The past few years have seen a flood of articles informing readers of the dire prospects for doctoral students in such increasingly unemployable fields as the humanities. The bad press is so unrelenting that it’s worth taking time to explain why the advanced pursuit of knowledge can and should be a worthwhile endeavor.
I want to dispel a few myths currently being perpetuated:
Myth No. 1: There has never been a worse time to be a doctoral student in the humanities.
During the past 20 years, increased support for doctoral students and the decreased size of many graduate programs have given a greater proportion of doctoral students the reassurance of decent funding—fully paid tuition and stipends, teaching assistantships, and money to cover many basic living expenses.
Having gone to graduate school in the era before fellowship packages were routinely offered, a time when the largest graduate programs admitted 50 to 100 students per year, mostly without funds, I have a clear sense of how different the current experience is—and why it’s preferable. Small, well-financed programs offer a supportive educational experience that facilitates the pursuit of advanced knowledge.
We need some citizens committed to exploring and producing knowledge, as well as consuming it, and the outcomes cannot be measured solely in economic terms (nor is the Ph.D. the only path to that end, but it is certainly an important one). We need to support graduate education at a reasonable financial level, and to offer those who pursue it strong incentives not to linger. And yes, we need to expose doctoral students to a wider range of employment possibilities, internship programs, joint degrees, etc., while also taking the lead in educating employers about the skills many Ph.D.’s have to offer the nonacademic world. Our students will not all be employed in academic jobs, but in fact, they never have been.
Myth No. 2: There has never been a worse job market for doctoral students in the humanities.
Memories are short. After the more prosperous era of the mid-1990s through around 2008, we seem to have forgotten the truly dreadful market of the 1970s, the awful job market of most of the 1980s, some of the occasional downturns of the 1990s, and the fact that even the best of times has never offered the number of tenure-track jobs equal to the number of Ph.D.’s.
When I applied to graduate school, in 1983-84, some clear-sighted programs included a disclaimer about job prospects in their admissions packets. It was a good thing. My mentors, veterans of the job market of the 1970s, explained the futility of having specific job outcomes in mind. I went to graduate school knowing there were few academic jobs, and I spent every year in graduate school thinking about how I might handle that issue at the end of my degree.
An article written during my senior year by a recent graduate of my college further underscored the uselessness of the very field I was considering. Leslie S.P. Brown’s “Who Cares About the Renaissance?” appeared in Newsweek in 1983. Its author, then a graduate student in art history, described in poignant detail the irrelevance of pursuing a life of scholarship devoted to an antiquated and obsolete subject, and the frustrations of her professors (some of whom were also mine) about writing books that almost no one read. She also told readers quite eloquently why she was going to graduate school anyway. I posted the article on my door to remind myself that pursuing graduate work was not an obvious choice. Yet I didn’t then choose to apply to law school.
I decided to go to graduate school to have a period in my life in which I would not put issues of career and employment in the foreground but would learn history, study many languages, and see how much I liked teaching. (I discovered that I liked it a lot.)
With hindsight, I can say that it all worked out. But the point I want to make for the benefit of students now who are wondering if they should pursue their love of some arcane subject is that there was not a single day in graduate school, or in the period in which I first entered the job market, when I assumed that the outcome of my decision to become an expert on the Renaissance would be a job as a professor. I hoped that might happen; I did everything I could to be a good candidate for any positions that might appear. But I did so with a realistic sense that there were not many of them.
Thinking about the Ph.D. as a decision with unclear job prospects was clarifying. It was a reality check. I made sure not to stay in graduate school too long.
Myth No. 3: There will be no academic jobs in the humanities.
Discussions of the academic job market often remind me of the apocalyptic predictions of charismatic preachers who roamed the streets of medieval and Renaissance cities, proclaiming the end of the world. There are certainly fewer jobs than there were a few years ago. And, no doubt, some fields of study are being endangered not only by the economy but also by administrators who no longer see the importance—the “usefulness"—of investing in fields like foreign languages and literatures, or in exploring the relation of the humanities to other areas of knowledge. We are also faced with undergraduates’ changing interests and concerns about their own job prospects.
But will such fields disappear entirely across all institutions? Surely not. Will graduate students interested, say, in Italian literature, medieval music, or 19th-century philosophy have to be trained differently for the current and future job market? Absolutely. The answer is to train broadly rather than narrowly and, in some instances, to train under a different rubric.
My field was once called Renaissance and Reformation. Then it became Early Modern Europe. Now it is Medieval/Early Modern. Soon it will be the Pre-Modern World. I expect to train students to enfold the smaller subjects within the larger category. They will still teach the Renaissance with the depth and skill it deserves, but they will teach it in a broader context and compete for jobs with other graduate students who study other aspects of the pre-modern world. The narrowly defined silos that were once departments, or distinct subfields with specific employment tracks, can work at the level of research expertise; they can work in teaching subjects of genuine interest to our undergraduates or graduate students. But they are unlikely to be the only thing we can or should do, if they ever were.
Myth No. 4: We cannot in good conscience allow people to pursue Ph.D.’s in the humanities.
Why should someone get a Ph.D. in 2014? For all the reasons that have always existed: for unbridled intellectual ecstasy; because you are curious and passionate about learning and want to acquire more academic skills; because you are unable to imagine yourself not doing this for some period of your life, regardless of what job(s) will come later. This is a pragmatic decision, after serious reflection on the alternatives, and with a full understanding of the uncertainties of employment.
Few, if any, employment markets that I know of in the 21st century guarantee specific and stable outcomes. Ask a 50-year-old programmer whether he or she can get a job at Facebook, and you’ll see what I mean.
I would be the first to say that getting a Ph.D. has its frustrations. You defer a number of things along the way, but it is remiss not to discuss what is gained as well. You will be training in something specific and not general like law, business, or education. You will be offered a period in your life in which to learn and think, and see where it takes you. That is a rare and valuable thing. We have begun to assess the Ph.D. as if it were an M.B.A. It isn’t.
So here is my advice to someone contemplating graduate school:
First, unless you have personal financial resources, or will attend a well-funded program, don’t go. If there are doctoral programs out there still admitting graduate students without adequate financial support—or woefully underpaying teaching assistants—they should be pressured (indeed embarrassed) into recalibrating their admissions policies.
Second, you should go to graduate school because you want to have a unique educational experience, one that you can get only by pursuing a Ph.D., and to contribute to knowledge of the subject in the process. Wanting to be a college professor may be a secondary goal, but it shouldn’t be your primary motivation.
Third, if you decide to go to graduate school, make a contract with yourself about how much time you wish to invest in this project of intellectual advancement.
Fourth, prepare yourself for jobs that may use your expertise—but not necessarily as a college teacher. A friend who did a lot of consulting work when tenure-track jobs were not readily forthcoming once told me that having a Ph.D. means two things: You know a lot about a little, and you know better than most people how to look things up—particularly at a time when there is so much cheap, unreliable, useless information out there. If you can convince people that you are better at generating and handling information than they are, you will be valuable. Write and analyze better than the average college graduate, and you will see why a number of employers value that skill, too. Know how to use technology in ways that are relevant to the skills you are developing as a scholar, being mindful that those skills might have other applications. In other words, look up on the scholarly path, but also look outward.
In my most optimistic moments, I have a modest hope that we might evolve beyond the conversation that measures whether we have fulfilled the implicit contract: Ph.D. = academic career. I already sense a strong desire to move forward in this direction at many institutions, and that is encouraging. No program should present its degree as being focused on a single outcome. We need to see the Ph.D. as a flexible degree.
At the same time, we should not diminish the value of advanced research that demonstrates unique skills and the ability to contribute to the advancement of knowledge and its translation. If we can manage to do both, we can ensure a future for this lengthy, uncertain path to a degree.
