James W. Cortada, a historian who spent nearly four decades in sales at IBM, sees a stigma fading away.
When, in the late 1970s, Mr. Cortada and fellow scholars working outside higher education told their stories to Ph.D. students and professors, they seemed uninterested. “Arms forward, leaning back,” he says, “you’d get the sense that they were ordered into the conference room.”
Now rooms sometimes overflow for talks by Mr. Cortada, who earned his Ph.D. from Florida State University and is now a senior research fellow at the University of Minnesota.
Mr. Cortada is one of a growing number of academics taking steps to help doctoral students, especially those in the humanities, learn about jobs outside the professoriate, as more Ph.D.'s seek alternate careers, by choice or by necessity.
Among the groups expanding their efforts are the Modern Language Association and the American Historical Association, two organizations that have been talking for a number of years already about helping Ph.D.'s expand their career outlooks and options.
The associations’ work on alternative careers has been aided by grants of $85,000 that each one received in December from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The money is designed to allow the groups to learn how to help departments and graduate-studies directors prepare students for a wider variety of careers. To do this, the organizations are meeting with groups of graduate students, administrators, and potential employers.
Both associations will also focus on nonacademic careers at their annual meetings, in January. The American Historical Association is planning a series of panels about the “Malleable Ph.D.” and, for the first time, will have nonacademic employers present at its career fair.
The Modern Language Association, too, will have nonacademic recruiting and information sessions at its meeting, as it has in the past. At both associations’ meetings, sessions will feature discussions of alternatives to academic jobs.
“The story of the doctoral career is not complete until we look at the wide range of career choices,” says Rosemary G. Feal, the Modern Language Association’s executive director.
With the grant, the Modern Language Association is surveying students, conducting field interviews, and organizing meetings of department chairs, adjunct professors, and graduate students to learn how they think about job preparation, Ms. Feal says.
One workshop session planned for the MLA meeting will focus on government careers, like translation and intelligence analysis, that use language skills and cultural expertise.
A longstanding stigma at some colleges casts students who leave academe as failures, says James R. Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association. When the association provides sessions at conferences and data on placement in nonacademic careers, he says, those actions can have a “legitimating” effect.
“You have to demonstrate that people who have done that are happy and successful and doing things intellectually challenging and worthwhile,” Mr. Grossman says.
Research by the American Historical Association found that from 1998 to 2009, 24.2 percent of a 2,500-person sample of Ph.D. recipients in history found careers outside the professoriate, reports Julia A. Brookins, the association’s special-projects coordinator.
The AHA has begun to share individual stories, which the group hopes will be able to change the culture in ways that data and panels cannot.
Short video clips show interviews with historians outside academe. In one of these clips, Lincoln Bramwell, chief historian of the U.S. Forest Service, says there is no “set typical day” in the public-history field.
“It may lead you in a different path that’s not as predictable as academic history,” he says in the video. “It’s more of a business model, where you are constantly connecting and trying to work on things, and it’s unpredictable at times.”
The association will soon introduce a mentor program in which doctoral students looking for work outside higher education can speak with a Ph.D. recipient working in that field, Ms. Brookins says.
The ‘End-All-Be-All’
Individual departments have taken on this storytelling effort as well. Conversations between students and faculty or students and graduates may resonate more strongly than data, says Julie Miller Vick, a former senior associate director of career services at the University of Pennsylvania.
“They’ll see that maybe 50 percent of graduates got some kind of academic job,” says Ms. Vick, who works part time as a senior career adviser at Penn and writes for The Chronicle. “They’ll say, ‘I’ll be one of those.’”
If institutions share graduates’ stories, she says, students might consider careers outside academe more seriously.
For example, a former student found that his skills from his humanities Ph.D. program—identifying and solving problems, communicating with newcomers and experts to the field, and close reading—bolstered his career with the FBI.
“But the thing is,” Ms. Vick says, “these paths are not clear-cut or straightforward, like applying for a faculty position or like applying for many business jobs.”
Despite two slight annual increases in a row in positions advertised with the Modern Language Association and the American Historical Association, the reality of the academic job market remains grim.
Although jobs advertised in the Modern Language Association’s 2011-12 Job Information List increased to 1,235 from 1,190 the previous year, the figure is 591 jobs shy of its 2007-8 counterpart, according to an MLA report.
In the year beginning June 1, 2011, employers posted 740 positions with the American Historical Association, while 1,066 history Ph.D.'s were awarded in the 2010-11 academic year, according to the association’s 2012 jobs report.
Facing that longstanding gap, Ms. Feal notes that more academic departments now introduce career alternatives to students well before they begin their job searches.
At the University of Texas at Austin, the history department posts information online about its graduates’ careers, culled from Google and Facebook, documenting where people are working both inside and outside academe.
“People might think, if we list people other than folks in tenure-track jobs, we denigrate our program,” says Jacqueline Jones, the history department’s graduate adviser and vice president of the American Historical Association’s professional division. “I think it’s really essential for prospective students to know what the graduates of a program are doing.”
Yet broadening this outlook to the faculty can be difficult, because professors, when they were students, held the tenure-track job as the “end-all-be-all,” Ms. Jones says. “We tend to replicate that culture.”
Elliott Shore, executive director of the Association of Research Libraries, says a focus by higher-education experts and scholarly leaders on alternate career paths encourages this cultural change.
He cites Anthony T. Grafton and Mr. Grossman’s “No More Plan B,” published in the fall of 2011 in the American Historical Association’s monthly publication, Perspectives on History. The piece advocates taking a broad outlook on career options for Ph.D.'s.
“Those kinds of voices speaking up are probably changing the debate,” Mr. Shore says.
‘Exploring Other Options’
Faculty are becoming more open to showing students these options, some scholars say.
In 2008, Bethany P. Nowviskie, director of digital research and scholarship at the University of Virginia Library and editor of the open-access publication #alt-academy, spoke on career panels in academic departments. She said students would wait to ask “real, genuine questions” until professors left, fearing to appear less than serious about their academic aspirations.
“It was so taboo to be seen as thinking about exploring other options or about hybrid careers,” Ms. Nowviskie said.
More recently, however, faculty and graduate-studies directors seek out panelists like Ms. Nowviskie to talk to students, whom she describes as more aware of both the job market’s realities and the need to equip themselves with skills outside their traditional curricula.
Ph.D. students at the University of California at Berkeley organized their own event, “Beyond Academia,” a career conference last spring that featured speakers who have pursued careers in nonacademic research, consulting, technology, science communication, and entrepreneurship.
William S. Griscom, a fifth-year psychology student who helped organize the event, says today’s economy requires students to take the job market into account. Hearing about alternatives to academe at the conference broadened his idea of possible jobs, he says, but reinforced his belief that he would prefer academe, because it would allow him flexibility in research.
“There may not be a lot of academic jobs available now, but it’s still something I would be really happy to be doing,” he says. “Whether that’s possible is more the question in my mind.”
Alison T. Miller Singley, another organizer who is attracted to academe, says she noticed the enthusiasm of last year’s speakers.
“I got the sense that they didn’t feel they had as much support when they were in college,” she says. “They wanted to be that support for others.”
