CHE: Why I’m Planning to Leave My Ph.D. Program

[Brego]

When I got my doctorate more than a decade ago, the stipend was $11,000 in a state known for its low cost of living.  Fellowships got me up to $17,000.  I was lucky to get a part-time job with excellent health insurance.  Other students in my program weren't as lucky.  They took on debt loads that destroyed their health, their marriages, and the well-being of their spouses and children. 

People in my discipline have been talking about the unethical system of graduate education for a long time.  Despite that, faculty members across the country eagerly recruit people to be drawn into an endless cycle of exploitation.  My department is one of many second-tier graduate programs that churn out poorly trained students who "love" the humanities but have few real skills.  I don't want to exploit people, so I take on a tiny number of graduate students.  The repercussions for tenure are obvious for those of us who make that decision. 

Pannapacker's essays on graduate school ("Just Don't Go") need to be in circulation again.  Dreams of a tenure-track job don't put food on the table.

[poiuy]

I don't want to exploit people, so I take on a tiny number of graduate students.  The repercussions for tenure are obvious for those of us who make that decision. 

I applaud your ethical decision.  Re the tenure situation (and promotion thereafter), have you considered explicitly framing your decisions to be intentional / selective about the graduate students you take on in the light of being ethical, transparent, non-exploitive, etc.? I am sure you are in a position to write powerfully and positively about this, and the T&P committees will take that on board. 

[arcturus]

I don't want to exploit people, so I take on a tiny number of graduate students.  The repercussions for tenure are obvious for those of us who make that decision. 

I applaud your ethical decision.  Re the tenure situation (and promotion thereafter), have you considered explicitly framing your decisions to be intentional / selective about the graduate students you take on in the light of being ethical, transparent, non-exploitive, etc.? I am sure you are in a position to write powerfully and positively about this, and the T&P committees will take that on board. 

I would not recommend addressing this in a tenure document (where an up or out vote is expected) since it is a political landmine. In essence, this statement implies that those who do take on students (i.e., the majority of the senior faculty voting on the tenure case) are behaving unethically, opaquely, or exploitively.  Even worse, it can be taken as a negative evaluation of the quality of students at that institution.

Regarding the later, we all know colleagues who think along the following lines: "We all know our students are above average! Who are you to say that they are not! If you don't respect our students, you should not be a professor here. Tenure denied!" It is not worth the risk.

[Caracal]

When I got my doctorate more than a decade ago, the stipend was $11,000 in a state known for its low cost of living.  Fellowships got me up to $17,000.  I was lucky to get a part-time job with excellent health insurance.  Other students in my program weren't as lucky.  They took on debt loads that destroyed their health, their marriages, and the well-being of their spouses and children. 

People in my discipline have been talking about the unethical system of graduate education for a long time.  Despite that, faculty members across the country eagerly recruit people to be drawn into an endless cycle of exploitation.  My department is one of many second-tier graduate programs that churn out poorly trained students who "love" the humanities but have few real skills.  I don't want to exploit people, so I take on a tiny number of graduate students.  The repercussions for tenure are obvious for those of us who make that decision. 

Pannapacker's essays on graduate school ("Just Don't Go") need to be in circulation again.  Dreams of a tenure-track job don't put food on the table.

Sigh, we've been here before. For some reason, whenever these discussions come up, there's a lot of rhetoric and not a lot of nuance, and that essay is a good example of it.

1. Can we stop talking about"lotteries?" It's a bad metaphor. In a lottery, your chance of winning the grand prize in a lottery is infintessimally small. The most recent good data on history phds showed that about 40 percent of those who received their degree between 2011 and 2013 had tenure track jobs. That's not great, but it doesn't really fit with the idea of a lottery.

2. The whole discussion is infected with the idea that failing to get a tenure track job is a life ruining calamity. Ironically, that comes out of grad school and academic cultures. Even though many of the people writing quit lit are railing against these cultures they can't seem to break out of them. A lot of the people I went to grad school with do have tenure track jobs. Of the rest of them, a few are working for think tanks or non profits, some are in private sector jobs, a couple teach high school, one or two work in higher ed outside of the field. A few others are full time stay at home parents. Only a few of us are adjuncts like me and nobody is living under a bridge.

I'm not really sure why anyone thinks hyperbole is going to convince anyone to reconsider grad school. When students ask me about grad school, I'm not particularly encouraging. I want them to know the realities-which should give anyone considering grad school considerable pause. We can do that without resorting to misleading rhetoric.

[Brego]

From the AHA's 2022 jobs report:

"For those who graduated from a PhD program in 2017, 27 percent (231 of 860) were employed in TT positions four years later in 2021. This contrasts starkly with the data from earlier cohorts. Of those who earned their PhDs in 2013, for example, 54 percent (511 of 944) were employed in TT jobs after four years."  For people graduating from a program not in the top 30, the success rate is 7%. 

I'm not a historian (or a statistician), but 7% seems pretty bleak, at least in my opinion. 

[dismalist]

From the AHA's 2022 jobs report:

"For those who graduated from a PhD program in 2017, 27 percent (231 of 860) were employed in TT positions four years later in 2021. This contrasts starkly with the data from earlier cohorts. Of those who earned their PhDs in 2013, for example, 54 percent (511 of 944) were employed in TT jobs after four years."  For people graduating from a program not in the top 30, the success rate is 7%. 

I'm not a historian (or a statistician), but 7% seems pretty bleak, at least in my opinion.

It's not quite the same definition of the numerator and denominator -- not people, but rather dollars -- but looks to me like Las Vegas is a not at all a bad deal by comparison to the higher ed lottery. [In what follows, "winning percentage" means the house's gross profit margin, i.e not counting the house's costs.]

The winning percentages Las Vegas Valley casinos enjoy on slots vary from about 1.3 percent to 12.5 percent depending on the denomination played. In general the house enjoys its lowest winning percentages on slots from 25 cents and higher with the exception of Megabucks, from which the casinos get their highest winning percentages.

Compared to the Las Vegas Strip, the casinos in North Las Vegas have winning percentages that are 2 to 4 percent less on most slots from 25 cents on up. In theory that means that gamblers can make their money last longer in those North Las Vegas casinos.

From here https://lasvegassun.com/news/1999/jul/11/playing-the-percentages/ Also talks about different sorts of gambling venues attracting different types of players. Just substitute the word "student" for "player", or "PhD" for "player", and we get the picture. And to complete the picture, the longer you stay, the more you spend on ancillaries!

Of course, as far as I know, going gambling in Vegas is not financed by the government, and certainly gambling losses are not.

[Ruralguy]

i think a lot of people are not even applying for the tenure track jobs they can probably get. My school, increasingly, has to close searches after not having enough applicants, or the person we do hire leaves after a year or two. This isn't just in CS. We have English and Comp people leaving as well.

[Hibush]

From the AHA's 2022 jobs report:

"For those who graduated from a PhD program in 2017, 27 percent (231 of 860) were employed in TT positions four years later in 2021. This contrasts starkly with the data from earlier cohorts. Of those who earned their PhDs in 2013, for example, 54 percent (511 of 944) were employed in TT jobs after four years."  For people graduating from a program not in the top 30, the success rate is 7%. 

I'm not a historian (or a statistician), but 7% seems pretty bleak, at least in my opinion.

Of college baseball players who get drafted by a pro team, how many make it to the majors within four years? Seven percent probably starts looking good.

[spork]

From the AHA's 2022 jobs report:

"For those who graduated from a PhD program in 2017, 27 percent (231 of 860) were employed in TT positions four years later in 2021. This contrasts starkly with the data from earlier cohorts. Of those who earned their PhDs in 2013, for example, 54 percent (511 of 944) were employed in TT jobs after four years."  For people graduating from a program not in the top 30, the success rate is 7%. 

I'm not a historian (or a statistician), but 7% seems pretty bleak, at least in my opinion.

And this data is a reflection of survivorship bias -- it doesn't account for the students who enrolled but never completed the degree. Supposedly (because programs don't want to track it) the attrition rate is often around 50%.

[kaysixteen]

If more people apply for job x, more people won't get it.   That would of course increase the number of unsuccessful applicants, and reduce the percentage of new grads who got a job.  Like it or not, after a wee bit of time on the job market, one should be able to realistically ascertain which jobs one might have a potential chance of obtaining.   FT TT academic job applications are also not what they were when oodles of Baby Boomers got easy employment 50 years ago-- they are time-consuming and often expensive, and run the risk  of overtaxing one's references as well... why do this for jobs you are just not likely to obtain?   As to job searches that 'have to be cancelled for lack of applicants' (my paraphrase), exactly why would this happen, unless there literally were no applicants who met the listed job ad criteria?

[marshwiggle]

From the AHA's 2022 jobs report:

"For those who graduated from a PhD program in 2017, 27 percent (231 of 860) were employed in TT positions four years later in 2021. This contrasts starkly with the data from earlier cohorts. Of those who earned their PhDs in 2013, for example, 54 percent (511 of 944) were employed in TT jobs after four years."  For people graduating from a program not in the top 30, the success rate is 7%. 

I'm not a historian (or a statistician), but 7% seems pretty bleak, at least in my opinion.

Of college baseball players who get drafted by a pro team, how many make it to the majors within four years? Seven percent probably starts looking good.

When getting into professional sports is the comparison for getting a TT job, you've already jumped the shark.

[Caracal]

From the AHA's 2022 jobs report:

"For those who graduated from a PhD program in 2017, 27 percent (231 of 860) were employed in TT positions four years later in 2021. This contrasts starkly with the data from earlier cohorts. Of those who earned their PhDs in 2013, for example, 54 percent (511 of 944) were employed in TT jobs after four years."  For people graduating from a program not in the top 30, the success rate is 7%. 

I'm not a historian (or a statistician), but 7% seems pretty bleak, at least in my opinion.

None of it is great, although that number is first of all for programs out of the top 30-which is quite low-I would advise students to only apply in the top ten or so. It also is for people who completed their degree in the last two years. Increasingly in the humanities, visitor positions and postdocs have become common for recent graduates. I know a lot of people who had visitor jobs out of grad school and secured tenure track positions after a couple of years.

The more concerning number is the drop in people who are getting tenure track jobs four years later. It's hard to tell how much of this is temporary disruption caused by the pandemic-and how much is permanent. You could just have people whose job searches got delayed by the pandemic and that cohort will catch up in the next couple of years. I can also imagine you may have more people who dropped out of academia. If you were in a visiting position in 2020, the jobs you were applying for mostly cancelled their searches, your contract didn't get renewed and when the job market resumed next year, the situation in higher ed was fraught and uncertain, I can imagine many people might just decide to go do something else.

Or the shifts might be more permanent, we'll just have to wait and see. The numbers are actually pretty bad, but they still get exaggerated. More broadly, I just don't like the idea of professors telling students what to do and not do with their lives. Anybody going to grad school in the humanities, needs to understand that they can't expect to ever get a tenure track job and prepare for that. There are things they can do maximize their chances and minimize the harms if things don't work out-don't go to a school outside of the top tier of programs, don't accept an offer without full funding, make sure your stipend is reasonable, select a subfield with better job prospects-but they can do all of that and still not get a tenure track job.

Somebody who is prepared for all of that going in is going to probably be ok even if they never do get a tenure track job.

[apl68]

Anybody going to grad school in the humanities, needs to understand that they can't expect to ever get a tenure track job and prepare for that. There are things they can do maximize their chances and minimize the harms if things don't work out-don't go to a school outside of the top tier of programs, don't accept an offer without full funding, make sure your stipend is reasonable, select a subfield with better job prospects-but they can do all of that and still not get a tenure track job.

Somebody who is prepared for all of that going in is going to probably be ok even if they never do get a tenure track job.

All good advice.  Some of these stories give the impression that some students are still either not getting it, or not listening to it if they do.

[Ruralguy]

For the job searches delayed or cancelled due to lack of applicants, well, its just what I have said, and what you said. There aren't enough applicants to proceed. That is to say, in a very small pool (less than 5 sometimes), often there isn't anyone good enough to interview, and when there is, they sometimes take the job, then leave. I am not claiming that this is anything but probably a bad sign for my school, just saying that there are probably quite a few people out there who could apply but don't. Maybe some have good reasons not to, and I'd rather they not if they don't want to be here. But then some of the same people might be saying "there aren't any jobs for me."  I don't have any proof that this is happening. I just throw it out there as a hypothesis.

[Ruralguy]

And I would certainly also add that Caracal's and apl86's advice applies to most students in the natural and social sciences as well.