To quote Mark Twain: “There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.”
A lot of statistics were thrown out in that thread about New College, but it’s success in preparing students for PhD programs wasn’t one of them. Nor was there any discussion of what this says about their mission. High transfer rates, for example, were seen as a failure when it might simply reflect students at a liberal arts college finding their direction and moving to a college which offers the program they had become interested in, which wasn’t available in a small school with less than 1000 students.
It takes a group of academicians to focus on PhD production. I’m not sure what the significance of that is. In many fields, the terminal degree is something other than a PhD, for example JD, PsyD, EdD, DPT, OTD, MBA, MD, DDS, etc. A PhD is a research degree while some other doctorates are practitioner’s degrees. Some professionals will pursue two doctoral degrees, e.g. MD/PhD. One is not superior to the other; they’re just different. So, I’m not sure what the significance of a study which focuses on PhD production is. What is it telling us? Is a school which produces PhD’s at a higher rate supposed to be somehow better than a school which doesn’t?
A person with no axe to grind could look at the data and conclude that colleges with poor advising have a higher rate of PhD production because their faculty and Dean’s do not adequately warn their students of the abysmal hiring prospects of new PhD’s in many fields. Whereas colleges with strong advising do a better job of steering such students to career paths with a better career track.
I was praying to dear god that my kid steps off the PhD track group think in his small cohort at college :-).
As a separate matter I also wonder if women go for a PhD more than men from LACs – anecdotally I am noticing that new-grad women seem less commercially inclined than men.
Women may figure that the itinerant work-life of a long term adjunct fits their timetable better than the traditional “can’t have a baby now because I am grinding towards tenure”. And if they are making that choice with full knowledge of what that entails- more power to them.
But I see a semi-permanent academic “underclass” emerging; women with doctorates, patching together three adjunct positions at different institutions, no benefits or career track, and I wonder how much advising did they get as undergrads. Wouldn’t it be ironic if we are getting to the point where a corporate career offers BETTER work-life balance for parents than an academic career?
This is really sad. The instincts of women going down these paths is very strong – perhaps because they don’t like corporate environments. Just yesterday I was talking a friend about his kid wanting to do a PhD in Philosophy. I was telling him to ask her to go talk to the department on what % of the kids get into a PhD, what % get tenure track positions, what % get tenure, and what % end up teaching at a top 10 place, which is her aspiration. Those are daunting odds as you step through that chain.
My son eventually made the choice to be on the commercial side partly because he said grad school is 80 hours/wk, and a job is 50 hours/wk – in some industries even 40 hours/week. And some friends tell me that even after tenure academic work load runs 70 hours/wk.
Count me as another who is delighted that my kid finally decided against the phd track. I told her only to pursue it if she literally could not envision any other future-if it was a true calling. Thankfully, it was not.
This is almost the exact language that my son’s prof used with him in advising against a PhD just because you like a subject. He said their generation was lucky with tenure etc. This is a celebrated prof that has done exceptionally well.
A typical teaching load at an R1 is 2-2, with a combination of graduate and undergraduate classes. I’m not sure where people get the idea that professors at R1s do not teach undergraduates – they most certainly do, from giant lectures to small seminars. In lecture courses, though, they generally grade just a fraction (or sometimes none) of the students, because graduate students take on most of the discussion sections and grading. Maybe it’s different in STEM fields in which professors are in charge of labs, but in humanities and social sciences, the 2-2 load is overwhelmingly the rule.
So that’s not “barely teaching.” But there are more opportunities for leave and course releases, which means there are more visiting professors to fill in, and there are more grad students teaching classes or discussion sections than you would find at a LAC, which usually wouldn’t have grad programs (with some exceptions). And in R1 STEM programs, there are a lot of Ph.D.s in non-teaching positions (in labs), but I don’t think they’re counted as faculty, anyway.
I find it interesting that fintech, the most useless career in terms of its use to society, is considered great while a PhD, aka teaching & research, is not.
It is not a question of considering a path great; it is the practical realities that there are very few positions for phd holders and supply greatly exceeds demand, a status likely to continue in the future. That leads to tremendous underemployment of phd’s and a fair amount of unhappiness among those pursuing the phd.
It is not coincidence that a disproportionate number of phd holders come from monied families. If one has independent wealth one is free to pursue learning indefinitely. The rest of us have different constraints.
Yeah, sorry. I should have been careful to specify that the 1-2 courses per year for R1 profs is for science research faculty. Many of them teach undergrad courses, some only teach grad courses. And many of them do it super well!
I know the teaching load is typically higher for profs in other disciplines and/or profs without external grant funding (which you usually need to be tenured in science at an R1). I know plenty of R1 science faculty who only teach one class per year, to grad students. But I know others who teach a couple intro undergrad courses per year. Still others have to teach more because they haven’t been able to maintain external funding, or because they’re in a teaching-specific position. It does vary by discipline. I agree with everything you’ve said.
Who mentioned fintech as an alternative? I’m thinking of the new grads I know- one teaching Classics at a private school instead of pursuing a doctorate, one working at a foundation which funds programs to break the cycle of multi-generational poverty instead of a PhD in Public Policy, one working in the Major Gifts office at a museum instead of a PhD in Art History.
I don’t believe any of these are useless career paths. If any of these young people decide to go back and do a doctorate in a few years, I am confident that academia will still be there. But for now, given the lousy job market in Classics, Public Policy and Art History (at least until all the boomer professors retire) seems like rational decision-making to me.
Over the course of a career, a tenured professor would typically have at least 10 phd-student advisees. Only one of those advisees can replace him when he retires. What are the other 9 going to do? The college age population is not expanding to generate the need for new teachers. Some scientific areas support research, but again, there are far too many fish in that pond already.
Regardless of the soundness of going for a doctoral degree with impending shifts in demographics and demand for college, I still think that those who choose to go for a DOCTORATE will be more intellectually curious than average. Master’s, I can totally see that as buying time to find a job/better job, but for the doctorate, I think 99% of people would just find a different field and not go through all the efforts to complete it. So the students might be intellectually curious from extremely wealthy families or intellectually curious with little focus on pragmatics for the future, but it still doesn’t diminish the intellectual atmosphere of the college.
I myself had started in on the doctoral path in a humanities subject at a Top X school, but even I could see the writing on the wall the more I read the Chronicle of Higher Education (combined with my advisor’s extinguishing my love of the subject). I never thought about it in relation to the quality of advising I received in undergrad (at a midwestern flagship), though I did have close relationships with several professors. Something to think about!
OT: I just did an internet search on my grad school advisor and his Rate My Professor site (at a different university) came up. Of all the RMP reviews I’ve seen, this one was the worst.
Is the “academic underclass” primarily women or is it proportional to the number of women earning PhDs and the number of men earning PhDs? I know that for undergrad, women are now definitely outnumbering men, so it may well be the same for PhDs. Or it could be that women are disproportionately getting PhDs in humanities and social sciences where there are fewer non-teaching options and men are disproportionately getting PhDs in STEM fields where there are more non-academic options. But yes, the adjuncts of academia are certainly disadvantaged in many ways, and looking at the increasing percentage of teaching positions that are being switched to adjunct roles is particularly unsettling.
The math doesn’t really work like you’re describing, because Ph.D.s don’t just replace professors in Ph.D.-granting institutions. The vast majority of professors teach in colleges and universities that don’t offer doctorates, and that’s where most Ph.D.s end up teaching. I do agree that the job market is horrible and will be for some time, and there aren’t enough jobs for qualified Ph.D.s; this situation is due to a lot of factors, but a 1:1 replacement ratio isn’t one of them.
One of the reasons that women outnumber men in the adjunct ranks is structural gender inequity. If a (heterosexual) couple has to relocate for one spouse’s career, it’s more likely to be the man’s. In academic (heterosexual) couples, the trailing spouse is more likely to be the woman, who then has far less geographic flexibility in finding a tenure-track job. And all of this usually happens right around the time the couple might be having children, the burden for which tends to fall on the woman and delay her career further. Certainly, not all couples make the same decisions in the same ways, but this is more about what happens after people get their doctorates than before (i.e., gender ratios in grad school). I know so many academic couples who have followed this pattern – most of whom never intended to! – and very few who have not.
