What the Numbers Can Tell Us About Humanities Ph.D. Careers

Imagine, Maureen McCarthy asked a room full of faculty members, if you could know where all of the Ph.D. graduates from your program are working, right now.

Not only that, she told a packed session at the annual Modern Language Association conference here in Chicago. Imagine if you could know how satisfied they are with the training they’d received in their Ph.D. program. Imagine if you could know if they’d do it again, and why.

Until recently, that type of data was hard to come by, said McCarthy, director of best practices at the Council of Graduate Schools. The council conducted two surveys last year — one geared toward current Ph.D. students and their career aspirations, one geared toward Ph.D.-program graduates — to fill in those gaps.

But holes still exist. For instance, there isn’t much information about what happens to the people who drop out of Ph.D. programs, said Robert B. Townsend, who directs the Humanities Indicators project for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. We don’t have much data about the admissions process, he said, or what happens to people as they go through their doctoral programs.

Townsend and McCarthy both presented during a session called “Diving Into the Data: What the Numbers Tell Us About the Careers of Humanities Ph.D.s.” Those in attendance were well acquainted with the death knell often sounded about the academic job market in the humanities. Since the Great Recession, there’s been a steep drop-off in academic jobs advertised, while the number of Ph.D.s continues to increase.

In previous years, the MLA conference was synonymous with “flop sweat” as anxious graduate students interviewed in the cattle-call room for positions they probably wouldn’t get. (Paula M. Krebs, executive director of the MLA, told me the organization is now discouraging departments from treating the conference as a hiring convention: “We are no longer the place full of sweaty job seekers,” she said.)

But much of the conference’s talk is still about jobs. Here are a few takeaways from the data presented:

• 56 percent of employed humanities Ph.D.s were teaching at the postsecondary level as their principal job. That’s a substantially higher percentage than in other Ph.D. fields, Townsend said, a fact he keeps in mind when he gives talks across academe. The humanities are anomalous in their focus on academe as being “the one true career path” for students, Townsend said, which is why he feels he has to defend the importance of career diversity.
• About 70 percent of humanities Ph.D.s who work in academe are working full time, Townsend said, though he cautioned that the data set he was presenting masked some of the nuances in the contingent-faculty job market. For example, he said, it looked at peoples’ hourly workloads, separating those who worked at least 35 hours a week. That doesn’t take into account adjuncts who work lots of hours because they have partial loads at multiple colleges.
• A majority of humanities Ph.D. graduates at 65 universities told the Council of Graduate Schools they’d do it again, McCarthy said, though people who were three years out from their degree were less likely to say yes if they were working outside of academe. That discrepancy “is a function of the shame that people feel when they’re first starting out in their careers and not going into academia,” McCarthy said. “There’s still that stigma.”
• About 66 percent of people who have completed Ph.D.s in history are teaching at postsecondary institutions, as either contingent or tenure-track faculty members, said Dylan Ruediger, a panelist and a coordinator at the American Historical Association. That finding came from a data project, called Where Historians Work, that tracked the career outcomes for 8,523 historians who completed their degrees from 2004 to 2013.
• Very few of the historians who work in academe are teaching at universities that resemble the R1 institutions where they got their advanced degrees. Just 19 percent of them, said Ruediger, are employed at R1 institutions.
• It’s not all roses outside the humanities. The academic job market is challenging for the biosciences, for example, said Chris M. Golde, a panelist and a career counselor at Stanford University. Only about 12 percent of those Ph.D.s end up with a tenure-track job, she said, and that’s after a five-year postdoc. “I’m not trying to minimize the crisis in the humanities, but there are fellow travelers who are dealing with the same questions, and there are partnerships to be made across unlikely alliances on campus to help address these issues,” Golde said.

Emma Pettit is a staff reporter at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @EmmaJanePettit, or email her at emma.pettit@chronicle.com.