<p>With a Ph.D in English, you can be middle-upper class teaching English overseas in Mainland China or Taiwan at the university level. Plus, there is virtually zero competition; if you have the degree and the willingness to travel, the best universities will hire you.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>That is not what Iâm talking about. Even non-tenured, contingent full-time positions on year-to-year or semester-to-semester contracts are hard to get. People who are not in academe do not understand the extreme instability of college-level teaching in the humanities. I am not arguing that no one should try to get a Ph.D. in English. I am saying that the statistical likelihood of achieving a stable full-time college-level teaching job with benefits teaching English in the United States is extremely low. Thatâs all.</p>
<p>^^NJSue raises a good point. However, not all candidates for faculty positions have the same âstatistical chance.â If the OPâs daughter finishes a masterâs at Harvard, and the faculty acts like she is amazing, then perhaps a faculty position is more realistic. Then, perhaps it is more like a crapshoot to get a position rather than nearly impossible.
If they are merely pleased with her progress, then a faculty position may not be possible. </p>
<p>Iâve heard that, especially for humanities, it is important to have a PhD at a prestigious school to get a faculty position, so that is something to consider.</p>
<p>Itâs not clear to me if the OP is concerned about her daughter not getting a faculty position, or that even a faculty position would not be rewarding enough.</p>
<p>If itâs the former, then I think itâs best to see how she does through a masterâs to make a decision. She would be, what, 24 years old? Thereâs plenty of time to bail later if itâs not working out.</p>
<p>A very good friend of mine was an English lit prof in a top college. He decided that he didnât like the politics of academia and in his mid-30âs went to law school, where his research, writing and critical thinking skills served him well. 20+ years later, he is in demand as an appellate brief writer. He is semi-retired and can do all of his work from his home office in another state. He doesnât argue the appeals, just writes them.</p>
<h1>83: True and she can change her mind. But if the OPâs daughter really wants to go after the brass ring of a tenure-track slot, she should apply directly to fully funded Ph.D. programs at prestigious schools and get accepted. Then, if she changes her mind, she can leave with an M.A. She should not apply for M.A. programs as a provisional first step. The M.A. in English is widely regarded as a consolation prize for people who wash out of Ph.D. programs at the dissertation stage.</h1>
<p>
</p>
<p>I didnât know that people didnât do a masterâs first in english. Do they need to present their findings after a couple of years? That is what they do in science. I was curious, because if there was some presentation or submission of their work to the department after a couple of years, then a PhD student might have a better idea of what their career trajectory is looking like.</p>
<p>
Lots of people wish that. Of course, only a tiny fraction of them ever achieve that goal. You have three hurdles:</p>
<p>(1) Admissions - To have any sort of decent shot at a teaching position afterwards, you need to get into a top program. With 40 applicants per spot at Columbia and 45 per spot at Stanford, that isnât exactly easy, even with a masterâs under your belt. </p>
<p>(2) Getting your PhD - PhD programs in the humanities are exceedingly long (9.5 years is average), stressful, and low paying. (Stipends are often less than half those of STEM fields, leading to average debt at graduation being more than double that of engineering.) Slightly less than half of all humanities PhD students eventually earn their PhDs. </p>
<p>(3) Finding a job - Universities pump out about 900 PhDs a year, more than enough to swamp the 500-600 TT jobs each year, especially with the backlog of well-qualified applicants from years past, many of whom are in purgatory as visiting profs and adjuncts.</p>
<p>Of course, the statistics are actually much more slanted than they appear. All jobs are not created equalâŠa position in Caribbean literature may draw significantly fewer applicants than a position in severely flooded fields like 20th century American lit. Such fields frequently receive upwards of 200 applications for a position, of which only about 10% even get interviewed. To use history as an example, one of my friends here at UCLA just earned his PhD in US history. Highly intelligent, well published and a book underway, eloquent speaker. He sent out over 100 applications, got about 10 interviews at AHA, was invited to 2 on campus interviews, and received 0 job offers. He did secure an adjunct position at a local community college â meaning he teaches 5 courses a semester while making only about $20,000 a year, not a lot in LA.</p>
<p>
I couldnât agree more.</p>
<p>Itâs not enough to âhave a love of learningâ or to âlove English and be good at itâ or any other trite phrases common among undergraduates. Graduate school in the humanities is for those who absolutely cannot see themselves doing ANYTHING else and who have the tools and mindset necessary to succeed. </p>
<p>You need to be willing to live and breathe your subject for a long time. Be aggressive about getting mentoring from professors who may or may not be concerned with your best interests. Be able to combine thousands of pages of reading a week for class, grading exams and papers, leading discussion sections, and sometimes even teaching. Be able to come up with novel research ideas that lead to publications or conference presentations. Be able to accept your best work being shredded by professors and other students and be able to mete out the same. </p>
<p>Can graduate school be fun? Yes, sometimes. There are few fields in which you get paid to do little except learn. Is it stressful, will it damage your ego, and will you sometimes question why youâre in graduate school? Yes, sometimes. Like with most things in life, graduate school has its ups and downs. </p>
<p>Iâm surprised by some of the knee-jerk reactions in this thread. I donât get the impression that the OP is âcoercingâ or âpressuringâ her daughter at all. Is it wrong to make sure kids fully explore their career options? By the time they graduate from college, kids have typically been in school for at least 17 years. Of course many of them look to academia! Many of them donât know anything else. Do they know that botanic gardens hire music majors? Or that the CIA hires comparative lit students? Or that BCG hires archaeology majors? (All of these are people I know.) For English specifically, do they know that majors at Penn have gone into publishing with Harper Collins, government with Homeland Security, media production with NBC, consulting with Bain, and management with Google? Not to mention the Penn English majors who went to graduate school in everything from city planning to health policy to social work. Iâm sure all of these people loved English and have found their degrees useful â Iâm equally sure many of them had no idea of the path their lives would take as a first or second year college student.</p>
<p>That said, academia is the right place for some people, and Iâd be a hypocrite to actively discourage someone from aiming for it. What I do recommend is going into it with eyes open. As someone suggested above, getting advice from faculty mentors is a good place to start. I would add talking with current graduate students as another step; professors are often out of touch with the daily lives of even their closest students, and graduate students do not share everything with their professors. </p>
<p>Recommended reading:</p>
<p>[So</a> You Want to Go to Grad School? - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher Education](<a href=âhttp://chronicle.com/article/So-You-Want-to-Go-to-Grad/45239]Soâ>http://chronicle.com/article/So-You-Want-to-Go-to-Grad/45239)</p>
<p>[Graduate</a> School in the Humanities: Just Donât Go - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher Education](<a href=âhttp://chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-in-the/44846]Graduateâ>http://chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-in-the/44846)</p>
<p>[Graduate</a> Study for the Twenty-First Century: How to Build an Academic Career in the Humanities](<a href=âhttp://www.amazon.com/Graduate-Study-Twenty-First-Century-Humanities/dp/1403969361]Graduateâ>http://www.amazon.com/Graduate-Study-Twenty-First-Century-Humanities/dp/1403969361)</p>
<h1>86: Fully funded English programs are generally for the Ph.D. only. The top-ranked programs accept students who have the intention of going all the way through, as an M.A. is not going to get anyone a full-time job at a research institution or LAC.</h1>
<p>There are many M.A.-only programs at lower-ranked institutions, but I would advise students who are serious about competing for a tenure-track position to avoid them and go straight for the Ph.D. The terminal M.A. is for high school teachers and for people who just want an enrichment experience. It is hard to get an M.A. at one place and then apply for a fully funded Ph.D. slot at another place. Few manage it.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I did get a whiff of it by the title to this very thread as it is almost the same sort of comments Iâd commonly hear from high school classmatesâ parents when their kids are considering majors/careers outside of the narrow medicine, engineer, CS, law, i-banking, or pharmacy field. </p>
<p>It is an implicit expression of disdain/disapproval of a given alternative career choice outside of those narrow career paths commonly viewed as stable jobs enabling comfortable secure upper-middle/middle class lifestyles. Iâve also personally known far too many high school classmates whose adolescence were/[lives ended up being] ruined by such parental/peer pressuring to choose the âapprovedâ careers paths.</p>
<p>Many thanks to people for some very thoughtful feedback.</p>
<p>JHSâs post on this thread is particularly interesting- same college and roughly similar status in the department. The difference is that she is not planning a Wall St summer internship, she is making plans that would take her more firmly towards that Ph.D in English.</p>
<p>Yes, I am aware that a very large number of people resent their parents for their past interference that prevented them from pursuing their dreams. But I also know people who were pressured by parents into certain careers, who are grateful that they were so pressured and are now enjoying a certain measure of financial security. I also know a few adults who are not doing so well today and who do complain to their parents that they were in effect too âhands offâ. </p>
<p>Iâll admit, my title (especially the Help! part) is a bit provocative. The goal was to provoke a lively discussion, which this certainly is proving to be. </p>
<p>I truly would be delighted for her if she could in 20 years be an English professor at a reasonably decent college. Tenure would be nice. And I do believe she has as good a chance as any of her peers to get there if that is what she chooses to do. But I also know the journey to such a destination is not easy, and the destination itself is not as rewarding as it might seem to a college sophomore. </p>
<p>So to what extent do I plan to meddle in my daughterâs plans? At this point, the only thing I might do is to send her an email with a link to this thread. Perhaps she can benefit from the collective wisdom of CC parents. So keep your comments coming - Yea or Nay?</p>
<p>Edited to add: JHS writes that he decided to forgo the English professorâs career in favor of a career in law. Law might also be my Dâs alternative career. But several recent threads here on CC and articles in the media make me wonder whether pursuing a law degree is such a great idea after all.</p>
<p>Nay. I think her faculty members should know - given who she is and what she looks like - whether to encourage or discourage, and I would encourage her to share her dreams/plans with them, rather than hear from a bunch of strangers who donât know her. If she wanted to post on CC (or anywhere else), I think sheâd be perfectly capable.</p>
<p>^I agree with mini. </p>
<p>Statistics arenât always of the chance of success for an individual. Reading between the lines from the OPâs posts, itâs likely that getting into a top PhD program wonât be a hurdle. So itâs illogical to discourage the OPâs daughter as one poster did because many candidates donât get into grad school. It sounds like the OPâs daughter is already in a selective undergrad program; while I agree that the english prof career is difficult, itâs not as unlikely as for some random student going for an english PhD.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Ewww. You want your daughter to be an investment banker? </p>
<p>Investment bankers â and the students who yearn to become them â are some of the most soul-less people I know. (Also, they think school is hard when thermodynamics is much harder than the accounting theorems they complain about.) </p>
<p>And why isnât âscientistâ in here?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Frankly, I know no one who is like that. Maybe there are a fewâŠbut in my social circle, theyâre not going to get much sympathy as complaining about the ramifications of their choices made as young adults is going to come across as pathetic and a sign theyâre trying to avoid responsibility for them. </p>
<p>Unless weâre talking parental neglect before 18 which caused the person in question to become a drug/alcohol addict, penalized criminal, or bankrupt spendthrift, their complaints are misplaced.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Those people should be completely ignored. How lame. They would have failed anyway.</p>
<p>What is everyone doing with their notes, workbooks etc?</p>
<p>vicariousparent: I donât know if this will be useful to you. One of my children and two of his best friends from undergraduate days are all in PhD programs in humanities, but all in obscure fields that make English look like a really marketable degreeâŠthe sort of fields where not only is no one new hired, the whole department is being cut especially with the economic crisis. I know these young people pretty well and when my son was home last summer for a short visit we had a gossipy chat, with him catching me up on their lives, telling me about their romantic interests, their academic research, etc. Then he stopped and said, âIâm really glad you and Dad support me in a PhD program. Ann and Janâs parents keep telling them to hurry up and apply to law school. They are really sick of it.â Both Ann and Jan have at least one parent who is a lawyer. What our son doesnât know is that my husband and I had several discussions on whether to attempt to âsend him to law school.â Our son is the type of person who loves nothing better than to work 20 hours a day on intellectual pursuits in which he is interested. When required to do something âuninterestingâ he makes life fairly miserable for all who canât get away from him. We decided we werenât interested in paying a small fortune to listen to him ***** and complain to us for three years. And then listen to him fuss for the next 30 years or so until we were dead. We thought if he was lucky enough to get into a PhD program where someone else paid his expenses for a few years that was a really good deal. Heâd be happy and weâd be happy. We may not be the best parents. We decided to wait and see if he asked to go to law school. So far he hasnât. He has a different Plan B, which he has come up with all on his own. My husband and I always say âgrad school is great but clearly there are no jobs in your field.â </p>
<p>I agree with mini that your daughterâs professors are who she should be talking to and I think the grad school message board is useful to some. She is at the right school now. They can get her into the right school for the PhD. This begins to have so much to do with connections. A few of our children will perhaps get tenure. Miracles happen. Every time one of my kids wins the lottery I am amazed all over again. But there is always Plan B. For the current humanities PhD students I know grad school has been worth it even if Plan B has to be implemented.</p>
<p>Wow⊠If you want your child to have a happy life in the future, maybe just simply let her do the things she wants. Morever, bases on my personal experinces, children change their mind VERY OFTEN⊠I want to do visual art when I was in year 10 and now I think science and biology are amazingâŠ
Just be easy⊠Everything will be fine.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This doesnât sound so bad. First, surely not all PhD graduates deserve a TT job in their field - some of them must be pretty marginal and just scraped through their degree. And maybe some donât want a TT job.</p>
<p>Also, if you go to a prestigious program, say Harvard, you have a significant advantage over the PhD graduate from Mickey Mouse State University.</p>
<p>sorghum: It really is bad, very very bad. JHS is describing the situation for English PhD graduates from the very best universities 30 years ago. Very Bad. It is even worse today. Much worse. That is why NJSue keeps posting the warnings. They are really good warnings.</p>
<p>Maybe this is just practically impossible to comprehend for those who havenât experienced it first hand? It is more than reasonable for a parent to be concerned about a child pursuing this path.</p>