Three weeks before the history department at Rutgers University began making decisions about whom to admit to its doctoral program this year, about one-quarter of its faculty gathered over lunch to talk about the employment crisis, the future direction of their field, and all the things they don’t know about their recent Ph.D.'s.
Some participants voiced frustration because the department does not have comprehensive data on how many graduate students entered the program, how long they stayed, and where they eventually found jobs.
The department keeps a good list of contacts of graduates for an annual newsletter, and a department administrator has undertaken the arduous task of locating former students, but some faculty members say the results are still well short of a complete record of what Ph.D.'s have or have not done.
Rudolph M. Bell, a Rutgers professor who specializes in Italian history, says that tracking Ph.D.'s is a matter of quality control. Being able to provide accurate data, he says, is important for making the case to potential donors and foundations that a department is worthy of their support.
But fear and faculty resistance, he says, have hampered the collection of data in some programs, including at Rutgers.
“History faculty, along with the humanities generally, always resist controls over whether what they are doing is worth anything,” says Mr. Bell. “If you look at some of the numbers published on department Web sites, they range from dishonest to incompetent.” For example, he says, some elite institutions selectively list placements, noting only Ph.D.'s who are working at prestigious places.
Departments across the humanities are facing new pressures to document their worth. With shrinking budgets and a tight job market, programs are being pressed to do more to collect, assess, and publish data about how their graduates fare.
Government officials, graduates, and families are calling for higher education to be more accountable about quality. Those calls are not new or sudden, says Chris M. Golde, associate vice provost for graduate education at Stanford University. Ms. Golde, a former research director for the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate, says that, in the mid-1990s, research universities were urged to do a better job of tracking careers of their Ph.D.'s. Those calls were prompted by a contraction in the job market and a mismatch between the number of Ph.D.'s being produced and the number of jobs available.
Decades later, many programs still lack comprehensive systems for reporting on their graduates. “The fact that people keep asking these questions suggests that we haven’t done a uniformly great job of answering them,” Ms. Golde says. “Now the calls will continue to get louder and louder because we live in a much more data-rich world, and there are a lot of pressures around outcomes in higher education.”
Virginia S. Yans, a history professor at Rutgers for more than 30 years, says it’s time for departments like hers to face facts and do more to help students plan, including by forging more connections with potential employers outside academe. “I am a mentor who is given the responsibility to train in a discipline according to scholarly convention, academic rigor, and integrity,” she says. “For the first time in my career, I’m called upon to face a conflict over whether it is ethical to train students to practice a discipline no longer in demand.”
The Rutgers faculty, like many others, have yet to come up with concrete strategies to deal with the employment crisis, but they plan to continue talking about how they can reshape their graduate program in response to changes in higher education and the discipline of history in particular.
A number of historians worry that the overall decline in entry-level, tenure-track positions for new Ph.D.'s in all subfields signals not only economic hard times but structural changes, some of which may be permanent, in the university labor force. As a result, universities may scale back doctoral programs in humanities disciplines such as history, which some faculty fear might become more like a “boutique discipline” offered only at elite institutions.
Another worry is that finding more data on where Ph.D.'s get jobs will provide fodder to outsiders who raise questions about programs’ worth and could paint a gloomy picture that might put their own programs at risk.
Part of the tension over the reporting of job placements, too, is that the very definition of success is changing, or is at least in dispute. In October, Anthony T. Grafton, a historian at Princeton University, and James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, wrote an article titled “No More Plan B” in Perspectives on History, the organization’s news publication. They urged history faculty to recognize that their students may either face long years seeking academic positions or will not find jobs in academe at all.
There are signs that the history market is stabilizing after two years of sharp declines. The number of job openings advertised through the history association rose by 10 percent, from 569 last year to 627 this year. But the number of historians competing for jobs also continued to grow, and the number of job advertisements remains well below the 2008-9 historical high of 1,064. In the 2009-10 academic year, there were 1009 Ph.D.'s earned and 569 jobs listed through the AHA. Complicating new Ph.D.'s efforts to land a job is competition with a backlog of other scholars who haven’t been able to get a job and remain on the market.
More Hard Data, Please
Some departments have been doing a better job of tracking than others. Cornell, Duke, and Yale Universities provide comprehensive tables of data that are easily accessible on their Web sites.
Columbia University’s Web site gives an overview of its record, saying that 80 percent of its 390 graduates who received Ph.D.'s since 1993 now hold full-time academic positions, but it does not provide any breakdowns of those numbers. (After numerous e-mails and phone calls requesting more details, Columbia did provide a comprehensive chart with specific information about the jobs held by its 2010 graduates.)
Other universities’ history departments, including those at Brown and Northwestern Universities, list names of students from a few recent classes and where they are now. Still others, including New York University, have no system of tracking at all. Those institutions also supplied job-status data for 2010 graduates at The Chronicle’s request.
“We have only recently begun to explore a departmentwide initiative to track career outcomes,” says Fiona J. Griffiths, director of the graduate history program at NYU. “Faculty advisers have this information, though usually anecdotally. However, we’d like to collect more hard data.”
Ms. Griffiths says her department has put in place an “exit survey” to collect information about how to keep in touch with students and track their careers.
There are various explanations for why more universities don’t have comprehensive placement data. Budget and staff cuts are part of the problem. Some say that alumni offices don’t have a strong philanthropic incentive to stay in touch with humanities graduates, since they do not tend to earn as much on average as graduates of programs in science, law, and business fields. And the quality of placement reports can vary based on the students themselves and how inclined they are to provide updates.
Faculty say that what’s needed are reports that provide a longitudinal analysis, but academic career paths can be hard to follow, particularly if people are moving frequently among postdoctoral, adjunct, and other positions off the tenure track.
Some history departments get help in gathering data from their graduate schools or alumni offices. The University of California at Los Angeles is exploring ways for students to update their information online. Harvard surveys its students at two points in time, as they leave and after three years. Rutgers and other departments use the annual history-association meetings to draw alumni to social events where they are asked for updates about their status.
Despite the obstacles, many faculty do see benefits in improving the tracking of Ph.D. placements. It can give departments better information about how to plan, including as they make decisions about how many people to admit and what kinds of courses to offer. The data also can inform their discussions about alternative career paths and how to prepare students for their job options. More openness also would give Ph.D. students and those considering a doctoral degree information to make better-informed decisions and curb unrealistic expectations.
Ultimately, the ways departments count successful placement or how aggressively they help students find alternative careers can affect their numbers and how their programs are viewed.
No More Snobbery
Mr. Grafton and Mr. Grossman’s controversial Perspectives article urged faculty to begin to view nonacademic careers as equally successful outcomes as the “golden ring” of a tenure-track job. For historians, that could mean positions in places like museums, libraries, and government agencies. But if departments are to take those careers more seriously, they will also have to figure out how to move beyond disciplinary training and prepare graduate students to meet the needs of the labor market. That challenge is compounded by their inability to predict what fields in history will be hot and what the academic market will look like five to 10 years from now.
The authors’ call for a shift in focus has met with resistance. Peter H. Sigal, director of graduate studies at Duke, says that some of his colleagues worry that a focus on preparing students for alternative careers would diminish their efforts to encourage critical thinking. Such a focus, they worry, might also limit their ability to train the right kind of faculty. But Mr. Sigal says other faculty embrace the idea of broadening students’ career horizons, arguing that doing more to help students pursue alternative careers can be one way to demonstrate that academic programs have public good.
Some historians, meanwhile, have sought to spur more of a response to Mr. Grafton and Mr. Grossman’s call. In a session at the history association’s annual meeting last month, Thomas Bender, a history professor at New York University, said he was worried that he hadn’t heard much buzz around the historians’ article among his colleagues.
“There will be no change in the definition of the professional dimensions of history unless leading departments in fact lead,” Mr. Bender told the audience. “I think it is a hard sell to faculty and students unless there is a sufficient recognition of the seriousness of the crisis to produce real reflection and questioning about what we are doing and not doing.
“We must recognize that the crisis is larger than the employment of historians,” he continued. “I think it is also about the place of history in our civic life.”
At an AHA session called “Jobs for Historians,” Jesse Lemisch, a historian at John Jay College of Criminal Justice argued that getting rid of “ancient hierarchies and snobberies” about non-academic employment is not enough. And telling graduate students who can’t find work in academe to look outside where there are no jobs is not the answer either. Mr. Lemisch called for the AHA and the Organization of American Historians to do more to create jobs through a Works Progress Administration for history.
Aside from Rutgers, none of the other history departments The Chronicle contacted, which composed the top 20 as ranked by U.S. News & World Report, have held formal meetings this academic year about the issues raised in the article or about how best to systematically track the job placements of their Ph.D.'s. But individual faculty members say they are mindful of their responsibility to equip students to get jobs and have been having conversations about developing more interdisciplinary courses that might help prepare students for nonacademic positions.
At Duke and Rutgers, some professors have discussed how their departments might consider revising their mission statements to reflect a broader public mission that moves beyond arcane research and narrow academic discourse.
“The attitude is changing because of the collapse of the job market,” says Laird Boswell, director of graduate studies in history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “People have realized that even their very best students may not get jobs. That’s helping people think about placement elsewhere.”
Despite those realities, faculty report that students often arrive at graduate programs with rosy expectations and a mind-set that they will become university professors. Students’ insistence on pursuing an academic career track can complicate any efforts departments are trying to make to broaden training.
Stubborn mind-sets among graduate-school professors also remain a problem, some say.
“Historians are a very conservative bunch, and there’s a real looking down your nose at alternative careers for Ph.D.'s,” says Mr. Bell of Rutgers. He and others say this attitude, which extends to Ph.D.'s who choose to teach at community colleges and at four-year colleges that primarily emphasize teaching, may be hampering departments’ ability to keep track of Ph.D.'s who might feel embarrassed about not landing a job on the tenure track and don’t report their career status.
Coming to grips with, and adapting to, shifts in the job market and the discipline is difficult, many historians say.
“Most of us, particularly in the top-20 programs, have spent the better part of our lives reading, writing, and sitting in the archives,” says Robert Self, an associate professor at Brown University who specializes in 20th-century U.S. history. “We haven’t had experiences in other careers. If you put 20 or 30 academics in a room and say, ‘Reinvent your training,’ how do you do that?”
At least, say many who see an urgent need for change, the conversation has started.
Through those conversations faculty are looking inward to try to solve problems spawned largely by external forces. Whatever actions they take in response to this nationwide problem, historians fear, may have negligible consequences, no matter how well they document their outcomes.
