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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."
... 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."
It looks like we have a good trend going, so I'm failing to see where the problem is or what actually need to be fixed.
If you think "good scholarship" is the first (or only) criteria for getting tenure, then you don't know anything at all about academia. Getting tenure is about politics and schmoozing and ass-kissing.
Eliminating the Humanities Ph.D.
I fixed that for you...
Based on the summary it appears that the solution to humanities PhDs not finding work is to graduate more people with humanities PhD degrees. Law schools around the country have been trying that approach and it doesn't seem to be working out very well. Considering the lawyers have government buildings full of lawyer advocates (such buildings are often called "congress"), which the humanities decidedly do not, it is hard to see how the humanities could possibly bode better from this approach.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Your paper about the symbolism of The One Ring in The Lord of the Rings was all well and good, but there's already 8 other papers just like it. Humanities is no different than the sciences: nobody gets a Nobel Prize for dropping rocks off a tower.
That's a separate issue from the fact that writing a paper about The Lord of the Rings barely qualifies you to flip burgers. Liberal Arts (of which "the Humanities" are a part) were never meant to be a means to support yourself, they were traditionally the fields of the already-rich, who wanted to expand their horizons and dabble a bit.
So, the solution to a lack of jobs and prospects is to crank out MORE underemployed Humanities PhDs? The problem is on the demand side of the equation.
In other news, who cares? When was the last time something important was done as a result of studying the humanities? They're only good for "huge manatees" puns.
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
[Universities] 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
It's not just the humanities; it's every discipline.
But this makes perfect sense. What employer wants to hire someone with a commitment to not fire him no matter what?
The Academy as we have known it is dying. It must adapt to survive.
This is the market at work. A Humanities degree is fiscally worthless. At best, you can teach other people how to get the same degree you have. You might as well be teaching someone about stamp collecting or theology. Sure, there's rare cases where that will be handy to some company, but for the most part the humanities exist in their own echo chamber. You can teach other people about them, right books for other people interested in humanities, but it does the rest of the world almost no benefit. Get your humanities degree and you'll most likely end up working in tech support and spending your day correcting other peoples grammar. What's worse, is those other people (like me) wont care and just flag you as a troll.
Not exactly an inspiration to collegians these days to continue in the university system after graduation.
To meny people are in college and there are to meny joke degrees. We need more tech / trade schools
Or, they have become a business... that recruits with the same tactics as a cult.
Why is this so difficult to grasp?
When the only meaningful employment in an entire field is teaching others in that field, eventually things are going to implode.
It sucks that some people have a passion which society doesn't give a shit about, but in our defense, liberal arts types have done very little to make this stuff accessible to us inartistic plebs.
If you want society to value you, produce something that society values! Absurd abstract work that no one except maybe yourself understands or likes isn't going to encourage people to fund the arts.
The median time to get a Ph.D. is nine years.
I think students who enter are often doing so by default. Education has been their life unto that point, they have always been outstanding students, and they enjoy it. They are too young and inexperienced to realize how long 9 years is and what they'll be missing (or perhaps they are too optimistic about their personal chances of being an outlier).
This is about dumbing it down, right? Or am I misreading it?
My girlfriend recently graduated with a PhD in history from a department ranked 11th by US News. She's won a number of nationally recognized awards. She still can't find a tenure-track job. She was hired as a visiting professor at a university for this past year. Pay was around $40k with benefits. She got great reviews from her students, so the university offered to re-hire her as an adjunct with the same workload (teaching four classes a semester)... but at *half* the pay and *without* benefits. Her pay and benefits were better as a graduate student! She politely declined the offer. Being valued so little by the same world that qualified you is hard to endure.
FTFY
The best thing about the humanities is that computers aren't any good at them. On the other hand it is only a matter of time before computers are better at computers than humans are, whence 99.99% of all IT employees are functionaries for our machine overlords, at best, low-paid data janitors, more likely. Either way, appendages to the machine. Poets, postmodernists and the like will get all the chicks, because some things never change.
So 60% of phds gets a tenure position and they still complain? In Medical Biology less than 3% gets tenure
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
Thanks for adding that insight to a discussion of English degrees.
The career options for half of the courses offered in universities are strictly limited to teaching that subject at some university. In that way, from a financial angle, they are simply pyramid schemes. Many of these disciplines important for science, ie Theoretical Physicists, but the idea of churning out classes of hundreds of future physicist is just ridiculous.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
If the only jobs for freshly minted PhDs is teaching the next generation of students (even supposing that most are only there to study for fun - and have neither the intention nor the motivation to try and get a degree-based job), then it will quickly become obvious to them that filling the "dead mens' shoes" is a suckers game. Given the low to zero growth in humanities departments, there simply aren't enough vacancies created every year.
The biggest shame is that this comes as a surprise to so many of them AFTER they've graduated.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Hey, we try to fix the economy that way, too, so why not the humanities?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
...for humanities PhD grads is to add a required class in which they are taught all the nuanced ways in each regional dialect to say, "Would you like fries with that?"
I feel sorry for people that don't drink, because when they get up in the morning, that's as good as they're gonna feel
If we fix humanities (assuming it could be done at all) we would not have the humanities PHD to make fun of anymore.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
If the primary application of a specific education is to provide that specific education to the next group of people who will be providing that specific education, doesn't that strongly imply that it's not a very necessary area of expertise to have, and in turn, you should NOT have many jobs because they provide no benefit?
What is the end goal of getting an education that you only spend on furthering education? Specifically in the humanities fields where, often enough, the majority of obvious career options are in education, where you educate people so that they, one day, may also only apply their education to the field of education, and so on?
To meny people are in college
I'm just going to leave this right here, for the enjoyment of those who are fluent in English.
Great article !
Get Wechat Speed Cheats, Tips and STrategies:
I would advise your girlfriend to get a job with the military. History and battle tactics repeat themselves often, so her use would be of benefit.
if you see me, smile and say hello.
You are being flippant here. Hiring someone into a tenure track position is a lot more work than hiring someone into a temporary position. Someone in a temporary position is usually just going to teach classes and that's it. All you need to know is if they are knowledgable and can run a classroom. Credentials give you a ballpark idea of the first, and references give you an idea of the second. Budget-wise you only need a commitment from above for one year's salary, which is a lot easier to secure than a continuing salary. You don't have to worry about their research compatibility, long-term career plans, or their ability to get tenure.
And if you screw up and hire a person who isn't up to the job, you don't renew them. So true, they are easier to fire, but that's a very small part of the story.
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. ...
I think this is pointing at a larger cultural issue: The "Humanities" disappeared down a post-modern rabbit hole of nonsense. It's become widely held by "experts" that classics are all bullshit and only the most novel works are interesting. Paintings aren't important unless it's an abstract piece painted with feces. Literature isn't interesting unless it's incomprehensible. Philosophy isn't worth talking about unless it's mathematically provable.
These subjects have the potential to be incredibly interesting and even important to our lives, but instead it's relegated to pseudo-science and trivia, and as a result, a lot of the "expert" PhDs don't know what the hell they're talking about.
I notice the phrase "tenure-track" used a couple of times to describe the desirable jobs that might be obtained with these degrees. I've never heard the word "tenure" used to refer to a job outside an educational institution. If the only job for the degree holder is at the same sort of educational institution where the degree was obtained, perhaps that department could be merged with the other departments that teach people who will end up working within the education industry. Other subsets of the humanities that teach people who become lawyers or human relations consultants branch off into subdivisions or separate schools that specialize in teaching oriented towards those specific jobs. A university department that specializes in pursuit of knowledge for its own sake might best be aimed at teaching those who are independently wealthy. They could teach concurrent courses in patron flattery and high level begging, but I think the courses that teach revenue generating skills would quickly split off and be primarily attended by people without the interest in knowledge for its own sake.
That is actually an impressive level of bad grammar.
I mean I pride myself on subtle things, like never under any circumstances using "it's" without the apostrophe and even dragging out "irregardless" from time to time, but this is just brilliant.
If professors are teaching their replacements, they need dramatically fewer students, or an ever continuing ponzi scheme.
Assuming a stable population of x professors, with a career time of y years, each individual professor needs to engage only enough students to get a *single* success in y years. Assuming a success rate of z%, that means 1/z students in y years.
So, concrete example - 30 year career, 50% success rate of training a replacement, means each professor gets to teach 2 students in 30 years. Say you teach them sequentially, you could theoretically replace yourself in 15 years, but then the successful student would need to wait another 15 years to take over, while you teach your "failure" case.
The numbers get "better" as the success rate goes down, at least from the perspective of having enough students to justify gainful employment for 30 years. They also get "better" if the career is shorter.
Shouldn't the goal be a world with no tenure?
Time to close Black and Women's Studies programs everywhere.
According to the report, 40% of new Ph.D.s won't be able to find tenure-track jobs... 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.
So since there's already too many PhDs competing for too few tenure jobs, their "solution" is to decrease the effort of getting the degree, which econ 101 tells us will increase the number of teachers. With increased supply (PhDs in humanities) and the same demand (no new teaching slots), price (wages in this case) should go down.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
To all of my sibling posters:
You shouldn't need a Ph.D. in the humanities to recognize a "Whoosh!" moment.
I think this is right, Universities have turned themselves into vocational systems which claim to provide educations that provide white-collar middle class jobs. It's why everyone "wants" to go to college so that they can get some corporate job.
Of course the irony is that nobody gets a job anymore with their corporate-approved education.
Am I the only one who finds it hilariously ironic that a lot of the people who insist that the future of work is everyone having a "creative" job (i.e., humanities) are the same people mocking humanities majors for having useless educations?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Why should I care if someone can't get tenure?
If you aren't useful either as a teacher,a researcher, or are an embarrassment to the school, welcome to the private sector. Why should a business be prevented from letting less valuable expenditures go?
Seriously? As opposed to what? Governmentization? Why would the government be any better than a corporation, especially when the government is given a monopoly? It's not like politicians or even many of the voters are less greedy than anyone else. At least corporations have some incentive to fund the humanities. Politicians incentive is to get re-elected and embezzle taxpayer funds and since they control the media and the investigative bodies who will hold them accountable when they fail to adequately fund the humanities especially if the findings are untoward.
It is normal for it to be "unlikely to find a tenure-track job". It would be extremely unusual for it to be otherwise unless students in general embarked on a policy of assassinating at least one professor after getting their doctorate.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
I have a PhD in physics, where a much fewer percentage of people get tenure-track positions. I feel every grad student's pain here.
Mathematically the entire doctoral system is designed to turn out more PhDs than can be absorbed by academia. Seeing why is simple: If the number of academic positions is constant over time, then every tenured professor who advises PhD students can only expect on average one of his or her students to get a similar position. This is just the mathematics of population replacement. The problem of course is that many professors turn out dozens of PhD students, far above replacement.
The key for any PhD student -- regardless of field -- is to accept the fact that you will most likely spend the bulk of your career employed outside of academia. In engineering and many of the sciences this is understood, and people regularly go to tech companies and other places where the PhD profile is valuable. In humanities there aren't so many obvious places for PhDs to go HOWEVER this in my experience is more perception than reality. Marketing departments are full of English PhDs with very successful careers. The absolute key is to not define your skills too narrowly. If you bill yourself as, "I'm an expert in X, Y, or Z" you'll likely be disappointed, but if you can think of yourself as "I'm a good writer and problem-solver." you'll have a much better time of it.
Unfortunately when you're a student, the "system" has no incentive to prepare you for this likely reality. They think of their mission as turning out academics, and because of selection bias (every professor by definition succeeded in getting an academic position) it's a self-reinforcing belief. There is a huge risk of disillusionment and bitterness if you the student have unrealistic expectations. I maintain that if more degree-granting institutions looked at where their graduates end up, then with some simple adjustments they could make it a far more useful experience: For example shortening the time to PhD, providing greater opportunity to acquire marketable skills, and more interaction with program graduates.
Is your girlfriend a female historian of the hot 20 year old archelogist type, or the crime against humanity Mary Beard type? There is always room on TV for the first variety. The second, not so much.
Why was your girlfriend sucking up to students? There is a time for that, and it is after sucking up to whoever can get her tenure and getting tenure. If you want tenure, every hour you spend outside mandatories with students is a waste of time. Also if less people are getting humanities degrees, less are taking history....
Liberal Arts and Humanities need a STEM infusion much like how technical degrees get a Humanities infusion as part of the graduation requirements.
My Undergrad in Computer Science, required me to take 200+ level humanity classes. Humanity Majors just need to take pre-100 level Math and Science classes. (Basically a rehash on what they took in high school)
As for creating a balanced education Humanity Majors should Take Calculus I-II and 1 200+ Level Math class. And none of this watered down Calculus for Humanities, take the same class that freshmen engineers are taking. And they should be required to take 2 100 level Natural Science Classes (Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Astronomy (The real Astronomy not star gazing and remembering the planets) )
There is a lot of value in a humanity education, it teaches you new ways to think about situations, but so Does Science and Math, when the situation needs a solid fact not a well formed opinion.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
http://xkcd.com/451/
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Was she surprised by this outcome? What percentage of the previous, say, 20 history PhD students at her institution now have tenure track jobs? In the past 10 years, how many history PhDs has her institution matriculated? And how many tenure-track faculty have they hired? If the institution has graduated 50 PhDs in the last 10 years, and hired 5, you don't have to be a statistics major to see that there's a looming problem.
Before she started down this route of getting a PHD and all that follows, did she investigate subsequent employment, or did she just assume that people would offer her great jobs/throw money at her? (Don't take this sarcastically, I'm just curious about some of the things people study and their expectations. It's seems like a variation on the Cargo Cult).
To summarize the summary, there are too few tenure-track professorial positions in the Humanities for most of the graduates to get a tenure-track position. This is because the demand for Humanities professors is down, because fewer people are going into Humanities, because it's too "weird" and takes too long to get a degree. So the proposal is to reduce the requirements for a degree, thus increasing enrollment and increasing the demand for professors.
Left unstated is the fact that having more Humanities students will also increase the supply of Doctors of Humanities, who will need jobs, so we'll need even more students to soak up an even greater excess of professors. And so on, ad infinitum. (That's Latin. I'm told Humanities profs like Latin phrases.)
Somebody remind me again, why do we even want the number of Humanities graduates that we already have?
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
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.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
Fuck you. Ain't nothing in my PhD in English needs to be "fixed". Ain't that some shit?
Gave me a lucrative career and retirement at 50, and now you're gonna tell me it needs to be fixed. I'll fix my size 12 New Balance Minimus v2 cross-training shoe up your motherfucking ass.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Human rights don't.
And by the way... next time you hear someone compare today with the 60s tell them it just ain't true! The 60s was about human rights and humanities were an integral part of everyone's life. Now with disappearing humanities in universities..... comes the curtailing of human rights.
Because we know less and less what it means to be human.
Tenure should be viewed as a bonus or a nice reward, not a career goal.
I think the fact that these people think a "tenure track" is the only use for the degree just might have something to do with why fewer people pursue it.
Maybe a few people don't want to teach, hmm?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Guess what the captain majored in, or at least spent vast amounts of his time on. The guy is well versed in ancient litterature, plays, myths and countless civilisations and archaeology. He enjoys it and always has some tale or teaching to bring up to Data, or Jordy or Riker or the rest of the crew.
It struck me when I watched the series last year (first time). Ha, this captain had an old school education! I'm gonna watch a fluent nice guy who comes from the 1950s or 60s (the actor did) planted in that pretend 24th century setting. Didn't work out bad.
Yeah, humanities were a sign of bourgeouisie or high society, i.e. it allowed you to be in circles of power. Snobbishness, self-importance, pontification and circle-jerking maybe but it had some elegance over mastery of "marketroid bullshit generator" or how the highest pursuit of life is to be a millionaire accountant and mystificator.
Apparently the author doesn't understand supply & demand curves. His solution to over-supply is to reduce barriers to entry which will increase supply and lower both wages and tenure rates. If we're not going to increase the available number of tenure track humanities positions (unlikely) then it seems the correct answer is to make a Humanities Phd harder to get, not easier.
I've been applying for teaching jobs at universities for almost a year. At the age of 62 and with almost 30 years experience as a teacher, professor (Vanderbilt University), and professional performer in my local Symphony (Nashville, TN) - I have (over and over) run into the requirement for a doctorate in order to even apply. This is clearly a false economy and is driven by many motives that have nothing to do with my ability to teach and inform students. The requirement for a doctorate is now almost always absolute. It used to be that teaching positions were listed as "Doctorate or equivalent" meaning that a life-time of experience and proof of excellence on a day to day basis had value. No more. Now...Doctorate Required is the requirement in order to even apply for a job as a teacher.
What in the world does someone with a humanities Ph.D. do to decrease misery, reduce tension, reduce stupidity, properly guide masculinity, or improve religious knowledge?
What does someone with a humanities Ph.D. do to progress mankind or help mankind survive?
Do some humanities Ph.D.s do a better job than others at these tasks, and can we winnow out those that are doing a poor job?
...it's pretty important to choose the quickest path to the most income.
Arts and humanities are hobbies, and everyone should enjoy them on their own time. That doesn't stop the fact that bills need to be paid, and real work needs to get done, which is why if you're going to spend $250k on college, you'd better have a plan for the income required to pay that off afterwards.
Do you feel like you don't have the opportunity to engage in your arts and humanities hobbies? If not, who do you hold responsible for that, and how will you force them to support you?
A paraphrase of a joke I heard from a history major: A plane crashes with 100 history professors, PhD students and post docs rejoice over new openings.
Humanity Majors should Take Calculus I-II and 1 200+ Level Math class. And none of this watered down Calculus for Humanities, take the same class that freshmen engineers are taking.
Oh, the Humanities!
Come on. They do not need that much "pure" math (the key word is "need"). Hell, many STEM majors don't even need that much.
A class in personal finance and a watered-down class in interpreting statistics would probably be more beneficial.
P.S. Fuck Beta.
"dae STEM master race??"
Freshman engineers (or at least EEs) don't really take any engineering classes. Just math and gen eds.
100-level college math and science are useless if you are not continuing along the progression of studies, it's like learning the alphabet of a language and going no further. The only advantage might be that they could offer an opportunity for the kids to save themselves by switching majors, though those introductory classes usually test the resolve of even those committed to the subject. Humanities majors don't need more distractions, they should be focused on qualifying for or conning their way into a job. Of course if humanities programs actually were concerned with students' best interest and emphasized this most students would find dropping from the program to be the best choice
Apparently the humanities wasn't always so broken. There was a time, before the mythical 60s that a few of our politicians and influencers would have an understanding of the Arts. Having a degree that tried to make you "well rounded" might have been a bonus in some non-technical fields.
Now that culture has deemed that _everybody_ must have a degree, the humanites has become what people who shouldn't have a tertiary education study. It's been dumbed down just to get these people through the course and by the cult of postmodernmism.
On top of that, it's become overly politcal and aggressively liberal - you can only dissect Lincoln's sexuality (btw, the only acceptable anwser is that he was gay) so many times without the whole thing becoming a meaningless farce.
As a result we're governed by technocrats - people with a lot of niche knowledge, but little broad knowledge.
I am a mathemetician and parent. My wife and I know our daughter will not swim in the olympics. Swimmers are very easy to analyze that way. However, she enjoys the sport and competing, and it sets a healthy exercise pattern for her, so we continue to spend a thousand dollars a year on swim team. There's a vague chance that we'll get some return if she swims in college, but probably not, and we're not assuming that in the cost/benefit analysis.
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.
This is from the Modern Language Association? Hell when I was an undergrad 20+ years ago they didn't have professors teach language courses. That was done by wet behind the ears grad students in charge of classes of 15-20 students.(Oh and it didn't seem like it was a new thing.) I know, I know. The language professors couldn't do it because they were too busy with research. You know, if you're a Spanish prof well you have to do that research of eating Serrano ham in Spain or maybe you're a French prof. Damn it, you can't teach, you've got to drink your coffee by the Seine river, oops I mean do research.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
I look forward to the inevitable abuse and ridicule of the humanities by most of the readership of Slashdot.
I'm sure I won't leave disappointed.
Tenure should be viewed as a bonus or a nice reward, not a career goal.
Tenure is a hugely valuable asset - we shouldn't be surprised that people go after it. Similar in many ways to a huge annuity, except you do have to teach the Freshman lecture to keep getting it.
Some are even starting to talk about how tenure's value should be taxed.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
OTOH, 100-level college humanities are useless if you are not continuing along the progression of studies, it's like learning the alphabet of a language and going no further. The only advantage might be that they could offer an opportunity for the kids to save themselves by switching majors, though those introductory classes usually test the resolve of even those committed to the subject. STEM majors don't need more distractions, they should be focused on qualifying for or conning their way into a job.
See, it works both ways.
BTW, GP was calling for Humanity majors to take 200+ level Math classes, not 100-level.
Oliver.
Caltech Vice-Provost on pyramid scheme: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...
From 2004, and it has only gotten worse: http://www.villagevoice.com/20...
Still, also problems in science for anyone: http://philip.greenspun.com/ca...
More by me from 2009:
"[p2p-research] College Daze links (was Re: : FlossedBk, "Free/Libre and Open Source Solutions for Education")"
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
"[p2p-research] The Higher Educational Bubble Continues to Grow"
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
We can and should do better than this as a society.
My proposed solution: a "basic income" (as well as an expanded gift economy and better subsistence via 3D printing and cheap solar panels and cheap agricultural robots). Then anyone can live like a graduate and think and talk and publish all they want on whatever topic they like. Of course, if people want to afford lab space or equipment, that is more of a challenge, and they might have to do paying work. But so much can be done with cheap computers and cheap equipment now, that a lot of good tabletop research can still be done on a shoestring.
http://www.basicincome.org/bie...
One example (not saying it will work, but is it tabletop physics/chemistry on the cheap):
http://www.e-catworld.com/2014...
Even most millionaires would be better off with a basic income IMHO:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basi...
Now if only the legions of unemployed humanities PhDs (and some unemployed law school graduates too) would just collectively take up this cause for a basic income and expanded gift economy etc. and write stories about it, write persuasive essays about it, write funny viral videos about it, lobby for incremental laws about it (Social Security for All from Birth), and so on. Then we might see some accelerating movement on it... My own attempts in that direction, which I'm sure those legions could vastly improve on:
"The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income "
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Nothing short of a big social shift like that is going to solve the fix academia is in, between the student load debt bubble about to burst and the collapsing pyramid scheme of the value of a PhD to train other PhDs. Instead we are seeing play out the ultimate folly of expanding cradle-to-grave schooling as a sort of arms race where parents invest vast amounts of money in hopes their offspring will have secure more credentials than someone else whose parents have less money and so get some coveted job in academia or elsewhere. All the while, AI and robotics are taking on more and more jobs -- even grading student essays and doing it so cheaply that, as in the parable above, humans need not apply.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
It's a perverse incentive really though and attracts the kind of people who aren't confident they will continue to provide value (or just want to reach a stage when they don't want to have to bother)
I don't see how you can be a chemical engineering without differential equations and that is after calculus 3. You can forget how to solve them because the computer can do that part but you HAVE to know how to set them up to be solved. I have worked with some models for reducing experiment time to bring new drugs to market and so far those have been nasty coupled differential equations with nice highly non-linear coupled equations.
Granted if you want to not do any of that stuff you can get an easier engineering job but you won't be paid as well or treated as well and one day you will probably be replaced by a computer the same way many other jobs are going.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
BAN for profit universities and require more tenured faculty teach classes.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Essentially *all* fields overproduce PhDs relative to the number of tenure-track positions out there. Given that faculty can have decades-long careers and the increase in available tenure track positions is slow, anybody producing more than one or two PhD students is probably overproducing. But faculty are rated in part on the number of PhD students they graduate, and in the sciences there's an expectation of very high publication rates to get tenure, which leads to large groups and probably more overproduction than in the humanities.
The issue is really more that much of academia (including a great deal of the sciences) considers students a failure if they don't end up in a tenure track position somewhere, and students buy into it. PhDs in the hard sciences and engineering tend to have low unemployment, but it results from people shifting into industry or government jobs of various sorts, often that pay much better and have more mobility (and not significantly less job security). Tenure is overrated -- tenured faculty tend to have relatively low (and slow) mobility compared to industry, and pay scales in industry tend to be much better. I know quite a few tenured faculty who feel more or less trapped in the institutions where they were tenured - tenure is a big commitment for institutions (and tenured faculty tend to want big startup packages to move) so there tends to not be a lot of moving around except among the top ones who get recruited from place to place. In principle, tenure gives you a lot of flexibility in your research, but it's still limited by what you can convince a review committee to rank highly enough to fund, so money tends to follow name recognition and familiar research.
The separate problem that humanities has is that many, if not most, students pay for their own advanced degrees, where in science and engineering you're paid (not highly, but enough to live) to get your degree. If you're in a technical field, your undergrad loans are getting to look less and less expensive as you get deferments while in grad school and aren't racking up any additional debt. In the humanities, you tend to just be adding more debt on top of the undergrad loans. There are plenty of jobs that humanities PhDs can do just fine that probably pay better than faculty jobs-- what's needed is a cultural shift that says "you don't have to do research on whatever you did your PhD in for the rest of your life, or even research at all. A PhD is a demonstration that you can do unique, intensive research in an area and makes a contribution to the knowledge in an area. It shows that you can read, write, and think independently." It shouldn't be treated as trade school for whatever narrow subject you wrote your thesis on.
The MLA and others have reasons to not be forthright about the real issue: universities don't hire tenure-track professions nearly as often as they used to. Nowadays, over 70% of your humanities courses are taught by people off the tenure track, most of whom aren't even working full-time. The issue isn't "overproduction" of PhDs in the humanities as so many like to say. It's that universities don't want to pay for faculty. I know many may say "Good, those are useless elitest shits anyway." OK. Maybe we are. BUT consider what happens if getting the doctorate is as hard as it is now with as little payoff. Who can do that? Middle-class kids, or people who won't be taking on any risk to make this gamble? What then happens if we make it even harder to get the professorship by admitting fewer people into PhD programs. I'll tell you, from my experience, that having gone to good schools as a kid, having the right class markers, all that, those still make getting the PhD easier. As a first-generation college student, I struggled and struggled to get my doctorate and eventual professorship. If you reduce the number of people like me--ones who started out poor or middle-class or hispanic or black--you're only going to make it harder for the "token" students who do get admitted to hang in there with Biff and Buffy. Note also, I'm not talking about the Ivy leagues. I was a midwestern state school for my doctorate, and my classmates included the daughter of a VP of one of the big three automakers, the child of a megachurch preacher, a couple of heirs, and several people who were "comfortable" or who had family business they could fall back on. This was out of a group of 18. As far as I know, there were only three of us who were actually from backgrounds that meant our failure would have serious consequences. Anyway, I'm going on and on. The term for this is casualization of academic labor. Because we like big words. But what it means is that some of the things that seem like they'd punish the elites would only lead to more elitism.
I can read the humanities on my own, so why do we need a professor? Every work of classical, medieval, modern, and current humanities is in print (in many translations if it isn't English) and I can read and draw my own conclusions.
Anyway, I just thought for two seconds about what I think people with humanities backgrounds have a better grounding in than techies, and my first thought was that they know a little more about how complicated it is, and have a better grasp on what doesn't quite work.
It's really easy for someone who hasn't thought it through to think that things are a lot simpler than they are... you know, kind of like Nate Silver figuring he can do arithmetic better than a Republican, and hence is probably just at good at climate science as a climate scientist.
Techies often seem to think they know all the answers ("Let the market decide!") when they're just barely getting started on the problems.
"There is no truth!" What can you do with that thought? Other than to use it to denigrate "western white men" and prompt the whole PC canon of BS!
What everyone should be taking (STEM and humanities) both is Logic 101. Both formal and informal. Laws of thought, common fallacies etc.
Instead of having educated post docs bag groceries while uneducated idiots fail to teach anything to kids in high school while getting paid double to triple, fire all the teachers in high schools and replace them with the post docs. High school education starts to be meaningful again, lowering the need for so much education, and lowering the number of post docs being made shoring up the overflow.
My proposal is magic cauldrons.
It's about as likely to happen.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Well, 3D printing is a lot like magic cauldrons, so we may both be right in the end. :-)
Of course, magic cauldrons are not without their downsides: :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
Yeah, I've seen surveys that say humanity in the West can more easily imagine nuclear war or other destruction of everything we care about instead of significant social change... None-the-less, as Howard Zinn wrote:
http://www.commondreams.org/vi...
"In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning.
To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. This confounds us, because we are talking about exactly the period when human beings became so ingenious technologically that they could plan and predict the exact time of someone landing on the moon, or walk down the street talking to someone halfway around the earth."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I was pretty much only interested in the humanities before I saw this. Damn you society -_-#
So the problem is that the Humanities are too academic and the PhD is too academic and Universities are meant to give you...technical training??
The point about Match education isn't about needing to use the stuff you learned. It is about opening your mind to different methods to solving a problem.
My work doesn't have me handling Calculus Equations. But the ideas of Limits, Local Min and Max, does. Also if I need to do some Calculus again, I can just open up some reference material and continue on without me having to learn the basics.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Or there needs to be a division between applied humanities, and theoretical and/or teaching humanity degrees. Sociologists, Anthropologists, etc.., could greatly benefit product research, marketing, design and ux, etc.. if they had a more applied/hands on series of courses instead of it being mostly theory.. followed by a few hands on projects towards the end.
But that would also take businesses realizing that they could benefit from staffing those skill sets. Something only the very largest companies generally do right now.
They are far from worthless when properly taught and studied. Humanities programs are useful because they give people the skills to discuss and logically argue the ethics of the subjective and diverse human condition, instead of just making people one monocultural extension of technological industry.