That's a typo, professor.

You did a thesis on Kafka. You should have known that the world was a harsh, uncaring place...

I got my masters between 2005-2007. Before that I had done two internships (while getting my undergrad) and then worked a year without school. When I went back to school my employer completely paid for my masters of science in computer science and, actually, I worked forty hours a week the whole time I was going to school full time. Doctorates are a completely different animal. I wanted to do one and yet the two professors who were interested in me said I would have to quit working my job. No deal, I've been working at least a 20 hour a week job since I was 13 and I think I would go insane now if I didn't have a full time job. And before you ask, academia is a lot of work but it is not a job.

A lot of these complaints in this article (though well written and entertaining surprise surprise) are indicative of anyone who takes a career in an entertainment world to the final resting place. What? You think the second trombonist for the Milwaukee Symphony is a bad trombone player? And when he travels to Kansas for an audition and is rejected because some insider got the lead, he's not upset that he's structured his whole life around trombone playing? No, he just picked an entertainment profession which means Pareto Law would be the best possible outcome and you're likely going to be a starving artist. There's just not enough revenue to spread around and when there is it is highly concentrated to a few individuals.

This is why STEM is pressed so hard and fascist leadership in China actually dictates how many STEM graduates their universities will pump out. I don't want that here in the states, what I want is realistic expectations set and delivered to prospective students about what employment rates look like and where the payout in the endgame lies. Don't confuse me some sort of dream crusher rubbing one out to telling people that their passion is a sideshow in the game of life but rather just a realist with production of goods and services in mind.

This story actually sounds positive compared to my friends who got lit undergrad degrees and then went out into the world to use them. My close friend from high school first got a job proof reading SEC filings that had already gone public. He would proof them all night long and then they would go out as updates -- that nobody would ever read. Then after feeling like he was doing nothing, he started delivering pizzas and did that for six years before he finally landed a great job. What job would that be? Well, he works as one of the state's tax collectors who calls people up. He's a genuinely nice guy and has a very friendly voice and talks about tax solutions to people who owe the state money. And he never took a math or accounting course and he does very little writing in his job. That is the reality of a lit degree.

From the sound of this author's research [proquest.com], she could probably get into natural language parsing fairly easily ... she understands orders of logic so may be able to learn some of the more friendly computer languages.

Reading, writing, making music, painting, playing games are all things that I super love to do. But they're just a side thing to something else that I'm good at that is much more productive and tangible to society.

Of course, a PhD in literature (of all things) is not going to be a meal ticket for the vast majority of people. How many tenure track positions SHOULD there be for literature studies? A couple of hundred in the US? It's a tiny, tiny sliver of adult life. If you have a burning desire to expound on the mysteries of "Gravity's Rainbow" and you think you need to devote your life to it, go ahead. The world might be a better place for it. But expecting to get a job doing that? Not so much.

There are PhD level studies that can reliably lead to gainful employment, but that's not what doctorate level education has been about. I think it would reflect nicely on our society if you COULD expect to devote your like to James Joyce and get compensated for your efforts, but we're a long way away from that particular utopia.

If you need money, get a job. If you have money, do what makes you happy and fulfilled. Don't necessarily conflate the two.

The issue is that the jobs are taken by the graduates of the elite institutions. I don't know where Ohio State University stands in Literature, but unless it's ranked in the top ten for that field, the chances of getting a job when one opens up is virtually nil.

It's simple arithmetic. The top schools, Ivies and their equivalents produce an equal or greater number of PhDs than there are positions opening in any given year in the humanities. Why would any school that is hiring, when they have applicants from half a dozen Ivies bother looking at someone from a lower ranked program? Sure, there is more to it than simply the program that mints you: how good your dissertation is, if your adviser is friends with the people hiring etc., but remember that the people graduating from the Ivies will also have very good dissertations and advisers who are friends with (or former professors of!) the people hiring!

If you want to be a humanities professor, and think you can do it without going to a top school, then yes, your cause is lost from the beginning. But, if you are as great as you think you are, and can get into a top program, then your chances aren't as bad as people make it out to be.

Education can be both a leisure activity and an investment. When picking a major you have to consider both. If you are rich and are going to school purely for leisure then it doesn't matter. It's like an American that can afford to spend a year in Europe. It is fun and it will lead to personal growth.

But if you don't have the money and are getting yourself in massive debt you better think of it as an investment. Will I get a return on the money I am spending or borrowing? If not pick another subject. You have a lifetime to study for leisure. If you have a well paying job you will have more resources to help you. It's like that trip to Europe. Its fine to go if you can afford it. If you have to put yourself into crippling debt to go it might not be such a good idea.

An intelligent person comes to recognize that having a LITERATURE DEGREE isn't a route to financial security.

Wow. That's some insight.

(This reminds me of an interview I saw on NPR purporting to illustrate how "hard" times have gotten in Greece, that PhD's were waiting tables in restaurants and barely scraping by. Almost as an aside at the end of the interview, they asked him what his PhD was in - "Russian Literature". I almost crashed my car I was laughing so hard.)

Not to downplay this persons experience ... but, since this is Slashdot, and a tech-heavy web site ... show of hands for people who are shocked a PhD in literature may not be an awesome career path? Anybody?

Universities are pinched, and there's an increasing move among governments to say "why are we training people for stuff for which there are no jobs?". I knew someone years ago who was in his 5th year of university, working on a BA in English, had massive debts, and no prospects -- and the question at the time was, "other than personal interest, what will this degree ever do for you?". He had no idea about that.

Unfortunately, much of the 'humanities' subjects in university are so specialized and highly focused, that it's hard not to see how some of this is relevant to anybody except other people with PhDs in the field.

I've known a few people who studied post-modernism in literature ... and even they couldn't tell me what you'd use it for other than a purely academic discussion. For that matter, they mostly can't even define what post-modernism is to a layman, or why it has to be so incomprehensible that a computer generated paper gets accepted into journals.

Sadly, some degrees can only qualify you for academia, and if those positions aren't available, what have you gained by it? The ability to cite Chaucer while asking me if I want fries?

I wouldn't have guessed that 240 comments could be posted, on Slashdot no less, in connection with the employment prospects of Ph.D's in literature without the phrase "digital humanities" having cropped up once. For folks with advanced degrees in the humanities plus the appropriate tech cred and skills, there are jobs out there [digitalhumanitiesnow.org]. Most not tenure-track, but generally rewarding, and often in settings where one's colleagues are less ego-driven than in conventional academic departments.

Of course, earning a Ph.D. in say the poetry of Arthur Hugh Clough without having once touched a computer keyboard isn't the route to one of those.

I'm living proof that a PhD in Literature will make you a horrible person.

I was probably part of the penultimate group of Literature PhDs who got the sweet jobs, and even then, in the early '80s, we could see where the Age of Reagan was going to take the world. We could see that the people who could make a good living, buy a house, raise a family, in a job that didn't require a college degree were in the crosshairs of the economic elite. Those people, like my dad, who came back from the China-Burma Theater of WWII with shrapnel in his hip and a cheap Purple Heart on his chest, and who followed the social contract to the letter just could not be allowed to enter the ownership class. Dad went to work before he got a high school diploma, and then to war after Pearl Harbor, and came back to the possibility (thanks to the GI Bill, veterans' benefits, etc) could improve his life, buy a single family home, a car every 4 or 5 years and put me and my sister through school. Thanks to the union, jobs were stable enough that he stayed with the same, successful company for 40 years and his income was sufficient so Mom could stay home and raise us kids. Thanks to Social Security and Medicare, his parents and my Mom's parents could grow old and die with some dignity, as could Dad and Mom when the time came. There was stability. There was certainty, and that stability - that certainty - created the strongest peacetime economy in the history of the world. Women could enter the workplace and vote and started to gain political power. The civil rights movement saw a time when the Black community became more prosperous and gained political power. And the economic elite saw all of this as a threat that could not be allowed. Enter: Ronald Reagan. Supply-side economics. Peacetime budget deficits. Talk of "entitlement reform". Talk of "welfare reform" to stop what he told people were the greedy black welfare queens who were all eating steak and driving Cadillacs. The beginning of the "Christian Right" and the "Silent Majority". The Reagan Justice Department sought a "constitutional right to own guns" and got Rhenquist to sign off on this new right. And in this way, the seeds of division were sown that would make the increasingly powerful middle class to start eating one another politically. The social contract wasn't worth the toilet paper it had apparently been printed on.

So even back in those early 80's, when AIDS was barely on peoples' radar, while crack was hollowing out the cities, when the "Savings and Loan Scandal" was too complicated for people to see the complicit hand of the economic elite, even then you could see that the kind of stable growth we were experiencing as a nation - as a society - was in danger from the greed and cupidity of the ones Reagan told us would "trickle" their wealth down on the rest.

I could see then that the young grad students in my classes were probably not going to have anything like the experience I had, nor would they have anything like the experience my father had. Gordon Gecko was telling them that "Greed is good" after all, and the inevitable bubble that Reagan's tax cuts for the rich would create was still inflating.

I got out in '04. Twenty years after my first tenure-track position and twenty-five after I got that sweet PhD in a field that would only be worthwhile as long as peoples' souls weren't crushed. By 2004, they were pretty thoroughly crushed.