The Disappearing Humanities Faculty Jobs

Welcome to reality! The cold hard truth is that no one wants to pay that many grads to fulfill their “dreams”. This is no different than any other job.

Except that most professional fields don’t have a large academic legacy preparation infrastructure producing advanced degree holders with no good job at the end of the pipeline. That’s the difference. We’re talking about graduate school here, not undergrad.

A PhD is a professional degree and the profession is undergoing severe structural contraction. One doesn’t get a PhD just for self-development, enrichment or interest (unlike a liberal arts undergraduate degree). The opportunity cost of spending your twenties in graduate school with nothing to show for it at the end (or employment you can’t stand or could have gotten otherwise without the PhD) is just too high. I wouldn’t recommend going to graduate school in the humanities to anyone unless you literally cannot see yourself doing anything else. And of course one should never, ever pay for a PhD.

I disagree. The “only” large academic professional degrees that has a job waiting for it is an MD/DO and perhaps a Pharmacy degree.

Lawyers are a dime a dozen. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we are graduating 2x the humber of JD’s that the market can absorb/needs.

I guess we have a different definition of ‘professional’ since I would put PhD’s into the academic category.

Except that many people pursue PhDs with no interest in working in academia or being academics. So that’s kind of a misleading definition, bluebayou, although it’s true that they’re not what this thread is about.

right, but those are really not the subject of this thread, which is hume PhD’s for academic jobs.

Obviously, many earn a PhD for industry or research/think tanks or for government jobs, including management/leadership in school systems. But I would bet big cyber-dollars that the Deans of nearly all of those academic departments (where such folks earn their PhD’s.) don’t consider themselves holding a professional degree or that their department even offers a professional degree. Exceptions might be a PhD from an Education School, or Egineering, but then those are degree-granting professional schools to begin with.

OTOH, I just might be ignorant.

Oh come on. PhD programs are, by and large, “professor/researcher school.” Unless you are the lucky recipient of a trustfund or you are a true bohemian (or you are a government supported ewiger student in Germany, although they are now cracking down on this), you can’t spend a decade of your life in higher ed for no guaranteed outcome.

The lawyer glut is fairly recent. But for 40 years the academic job market in the humanities has been in crisis.

NJSue, there are 3 PhDs in my immediate family - no one is in academics. One actually started in academia, got tenure, and quit right afterwards. :))

The other two never considered academia. One went into government as an analyst, the other into the private research sector. My daughter is starting a PhD program next fall with no intention of being an academic, instead remaining in the industry sector she’s worked in for the past 6 years. (She needs the PhD for all of the higher-level positions.)

That was my point when I responded to bluebayou’s comment that she’d classify PhDs as academics.

‘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.’
My oldest son graduated from a private college (only because it was top for his field) recently. Several of the tenured faculty would spend large percentages of the teaching time on their favorite political subject, daring the students to ‘challenge’ the thinking. The teacher reviews were awful, students hated them, but nothing could be done. As class registrations tightened up, you were sometimes stuck. The advice was just ‘agree’ and write compliant papers. Because of the professors’ race or sexual orientation, little was done. Administration just avoided the issue. Student press refused to deal discuss, as past journalism students lost their battles.
Not an unusual situation, as I talk to other parents.
Solution is easy… dump tenure. That ONE change would transform college education for the better.

Fewer than 30 percent of current college faculty are tenured or tenure-track. If you want to actually avoid being taught by a tenured professor, it’s very easy to do. Tenure is already being effectively abolished for most new hires. Tenure is not responsible for the occasional culture clash between academics and students.

^^Agree that tenure has little/nothing to do with the lack of faculty jobs in humanities and, for that matter, all disciplines. It is a basic econ: supply/demand. There are just too many PhD’s being produced every year to be absorbed. This is no different than the field of law, where we graduate twice the number of lawyers every year that the US needs. (according to Bureau of Labor Statistics).

There is a reason that only 50% of law grads can find a legal job that requires a JD.

The ONLY way to limit the unemployed/underemployed of PhD’s (and JD’s) is to reduce the supply of grads.

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Not really. The problem is that many students want to get well-paid jobs. Unfortunately, they realize it in their 20s, when it is too late to learn math/science/engineering. Students don’t have enough math/science background for any STEM/finance/econ/medical jobs. Thus, they look around and try to find something that doesn’t require math, but promises decent salary. Bingo: JD, MBA, PhD !

In their late 20s they, suddenly, realize that all these JD, MBA, PhDs are not enough to get a job. As a next step, they look around and apply for teacher’s positions (Ph.D.s), sales and marketing (MBAs), and regulatory/political offices (JDs).

The ONLY way to limit the unemployed/underemployed of PhD’s (and JD’s) is to teach math / science. It gives students more flexibility in job market.

If everyone goes into math and science, won’t those jobs become scarcer as well?

And what about people who, you know, actually want to study the humanities?

There are a number of ways to limit the underemployment of PhDs without expecting everyone to become programmers and engineers. Whether or not humanities PhD programs and institutions as a whole are willing to implement them is another issue.

In the meantime, even in the current climate, this newly-minted English PhD finished her program with no debt and some savings, and has a reasonably paying job through a university-affiliated research center for at least the next year. Longer term, the “worst case scenario” would involve converting my PhD into a secondary teaching certificate – not terribly difficult to do in my state – and making the transition to high school teaching. Neither that, nor my current position, is my “dream job”, but I’m hardly dooming myself to a life of virtuous poverty.

The issue for hiring in higher ed must also be looked at through the lens of demand. Many colleges face shortfalls of students now that population is going down and high schools are not able to educate most students at college-ready levels. About 70% of colleges were undersubscribed. CC folks see “all” colleges as competitive because most colleges that CC folks care about are the same few. The vast majority of colleges do not have enough students. Many are facing closing down entirely.

In that context, the issue is not tenure it’s how to keep the doors open. Humanities are in less demand than STEM programs, I’d venture (someone pls get me stats STAT!) which may account for why some schools are closing them down. They are prob a net drain on the budget.

The situation is a little more complicated than you all are describing. Or at least I think it is.

For one, the declining student base is not equally distributed regionally. And the increasing affluence (at least until recently) of people who live in countries that have not invested enough in their higher education systems to meet demand has produced a significant stream of foreign students to the U.S. for undergraduate education. That’s something that gets discussed on CC all the time, and something we see and feel reading countless posts by non-U.S. students.

That doesn’t mean PhD programs aren’t graduating more people than there are jobs in higher education available. They are. And student tastes are definitely shifting away from humanities in a big way.

It’s ludicrous to suggest that any student in the past 20 years has entered a PhD program in the humanities with the idea that it was a ticket to a well-paying job. For the most part, I think they really love the humanities, and they look at PhD programs as crappy jobs competitive with working at Starbucks but instead of drawing espressos you get to read Great Works, think Great Thoughts, and talk with Great Scholars. You defer deciding what to do with your life for a few years, get some stuff out of your system, and maybe, just maybe, luck into an academic job somewhere that pays poorly – maybe slightly better than poorly, especially if you value the extras – but lets you do what you love. (An English Lit grad student who was an important mentor for my daughter, who I think was a 2003 Harvard AB, just got a ladder faculty appointment — her first – at a public flagship, albeit one better known for football than for literary scholarship. Prior to that, she has had a series of 1-2 year non-ladder appointments all over the country.) The real cost of graduate school is the opportunity cost, and if your alternative opportunity is food service and moving back with your parents – as was probably the case for lots of kids graduating in 2008-2011 – then being in a decently funded PhD program really does cost nothing. At least until you think of something better to do.

Depends on the field. If you consider linguistics a humanities field (not everyone does), for example, that field’s academic job market didn’t actually properly crash until 2008ish, and that was pretty well unexpected by everyone in that field. (And on the non-humanities side, the academic job market in the life sciences had crashed by the mid-1990s, again to the surprise of lots of people in those fields.)

Also, there were a lot of humanities PhD faculty, not just students, who were blissfully unaware of how bad the job market was at that time—I know that when I entered my PhD program in the mid-1990s, there were still a lot of claims that a wave of faculty retirements were just a few years off, opening everything up for those of us in the pipeline.

Really, from reading the Chronicle of Higher Education regularly for most than 20 years, I’d say that it isn’t really until the last 10 to 12 years that people in academia have generally become properly aware that the academic job market is broken for the vast majority of fields. (And that’s actually probably the result of a generational shift, I think—it’s only relatively recently that there’s a critical mass of faculty who have experienced the academic job market as it now exists.) Even then, though, a lot of students entering PhD programs aren’t suitably warned about what they’ll be facing—and even those that are, well, you’re talking about the best and brightest, most of whom have had a pretty easy time with anything connected with college, and so of course they’re going to expect they’ll be successful, no matter the general odds, because they’ve always been successful no matter the general odds.

It’s a problem from all sides, really.

The idea that young people actually choose graduate school in the humanities as a math-avoidance life strategy is absurd, as is the idea that they are motivated primarily by salary.

I agree; PhD students have always been successful students, and it’s puzzling and psychologically painful to reach the top of the educational ladder only to have the trapdoor to the sky nailed shut.

PS if you are a good enough student get into a funded PhD program in the humanities, you are probably reasonably proficient at math compared to the general population, at least enough to be a finance major if not an engineer. You just have chosen not to be. Recently there seems to be a number of individuals on CC who seemingly cannot understand why people might choose an occupation that is not quant-based unless they are stupid, a view that I find, well, stupid.

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Life-Science PhDs had far more flexibility on job market. Their skills are versatile. Pharmacological industry, medicine, education, patents, clinical work, forensics, biostatistics, ecology, government work related to clinical trials or ecology, regulatory, patents, intellectual property.

What would a Ph.D in linguistics do? Education, marketing, advertising industry? What else?

<the idea="" that="" young="" people="" actually="" choose="" graduate="" school="" in="" the="" humanities="" as="" a="" math-avoidance="" life="" strategy="" is="" absurd,="" they="" are="" motivated="" primarily="" by="" salary.="">

Why absurd? If you have a degree in, for example, history. And can’t find a job after college, what would you do? Lots of people go into Masters or Ph.D. programs if they can’t find good employment.

http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110420/full/472276a.html indicates that the job market for them is not so great either.

I think college grads of any field can find jobs, even if they are jobs they don’t like. And there are many ways to make yourself more employable besides returning to school for another degree. You can acquire discrete vocational skills that employers value without doing that. The point of college is learning what you enjoy and are good at, so that you can find interesting work that suits and motivates you.

Not everyone is cut out to be a STEM major, and if everyone were a STEM major, as @apprenticeprof points out, then there would be no competitive advantage to being one. I also know many people with STEM majors/careers who have struggled, been laid off, had to move away from family for short term assignments, whose jobs were replaced by cheaper H1bs, etc. , who lost their jobs when the US gov’t closed the nearby fort or stopped the funding for their research, when AT&T was bought by Lucent, etc. STEM training is great, it’s important and necessary, but it does not guarantee economic security. I live in an area that had Bell Labs, AT&T, Telcordia, Lucent/Alcatel etc. I know from observation that smart, hardworking STEM folks are not immune to job loss and financial insecurity. I know of several American STEM -trained kids who can’t get good jobs because of corporate reliance on cheap foreign H1b workers. The idea that Americans are lazy and won’t do math is not true.