Fixing the Humanities Ph.D.

An anonymous reader writes "A new report from the Modern Language Association focuses on the decline of Ph.D. programs in the humanities over the past several years. "These programs have gotten both more difficult and less rewarding: today, it can take almost a decade to get a doctorate, and, at the end of your program, you're unlikely to find a tenure-track job." According to the report, 40% of new Ph.D.s won't be able to find tenure-track jobs, and many of the rest won't manage to receive tenure at all. "Different people will tell you different stories about where all the jobs went. Some critics think that the humanities have gotten too weird—that undergrads, turned off by an overly theoretical approach, don't want to participate anymore, and that teaching opportunities have disappeared as a result. ... Others point to the corporatization of universities, which are increasingly inclined to hire part-time, 'adjunct' professors, rather than full-time, tenure-track ones, to teach undergrads. Adjuncts are cheaper; perhaps more importantly, they are easier to hire." The MLA doesn't want to reduce enrollments, but they think the grad school programs should be quicker to complete and dissertations should be shorter and less complex."

Because...

[Anonymous Coward]

... Everyone goes to work and says, "What we need is someone who's spent the last 15 years studying Humanities. That will make filing these invoices sooooo much easier."

Re:Because...

[bunratty]

There's no way most CS PhD students could go on to be professors. Most professors advise many PhD students, so the number of CS professors would have to double every few decades if that were the case. Most CS PhD students move on to do research in industry: Microsoft, Google, and so on. I just got my masters degree in CS, and I actually do know where the PhDs go -- overwhelmingly to the west coast to work in industry.

40%?

[Ubi_NL]

So 60% of phds gets a tenure position and they still complain? In Medical Biology less than 3% gets tenure

Re:Are they taking advice from law schools?

[timeOday]

The story already responded to your comment:

Only briefly does the report address what, to many people, is the most obvious solution: reducing admissions. âoeIn the face of the post-2008 contraction of the academic job market, proposals to reduce the size of graduate education in our fields have been heard,â the committee writes:

The ostensible goal of such a reduction would be to realign the rate of PhD production with the number of tenure-track openings. While the logic of the strategy may seem at first clear, the task force believes it is misguided. Doctoral education is not exclusively for the production of future tenure-track faculty members. Reducing cohort size is tantamount to reducing accessibility.

I think what they are saying is - this won't stop being hyper-competitive. Most will not end up getting that tenured professorship. But a reasonable period in academia of 4 or 5 years for a PhD should be enough to differentiate candidates and put them on that track or not, instead of leading people along for 7+ years before flushing them. Put the rest out of their misery sooner so they can go do whatever they are going to end up doing in industry.

Re:Oh the humanities!

[digitig]

They're more likely to your boss [insidehighered.com] (or, more likely given your blinkered attitude, governing the welfare system you depend on) than waiting tables.

Re:Because...

[Sir_Sri]

The US only graduates about 2000 phd's in comp sci every year, and a chunk of those are foreigners who intend to go back to their home countries.

But yes, Google and MS take a large chunk of comp sci PhD's as do a few other places.

Where I am (and other places track) where people end up - it's a majority academia - if you count the 1/3 of students who are chinese, and go back to china to become professors in china that skews the average. If you look at people who stay in canada and the US it's about 50/50 academa/industry. Lots of people going to academia don't do so with much fanfare because they do postdoctoral fellowships or they do some teaching while working elsewhere and then slide into teaching full time when the 6 weeks vacation and a pension plan start to become beneficial (I just started as an assistant prof and it's 82k/year with 6 weeks vacation and a pension plan at a university you've never heard of).

Re:It's a numbers game - Art History anyone?

[onkelonkel]

You are exactly right.

There was a sad story on the radio the other day. A nice lady with a PHD in Art History was living in her car because she was broke and unemployed.

What struck me was how very _betrayed_ she felt. Here she had studied hard, gotten good grades, and had achieved the highest academic degree possible and yet the job she expected wasn't forthcoming. All her life she was told "you need a degree to get a good job" and she somehow interpreted that to mean that if she got a degree she would get a job. Her whole attitude was that she was all but promised a job, and that it was the university's fault that this job wasn't there, and that she should have been told by the university that there were no jobs in her chosen field "before they took her money".

She wanted to work as a museum curator, cataloging and managing the museums art collection. When asked how many such jobs existed, she was taken aback, as if she had never thought about it and then said maybe 10 or 20 in the entire province.

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