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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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
So... the solution to a worthless degree is to make it less valuable.
Is that idea from the same idiots that try to fix our economy?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
In Capitalism, yes. Since the best will always be paid top $$$
I really don't know how to argue the no side of this question but I believe that it has to do with job security.
if you see me, smile and say hello.
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.
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.
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
Constantly. During the Soviet era, scholars studying the minority peoples of Russia were a key part of US military readiness, espionage and political negotiations. Indiana University at Bloomington in particular was commissioned for a number of projects by the Department of the Army, Department of the Air Force, and three-letter agencies. After the invasion of Afghanistan, people who had studied Dari and Pashto were in high demand for dealing with locals -- of course one can debate the wisdom of that particular invasion, but when a truly necessary military mission rolls around, it would be nice to have qualified personnel for it. In Finland, I've seen great demand for locals with skills in Somali (and, before that, Vietnamese) to deal with the arrival of refugees.
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.
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.
nobody gets a Nobel Prize for dropping rocks off a tower.
Fuck.
...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?
It's certainly the best way to learn certain obscure languages. As a linguist working with several minority languages of Russia and languages of Central Asia, I am acquainted with hobbyists who took up an interest in one or another of these, and none was able to reach real proficiency without going through a university course in it at some point. Speaking a language to a degree sufficient for employment requires more than just buying a Teach Yourself book (which doesn't even exist for the world's smaller languages) or chatting on Skype with an untrained native speaker. It requires guidance from a trained instructor, and access to a wide array of publications (which usually aren't online and aren't even in English but in Russia or another scholarly lingua franca you must learn first) which give training both in grammar and in pragmatics/cultural background, and some sort of certification of skills.
Universities are ideal places for teaching the languages useful to the areal studies needs of a country's military or government. Even the US military's own language school (Defense Language Institute, where I learned Chinese many years ago) came to be structured according to a quasi-university model.
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.