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[mountainguy]

This week's Chronicle Review contains several articles and opinion pieces about the current state of graduate education in the humanities. I particularly agree with Katharine Polak's column, A Letter From Graduate Students in the Humanities.

Polak's basic argument--one that I support--is that graduate programs can acknowledge that the times are a'changin' and that reforms are needed. In particular, she writes that it's time to acknowledge that PhDs can do more than just teach (emphasis mine):

Such pundits need to do what we TA's tell our composition students to do: Offer potential solutions for the problem at hand. Writing the same meandering, pointless first draft of an argument does not constitute a valid contribution to the work of finding solutions. While our profession regularly excoriates the news media for overblown rhetoric, we seem to be better at articles that induce panic about our prospects than about, for example, jobs outside academe for which we might be suited. Just because we may not all get jobs at research institutions doesn't mean we can't contribute, and make a reasonable income to boot.

Folks, if I have to have to hear one more person at PepsiU say that a PhD teaching at a community college is a "failure" or that the measure of a successful doctoral program is the number of PhDs we place as TT faculty at other PhD-granting institutions, I'm going to scream. The times are changing, and it's time that academia did too.

[frenchgirl]

I couldn't agree more. It is time to stop saying "oh, what a horrible market . . . better luck next year" or "be patient, things will work out down the line" and to start coming up with some practical, realistic solutions.
Frankly, I would be over the moon if my former advisors offered to help me find a relevant non-academic post or other form of employment suited to my credentials and experience. But this has not and will not happen. Non-academic jobs, 3rd or 4th tier TT jobs, and community college jobs are still viewed as failures in their research intensive world, and I am subject to the whims of that world. Of course, I would love to be part of that research culture but that is, perhaps, increasingly unrealistic for me as a humanities PhD. And if I did have a TT job at a R1 university, I would certainly be offering pragmatic advice to my students, as long as they were willing to listen.
I feel awkward listing my advisors on non-academic job applications, too, because they see such applications as a sign that I have "just given up" or "am too impatient." Many still maintain that if I work hard and demonstrate my commitment to the profession by hanging in there for a few more years, even unpaid, and definitely not having children in the meantime, all will be well. The market will sort itself out and "the cream will rise to the top." Well, if I'm supposed to be the cream in this market metaphor, I don't want to wait until I've curdled before finally finding meaningful full-time employment, tenure track/academic or otherwise.

[kaysixteen]

You have a point but methinks the young lady doth protest too much.  Humanities grad education in this country IS largely broken, there are far too many students studying in far too many PhD (let alone terminal MA) programs, and many of these kids have either been sold a bill of goods wrt their future employability and/or been self-deceiving themselves wrt just how special they are and how likely they are to beat the odds.  That grad programs should offer more counseling and substantive assistance to their students in scoping out and then landing potential non-academic work is obvious-- that many of the students who would most benefit from such advice do not want to take it is sadly also pretty clear, too.

[academic_cog]

Also, she suggests the non-profit world as a viable alternative for all us unemployed humanities PhDs, and I gotta say, no. Didn't she read the articles in The Nation and elsewhere talking about "a perfect storm" hitting the nonprofit world since the stock market crashed a year or two ago?

Also, I have several former students now (!!!) moving up through the nonprofits and I still keep in touch with them. They tell me there's no way in hell some random English PhD is going to get to the front of the interview line over the resumes of new graduates who have more relevant majors and tons of actual on the job experience.

I see her PhD completion date is still in the future (2011). Ask her in a year or two how she feels about this column, once she has been battered by a few rounds of the academic and the "plan B" job markets.

[mountainguy]

Cog, I think you raise an absolutely valid point that a random English PhD without professional experience is unlikely to fare well on the job market in the nonprofit sector (or for that matter, in any sector outside of academia).

That having been said, I think one of the author's points is that PhD students are discouraged from pursuing the type of credentials and experiences they would need to break into other sectors, because somehow anything outside of the realm of a tenure-track position at a research-intensive school is seen as a failure by many graduate programs.* I read her column as a plea for giving doctoral students the resources or support needed to make pursuing these alternate careers possible in the first place.**



*Note that I say many programs programs here, not all programs. I realize that there are many grad school faculty who have a realistic grasp on what it's like for young PhDs. But there are some who just don't get it.

**By "support.' I don't mean drastically changing the structure of programs. No one in academia has a magic wand. What I do mean is not erecting personal barriers that discourage graduate students from gaining career experience, i.e., pooh-poohing their plans to work outside academia during the summer, telling them that taking their cognate in the business or public policy school shows a "lack of career focus," etc. Yes, I've heard both of those things in my grad program.

[jonesey]

The related article (http://chronicle.com/article/We-Need-to-Acknowledge-the-/64885/) has some good points:

The end of mandatory retirement, by the way, is one concrete and probably permanent example of the difference between our current situation and earlier downturns in the job market (at least those before the mid-1990s).

What about those retirements?

The slowing of retirement since the end of mandatory retirement under federal law, in 1994, has added another growing problem to the job-market mix. At the University of Pennsylvania—the only place for which I can get more or less exact and timely data—we have gone from having no faculty members over 70 in the School of Arts and Sciences, 15 years ago, to 28, or 7.3 percent of the 383 tenured faculty members, in 2010. And the median age of tenured faculty members has risen to 55.

Seven-plus percent is a substantial proportion, especially since each of those senior citizens is arguably blocking at least two assistant-professor slots. Penn could probably add upward of 40 new assistant professors in the School of Arts and Sciences, without significantly increasing its instructional budget, if everyone over 70 retired. (Whether Penn's administrators would actually do that much hiring is, of course, an entirely different matter.)

As far as "Why go?" I think the author's reason is solid, and one I agree with:

The core mission of graduate programs in the humanities is to prepare the teachers and scholars of the next generation.

[timurid]

The elephant in the room here is that the academic job market is not an aberration but a leading indicator.
Almost all of the other middle class professions, the "Plan B" jobs, are also oversubscribed. (There are a few exceptions like medicine, fields with governing bodies that have long maintained an artificial scarcity.) Dropouts from the academic job market will have to complete with a glut of unemployed workers who already have specific training for and/or practical experience in the Plan B workplace.

It's not as if law firms and corporate offices are standing idle because their potential workforce is trapped in graduate school somewhere. They already have all the labor they need and more. People who use grad school as a kind of bomb shelter to ride out recessions have become a cliche', but the problem now extends far beyond the current economic crisis. 5-10 years of relative security, albeit in modest circumstances, is far from the worst possible outcome for new college graduates in the years ahead. Due to technology and automation, corporate consolidation, "offshoring" and a number of other factors, the shape of the national labor market is changing permanently. As blue collar workers leave the middle class, the demand for professional services of all kinds will contract. It's not a question of reforming or abolishing the academic job market. It's a question of how quickly the markets for other professions will come to closely resemble that academic market... with all of its hypercompetition, unrealistic expectations, contingent labor and permanent apprenticeships... as young adults continue to compete for places in a shrinking middle class.

[kaysixteen]

You have a point, timuid, but no one should *borrow* money to finance grad school as a way of escaping recession.

[timurid]

You have a point, timuid, but no one should *borrow* money to finance grad school as a way of escaping recession.

I agree on that point. I was thinking primarily of graduate students with funding, and I'm guessing it won't be too long before full funding is the only viable course through grad school. (Well, that and independent wealth, but people in that category won't have to worry about the issues in this thread or much of anything else.)
There will come a time when lenders, public or private, simply stop granting loans in high risk-low reward fields like the humanities or place limits on the amount loaned according to the expected outcome:
"You want to go to medical school? Here's $200,000. You want a PhD in History? Here's $200. You can go ahead and buy that boxed set of Braudel you always wanted..."

[jonesey]

There will come a time when lenders, public or private, simply stop granting loans in high risk-low reward fields like the humanities or place limits on the amount loaned according to the expected outcome:
"You want to go to medical school? Here's $200,000. You want a PhD in History? Here's $200. You can go ahead and buy that boxed set of Braudel you always wanted..."

Well, there aren't private lenders anymore; the feds run the student loan program as of about a week ago.

It's not high risk for lenders; you can't declare bankruptcy as a way out of student loan debt, and the IRS can just take it out of any refund you may get.  You can't get rid if them.  They're the herpes of loans. 

[timurid]

There will come a time when lenders, public or private, simply stop granting loans in high risk-low reward fields like the humanities or place limits on the amount loaned according to the expected outcome:
"You want to go to medical school? Here's $200,000. You want a PhD in History? Here's $200. You can go ahead and buy that boxed set of Braudel you always wanted..."

Well, there aren't private lenders anymore; the feds run the student loan program as of about a week ago.

It's not high risk for lenders; you can't declare bankruptcy as a way out of student loan debt, and the IRS can just take it out of any refund you may get.  You can't get rid if them.  They're the herpes of loans.  

If you can't get a job and can't earn money, you can't repay a loan, no matter what the law tells you.
As more and more graduates fall out of the middle class, the more fundamental laws of physics and biology will ensure that many student loans will never be repaid. If you're working on the loading dock at Costco, you're not paying back high 5-figure or 6-figure student loans without using that magic stopwatch from Harry Potter or otherwise finding a way to live an extra 100 years or so...

Under those circumstances the lenders will have to become much more cautious.

[renji]

You have a point, timuid, but no one should *borrow* money to finance grad school as a way of escaping recession.

No one in the humanities should... But, a lot of us make six figures. Borrowing a little money to gain access to a multi-million dollar career can be a good move.

[academic_cog]

Cog, I think you raise an absolutely valid point that a random English PhD without professional experience is unlikely to fare well on the job market in the nonprofit sector (or for that matter, in any sector outside of academia).

That having been said, I think one of the author's points is that PhD students are discouraged from pursuing the type of credentials and experiences they would need to break into other sectors, because somehow anything outside of the realm of a tenure-track position at a research-intensive school is seen as a failure by many graduate programs.* I read her column as a plea for giving doctoral students the resources or support needed to make pursuing these alternate careers possible in the first place.**



*Note that I say many programs programs here, not all programs. I realize that there are many grad school faculty who have a realistic grasp on what it's like for young PhDs. But there are some who just don't get it.

**By "support.' I don't mean drastically changing the structure of programs. No one in academia has a magic wand. What I do mean is not erecting personal barriers that discourage graduate students from gaining career experience, i.e., pooh-poohing their plans to work outside academia during the summer, telling them that taking their cognate in the business or public policy school shows a "lack of career focus," etc. Yes, I've heard both of those things in my grad program.

Dude. I'm trying the Plan B route right now and I can tell you that it's pointless to go get the PhD if you're not going in to academia. It just is. I've been to the career services at two different schools now and at both of them, the first thing they told me was to take all evidence of the PhD off my resume. There isn't much you can spin as viable training and experience that would actually set you up for a nonacademic job. (I should backtrack here and say, for English. I keep hearing that other fields, like possibly history, (or any social science disciplines that do stats) can move in to government research type jobs.

Our department has had a fairly flexible attitude toward alternate "credentialling" and career plans, and it hasn't seemed to help any one. The amount you'd need to do is more than just the occasional summer or part time side thing. I think instead of trying halfassed "alternative career training," they should let in fewer students and just have the rest of them go off into those "alternative" careers right away. Mostly I think we should fight more for making those adjunct jobs into real jobs. I can't read that pay article on outsourcing grading, but that idea is terrifying me. What's going to happen if even the s***ty jobs get outsourced from America? Am I really going to have to move back into my parents' and subsistence farm their backyard because there will be no jobs?

[janewales]

You have a point, timuid, but no one should *borrow* money to finance grad school as a way of escaping recession.

No one in the humanities should... But, a lot of us make six figures. Borrowing a little money to gain access to a multi-million dollar career can be a good move.

You can make 6 figures in the humanities too, renji (I do). That's part of the problem, I think. Our students see us in really great jobs, and naturally want those jobs too.

[drpud]

The elephant in the room here is that the academic job market is not an aberration but a leading indicator.
Almost all of the other middle class professions, the "Plan B" jobs, are also oversubscribed. (There are a few exceptions like medicine, fields with governing bodies that have long maintained an artificial scarcity.) Dropouts from the academic job market will have to complete with a glut of unemployed workers who already have specific training for and/or practical experience in the Plan B workplace.

This is so depressing. I have no idea what the hell to do with myself. No wonder people contemplate putting their heads in the oven . . .