madhatter]

And yes, I think all this does contribute to the long duration of PhD programs. In history, most dissertations really start from scratch. They don't build off of a broader research program already underway in a shared lab. So it takes longer. We need to figure out ways to reduce time to degree, but trying to be more like the lab sciences probably won't cut it. It's a totally different kind of work.

Lovitts' comparison also makes the point that the peer-level socialization can make a difference in completion rates. Working on the same research with a group of peers can help set a norm for persistence in work, pace of work, etc. Individual scholars working on solo projects don't have that sort of peer pressure.

[kedves]

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.

Here are some ways students can apply to and finish graduate school without knowing anything helpful or accurate about job prospects:

• Not all disciplines conduct and publish job-market studies on their association sites.  Mine does (social science) and some humanities associations do, but many do not.  For some, the "careers" area of the site features a fantasy list of jobs that Ph.D.s might hypothetically be able to do with no discussion at all of the real job market.
• Accurate information about job placement from any particular department is nearly impossible to get.  My well-ranked grad department gives information about grads employed in academic jobs only, for example.  If your goal or eventual outcome is to work for government, a foundation, industry, and NGO, you're invisible.  Useful ratios (such as employed:unemployed, academic:non-academic, target career: second-choice career) are not available.
• Faculty advisers might give no information or inaccurate information and advice about the job outlook when students are applying and when they are in programs.  Even when they admit to intense competition, they often hold fast to the belief that quality will overcome obstacles.  ("If you don't get a job, you weren't good enough--but you are good, therefore you will get a job.")  Do they 1) not know any better, 2) distort optimistically, or 3) lie intentionally?  I don't know.  Read some of the recent posts by people who have given up in the "Job-seeking check-in" thread for examples.

I am puzzled and angry that I, a non-TT lecturer in a very different discipline, have to be the one to tell humanities students about the job market in their area.  I expect to do it for my own discipline, although I'm not an adviser and technically it is not my place.  But these humanities students have TT and tenured advisers and letter-writers in their majors.  What are those people doing?  The students I've talked with are going through with their grad-school plans and truly feel that education is never wasted.  There is a romantic aura of the value of learning that attaches more to some disciplines than to others.  I do not mean "romantic" in a disparaging way; these ideals give people meaning and direction.  But it scares me to think that I am catching students to whisper bad news in their ears who would have gone on their way, unknowing, if I didn't chance upon them.

I think the solution is uniform reporting of grad-program outcomes in terms of both career and satisfaction--a cheap, simple, uniform annual survey of people exit master's and Ph.D. programs with or without the degree, that could then be collected and analyzed for national patterns.  And everyone with undergraduate advising responsibilities should be made to understand that the job-market talk is part of the responsibility.

[locutus]

Even when they admit to intense competition, they often hold fast to the belief that quality will overcome obstacles.  ("If you don't get a job, you weren't good enough--but you are good, therefore you will get a job.")  Do they 1) not know any better, 2) distort optimistically, or 3) lie intentionally?  I don't know. 

Chime to this and everything else. My old department as a group was not paricularly forthcoming.

"oh don't worry, this is a good program"
"Have we mentioned Sally Superstar who graduated 3 years ago and got a great job?"
"Just keep your head down and work, things will take care of themselves"

Though one year one prof suddenly broke ranks and was quite blunt about the job market. How many qualified applicants there were for each job. How long these applicants CVs were, that it had been increasing every year. That things had been tougher for recent graduates than the professors had expected. And most importantly, that the professors collectively really had no idea if their graduates would get anything at all.

The students weren't all totally naive, but I don't think any of us had ever managed to get such a thorough and blunt assessment of the market in my field before. It's just not something that is easy to get.

[marigolds]

Daniel, I'm talking 40pp worth of BOOKS.  Thousands upon thousands of pages written by people like Joyce, Frederic Jameson, Derrida, Kant, Bourdieu and a whole bunch of other people whose prose is, shall we say, not an easy read.

In my dissertation are over 300 books from the 17th century, all of which I read, face to face, in original editions in rare book libraries (Huntington, Beinecke, Clark, UVa, Iowa, Folger, etc.).  It took time to get to these places and do this reading.

BTW, it took me 8 years and 2 months to finish, including 3 years and 2 months of FT teaching.  But I read fast, and had the huge advantage of having my parents' house within a short drive of the Clark and Huntington so I didn't have to work extra hours to pay to study there.

Also, to rewind a bit to the problem of the length of time humanities dissertations take to complete: humanities scholarship rarely goes out of date.  Unlike the sciences, where new/updated information replaces the old, humanities scholarship is additive.  Though theoretical trends come and go, making some work sound very dated and un-hip, I feel that I now need to read both the last 2 years' worth of articles and monographs on Henry James, and all the philosophers and theorists that people are using these days to think about his language use, AND I still need to read Ian Watt's stuff on James from 1960.  Along with all Henry James's letters, of course.  And his notebooks.  And his extensive literary, theater, and art criticism.

Oh yeah, and I forgot about his novels.  Have to read those too - at least all 16 of the major-ish ones, and 4 of the novellas, and all of the short stories.   

All this is for one chapter of my dissertation.  How much of the actual text of that chapter do you think I have written, after 3 months of work?

The weird thing about humanities research is that there is a creative element in addition to the synthetic element; it would be as if scientists all had to use the same primary dataset to come up with new, original, and significant interventions into the field.

In other words, we have to make it up, and that takes a long time.

[t_r_b]

The students weren't all totally naive, but I don't think any of us had ever managed to get such a thorough and blunt assessment of the market in my field before. It's just not something that is easy to get.

The answer here, from the student's (or prospective student's) perspective, is to push your (prospective) advisor for details. "Tell me about your recent grad students. How many dissertations have you supervised in the last ten years? How long did they take to finish? What are they doing now?"

If the prospective advisor is a keeper, you won't get past "recent grad students" without being deluged with glowing and very detailed descriptions of a flock of recent PhDs enjoying happy and productive careers. If you get hemming and hawing and vague assertions that "they're doing well," then that's a big red flag.

It's important to note here that the best source for this information is not the graduate program as a whole, which as Kedves notes probably won't tell you anything useful, but the individual faculty member in whom you would be trusting your professional future.

In a nutshell, even in some of the more competitive humanities fields, there are faculty advisors whose students usually get decent jobs. If you can find such an advisor who will commit to supporting your project, then it might be worth doing a PhD. If not, it probably isn't.

[kedves]

The answer here, from the student's (or prospective student's) perspective, is to push your (prospective) advisor for details. "Tell me about your recent grad students. How many dissertations have you supervised in the last ten years? How long did they take to finish? What are they doing now?"

If the prospective advisor is a keeper, you won't get past "recent grad students" without being deluged with glowing and very detailed descriptions of a flock of recent PhDs enjoying happy and productive careers.

It's an optimistic thought, but I do not think it works that way.  A student asking about recent grad students will hear the success stories.   What the student won't get is an accurate ratio of "happy and productive careers" to "don't recall student because he/she dropped out or is not an academic 'success'"  or an honest answer to "how many dissertations in last 10 years."  The overall job outlook matters as much as the individual department and adviser record.   There is too much supply and it is against universities' interests to decrease it by eliminating weak grad programs.  And there is too much trust on the part of students, not earned by faculty.  We can try to shift the responsibility to the students, but when everyone at every step intentionally or unintentionally conceals relevant information, that will not work.  Open markets with rational actors assume something very far from the imperfect information that students get now. 

Minimally, I am asking that faculty in my humanities students' departments have the talk that I am having when the LOR request is made--and by posting, to plead with everyone reading this who advises humanities students to have that talk.

[concordancia]

Daniel, I'm talking 40pp worth of BOOKS.  Thousands upon thousands of pages written by people like Joyce, Frederic Jameson, Derrida, Kant, Bourdieu and a whole bunch of other people whose prose is, shall we say, not an easy read.

In my dissertation are over 300 books from the 17th century, all of which I read, face to face, in original editions in rare book libraries (Huntington, Beinecke, Clark, UVa, Iowa, Folger, etc.).  It took time to get to these places and do this reading.

BTW, it took me 8 years and 2 months to finish, including 3 years and 2 months of FT teaching.  But I read fast, and had the huge advantage of having my parents' house within a short drive of the Clark and Huntington so I didn't have to work extra hours to pay to study there.

Also, to rewind a bit to the problem of the length of time humanities dissertations take to complete: humanities scholarship rarely goes out of date.  Unlike the sciences, where new/updated information replaces the old, humanities scholarship is additive.  Though theoretical trends come and go, making some work sound very dated and un-hip, I feel that I now need to read both the last 2 years' worth of articles and monographs on Henry James, and all the philosophers and theorists that people are using these days to think about his language use, AND I still need to read Ian Watt's stuff on James from 1960.  Along with all Henry James's letters, of course.  And his notebooks.  And his extensive literary, theater, and art criticism.

Oh yeah, and I forgot about his novels.  Have to read those too - at least all 16 of the major-ish ones, and 4 of the novellas, and all of the short stories.   

All this is for one chapter of my dissertation.  How much of the actual text of that chapter do you think I have written, after 3 months of work?

The weird thing about humanities research is that there is a creative element in addition to the synthetic element; it would be as if scientists all had to use the same primary dataset to come up with new, original, and significant interventions into the field.

In other words, we have to make it up, and that takes a long time.

This is why I ended up reading Proust. I want my lost time back.

[reener06]

I have done grad school twice. The first time, in '93, I was told by my small undergrad program and then by my graduate program (where I got an MA) that there would be plenty of jobs because all those baby boomers were going to retire. I returned ten years later, to hear the same exact thing. In the meantime, I'd seen them retire and not get replaced, or just not retire. I think my undergrad institution pushed me to go to grad school because it made them look and feel good. I am still in contact with those profs, and they work in a small SLAC where most students do not go on; to have the handful they do who went on and mimicked them in their careers, or at least attempted to, feeds the ego. It must. Also, they were all on the market at least 20 years ago. They have very little idea of what it takes. And I graduated in '93. Those boomers at my old institution--still there, still going strong. In fact, they just started up a new institute that guarantees their job without creating new ones, by changing the track of the department.

As for why it takes so long...departments in my experience need to work on this. This also is part of ego-feeding. There's a bit of a contest to see how hard we all are. Our department seems to promulgate long, hard written and oral comps so they can rank with the big boys. Problem is, after I took (and wrote 200 pages for) my comps, I did a survey of the best departments in our field. Ours are much harder; hell, most of the best have foregone comps, and their students are the ones getting jobs. And they are getting out faster, b/c, well, they didn't waste a semester on comps. Add to that the 3+ years of coursework after my master's I was required to take, including a course after my comps which I wasn't even allowed to take as a pass/fail, mostly b/c the department needed to have the course make, and you have a while before I even began my research. And I had published on my research area before I began the PhD. Now, 2 field seasons and a lot of analysis later, and a lot of reading, I'm trying to wrap up a now-400 page diss after a year of writing. I'm tired, bored with it, and burned out. I'm also in debt, but that's another thread.

Also, no one has pointed out the difference between male and female graduation rates. In my field, men get a PhD in an average of 8 years; for women, it's 11. I did all of grad school while working 20+ hours as a TA, raising a child, running a household. I know larryc and spouse, based on past posts, raise their offspring more equitably than most, but I see in both my male professors and fellow married male grad students that they either have wives to deal with the sh*t I deal with or they don't deal with it-mostly b/c there is less to deal with. The female profs in my department, save one, are single and childless. I wouldn't be surprised to see the one leave.

BTW, I did know a lot, but not all, about the current job market. I was employed full time in my field before returning, but it had limited research and promotion potential. I figured, past on past economic history, that the bubble was going to burst, but I didn't know when, so I returned.