The Disappearing Humanities Faculty Jobs

All right, I’ll quibble. The US, like the world, has never been wealthier than it is now. There are still plenty of well-heeled students - but they’ve been joined by an influx of those who never could’ve gone to college 25 years ago. That’s why the percentage of college graduates has increased from just under 10% (1965) to about 22% (1990) and now 30%. That means the benefits of college education are more evenly distributed, and there are more students with specialized majors (e.g. Business, Marketing) crowding out humanities students who once would’ve been hired because having a degree was enough. It’s a shift from a Latin major earning $60,000/year in today’s dollars as an entry-level employee to 3-4 Business majors doing similar work for the same company, and earning $45,000 a year.

In the 70s, students may have “flocked” to the humanities (at least relative to today), but it certainly wasn’t without thinking about jobs. The fact was – and I think @NotVerySmart basically has it right – there were plenty of jobs for the college-educated elite, without regard to specific skills they had learned in college. That’s because, on average, they were more intelligent, and they started with a lot more privilege and connection, than people who didn’t go to college or who went but didn’t graduate. Also, that was effectively the beginning of the huge boomer-fueled boom in the economy. There were lots of knowledge-worker slots unfilled.

Anyway, while at the beginning of the 70s, academic careers in the humanities may have looked like a decent plan, I know very well that by the mid-to-late 70s that was crumbling before people’s eyes. I was one of those people who wanted an academic career in the humanities, and I was in a perfect position to start, but by the time I was a college junior it was clear to me that even the best, smartest, hardest-working graduate students and junior faculty faced daunting odds and horrible choices. I started making certain I had other options, with the enthusiastic support of my faculty mentors, who said, essentially, “If you have the ability and interest to do something else, you probably should.”

I must say I have not noticed this tendency at all. The most popular career plans on these boards among high school students involve medicine, engineering, or banking/finance.

The desire for a career in academe now is pretty similar to the desire for a career in the arts. It’s pursued for love/obsession, not money or security. There aren’t a lot of students out there with the obsessive drive/interest in a particular academic area to go for the scholarly life.

^ that’s very true. Especially the comparison to the arts.
Very, very few of the students here on cc are interested in majoring in the humanities and even fewer in becoming professors. The typical ‘ambitious’ careers involve medicine, CS, engineering, or IB/consulting, with enough who have high stats and are considering math, economics, business.
I was directly told from a relatively well-known university where many students are pre-law, the number of future philosophy majors in the current freshman class numbers 6 out of thousands and thousands.

I for one would like to thank @Zinhead for posting this article here on CC. My kids are not remotely interested in a humanities related career nor am I well versed in the market for humanities jobs, so it was a nice primer for me. I do consider an education grounded in the liberal arts critical to a solid undergraduate experience, so I wonder how long before the lack of being able to earn a decent living teaching humanities will start affecting the talent pool of teachers in universities.

I am seeing this issue in public high schools my kids go to now. K-12 teachers are generally so poorly compensated relative to other professions while being required to do so much more now, that many of the best and brightest are not going into teaching anymore. The quality of teaching has definitely deteriorated. There is also an extreme gender related skew among public school teachers, with very few men and a lot of women among the teacher ranks. This poses unique challenges for boys in public schools, because women teach, inspire and discipline very differently than men.

Not sure if this is purely coincidental, but my kids have also told me that some of the teachers (specially women) have no tolerance for discussing anything controversial in class. They want a clean, sanitized class with well behaved polite students who don’t raise any troubling questions or argue too much in class. Not sure if this is because of a new breed of teachers entering classrooms now.

If something like this happens in colleges, it will be a tragedy.

heck, this happens in professional school. My son is attending a top 10 law school and several of his professors said that they flat out would not be discussion, x, y, and z, bcos of…

That is a shame, as a philosophy undergrad would be a great primer for becoming a lawyer. Many pre-laws seem to take the “easy” courses in political science or criminal justice in an attempt to boost the GPA.

Pre-law students chasing (what they think are) easy-A courses is not surprising, given the GPA and LSAT emphasis in law school admissions.

The number of people awarded bachelor’s degrees in “Health professions and related programs” in the 2012-13 academic year was about 2 and a half times the number in the 2002-03 year (https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d14/tables/dt14_322.10.asp?current=yes), so its faculty-student ratio declined. The gain in humanities faculty over that time period matches the increase in all bachelor’s degrees over that time period (both 36% higher in 2012-13 than in 2002-03) and exceeds the gain in humanities bachelor’s degrees awarded. It looks like the health professions teaching area has been, of these two areas, the area effectively more depleted.

@bluebayou: As a philosophy major, most of my fellow philosophy students wanted to go to law school. I can proudly state that I feel my philosophy degree prepared me no better than anyone else.

I will say that very few of my philosophy contemporaries, including those pursuing advanced degrees in philosophy, thought there was any real chance of doing it long term.

As far as humanities master’s degrees are concerned, the gain in numbers also appears less than the gain in faculty (https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d14/tables/dt14_323.10.asp).

There are jobs for liberal arts majors if you have some skill sets http://chronicle.com/article/Liberal-Arts-Majors-Have/236749?cid=trend_au&elqTrackId=6e4f5f9950b8487c9ddbc00eb19e4474&elq=9980ad498b7f45f5842649beb36b0f8a&elqaid=9408&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=3318

And more info on salaries by skill set with a liberal arts education (warning, the article is long, but fabulous) http://burning-glass.com/wp-content/uploads/BGTReportLiberalArts.pdf?platform=hootsuite

Hang out on the college major forums sometime. Yes, the ones you listed are probably the most popular (although I would say that software development and computer science has edged out banking/finance a bit), but being a college professor is a very popular career goal that I see pop up a lot on this website.

A long time, I think. I have a PhD in a social science field, so I have lots of friends in the social sciences and humanities with PhDs or earning PhDs. The ones who truly drink the Kool-Aid - who do have that obsessive passion for the field that at least puts them in the running for success at scholarship - are kind of part of the problem in that regard, because they honestly don’t care how little humanities and some social science professors are paid. They would rather make $45,000 a year living in a small rural town 4 hours from the nearest city just to get the chance to teach 18th century Japanese literature to a small handful of college seniors. And I’m not snarking - I’m being genuine. For a lot of people, that’s an idyllic dream. I can’t say that it’s one I didn’t have, too - if you look back to my posts 2-3 years ago you’ll see me talking about wanting to teach psychology at a small liberal arts college.

The competition for these positions is enormous - a small, mid-ranked, tuition-dependent liberal arts college in a rural/suburban area that pays less than $60K a year can easily get 200+ applications for one open position. At least half of them will have the PhD in hand from a great program, a published book, and several years of teaching experience. An elite liberal arts college, and/or one that’s near a metro area or other universities? 300+ applications. Most of which will be not just qualified but WELL qualified. They could cut the bottom 25%, then select at random out of a hat and probably still have an excellent scholar who could competently do the job.

Add to that that there aren’t a whole lot of decent prospects for a humanities PhD out of academia that allow them to use their degree…not that humanities PhDs can’t get non-academic work, because they can. But none of that non-academic work will allow them to really dig into their passion the way that an academic position would. So you create a situation where there will, at least for the foreseeable future, be far more obsessed humanities scholars than there are jobs to put them in (and social science and life sciences, for that matter. Probably most of the physical sciences, too, especially the more theoretical ones. The only academic fields that are thriving are ones that have significant competition from the non-academic sector, like computer science or accounting or nursing).

The key, I think, starts earlier: Start dissuading young starry-eyed college students from getting PhDs, and cut the sizes of most PhD programs (especially in the social sciences and humanities, but in other fields too). PhD programs are churning out far more young scholars than the world actually needs. The problem is that programs have no vested interest in cutting their sizes, because the doctoral students lend prestige to a department, give the senior professors someone to teach really niche small seminars too, and provide an endless workforce of people to teach freshman composition so the senior professors don’t have to.

@jym626 - It is ironic that both articles linked suggest that humanities majors learn computer programming to get a job. An excerpt.

In the meantime, from the Wall Street Journal a few days ago.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/job-seeking-ph-d-holders-look-to-life-outside-school-1465924943

@Zinhead,
The 2 articles are related (one references the other) so yes, there is overlap in content. It seems a key point they make is:

And it says “a small level of proficiency”, which is not defined, that I saw.

Shouldn’t be earth shaking that some broader, more in-demand skills enhance hiring opps.

And as the number of academic jobs shifts, don’t forget how many faculty are asked to teach courses not strictly their specialties, rather than hire another specialist.

“The competition for these positions is enormous - a small, mid-ranked, tuition-dependent liberal arts college in a rural/suburban area that pays less than $60K a year can easily get 200+ applications for one open position. At least half of them will have the PhD in hand from a great program, a published book, and several years of teaching experience. An elite liberal arts college, and/or one that’s near a metro area or other universities? 300+ applications. Most of which will be not just qualified but WELL qualified. They could cut the bottom 25%, then select at random out of a hat and probably still have an excellent scholar who could competently do the job.”

Looking at the pay scale for our district the PhD History teacher n our high school’s IB program probably makes 90K a year based on number of years served and degree. So that may be a better bet for many! Maybe not as “fun” as being a professor.

While I agree with the suggestion in some of the comments here about the implications of the glut of PhD’s produced, I disagree with some of the inferences drawn from that. And I disagree with the idea that learning to “code” is somehow demeaning to the humanities specialist.

An awful lot of “academic” publications appear in news media, blogs, and other analytic forums. Increasingly these publications use graphics and illustrations along with the words. The humanist with talent in visual presentation has possibilities outside of academia. The social scientist, whether the field be economics, political science, sociology, geography or an applied field such as urban planning or program evaluation, have options outside of academia. And in those careers they can draw on their research and deep and critical reading of the literature, their ability to conduct quantitative analyses, and their ability to write well for both professional and lay audiences.

Look at the masthead of the major online blogs, journals, and newspapers. For example: http://fivethirtyeight.com/masthead . There are many people working on both the creative and production side of the media (and much of production IS creative). Skills in film, animation, and video are in demand. We see almost no such demand on this discussion board, and scant discussion of how the skill-set needed in old, established (but “reputable”) professions has been changing. We make words here, not graphic illustrations. But read the newspapers and blogs. For example: http://www.vox.com/.

I write this as a lifelong academic in the social sciences. I’m neither optimistic nor pessimistic about academia. (I’ll admit to being somewhat mystic about it.) Career options both inside and outside academia for the well trained humanist or social scientist who is skilled in multiple ways of contending are still available and being defined anew every day.

But is the issue one of PhDs not getting jobs? Or not getting jobs in their field?

I know plenty of PhDs who left academia and are doing quite well; it’s the ones who’ve stayed in academics that seem to be struggling. They’re either trying to cobble a living/career out of being adjuncts/non-tenure-track jobs or having a hard time with the publish-or-perish pressures.