Here is another article that follows along with Douthar’s Op Ed. Entitled “So You’re Getting a Ph.D. Welcome to the worst job market in America” :
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/so-you-re-getting-phd_1059359.html?page=1#
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All of this means that every fall there is a desperate scramble among the young and the highly credentialed to garner one of the ever-diminishing entry-level tenure-track slots that still exist. A May 2014 report from the Modern Language Association (MLA), representing scholars in English and foreign languages, asserted that every year about 1,000 brand-new Ph.D.s in those fields emerge to chase about 600 new job openings. The report didn’t consider that those newbies are also competing with the 400 leftovers who had failed to obtain jobs during the previous year—plus all the leftovers still in the job market from the years before that. The humanities, where undergraduate majors are in steep decline, are famously overloaded with unusable doctorates, but as John Cooley learned to his chagrin, new STEM Ph.D.s fare only slightly better. Atlantic senior associate editor Jordan Weissman observed in 2013 “a pattern reaching back to 2001” of “fewer jobs, more unemployment, and more post-doc work.” Postdocs in the sciences essentially consist of low-paid lab scut work. “Once it was just a one or two-year rite of passage where budding scientists honed their research skills,” Weissman wrote. “Now, it can stretch on for half a decade.”
As Kelsky—but almost nobody who is actually still inside academia—points out, there’s an elephant in this clamorous room of underemployed scholars. It’s the fact that from a supply-and-demand standpoint, graduate schools are simply turning out way too many Ph.D.s for the academic market to bear, depressing their wages accordingly. It’s a similar crisis to the glut of new attorneys that law schools were churning out in recent years even as law jobs paying enough to cover sky-high law school debt were disappearing. The law market seems to have corrected itself, with law school enrollments steadily plunging since 2011. That collapse hasn’t happened with graduate schools. Indeed, throughout the 2000s and beyond, new enrollments in master’s and doctoral programs of every kind continued to climb, even in the arts and humanities, where the job pickings are slimmest. In the fall of 2012, for example, new arts-and-humanities enrollments shot up by nearly 8 percent, according to a report from the Council of Graduate Schools. “It’s an ethical problem,” Kelsky said. “The Ph.D. degree in the majority of cases leads directly to unemployment. Five- or six-figure debt and unemployment.”
A professor I contacted sent me this email: “It’s a hypocritical system in which we talk about how much we ‘love’ students while they are undergraduates, only to exploit them as graduate students and then adjuncts.” The professor refused to let me use the email for attribution: “One can’t even talk about these questions from inside the system without risking serious pushback.”
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