Each Graduate Program Is A Destination
Even if the academic fit is good, not all universities are a good fit for all students
Today, I return to my four-part series on how to help an undergraduate choose a graduate program in the humanities. Click here for part 1, about why you might ask students to delay a graduate application. For part 2, where I suggest that students be encouraged to apply to programs that support diverse outcomes beyond a tenure-track teaching job, click here. Our third D? Destination. And if you know someone who might find these essays useful, please:
So, you have failed to dissuade your talented undergraduate student from attending a Ph.D. program in the humanities. And you have made it plain that anyone seeking a Ph.D. in the humanities needs to imagine diverse and concrete employment outcomes other than a tenure-track teaching job. It’s time for that student to choose a destination.
What advice will you give? And why?
In 1982, after grinding it out in the Lower Manhattan alternative journalism world for two years and (barely) paying the bills with a writing job in the corporate communications department of a major ad agency, I began to devote my lunch hours to graduate applications in history. I sent out four (I had applied to three colleges) and was accepted to three, two of which allowed me to stay in New York. Realistically, I never considered leaving New York unless I was accepted to Yale (my undergrad institution), which, probably due to my late bloomer transcript and undistinguished GRE scores, I was not.
So I was left with two choices: Columbia and New York University.
Without Googling me:
I’ll let you know the correct answer later. But let’s continue the story.
Had I asked anyone (and for reasons still a little mysterious to me, even after years of therapy, I never consulted with anyone in authority about this decision), they would have been given this advice: Attend the highest-status graduate program that admits you. Forty years later, this is still what any aspiring humanities Ph.D. is usually told. The theory is this: most humanities graduate students, should they be fortunate enough to win a tenure-track job, will start work at a place of equal, but probably lower, status than the school they attended. Thus, the higher up the chain a young scholar starts, the more options present themselves at job market time.
Of course, anyone who has spent time thinking about it will also tell you that success in the humanities job market cannot be titrated or gamed out. Up to 50% of high-status Ph.D.s will, just like everyone else, fail to get a tenure track job. Yet a look at any Ivy League or selective liberal arts college (SLAC) humanities department roster argues that the theory of high origins has some merit. An article by Colleen Flaherty in Inside Higher Ed reported on a recent study by Nature that quantifies this. In any given field, not only do the top programs tend to recirculate and redistribute their Ph.D.s among themselves, but 20% of the graduate schools produce 80% of the people who make their way into an academic career.
We are not just talking about careers at elite schools, but careers anywhere. And it gets more astonishing. According to Flaherty, the “Universities of Michigan; Wisconsin at Madison; and California, Berkeley; plus Harvard and Stanford Universities—account for one in eight U.S.-trained faculty members.” However, what Flaherty doesn't say is that a subset of Ivy League grads who are sent off into the wilderness to earn tenure elsewhere then also recruited back, full circle, to the departments where they were trained.
Whether it is the quality of the training, the luster conveyed by a degree from a high-status university, or a certain clubbiness that blinkers the perspective of search committees, departments, and deans, future success as an academic in the humanities (and a wage earner) is more likely when a student attends a high-status program.
But this isn’t the only way to choose a destination or the only logic for charting a life in the humanities. And this is where I will tell you the strange thing I did, and why. Back in the spring of 1983 when NYU’s department was still in the process of becoming the excellent training ground for historians that it is today, I turned down the higher-status department, Columbia, and went to the then lower-status NYU instead.
I had two good reasons for this and an apparently stupid one. The good reasons? NYU offered me significantly more money (we will get to that in the fourth installment on debt), and Columbia winnowed its humanities masters candidates at the Ph.D. stage, making the student culture notoriously nasty and cut-throat.
The (apparently) stupid reason, which I found as, or more compelling than the two good reasons combined? NYU was only four blocks from my house, whereas attending Columbia would have required either moving to the Upper West Side or making a 45-minute commute each way on two local trains, the F and the 1.
But were these silly reasons to choose where I would spend the next eight years of my life? You tell me:
Now, I want to introduce some other, less tangible, issues that anyone advising a doctoral candidate in the humanities should raise for students who, unlike me, actually ask for advice. And these factors can be summed up in a phrase: location matters. In other words, how does what a program offers—whether that is prestige, financial aid, or diversity of outcomes—mesh with the fact that the prospective student will be enrolled at an institution, one that is in a particular place, for a period of six to eight years? And what are the factors that might make one location better than another for a specific person? Why does the destination itself matter?
Before telling my own story, here are some factors that, rather than giving advice, you might ask a student to consider.
What does that student aspire to other than a Ph.D. in the humanities? Are they politically active? Do they feel more at home in a city, in a town anchored by a major research university, or in a place where they can enjoy the outdoors regularly? Do they aspire to write for a general audience and need to be in a city where numerous mainstream and alternative outlets allow them to break into journalism? Are they interested in the arts and/or see art as a form of intelligence that is in dialogue with their academic life? Are they a member of a minoritized community? Do they need the emotional support of family—or have responsibilities for others?
How much does the economic reality of the different proposed destinations support the student’s material and family resources? I will return to this theme when I discuss debt in the final installment, but the fact is that—except for the top programs, where student stipends are substantial—most people in graduate school have to work and/or take out loans to complete a Ph.D. But a prospective student’s budget is only the start. Does that student have other people to support? Do they have family resources that could serve as a safety net? Should they consider living with family? Does the cost of living in the destination city require a graduate student to work more than 10-15 hours a week, since more than that will impact the time they can devote to their studies?
How much do the social and cultural realities of the proposed destinations support the student’s emotional health? Here, the culture of the department itself is an important factor. If a program—as many top programs do—has a capacious master's program and a small doctoral program, it uses master's students as a cash cow to support their Ph.D. program.
This means that, along the way, there will be many casualties. But it also means that the student culture in the department can resemble, as one luckless person who did not qualify for the Ph.D. after three years of master's work put it, “crabs in a barrel.” Charges of actual and perceived favoritism, students competing with each other by any means necessary, and the crushing effect of eliminating two-thirds of the cohort can devastate all but the most self-confident people.
But there are other factors too. For example, what kind of institution is most welcoming to a student who is minoritized in some way? Are there enough faculty of color, feminist faculty, queer faculty, or women to create a genuinely welcoming and supportive atmosphere? When your student visited after the admissions process was complete, were other graduate students warm—or were they boastful, gossipy, conspiracy-minded, or snobbish? Furthermore, what destination might support a range of outcomes for a Ph.D. candidate? Robust cultural and political institutions offer exciting, full-time work off the tenure track, careers that a person might even begin while in graduate school through internships, part-time, and summer work?
As you sift through these factors with each prospective graduate student, know that you are not looking for the perfect match but, all things considered, the best match.
And now, for how my decision-making worked out. If you guessed that I regretted not going to Columbia, you would be wrong. New York University was perfect for me. But why?
First, NYU really was only four blocks from my house. I lived in a two-bedroom apartment on Avenue B and 4th street, which, because it was on the sixth floor and squarely in the middle of one of the liveliest open-air drug markets in the city, only cost $200 a month. For several years I rented the second bedroom out to someone else and, in effect, paid nothing for housing. I also paid no daily commuting costs, as I could walk or ride my bike to school, stay at the library as late as I wanted and get home in ten minutes. These conditions made graduate school affordable and far less stressful on many levels. Best of all, my building was very queer, and the early 1980s was not a very liberated time if you left a queer enclave. And I knew, having already done it, that I would struggle emotionally if I did not live in a community where I could be out.
Second, NYU’s history department was amidst a big transition, and I was part of that. It was exciting, and offered opportunities for hands-on historical research well beyond the purely academic. A primarily local program that churned out M.A.s (mostly public school teachers) and a few Ph.D.s, when I enrolled, the department was hiring interesting, even overlooked, scholars who were not only excited by the department’s aspirations but by the city itself. As part of this process, the department were actively recruiting people like me who had gone to good schools and had promise but weren’t necessarily pulling down offers (or in some cases, even applying) to the top schools.
Third, that unconventional pool of recruits meant that I studied alongside fascinating people who easily committed to supporting each other rather than defeating each other to win the approval of the faculty. Many of us had been out of school—writing, doing community organizing, working in the arts and the city’s broader literary culture—for a chunk of time, and we brought all those interests to our studies. And while many of us got tenure-stream jobs, many of us also took that Ph.D. back to the work we preferred: publishing, film, archival management, museum work, public history, and journalism. One of us became an administrator and helped to launch one of the nation’s top Ph.D. programs in women’s and gender studies.
Why is this important? Because there was no high-stakes outcome, I always knew that whether I got an academic job or not, I would succeed and still be a historian. It wasn’t about a Plan B, or an “alt-ac” track, or whatever they are calling it today. It was about figuring out how to make a life. In other words, being in a less prestigious program spared me the agony and doubt many graduate students feel today, in part because I had room to be myself. But also, my fellow graduate students are still some of my closest friends today because we taught each other and, most importantly, held each other up.
Finally, there was an unanticipated bonus round to making decisions based on my needs at the time. The NYU history department succeeded in its project and became a destination for excellent students. I remember more than one job interview between 1989 and 1991 in which a search committee member asked in a puzzled, oblique way how I had ever thought I would have a career in history by taking my Ph.D. in a program that was, at best, obscure. But the older I got, the less I heard that question, because NYU itself became prestigious.
And it is one beautiful outcome of a process that may seem serendipitous and risky today that I not only got to be a tiny part of that success, but am writing to you on this--and other--platforms today.
Next week, the final installment in my series will address debt.
What I do when you aren’t looking:
My review of historian Nicole Hemmer’s new book, Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s (Basic Books, 2022) is now out in The New Republic. (October 11, 2022)
Follow-up:
I rarely do this, but here’s more on last Friday’s report about fired faculty that partly featured adjunct organic chemistry professor Maitland Jones’s termination from NYU following a student protest over low grades. In an interview by Tom Bartlett in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Jones appears to be a thoughtful, decent pedagogue. His side of the story is very different, and he manages to present it by not blaming the students. Jones says he thinks the NYU administration “made a mistake. I think what they should have done was to get the parties together. Instead, they just overreacted, and now they can’t own up to that.”(October 10, 2022)
Short takes:
Rebecca Traister, one of the best political reporters I know, takes on the crucial Pennsylvania Senate race with a profile of Democratic candidate and current Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman. Fetterman’s campaign was briefly derailed by a blood clot caused by atrial fibrillation, and the race is tightening. “The stroke-victim candidate forced off the trail by recovery had increased the likelihood that even the most indifferent Pennsylvania voter knew that [GOP candidate Mehmet] Oz lived in a New Jersey mansion — in other words, that he was an elite, out-of-touch carpetbagger,” Traister writes about how Fetterman and his people worked to keep the campaign on track with attack ads launched on social media. “The purity of the message was a lesson in defining your opponent.” (October 10, 2022)
Home Depot has sent over 70 tweets denying that it supports Georgia Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker. The lying, hypocritical former NFL star campaigns on a total abortion ban, even though he paid for one termination and tried to pressure the same woman into having another. But, according to campaign finance bird dog Judd Legum at Popular Information, at $90,000, Home Depot is one of the most significant corporate contributors to The National Republican Senatorial Committee. The NRSC just spent $8.5 million on ads for Walker. However, “The biggest spender in support of Walker is not the NRSC, 34N22, or even Walker's campaign itself,” Legum writes. “It is the Senate Leadership Fund (SLF), the Super PAC controlled by [Mitch] McConnell” that just launched a $37.1 million ad buy. And Legum will tell you who those donors are too. (October 10, 2022)