<p>Thanks for all of the informative answers, it seems like a PHD in History isn’t for me. But, is a M.A. in History useful? Could you become a history professor, historian, or something across those lines with that degree?</p>
<p>If you want to be a professor, go for the PhD.</p>
<p>Take it from me. Even with a MA, it’s still a challenge to find a job as a historian. Networking is extremely important in getting those kind of jobs so you need to start looking around for an internship if you want to be in history of some kind but not in academia, like a local museum or History Network or something.</p>
<p>Just do not pay thousands of dollars in debt for the MA.</p>
<p>*If Juillet is describing untenured…I’d guess they are part-timers, not covering the rent, possibly with no benefits- and sometimes, no guarantee, year to year. They could be emeriti, yes. But, part-timers. *</p>
<p>They are not part-timers. They are full-time, untenured assistant professors who teach a 1/0 load because they work at a soft money R1 research institution that expects them to research, research, research and write, write, write. My advisor has been here for 6 years, is about to go up for tenure, and he has had a 1/0 load for every year he’s been here - except for the one year that he got an exemption from all teaching duties so he could write a grant. He also got this job straight out of a post-doctoral fellowship, as did several others in the same position. These jobs do exist, they are just extremely competitive and quite rare. Most professors will have at least a 3/3 load.</p>
<p>With an MA in history, one could teach history at the high school level and <em>perhaps</em> adjunct teach introductory history sections at a community college. Even that is difficult, though, because the glut of PhDs on the market means you’ll face fierce competition from those with more desirable qualifications for you even for adjunct jobs at Podunk Community College. You might be able to work in administration at a history museum, and perhaps even assisting in the programming and execution of some exhibits - but like ticklemepink said, networking and prior experience are moreso the key to those than the MA.</p>
<p>You certainly cannot expect to be a tenured full-time professor in history with an MA, not even at a community college these days. If you really, passionately want to be a professor, get a PhD in history. If you don’t think that the grueling work and uncertainty of the job market are for you, try something else.</p>
<p>J, clearly your profs and advisors are top-notch. Kudos to them for earning such a position at Columbia. I mean it. As you note, “extremely competitive and quite rare.” Asked DH about all this and he said any college can make any sort of arrangements it wants, depending on its position and funds. His basic advice to anyone who wants “a PhD in history and to be a prof” is a resounding “forget it.” That includes D1 who is likely headed in the same direction. He’s scrambling to convince her of other ways to use her love for her sub-set of history. And, she’s at a great LAC with one of the acknowledged specialists in her field, a guy with plenty of connections. And, she has already started accruing relevant experiences.</p>
<p>Agree with your post and tickle’s. And, let’s add that, like college admissions, there is also some need for diversity among college faculty and, in some cases, in the ancillary opps, too. Add that to the need to really stand out as a boon to your field, to get attention and a secure position.</p>
<p>The days when one could “fall into” teaching are long gone. Even at my kids’ hs, the word was- this is an exact quote, though brusque: “history teachers are a dime a dozen; we need good science teachers.” My best friend, a scientist with a long-standing, impressive professional background- and an MS- isn’t even getting responses when she applies for hs sci teaching jobs, with an added teaching credential, needed in her state.</p>
<p>I know it’s hard to love something and face this. IMO, the wise follow their love, but keep reality in mind. Get the best, appropriate internship experience you can. And, work hard on the skills you can pick up in the humanities that may be marketable in many directions: the ability to do primary research and comprehend, strong analytical skills and strong writing talents.</p>
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<p>So full of errors, you say? I don’t think I have to be in the discipline to note that plenty of PhD’s from ostensibly unmarketable disciplines are nevertheless able to obtain quite nice jobs…as long as they are at name-brand universities. Heck, I can think of quite a few people who dropped out of such PhD programs precisely because they had already garnered such job offers.</p>
<p>I also don’t have to be in the discipline to notice that numerous people in those same ostensibly unmarketable disciplines nevertheless pick up marketable skills. In fact, one of the better statistical programmers that I know is [Tom Nicholas](<a href=“http://drfd.hbs.edu/fit/public/facultyInfo.do?facInfo=bio&facId=337264”>http://drfd.hbs.edu/fit/public/facultyInfo.do?facInfo=bio&facId=337264</a>), who is a historian. Granted, he was trained within an ‘Economic and Social History’ PhD program, but that’s still a history program. He learned many of his statistical programming skills while a PhD student, and even if he couldn’t find an academic placement, his strong stat programming skills, combined with the Oxford brand, would have likely landed him a lucrative position in consulting or finance. </p>
<p>Ticklemepink, are you disputing any of that? If not, then exactly what are you disputing?</p>
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<p>I have to agree with juilliet. At Harvard, for example, it is rather uncommon for any assistant professors in any discipline - surely history included - to teach more than 1/1 or perhaps 2/0. The same seems to be true at MIT. {Yes, MIT has a history department; and I suspect that there aren’t any MIT history professors who teach more than 1/1 or 2/0. Nevertheless, they are full-time tenure track professors with reasonable pay/bennies and multi-year contracts.}</p>
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<p>One thing can improve your odds substantially: choose a subtopic in your field with a clear preprofessional focus and that allows you to develop useful backup career skills. Within history, one promising subtopic could be something like economic history, especially the history of finance/banking/capital-markets/regulation. Utilize large-n datasets that are highly amenable to advanced statistical analysis that provide you with opportunities to train on Stata, R, SAS, SPSS, or other stat software packages. Historical finance datasets tend to be very large-n, so that should not be a problem. Instrumental Variable (IV) models seems to be the watchword of the day, so learn how to build them. You say that you enjoy US history - well, you’re in luck because the US just happens to house the deepest and most sophisticated financial systems in the world (and, as we have learned lately, some of the most dysfunctional). Surely a historian could find many interesting things to say about these systems historically developed.</p>
<p>By choosing finance/banking/market history as your topic and advanced statistical analysis as your methodology, you immediately make yourself eligible to compete in the job market for business schools - one of the few bright spots within academia. Business schools are not only frantically ramping up faculty, they also pay very well. The market is likely to become even hotter considering that Asia, Latin America, and even Europe want to strengthen their own business schools (even the top European business schools were founded only in the last few decades). </p>
<p>And even if the business academia job market doesn’t work out, with that subtopic and skillset you will have, you can probably find a quite decent job in the research division of a financial firm or perhaps at a regulator (i.e. the Federal Reserve).</p>
<p>So, doing something like financial history as a topic of research only makes sense if it’s actually your real field of interest. If you sign up for a history PhD program in something you don’t like that much, you are going to hate your life for 6 years. And in that case, you might as well just get a “practical” degree in something else. I have a friend who went into a history PhD program in a field he didn’t love because he wasn’t sure what else to do, and now it’s unclear if he’s going to be able to finish it. Getting a PhD in history is not “fun” and it’s not “useful” – it’s more of a labor of love for most people who do it. Only worth it if you really, truly, love your subject area.</p>
<p>My professors always told me “don’t get a history PhD because you want to be a professor, get a history PhD because you want to spend 6 years studying your subject.” You can absolutely go work in other fields afterwords if academia doesn’t work out.</p>
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<p>Um, no you’re not. If you don’t like it, you’re free to leave anytime you want. Many people do leave early. Nobody can force you to complete the program. </p>
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<p>The major difference being that those ‘practical’ degrees usually require that you pay, whereas PhD programs (usually) *pay you<a href=“although%20often%20times%20in%20return%20for%20teaching%20or%20research%20responsibilities”>/i</a>. Many people therefore rationally view PhD programs as a paid job search, particularly if the program is at an Ivy (especially Harvard), Stanford, Chicago or likewise school that offers access to elite recruiters. It can also be used as a vehicle to be paid while learning marketable skills, such as the aforementioned statistical/econometric training. There are surely other marketable skills (i.e. languages) that can also be picked up while in a history PhD program. </p>
<p>The upshot is that no PhD program in any way ‘permanently commits’ you to an academic career, either because you may not want to be in academia, or (especially in a field such as history) academia may not want you. You should therefore be entrepreneurial in your approach to your career by constantly seeking to develop marketable skills and gain access to alternate employment opportunities.</p>
<p>Somehow, I don’t think OP, who is interested in “general US history,” is going to convert to “US financial history,” which would benefit from a deep understanding in and studies of economics.</p>
<p>The PhD studies period is about an intense focus, btw. Not exploring languages, programming, etc. You can do that ndergrad. Where academic proficiency in a language or two is required for grad school (and, I doubt that applies to US history,) my experience is that it is usually reading proficiency- not the level required for an occupation dependent on being fluent.</p>
<p>I also would never suggest a kid aim for grad school knowing he can drop out. Too much work and too little back-up.</p>
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<p>But hey, you said it yourself, a PhD program requires focus. Nobody can reasonably obtain a PhD in ‘general US history’. You will eventually have to pick a far narrower subfocus to tackle, and US financial/banking history is just as good as any. After all, it is part of US history, is it not? </p>
<p>Besides, any responsible PhD advisor should counsel his students that, at any given time, certain research subtopics and methodologies will be more successful on the academic job market than others, and it therefore behooves students to adjust their research focus accordingly. To provide one example one of the hottest topics on today’s social science job market is behaviorial economics, to the point that incoming economics and psychology PhD students are often times advised to take the first-year course sequence of the counterpart discipline. Those students who refuse to adjust their research focus according to the whims of the market must therefore assume the risk that the job market will will simply be closed to them, which therefore makes the development of marketable skills all the more imperative. </p>
<p>I agree that such a program would benefit greatly from a deep understanding of economics. But a PhD program may be precisely the way to obtain such an understanding. </p>
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<p>It’s not a time for exploring statistical programming? Really? That is precisely what plenty of people do within their PhD programs. For example, I can think of quite a few PhD students and graduates in such fields as poli-sci and sociology who have actually earned master’s degrees in statistics while pursuing their PhD’s. That’s what Scott Lynch, Josh Clinton, and JoWei Chen did, and they seem to be having successful academic careers. Maybe somebody should have told them - or more specifically their PhD programs - that they should not have been wasting time ‘exploring’ statistics. </p>
<p>[Home[/url</a>]</p>
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<p>[url=<a href=“http://www.lsa.umich.edu/polisci/people/ci.chenjowei_ci.detail]People[/url”>http://www.lsa.umich.edu/polisci/people/ci.chenjowei_ci.detail]People[/url</a>]</p>
<p>And besides, I’m not even proposing that anybody obtain an MS in statistics, which is probably overkill. I am simply saying that you become proficient in a handful of marketable statistical software packages, which doesn’t take you that long to learn. After all, if you’re going to work with large-n datasets, you’ll likely need to develop those skills anyway as part of your research methodology. </p>
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<p>Which is why you will likely need to supplement. I never said it was going to be easy. But so what? Most marketable skills aren’t easy to obtain. </p>
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<p>My philosophy is entirely the opposite: every student entering grad school should understand that he can, or may even be forced, to drop out. As has been mentioned throughout this thread, there aren’t enough academic jobs for all aspiring history PhD students out there. Students are therefore well advised to developed marketable backup skills as part of their education. </p>
<p>Besides, look at it this way. Let’s say that you ignore all of my advice: completing a PhD topic of US history that has no pre-professional ties, never developing a whit of marketable skills while in the program, attending a university that has neither an elite brand nor a power-laden recruiting/alumni access…and then you fail the history academic job market. Now what? Now you’re truly left with nothing. Compare that to the guy who joined the PhD program at Harvard…and then dropped out after a few years to join a strategy consulting firm whose recruitment meeting he obtained through contacts struck at the local Harvard Club. Be honest with yourself: who’s better off?</p>
<p>Sakky, you want to refute you? Fine, so be it.<br>
It depends on the student’s interests. Also many departments allow students in US History to substitute a foreign language for a quantitative research course in statistics or sociology. It’s no guarantee that the student will take these classes seriously and integrate what they’ve learned into their dissertations. They are just alternative options for students who don’t want to or are uncomfortable with foreign languages.</p>
<p>Some departments are proposing a new field of study- digital humanities. I’m interested in seeing where this goes. It’s a new potential opportunity for students to develop marketable skills that can be used in education or public history.</p>
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You aren’t going to have a lot of time after you pass your comprehensive exams. Years 4 and 5 should be devoted to dissertation research because by the time your funding runs out in Year 5 and you don’t have additional funding lined up, then you need to find an actual job and work on your dissertation outside of your working hours. That’s very difficult to do but it’s doable.</p>
<p>I’m getting a quiet sense that history programs are seriously considering applicants who have worked at least several years outside of academia. Students are better off getting their marketable skills on the job than in a classroom. This includes foreign language training. If the PhD student wants to work in a job involving China on a regular basis, the student better get their fluency in Chinese (reading and speaking) in order BEFORE going into the program. I know that there are some advisers who do encourage their students to continue taking foreign language classes in their research languages for communication reasons. It all depends what the students’ end goals are. If the student’s end goal is to spend a year or two abroad doing research or a post-doc, further training in foreign language is strongly encouraged, preferably before entering in the program.</p>
<p>Again, it’s all timing issue for history PhD programs. Students only have so much time to explore that anything outside of history classes, including technology, programming, stats, languages, etc <em>should</em> be done before entering. The most successful students come in with enough preparation in the languages and/or have marketable skills because they can just focus on fine-tuning those and spend bulk of their time on their coursework.</p>
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50% generally drop out. Either they flunked the comprehensive exams or had family obligations or found an opportunity too good to pass up. True, no program can FORCE you to complete the degree. You’ll only just burn bridges in academia.
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<p>What if the OP doesn’t want to? What if the OP wants to study colonial American history with a focus on religion? The OP is better off exploring digital humanities or taking courses in public history. It depends on the student’s interest. </p>
<p>One of the ways that can make those years miserable is a wrong dissertation topic. Students need to have some kind of personal relationship with their dissertation topic. They’re going to be spending more than 3 years working on that and they will encounter people who don’t CARE about it and they need some kind of motivation to keep moving forward.</p>
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You are essentially requiring your “hypothetical” student to do a pre-professional focus? Believe it or not, the demand for economics or medical history is quite low. I’ve got a friend who got a PhD with a pre-professional focus (certainly not from a top program) and earned a MPH from a top-notch program at the same time. Guess what? She had NO interviews and ended up landing a general history job at a CC… part-time. After this semester, I believe, she’s leaving academia for an actual job in which she most certainly did not need her PhD for.</p>
<p>You do not <em>have</em> to be in a Top 10 program to land an interview in academia. Your chances are huge, sure, but with a strong adviser, interesting dissertation topic, reasonable expectations, consistent networking, and excellent career preparation from the department or university’s career services, it is possible to be just as competitive as a top-10 candidate.</p>
<p>I graduated with my MA from a top-10. That got me interviews but guess what? Employers were choosing people from less-than top 10. Why? They had the right experience or better prepared for the job. My current job was most certainly not because of my universities’ brands but rather networking.</p>
<p>No matter what graduate student does, s/he must be networking from Day 1.</p>
<p>Any responsible PhD advisor should counsel his students that… Sorry, your Phd advisor is a specialist in the arena you choose to focus on. Using the ^ example, if you want Colonial religious history, you find a grad program with that and the right profs. Your advisor will be a specialist in that (or as close as you can get.) He may suggest an angle or twist, but is he going to tell you to go into a different sub-field? (Maybe, if he has some reason he doesn’t want to work with you.) </p>
<p>Remember, OP is interested, at this point, in general US history. If he is the least bit interested in some specific aspect, he hasn’t yet said so. If he wishes to find a way to combine interests in economics or stats with history- he hasn’t said so. </p>
<p>What some of us are suggesting here is NOT that he take this direction or that one. We are saying, the wool is over your eyes if you think this is a cakewalk. </p>
<p>Use the undergrad period to explore and refine your interests.</p>
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<p>It seems to me that you have far more time than you may think. After all, by the time you pass your comprehensive exams, you really should have a sense of where you stand within the program. You should know by years 4/5 whether your department considers you to be a potential star historian or not (and it seems that you do need to be a potential star to have a credible chance on the history job market). You should have been doing sufficient networking to know what your odds will be, and if you haven’t, then that’s the time (immediately after your exams) when you should be calling meetings with as many faculty who are connected with the hiring/publication process to tell them what your research focus is and request an honest assessment of your hiring chances. If you determine that your chances are low, then that’s when your goals should pivot towards just simply finishing the PhD while obtaining marketable skills to do so. And as has been discussed throughout this thread (which I do not dispute), the chances for the vast majority of history Phd’s to place at an academic tenure-track position are low. </p>
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<p>Let me put it to you this way. I don’t know too many social scientists who are actually interested in, say, the Generalized Method of Moments. Or Limited Information Maximum Likelihood estimators. Or Multivariate Logits. So why are articles in top social science journals replete with such complexities? </p>
<p>I have been most impressed by the ability of PhD students to choose topics and methodologies that they never even dreamed of ever pursuing when they started because they realized that that’s what they needed to do in order to succeed in academia. This seems to be especially true in the social sciences (of which I classify history). I can only think of a tiny handful of social science PhD students who actually graduated with a dissertation written regarding both the specific topic and using the specific methodology that they thought that they would when they started the program. Most will change focus/methodology, often times quite dramatically, with such focus/methodology always seeming to be coincidentally ‘steered’ towards whatever happens to be a topic or methodology that the journals happen to be predominantly publishing at that particular time. </p>
<p>To give you a specific example from sociology, many (probably most) incoming PhD’s want to pursue a qualitative inductive study using ‘grounded theory’ of a particular social topic of their interest, whether that be crime, an ethnic group, or what have you, yet quickly realize in their first few years of reading journal papers that they need to be tooled up in advanced statistics/quant techniques, because that’s what journals want nowadays, as the percentage of qualitative articles continues to dwindle. Heck, some of them have arguably become fully fledged econometric/statistics scholars, with students who used to barely even understand or care what a regression even is, are now fully fluent in such arcana as Huber-White sandwich-estimators, propensity score matching, multivariate probit/logit, generalized linear mixed models, and the like. </p>
<p>To give you another example, as computational network theory becomes increasingly ‘publishable’ within the literature, plenty of PhD students become deeply adroit in the various computational methods of calculating network features. In fact, I can think of some people who actually used to be afraid of computers and barely knew how to use them for little more than just Web browsing who have now not only become fully proficient in a number of computational network software tools, but are now even developing their own tools. One of them told me that, frankly, this is what you need to do to get published and succeed in academia. </p>
<p>The same holds regarding research topics. Many incoming students hope to research their specific topic of choice, only to find that journals aren’t really publishing articles upon that topic anymore. Departments aren’t really hiring scholars of that topic. The topic is moribund. Resource Allocation is basically a dead topic in sociology/organizational-behavior; nobody has really published any papers on that in top journals in years. {To be clear, Resource Allocation has not been disproven, rather it’s just lost popularity as a research topic.} I can think of a number of students who originally wanted to study Resource Allocation but are now pursuing other topics. </p>
<p>The upshot is, whether they like it or not, young scholars have to conform to whatever journals and hiring/tenure committees desire. Whenever a particular topic or methodology becomes trendy, it behooves young scholars to follow that trend. And many of them display an impressive ability to do just that. As a thought experiment, ask yourself exactly why are so many social science journal articles published in the last 5 years replete with instrumental variable analysis and quasi-experiments? Is it really the case that social science departments just happened to recently admit boatloads of students and junior faculty who just so happen to enjoy using those methodologies? Or is it that they chose to learn those techniques because they realized that that’s what get published nowadays? To quote Gerry Davis, editor of ASQ: “…The
entry charge for publication in top journals of organization theory now seems to include time-series data on large samples with lots of control variables using the latest implementation of Stata…” (2010). </p>
<p>If you’re simply not willing to change your topic/methodology, then you have to be willing to assume the (substantial) risk that your research may render you unhireable. </p>
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<p>Well, what can I say? The truth is, Phd students risk numerous sources of misery, and one way to be miserable is knowing that your topic is unhireable. What then is your motivation to push forward for those 3 years? Like I said, many young scholars find that they must switch their focus to conform to what journals and hiring committees want. Sad but true. </p>
<p>Certainly, we would all like to pursue the topic that both interests us and is also desired by journals . If that describes you, then more power to you. But that does not describe most of us.</p>
<p>**Put bluntly, the true purpose of a good PhD program is not actually to allow you to pursue whatever topic you desire. The true purpose is to prepare you for the academic job market. ** After all, what’s so wonderful about a program that allows students to pursue the topics they love, if they can’t get hired anywhere? Sad but true. That’s how academia works.</p>
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<p>The timing issues that you cited hold equally well in your example. Obviously it would be wonderful if everybody would have developed marketable skillsets before they entered PhD programs. But what if they didn’t, and the programs admitted them anyway? What are those people supposed to do now? You have to work with the skills and opportunities that you actually have, not ones that you wish you had. Like I said, if you don’t have marketable skills before you entered a PhD program, then the program may be an opportunity to develop them. </p>
<p>{Maybe your point is that programs should stop admitting students who haven’t already developed marketable skills. But I think that’s ultimately a different issue.} </p>
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<p>I’m not ‘requiring’ that anybody do anything. What I am saying is that if you absolutely refuse to ever change your research focus, then you are assuming the risk that you will be rendered unhireable. </p>
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<p>Hey, if you’re not going to be in academia anyway, honestly, so what? After all, you have to live your life for yourself, not for other people. Other people may not appreciate the life choices you make, but they’re not going to have to live your life. </p>
<p>Besides, Sergey Brin and Larry Page dropped out of grad school. So did Jerry Yang and David Filo. Somehow I don’t think the academic community is too upset with them. </p>
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<p>It’s surely higher than plenty of other fields in history. Like I said, if you want an academic career, you are well advised to do what is necessary to improve your odds in the job market. </p>
<p>But more importantly, certain methodologies such as computational econometrics are highly marketable in industry, in case academia does not work out. </p>
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<p>Which is why I recommended attending a name-brand program. And by that, I don’t just mean a program that is well-branded within academia, but one within the general public. Harvard, frankly, is the king of educational brands. If you obtain a PhD from Harvard and you developed marketable skills while doing so (i.e. knowing Stata, SAS, and/or R backwards and forwards), you will be able to obtain interviews. </p>
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<p>Which I think only proves my point. At least you got the interview because you came from a top-10 program. Plenty of people won’t even get that far. Let’s face it - if you are obtaining your PhD in history from Mississippi State University, you’re not going to get an interview at McKinsey, no matter how strong your skills may be. </p>
<p>Now, sure, I agree that once you have the interview, you still have to close the sale. But that’s why I also recommended obtaining marketable skills so that you can close that sale.</p>
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<p>Being an expert of that field also should means that you’re an expert about the job market of that field. If he truly is a responsible and caring advisor, then it is his duty to honestly tell you what your odds of placement are in that field should you choose to pursue it. If he knows that the field is moribund - that journals aren’t really publishing on that topic, that hiring/tenure committees aren’t really interested in such candidates - then he should tell you all of that if he is being honest and compassionate, and then, yes, even advise you to choose a different topic under a different advisor in order to maximize your chances of placement. </p>
<p>Now, if he tells you that the odds are poor and you elect to pursue it anyway, then fair enough. At least you did so with full information. But to do otherwise is to lead you on. Remember, it’s your advisor who is ultimately supposed to be guiding you through the job market process. If he doesn’t think that somebody researching your topic can be placed, then he should say so from the very beginning.</p>
<p>Now you could argue that the program should never have admitted those students in the first place. For example, if nobody is really hiring new Colonial Religious History junior faculty, then those departments should simply stop admitting new students. True enough. But that’s neither here nor there. Given that you have been admitted, the question is, what should a responsible advisor actually tell you?</p>
<p>The problem with chasing marketable topics as a PhD candidate is that academic job markets are so thin that they are largely unpredictable even one year out and one typically needs to commit even before completing course work (i.e. 3+ years before going on the market). One is often better off being one of the few new graduates in a relatively unpopular topic area rather than being one of the herd in an area that seems to be the next big thing.</p>
<p>To be successful you need to be both very good and VERY lucky. Essentially everyone is very good, admissions and programs select for that. Consequently, the difference is largely luck. Which departments have lines for rookies the year that you come out, what topic areas are chosen by comparable rookies who happen to come out the same year, how the economy and markets effect funding, etc. These aren’t things that you can predict, much less control.</p>
<p>In an oversubscribed discipline such as History, anyone hoping for any level of assurance or control would apply only to the most elite programs (no lower than top 10) and simply not do a PhD if not accepted. It’s not like applying to undergraduate programs where you know that you must go somewhere. It makes no sense to apply to so-called safety schools unless you come from a developing country and have no good alternative options so opportunity costs are near zero.</p>
<p>Essentially, you’ll end up rolling the dice at some point and living with the consequences of whatever you throw. By only applying to elite programs you take the biggest risk on the front end, before you’ve sunk 4-6 years. If you apply to and accept admission to a non-elite program you will face far more risk on the back end and the cost of the ultimate and likely failure will be far greater.</p>
<p>It’s not a bad idea to do a PhD in an oversubscribed discipline, it just shortens the list of schools that you should consider applying to. In some business disciplines, it might make sense to consider as many as 25 or even 30 programs. In physical science, maybe as many as 20. In humanities, it might be a stretch to go as far as 10.</p>
<p>Sakky, just what is your dog in this race? OP said general US history and you keep referring to sociology and other subjects. What is your relationship to the history PhD process and prospects?</p>
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<p>I think it is safe to say that certain trends are long-lasting. For example, the current quantitative/statistical paradigm that is revolutionizing all social sciences (including history) is not going to stop anytime soon, and certainly not in the next 5-10 years, (even though it has almost certainly gone too far to the point of statistical fetishism). The side-benefit for scholars of that revolution is that statistical training, and especially training in modern statistical software, is a marketable skill outside of academia (probably because business managers are both impressed and intimidated by regression tables). </p>
<p>Nor, frankly, is the burgeoning growth of business schools, and hence the interest in business/finance/banking/economic history, going to disappear anytime soon. Indeed, given the increasing globalization along with advances in wealth and interest in business education among their populace within rising nations in Asia and South America, it’s safe to say that business schools will be a clearly growing trend over the foreseeable future. </p>
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<p>Numerous history PhD graduates migrate to other, frankly healthier, sectors within academia, as well they should. [Tom</a> Nicholas](<a href=“http://drfd.hbs.edu/fit/public/facultyInfo.do?facInfo=ovr&facId=337264]Tom”>http://drfd.hbs.edu/fit/public/facultyInfo.do?facInfo=ovr&facId=337264)is one, [Noel</a> Maurer](<a href=“http://drfd.hbs.edu/fit/public/facultyInfo.do?facInfo=bio&facId=300128]Noel”>http://drfd.hbs.edu/fit/public/facultyInfo.do?facInfo=bio&facId=300128) is another, [Sophus</a> Reinert](<a href=“http://drfd.hbs.edu/fit/public/facultyInfo.do?facInfo=ovr&facId=603179]Sophus”>http://drfd.hbs.edu/fit/public/facultyInfo.do?facInfo=ovr&facId=603179) is yet another. Their message regarding the history job market is consistent: the market is indeed harsh, but you improve your odds tremendously by picking topics and methodologies that are consistent with where academia is trending. For example, as long as business schools continue to hire incessantly, as long as they continue to value statistical/econometric methodologies, then history students are well advised to choose a topic and a methodology that conforms to those trends. </p>
<p>Personally, I find the opposite philosophy to be disturbing. Those advisors who categorically refuse to advise their students on what the current and foreseeable job market values, who simply tell their students to research whatever they desire with no guidance about how to frame the research to conform to the demands of the job market and journals are doing a tremendous disservice to their own students and to themselves as well. As long as hiring committees and journals prioritize certain attributes over others, then it behooves departments to advise students what those attributes are in order to maximize their chances of success. For example, if one type of methodology or field is truly moribund, then you should advise your students not to go there, and if they do, then they be fully informed that they are unlikely to succeed on the job market.</p>