Want to Know Where Ph.D.s in English Get Jobs? This Is What Grad Programs Will Tell You

Chronicle Illustration by Ron Coddington

The road to the professoriate, when stripped down to its most basic milestones, goes like this: Enroll in graduate school. Earn a Ph.D. Land a tenure-track job — eventually.

Or, just as likely, not at all.

Current and prospective graduate students trying to predict whether they’ll beat the odds to join the faculty ranks face a tough task. That’s because colleges vary widely in what they say publicly about where their Ph.D. students land after graduation.

“Individual doctoral programs usually try to keep track of their graduates. Some departments try harder than others,” Leonard Cassuto, a professor of English at Fordham University, wrote in a column for The Chronicle last year. “Some publish their results, while others sit on their numbers — a venal decision that helps no one.”

To be sure, the decision to pursue a Ph.D. itself is, in some ways, a leap of faith. It’s a years-long endeavor largely fueled by the conviction that a stable job in academe will be the reward in the end. Graduate-student advisers, particularly at top research institutions, help bolster that belief by assuring the scholars they supervise that they’ll be among the chosen few. Grad students have little incentive to ask too many questions out of fear that doing so could signal to an adviser an unwillingness to buy into the mind-set of tenure-track-job-or-bust. Some of them may not even know what to ask.

Graduate students mulling whether or not to enter a program would benefit from some sort of analysis of what its alumni have done with their degree. But institutions often fail to consistently track and publicly report this information. It’s a much-discussed shortcoming in higher-ed circles and was the impetus for a discipline-wide, interactive database for historians. Earlier this month, the Association of American Universities announced a grant-funded initiative to help a pilot cohort of eight institutions make more widely available data about the Ph.D. career paths of its students in certain disciplines, among other improvements to graduate education.

The association started the effort after learning from a survey it conducted last year that, over all, its member institutions could be more transparent about their Ph.D. program data.

“I am convinced that reliable, accurate, and readily available data are necessary for making career diversity visible,” Mary Sue Coleman, president of the AAU, wrote in a blog post about the initiative. “We have much work to do and many miles to go, but I am convinced that there is a real potential to leverage each others’ strengths to positively influence the culture around Ph.D. education and career pathways.”

As the academic job market begins yet another cycle, The Chronicle sought out publicly available information about where Ph.D. students who’ve gone through the process now work. We turned to the websites of the top 30 graduate programs in English, as identified by U.S. News & World Report, because it’s a field whose doctoral training is geared toward preparing people for careers in academe — and the market is particularly tight. Here are the categories that describe the kinds of placement data that are available:

Scarce Details

Sometimes, an institution gives just the faintest details, offering a quick take on what gainful employment looks like for its graduates, but not quantifying outcomes or naming their destinations. One example is Indiana University at Bloomington, which, in a section of the department’s website that explains what its Ph.D. in English prepares graduate students for, says its “alumni can be found working as faculty and administrators in the Ivy League, flagship public universities, smaller regional universities and colleges, and liberal-arts colleges throughout the United States and beyond.”

The director of graduate studies for English at Indiana, Rae Greiner, wrote in an email that an updated list of jobs by year is available on request to current and prospective students, and that this information could be added to the program’s website soon. Tracking down the information to keep it updated, however, is a task that has been complicated by the amount of time it takes former graduate students, who have often moved away, to find a permanent position in academe or elsewhere, wrote Greiner, an associate professor of English. Self-reporting career moves after that doesn’t regularly happen; Greiner and an assistant — who in recent years have used social media to locate former alumni — sometimes hear thirdhand about jobs former Ph.D. students hold.

“Such students will usually alert their dissertation chairs and perhaps other committee members about their progress,” she wrote, “but they often do not think to alert the graduate office, which is the one office that keeps track of such things.”

Slightly Better, but Still Vague

Other programs give top-line data and the names of a few institutions where their graduates have wound up, but not much else. At the Johns Hopkins University, for example, the English department notes that 84 percent of its 25 students who earned Ph.D.s since 2009 went on to academic jobs or post-doctoral fellowships. It then goes on to say that a dozen of those graduates landed tenure-track jobs and are employed at insitutions that include Stanford University, Cornell University, City College of New York, and Case Western Reserve University.

In the same vein, some programs post something akin to “greatest hits” lists of varying lengths, naming the colleges that have hired graduates of their program. It’s a way to show that students attract a wide variety of academic employers, but key data points — job titles and the years that the appointments took place — are missing.

One example of that approach is the University of Virginia, where the English department provides “a complete list of institutions where holders of the Ph.D. from our program found assistant professorships from 2000 to spring 2018.” Following that list is a much shorter one of “similarly distinguished institutions” where the program’s alums have found full-time visiting and postdoctoral positions. Such lists, when not divided by year, can make it hard to determine how more-recent graduates have fared.

The Context Providers

At this point, there shouldn’t be any risk in openly acknowledging that the academic job market for the humanities is a tough one. But for the most part, institutions don’t mention it in connection with placement data for their own graduates. A few, however, are refreshingly candid.

The introduction to Princeton University’s English Ph.D. placement information notes that in the humanities just over 50 percent of Ph.D. holders will get tenure-track jobs, and it recommends that “every entering student actively consider other kinds of work to which their studies may lead.” Still, the Ivy League institution notes, its academic job-placement track record is “very competitive,” and the website goes on to provide a year-by-year list of the number of active job searches, dating to 1995, and how they turned out. Another moment of truth in the footnote attached to its data: “Please be aware that candidates for jobs sometimes repeat their candidacies over more than one year in the job market.”

Duke University says that “the worldwide financial crisis that began in 2008 affected our placement rate (just as, we assume, it affected the placement rate of all our peer institutions).” But like other English departments that nod to the effects of tough economic times, Duke — which calculates its placement rate using the number of Ph.D. graduates who get a tenure-track job within three years of graduation — makes a point to highlight its success despite that context. Between the spring of 2008 and the fall of 2013, the institution says, its placement rate was 63 percent, and it names graduates, specifies the year they earned their Ph.D., and tells where they work.

Cornell University points to how steeply the number of advertised positions in literature departments have dropped since the recession, but it goes on to paint a picture of how its graduates are beating the odds. One section of the English program’s placement data includes a look at what happened to Ph.D.s between 2012 and 2017. Eighty-five percent of graduates in those years found initial employment in higher education, which includes all types of academic jobs, while during that same time period about 60 percent of 2012 graduates accepted tenure-track positions, an indicator that “graduates from Cornell’s Ph.D. program in English outperform the national average on the tenure-track academic job market.”

Look at Our Alumni

Job placement information isn’t always marked as such. Sometimes it’s tucked under the “alumni” section of a program’s website. It may span a decade or two, and what’s available there varies. For instance, the University of California at Davis breaks down its English Ph.D. alumni by year and includes a name, dissertation title, job title, and place of employment.

“Our program posts all the information we have about our Ph.D. alumni, which means updating their current status as we are able,” wrote John Marx, chair of the department, in an email. “And therein lies a challenge we are currently working to address.” This year, he wrote, plans are underway to “activate and formalize” the department’s Ph.D. alumni netowrk to “provide more information to our current students about the diverse career experiences that our alums are having.”

The University of Pennsylvania, with perhaps the most extensive archive of program alums, lists graduates back to the 1890s — yes, the Gilded Age — although the department’s site gives only name, dissertation director, and dissertation title until the 1990s, when employment information — in the form of “where they are now” — is added to the mix. But, even among institutions that take this very detailed approach to listing alumni, big-picture data can be hard to come by.

Lots of Detail, but Still Omissions

A popular way for institutions to organize placement data is to break it down year by year with the names of graduates, their position, and institution or other workplace. But such lists often raise their share of questions — like how many people were on the market each year, how long it took them to find jobs, and how many of them never did.

Rutgers University, for one, acknowledges upfront that it takes job seekers two or three years to land a tenure-track job. The university doesn’t include data from its recent graduates in its calculations. Instead, it gives the share of its 134 graduates between 2004 and 2014 who found work teaching on or off the tenure track or held a postdoc.

OK, Not Everybody’s an Academic

Even as more institutions have decided to help Ph.D. students find work outside academe, that’s not reflected in placement data. For the most part, higher-ed outcomes are the focus.

Brown University’s English department, like Johns Hopkins’s and UVa’s, gives information about employment in academe only. It spans 2015 to 2019, and it shows assistant professors, visiting assistant professors, postdocs, lecturers, and instructors. For placement lists like these, it’s unclear whether none of a program’s graduates hold jobs outside academe or if institutions are selecting which employer information to include.

Yet some institutions have more purposefully included nonacademics in the placement data. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill says that its “graduate students have been hired into excellent tenure-track positions, postdoctoral fellowships, lectureships and visiting assistantships, and careers outside of academia.” Its English department’s list of places where former Ph.D. students work is sorted by job type and includes employers outside higher education, like prepatory schools and Google.

The University of Michigan similarly breaks down how many of its English Ph.D.s who have been admitted since 1994 (and completed the program) work outside of education, and what fields they’re in. Among them are writing and editing, business and law. Says Michigan about its placement data, which include nine years of information about where its graduates found work: “We strongly encourage prospective students to seek out comparable data from other schools they may be considering.”

Audrey Williams June is a senior reporter who writes about the academic workplace, faculty pay, and work-life balance in academe. Contact her at audrey.june@chronicle.com, or follow her on Twitter @chronaudrey.