Can I Afford a PhD.?*
Sure you can!
If your grad school gives you a full ride you can easily afford to go. Or if you can afford to pay for your schooling yourself with money left over. Or if you don't want children and are completely indifferent to material considerations. A rule of thumb is that you can afford to go to grad school if you can afford to spend an equivalent amount of time lying on the beach.
From a more practical point of view, graduate school can be a good choice for you if you're absolutely (and correctly) sure that when the big day comes around, the hiring committees will prefer you to 80-95% of your PhD cohort.
Otherwise the humanities PhD is a loser, practically speaking. A frighteningly small percentage of new PhD's ever gets a secure, full-time, tenured job with full benefits. Most limp along as the academic version of temps if they get jobs at all, and eventually most of them end up limping their way right out of the profession.
There are ways to win at musical chairs, but if there are twenty players and five chairs, fifteen people are going to lose. For the universities this is no problem at all, because grad student T.A.'s and cheap post-doc adjunct professors are what keep the system going. Every generation, the schools need to find a new batch of suckers to feed through the grinder, and every generation so far they've succeeded in doing so.
The first batch of links below covers the economics, demographics, and politics of humanities in the university. The next batch is testimony from PhD's trapped as permanent adjuncts. The next looks at the university and at scholarship from a more idealistic point of view. Next comes the testimony of PhD's who are making careers outside the university. (Note that most of these stress their resentment of the condescension they receive from their peers within the university. None really makes a case that getting a PhD was the best way for them to get to where they are now). At the bottom are a few search engines allowing you to check the present labor market of the field you want to specialize in.
*Originally this piece was entitled, "Can I afford a Humanities PhD", but based on a comment in D-squared, it seems possible that physics and perhaps some of the other hard sciences are devolving into humanities. Welcome to the club, guys!
THE HUMANITIES JOB MARKET
Marc Bousquet, Workplace Foreword: The Institution as False Horizon
Crunch the numbers with your own brain. At your typical large research institution's English department, you might see--in a good year--one full-time hire. But you'll see about forty graduate students admitted that year.
Workplace: a Journal for Academic Labor
A report recently put out by the National Study of Postsecondary Faculty recently pointed out that "in 1998-1999, less than one-third of all faculty members were tenured....[and that] in 1992-1993, 40 percent of the faculty was classified as part-time and in 1998-99, the share had risen to 45 percent."
(The Corporate War Against Higher Education by Henry A. Giroux )
Amazon Review of Cude: "The PhD Trap"
Time-till-completion and attrition rates in the Ph. D. program are notoriously higher than in the programs necessary to acquire the credentials for other professions. Within Ph. D. programs, the figures are progressively higher for the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities.
Thomas Hart Benton: So You Want to Go to Grad School?
The Modern Language Association's own data -- very conservative and upbeat in my opinion -- indicate that only about one in five newly-admitted graduate students in English will eventually become tenure-track professors.
Discussion of Benton on Grad School
Jack Miles, Three Differences between an Academic and an Intellectual
A typical newly tenured associate professor will have spent six years or more anxiously mind-reading his senior professors and at least another six years doing the same for his senior colleagues, and this is the best, most expeditious case. If a first negative tenure decision is followed by a second, doubly anxious six-year apprenticeship in a second university, a generation may have passed between the start of graduate school and the acquisition of tenure....
James Engell and Anthony Dangerfield, The Market-Model Universities: Humanities in the Age of Money
Measured by faculty salaries--a clear sign of prestige and clout--the humanities fare dismally. On average, humanists receive the lowest faculty salaries by thousands or tens of thousands of dollars; the gap affects the whole teaching population, regardless of rank, within colleges as well as universities. Nationally, in 1976, a newly hired assistant professor teaching literature earned $3,000 less than a new assistant professor in business. In 1984, that gap had grown to $10,000. In 1990, it was $20,000, and by 1996 exceeded $25,000. Beginning assistant professors in economics, law, engineering, and computer sciences enjoy a hefty advantage, too. In 1990 their salaries averaged $10,000 a year higher than those in literature, by 1996 more than $15,000. Nor is English literature the runt of the litter. Fine arts, foreign languages, and education are lower yet.
Thomas Hart Benton: Should We Stop Fooling Ourselves About Money?
There is an artificially constructed "supply-demand imbalance" between faculty positions and qualified candidates. So, in the desperate competition for academic jobs, wages can be lowered and benefits eliminated (with the questionable promise of a "real" job later). Seeking to preserve their dignity and enhance their status, many teachers come to believe that their unrequited toil is a form of good citizenship or even spiritual devotion. The intensity of their rhetoric is often in direct proportion to the degree of their exploitation.
Russell Johnson: 1998 Job Market: A Realistic Appraisal (article rejected by AHA)
Since the trend shows new PhDs increasing every year, there would appear to be as much or more reason for pessimism than optimism about the job market. Sure, job openings in 1997-98 returned to near their 1991-92 level, but roughly 300 more PhDs finished their degrees in 1997-98 than in 1991-92. Interestingly, a Perspectives article in February 1995 correctly interpreted the result. "If the supply side [i.e., number of new PhDs] resumes growing at a rate comparable to that of 1990-1992 [when the number of PhDs conferred rose steadily from 535 in 1989 to 725 in 1992], then the job market will worsen, even if the number of positions open remains stable or even increases modestly--there will simply be more people chasing a limited number of jobs."
Discussion; Further discussion
Invisible Adjunct: Thinking about graduate school in the humanities? Don't do it.
As I see it, the humanities "professions" are failed, or at least failing, professions. They have failed to secure the most basic requirements for their continuation as professions. Indeed, in my opinion, no profession that treats its aspiring/junior/entry-level members the way they are treated in the humanities deserves to be called a "profession" at all. And unless they make some radical changes, and soon, I doubt very much they will survive much longer as viable professions.
Richard Moser, The New Academic Labor System
The lessons are all too clear and instruct us all that teaching and learning, that the pursuit of the truth, are all unworthy activities. That teachers, students and ideas do not count for much. We learn that it is acceptable to exploit someone if you can get away with it. We learn that one should pay lip service to art or science or history or literature but that money is what really matters.
Richard P. Chait, Rethinking Tenure
The University of Virginia Medical School now has six tracks for full-time faculty members: one leads to a mandatory tenure decision, two offer the possibility of tenure, and three do not offer tenure--yet all offer the opportunity for promotion through the ranks.
Unionization of teaching assistants: Brad Delong rips Paul Kennedy
I don't know what I find more appalling:
The open snobbery with which Paul Kennedy ridicules the idea that lower-class union leaders and members might have something to teach about or some concern over conditions of employment of graduate students--culminating in the sneer that "[f]urther research might reveal that the National Candlestick Makers' Union is active among the Ph.D. [candidates] at Duke or Texas.".....
The sneer at humanities graduate student section leaders at his own university--paid I believe about $10 an hour when the average wage for people in their late 20s with advanced degrees is $20, and with little prospects for ever getting a tenured professorship like Paul Kennedy's--for "imagin[ing themselves] as an aggrieved member of an exploited academic proletariat."
Sara Davis, Women and the Tenure Track
Not long ago, a colleague of mine was turned down for a tenure-track job because she was married. How do I know this was the reason? The head of the hiring committee said so.
My colleague, Jenny, applied for a tenure-track position in history at a respected public university. After a brilliant on-campus interview and a few days of lively conversation with colleagues, Jenny thought she had the gig nailed. On the last day, the hiring committee, as a group, sat her down. The chair -- a woman -- told Jenny that she was their top candidate, but added: "We've been trying to figure out what your family situation is. What's the story?"
Mary Ann Mason and Marc Goulden, Do Babies Matter?
The employment patterns at the University of California, Berkeley, which are representative of those at other major research universities, indicate that while gender equality may be the reality for graduate students, it is a far different story for ladder-rank faculty, non-ladder-rank academic personnel, and staff.
Furthermore, suppose you do go to graduate school. You will go there thinking that now you'll be able to study the things you really love at a higher level, but forget that. You will find yourself continually pressured to narrow your interests and to conform your thinking to one of the handful of academic methodologies dominant in your school. If your English department happens to be dominated, for example, by the quantum tectonic paradigm, catastrophe poetics, and fractal discourse analysis, you goddamn well better get down with one of the three, or your chances of ever having a fulltime teaching job are nil. (And not only that -- if your department happens to have put its money on three losing horses, you could be SOL even if you do exactly what you're expected to).
Invisible Adjunct on the University of Phoenix
There's been a lot of talk lately about the two-tier academic labor system and what to do about it: policy statements have been issued, proposals put forth and debated, and so on. But the University of Phoenix is way ahead of the game: they have discovered an easy solution through the elimination of the top tier.
Robert Wright: Too many Historians?: Starve 'em out
The solution is clear. The salaries for new assistant professors should be lowered until the number of qualified job applicants (not the number of new Ph.D.'s, which is just a subset of that group) and the number of job openings become more equal.
Wilcox: How Tenure-track Hiring is Actually Done I
Wilcox: How Tenure-track Hiring is Actually Done II
Discussion of Willcox and Wright
Benton: How Tenure-track Hiring is Actually Done III
The PhD Octopus, by William James
We of the university faculties are responsible for deliberately creating this new class of American social failures, and heavy is the responsibility.
James McPherson on the Old Boy Network: The Way it Used to Be
THE ADJUNCTS (AND GRAD STUDENTS) SPEAK
"I cannot understand why a graduate department should wish to blunt my desire to do original and valuable work, but that was nevertheless the result. This episode marked the last time I ever tried to start a project on my own volition. I might add that this was a significant departure from my undergraduate experience, during which several professors encouraged me to research, write, and present papers and projects. "
A more optimistic point of view
Optimistic
conclusion: "You think
the kind of research and teaching you'll be doing is unspeakably
nifty, so much so that you're willing to deal with the many flaws
in the academic system, severely reduced earning potential for at
least several years, and an extremely uncertain (if not downright
lousy) job market.
There are many, many easier ways to make money or get a flexible
work schedule. You've got to be in this for love."
Comment on "More optimistic point of view"
Chris Cumo, Part Time Purgatory -- The Loneliness of an Adjunct
In contrast, I'm treading water. I have more in common with migrant laborers than my college friends -- the migrant is paid by the crop, I'm paid by the course. In fact, if enrollment dips below 10 students I'm paid per student. I've grossed as little as $225 for a five-week summer course. I could have refused the course -- but that might have irked the department chair, the one who has published nothing but derided my work as quantity at the expense of quality.
Professor Matt Hall, Why I Quit Adjunct Teaching
One short interaction with such an administrator prompted me to get out of teaching for good. Near the parking lot one day, I introduced myself to the president of our community college. "My name's Matt Hall," I said. "I teach English here part time." Our president looked at me and said, "Thanks for helping out."
Helping out? I watched as he got into his brand-new Lexus and drove away. Two-thirds of the classes at that community college are taught by part-time teachers. So then we are what to this man? Volunteers? Drones who help him make car payments?
Andreas Killen: "Going Adjunct"
The life of an adjunct is dismal indeed, as anyone who's experienced it can tell you. The worst part, according to Columbia grad student Patrick Young, is the rude discovery that one is in a dead-end rather than an entry-level job. Over the past two years Young has held down jobs at five different institutions while working toward his Ph.D. in history. His toughest days have included shuttling between three different campuses spread over two of New York City's boroughs. Young says he's reached the point where he feels more like a menial laborer than someone following a linear professional path.
Shipwrecked; Or, I Need Another Chance
Ship of Dreams. Ship of Fools. I am Shipwrecked, and I've washed up in Adjunctland, and I'm wondering what to do.
Adjunct as Entrepreneur: a Peppy Approach
"After helping a few friends
into the adjunct game, she has written a manual that encourages
part-timers to turn their worldview on its head. Don't be a
victim. Don't let others define you. With a bit of Stephen Covey
cheerleading and a dash of drill-sergeant discipline, she
encourages adjuncts to deal with the system that exists, rather
than pine for an adjunct utopia that isn't even on the horizon.
"Yeah, it sucks," she says. "But OK, now
what?"
Discussion of Adjunct as Entrepreneur
IDEALISTIC CONSIDERATIONS
Timothy Burke, Should I Go to Grad School?
Graduate school is not education. It is socialization. It is about learning to behave, about mastering a rhetorical and discursive etiquette as mind-blowingly arcane as table manners at a state dinner in 19th Century Western Europe. Graduate school is cotillion for eggheads.
Kenneth Mostern, On Being Postacademic
The scariest thing a young faculty member experiences is not, as is conventionally supposed, the "need to produce" and therefore her/his experience is not aided by the "mentorship" of an experienced scholar.Rather, the young scholar's fear stems from the fact that no one in the department is talking to each other about scholarship.Faculty are socializing, going out, schmoozing all the time, and the ideas that supposedly drive the work they do are not being discussed.The mentor, if assigned, will try to teach the young faculty member how to navigate the minefield of the department, but that is exactly what is alienating. .The mentor, especially when well-intentioned, may be the model for what is wrong, not an aid in coping.Indeed, if the mentor is really similar to the young faculty member in terms of ideology or social identity, the mentor may be a model for what the young faculty member does not wish to become.
When all is said and done, I love academia, but still, it hasn’t always been what I sometimes imagined it would be.
I thought I was choosing my dreams
and rejecting security, but it turns out I was choosing security
at the possible cost of some of my dreams.
What Mostern most accurately identifies is the strange absence of talk between academic professionals about their own work or the larger skein of their intellectual interests.
Jackson Lears, The Radicalism of the Liberal Arts Tradition
The attempt to turn universities into businesses challenges the conservative understanding of the humanities. If the liberal arts tradition is understood as a worldview, rather than a collection of courses, it poses a radical challenge to the managerial impulse—far more radical than self-proclaimed traditionalists like former secretary of education William Bennett realize. If we want to sustain and revitalize our concept of "what the university is for," we need to recognize the radicalism of the liberal arts tradition.
Jack Miles, Three Differences between an Academic and an Intellectual
If academics, reliably supported by their universities, are succeeded by intellectuals, only unreliably supported by the work they pick up here and there, the post- and extra-academic humanities will often go hungry and homeless. But hunting does not differ from farming only by being more hazardous and less reliable. Off campus, the liberal arts may, at least on occasion, enjoy a wild adventure and an extraordinary feast. Only time will tell -- but less time, if present trends continue, than we might think.
Zizka: The Humanities in the University
Unfortunately, the universities are heavily dependent on the stupidity of graduate students. In order to keep the research coming and to maintain the tenured faculty in the life to which they have become accustomed, it is necessary to have a large pool of low-paid graduate students and adjuncts to do the actual teaching. In a stagnant market, the overproduction of PhD's has made it possible to create a two-tier job structure manned increasingly by a new category of untenured faculty, who have no job security and whose pay and benefits are those of semi-skilled labor. These adjuncts are hardly in a position to do any research and mostly just teach.
Zizka: a non-academic scholarly calling
To me the villain in all this is the attempt to professionalize the humanities on the positivist model. The attempt to transform the humanities into sciences has produced nothing but little tiny piss-poor sciences of no great interest to anyone. Whatever advantages the humanities have lies in their inclusiveness -- the willingness to make the aesthetic and ethical dimensions central, to discuss questions which are not immediately decidable, to deal with complex systems and an open future, to suggest connections which are not provable, and to be inclusive and comprehensive rather than limited, exact, and certain.
Alternate Career Paths I:
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, Journeyman: Getting Into and Out of Academe
In the spring of 1996, after five years on the job market, I left academia for a job in the corporate world. After years of graduate school, two postdocs and a lectureship, I became the deputy editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Many of my reasons for taking the job were positive, but I had concluded that I was never going to get a permanent academic job. I'd published half a dozen articles, revised my thesis into a book, and taught my share of survey courses. I knew, absolutely without question, that I loved the life of the mind. While I could have survived for a couple more years on postdocs and visiting positions, I calculated that the odds of getting a tenure-track job were dwindling to zero. It was time to go on to something else, something that I hoped would be interesting, make use of my academic skills, and allow me some time to do my own research.
Annalee Newitz, Out of Academia
It's only within the past few years that organizations like the Modern Language Association have suggested that graduate programs in the humanities prepare students for nonacademic jobs. In part, their previous reluctance to make this recommendation has perpetuated the silence of recent Ph.D.s like myself. We've been too ashamed to speak up because once we leave campus, our nonacademic lives become Careers That Dare Not Speak Their Names, reminders that academia is as much about getting a job as it is about smarts. But now that the job crisis clearly isn't going away, graduate programs will have to rethink the role of Ph.D.s in the "real world." It is imperative for graduate students to understand that becoming a professor is only one of many careers they might pursue with their advanced degrees.
Ph.D. as Preparation for Nonacademic Careers?
I doubt very much that it is a useful form of preparation. I rather suspect that a more useful (and infinitely less painful) mode of preparation would involve skipping the academy altogether (do not pass go, do not collect $200) and moving directly into the relevant nonacademic field.
Michelle Tepper: "Doctor Outsider"
But I think that if PhDs who do follow an alternative career path can do so without feeling like the academy has turned its back on them, then they are less likely to feel embittered about the profession of literature after they leave it, and that if the GSC and groups like it reached out to those people, they could form a powerful link between the academic left and the non-academic world and work together to fight the corporatization of university life. A
I just don't believe my history Ph.D. has given me "transferable skills" that will be of interest and of value outside the academy. I think it's important for people to say this, if only to "preempt the equivocating tactics," as Devenney puts it, used by those who wish to continue producing PhDs for academic positions that no longer
A surprising number of people roughly my own age and status thanked me for what I said. Mostly women, they feel intensely the bitter irony of having wasted eight years of their lives in preparation for becoming secretaries to 26-year-old MBAs.
Timothy Burke: Monastery or Market?
Quite a few newly-minted
humanities Ph.Ds have found that their degree is an active
impediment to seeking employment outside the academy. Even if the
job-seeker is willing to start in an entry-level position,
potential employers often feel that is inappropriate for someone
with a doctorate—but that person often also lacks any
experience that would qualify them for more advanced jobs.
ALTERNATIVE CAREER PATHS II
JOB SEARCHES
Woodrow Wilson Institute: Non-academic Career Research Center (Note absence of "Participating Employers")
History and Humanities Job Searches
Chronicle of Higher Education Job Search (search "tenure" plus name of field)