Are Your Students Interested in Ph.D. Programs?
In a four-part series, I suggest that all potential graduate students be asked to think about the four D's: Delay, Diversity, Destination, and Debt. In today's installment, I discuss delay
I keep my fingers crossed for readers who are in the path of Hurricane Ian: good luck, friends. And if you are inclined to do so, please:
Now is the time of year when students’ thoughts turn to graduate school. Some will be seniors, and others will be recent alums who rode out the pandemic in a job or took time off. But when a young person tells you that they are considering a Ph.D. in a humanities field, what will you tell them?
Please think carefully about this because pursuing a Ph.D. in the humanities is not like getting a professional degree. It doesn’t necessarily pay back the investment of time and money in any straightforward way. It doesn’t necessarily lead to the job most young scholars thought they wanted when they decided to graduate school.
Although college and university faculty are routinely characterized as “elites,” nearly all of us who are fully employed in the humanities make less than a lawyer, doctor, or businessperson. We also make less than our colleagues in the sciences, in some social sciences (for example, economics), and many athletic coaches.
But as anyone who follows academic Twitter is well aware, getting secure, full-time humanities employment in the first place is a struggle. Whereas holders of professional degrees often have a broad scope of jobs available to them, many humanities Ph.D.’s scramble for full employment and the vast majority of academic workers in the humanities do not have traditional, tenure-stream jobs with full salaries and benefits. According to a 2020 report by the AAUP, 75% of American faculty teach off the tenure track, and around half of that number work as adjunct or contingent faculty at one or (usually) more schools.
However, this is what is mystifying: thousands of new students start a Ph.D. program every year without genuinely understanding the economic situation in the humanities or what it means for their aspirations.
So without further ado, the first thing I have learned over the years is that most people who aspire to a graduate degree in the humanities would benefit from delay: ideally, someone who thinks they want a Ph.D. would not apply to graduate school for at least one, if not two or three years, after taking the B.A.
Depending on a student’s class and ethnic background, as well as their immigration status, this may not be easy. Many families worry that once a student leaves school, they will never continue their education. Many families believe a graduate degree is a must for a successful life. Other students, often those who have been very successful students their whole lives, may want to stick with what they are good at: writing papers, reading books, and doing research. Yet others have fantasies about becoming who the professors they admire have become and can’t imagine why you would leave a university campus for any other place.
By “delay,” I don’t mean that once students’ attachment to learning becomes more abstract, they will give up the dream of a humanities graduate program, although some will, which is fine. I mean that too many students confuse applying to graduate school with the process they have recently gone through to get into college. They believe it is the natural next step, and there is little to be gained from waiting.
But there is. Delay creates time for soul-searching. Many unemployed academics regret having spent six to eight prime earning years in the low-paying work that most graduate programs will expect you to do as part of your program. Entering a Ph.D. program is as much an economic as a spiritual decision, and it ought to be made with clear eyes. Frankly, unless you come from money, in graduate school, you will work very hard and be poor. I will talk more about money in subsequent posts. Still, there is a bottom line. The only way to get the money you need to support yourself in most Ph.D. programs is by taking out loans or doing extra teaching at a salary lower than your graduate stipend.
There’s nothing wrong with being poor, especially if you are happy in your work, but it has consequences. It means you will take on debt. It means that you will probably be in graduate school longer than your Ivy League peers, who are fully funded and often have stipends adequate for survival. It may mean that you have difficulty accessing good medical care. You will live in substandard housing, take on more debt than you can pay back in a reasonable amount of time, and not dream of starting a family until your late twenties. These are not possibilities: they are facts.
Many graduate students become disappointed or disheartened as they enter the dissertation stage after years of being poor. After a year or two on the job market, some fear that the entire enterprise was a waste of time. And some claim that their undergraduate advisors not only supported their aspirations for a Ph.D. but urged them to do it without ever warning them of these risks and hardships.
I don’t believe that is always true, but it is sometimes true. I also think that people who are excited about the future sometimes hear what they want to hear. I remember talking to a college senior who had been admitted to a mid-prestige university for a history degree with the full support of their advisor. During lunch with several younger faculty and three post-docs, they were given unanimous advice that accepting this offer was wrong. Two post-docs had been on the job market for three years, and one was on the verge of walking away from academic work. This young person enrolled in the fall anyway, and today…is teaching six courses a semester at four different urban colleges. And they are really angry.
Delay should not necessarily turn a person away from graduate study in the humanities, however. Delay is productive. It can send a student into a program better informed about the future. It can give them time to think about how they might approach their education as a path that could lead to careers other than one defined by a tenure-track teaching job. It can give them time to find the most innovative programs in their discipline, ones coming to terms with the lousy job market. Remember that, except for students who come from academic families, all most prospective Ph.D.’s know about academic work is what they have seen as students—they have never seen how the sausage is made. Many are unaware that some of their faculty are part-time and some have distinguished chairs.
So how can they get this information? It requires a small investment, less than $200, which may seem like a lot to some students. But remember: prospective law, medical, and business students invest far more than this in prep classes for standardized tests. Explain it this way: it is better to invest money and go into a project clear-eyed (or maybe not at all) than to invest thousands of dollars in student loans and close to a decade of one's youth in a project that ultimately disappoints.
First, I recommend that they subscribe to the Chronicle of Higher Education. Reading the Chronicle can help them think more deeply about whether academic life, in its current state, is really for them. Digital Access for a year costs $119. It not only gives them access to the debates about higher education but to a job board that gives them a sense of what most academic jobs look like (translate: they don’t look like Swarthmore or Princeton.) For example, what are the teaching loads? Can they imagine traveling far from family for a job? How do people even get a job? And why do some people leave teaching for good long before retirement?
Second, students can join a relevant professional organization in their field to access publications, reports, and studies that let them know their choices. For example, my professional organization, the American Historical Association, has a student membership for $42. Membership includes up-to-date information about employment prospects in different fields and numerous accounts in its monthly Perspectives newsletter about the many paths to employment in areas other than academic history.
All of this information is important, but there is yet another reason for the delay. Prospective humanities scholars should read independently and across different fields to think more seriously about what intellectual project they might commit to and what compels them most. They should push themselves to read more than they ever have in college to see if this is the kind of life that pleases them. They should also write—for community newspapers, in a reading journal, and even revise a college paper for a local historical society. Finally, they should consider teaching high school. Is teaching a good fit? Or do you dread Monday mornings and the work of meeting one class after another?
Delay, in other words, does not mean discouraging students from applying to Ph.D. programs. Rather, it means asking them to spend at least as much time learning about the implications of this decision as they would invest in buying a car or getting married.
And it means asking them to consider whether continuing as a higher-level scholar is something they must do on a college or university campus--or whether a Ph.D. can take them to a dream they have not even thought of yet.
Short Takes:
Mormon Women for Ethical Government, a non-partisan group committed to fighting extremism in politics, has just opened a chapter in the increasingly right-wing state of Idaho. According to Audrey Dutton of the Idaho Capital Sun, MWEG formed in the aftermath of the pandemic, MWEG “is focused on protecting democracy, bipartisan immigration reform, environmental issues and anti-racism efforts. State chapters have leeway in what they choose to work on to further MWEG’s mission at the state level,” but explicitly stays away from abortion and same-sex marriage as issues that might divide the group and prevent progress on other issues. The LDS church is, however, particularly active in refugee resettlement. (September 28, 202)
Despite a last-minute MAGA rant by Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz, a bill reported out from the House Judiciary Committee reforms the Electoral Count Act to close some of the loopholes that insurrectionists tried to activate on J6. Insisting that the bill was “undemocratic” and “all about Donald Trump,” Cruz spread disinformation about a measure that is even supported by Republican Leader Mitch McConnell. As David Badash of the National Memo reminds us, Cruz was “deeply involved” in the J6 coup attempt. As some GOP colleagues rolled their eyes, Cruz also cited the election of 1876, in which a select commission agreed to the disenfranchisement of thousands of Black Southern voters in exchange for a Republican presidency. This, Cruz argued, was an instance of Congress “taking responsibility “ for investigating allegations of voter fraud. (September 27, 2022)
At Slate, Kevin Carey argues that the place to reform the student loan system is at the point of origin: the fiscal relationship between the federal government and institutions of higher education. “Overhauling America’s sprawling, decentralized higher education system won’t be easy—not least because the biggest adversary of reform is likely to be the powerful higher education industry itself,” Carey writes. “But there is a solution, one that starts with a clear-eyed appraisal of what got us into this mess and some realism about where the limitations of reform ultimately lie.” (September 25, 2022)
Are Your Students Interested in Ph.D. Programs?
What great advice and resources. Delay is so crucial. So many people have been in school all their lives for a whole host of reasons, including expectations of their families, or simply not knowing what else to do. This is important writing.
I'm no longer convinced that people don't know what they're getting into.
I know I didn't--but I started in an era when the odds weren't quite as long. My possible advisors (your former colleagues) were lovely people but I don't think any of them except one (AW) had the faintest idea what the labor market in academia was like on the other side, and definitely not in my field. (At least one of them has said as much in a long oral history of his work there--his circumstances of arrival in academia were so idiosyncratic that he just could not have given targeted advice to academically-inclined undergraduates.) So I was long been sympathetic to a kind of "lambs to the slaughter" view of how people end up in doctoral programs.
But in more recent years, both in talking to my own students and in listening in to public conversations among graduate students in precarious situations, while I sometimes hear regret and worry, I don't hear as many examples of the particular kind of ignorance or naivete that I had any longer.
What I hear is a lot of people who feel they have no better alternative or idea and I completely get that. Of your four Ds, delay for this reason is one of the more market-rational and emotionally-coherent justifications. Rattling off a list of other less-poverty inflicted options is unconvincing not the least because many of us have no idea how those options are entered. Some of them have in fact quite brutally specific prior preparations that are necessary--you're not coming into investment banking without a quant background AND either some diversity or old-school ties credential, very likely. You're not coming into coaching, lucrative as it is, without having been an athlete. Etc. So we're often talking to students who are disconcerted by the possible poverty of doctoral education but who also are disconcerted by the fact that non-poverty is pretty hard gated at this point, which it wasn't 30 years ago by comparison.
So I feel like I'm increasingly talking to folks who don't need me to tell them these particular facts of life in advance. Or maybe they would just rather I not point out how fucked they are if they're people who loved the things we taught and the world we live in and know that this is like loving a life that is being killed even as they come into desire for it. I know there are ways that people are continuing to live those lives (even in academia! as newly minted Ph.Ds!) but most of the pathways are bespoke, unlikely and require safety nets. All of which is unwelcome news, known or unknown.