In 2012, L. Maren Wood wrote "What Doors Does a Ph.D. in History Open?" (https://www.chronicle.com/article/What-Doors-Does-a-PhD-in/135448 )
The same author this week published "Odds Are, Your Doctorate Will Not Prepare You for a Profession Outside Academe" (https://www.chronicle.com/article/Odds-Are-Your-Doctorate-Will/246613 ).
As someone in a field where few people with doctorates like mine go into academia, I was interested to see the message switch from
"Humanities Ph.D.'s could make the transition to alternative careers faster if they had more support from their departments on how to translate their knowledge and skills into nonacademic careers." (2012 article)
to
"For midlevel positions in any profession, employers want someone with direct linear work experience. For entry-level jobs, they prefer someone with a bachelor's degree, a bit of work experience, and a willingness to learn on the job. Applicants with a doctorate — especially those who've spent years as adjuncts or postdocs — find themselves over-credentialed and under-experienced." (2019 article)
since the second message has been very clear for decades in reading first-person articles by those who successfully went on to other careers after earning a doctorate.
Thoughts?
Quote from: polly_mer on July 13, 2019, 08:14:54 AM
In 2012, L. Maren Wood wrote "What Doors Does a Ph.D. in History Open?" (https://www.chronicle.com/article/What-Doors-Does-a-PhD-in/135448 )
The same author this week published "Odds Are, Your Doctorate Will Not Prepare You for a Profession Outside Academe" (https://www.chronicle.com/article/Odds-Are-Your-Doctorate-Will/246613 ).
As someone in a field where few people with doctorates like mine go into academia, I was interested to see the message switch from
"Humanities Ph.D.'s could make the transition to alternative careers faster if they had more support from their departments on how to translate their knowledge and skills into nonacademic careers." (2012 article)
to
"For midlevel positions in any profession, employers want someone with direct linear work experience. For entry-level jobs, they prefer someone with a bachelor's degree, a bit of work experience, and a willingness to learn on the job. Applicants with a doctorate — especially those who've spent years as adjuncts or postdocs — find themselves over-credentialed and under-experienced." (2019 article)
since the second message has been very clear for decades in reading first-person articles by those who successfully went on to other careers after earning a doctorate.
Thoughts?
Interesting.
Yes, being willing to learn is important for any job. At the risk of sounding ageist, when someone of a certain age comes into a new job and claims to be "not a techie millenial type" or all about "not being able to do what they used to" then that person isn't sending a message they are willing to learn.
As far as teaching goes, after dot-bomb I picked up a few teaching gigs to pay a few bills and keep busy. It was very hard to shake that "professorial" air once I went back into corporate life.
Quote from: ciao_yall on July 13, 2019, 09:01:41 AM
Interesting.
Yes, being willing to learn is important for any job. At the risk of sounding ageist, when someone of a certain age comes into a new job and claims to be "not a techie millenial type" or all about "not being able to do what they used to" then that person isn't sending a message they are willing to learn.
As far as teaching goes, after dot-bomb I picked up a few teaching gigs to pay a few bills and keep busy. It was very hard to shake that "professorial" air once I went back into corporate life.
Regardless of age, anyone with an attitude like that of which you describe, one where someone self-identifies acceptable incompetency through off-loading required competencies to the "other," and one where past greatness is enough to compensate for lack of ability in the current, is someone that is not employable and is someone that should not have a first day on the job at any new job. I couldn't trust this kind of person to mow my lawn, because they probably couldn't figure out how to start the lawn mower, and would probably blame the lawn mower manufacturer for making a non-intuitive lawn mower.
Quote from: polly_mer on July 13, 2019, 08:14:54 AM
The same author this week published "Odds Are, Your Doctorate Will Not Prepare You for a Profession Outside Academe" (https://www.chronicle.com/article/Odds-Are-Your-Doctorate-Will/246613 ).
Heresy alert, from the 2nd article:
Quote
Those of us who have made a successful career transition out of academe have learned that the "transferable skills" we "developed in graduate school" are transferable precisely because they are the same skills that other professionals — equally smart and capable — are developing on the job in industry, foundations, or government agencies. Critical thinking, program and project management, qualitative and quantitative research, synthesizing evidence and data, data-informed decision making — none of those are unique to academe.
If many academics read this, he'll be burned at the stake.
Quote from: polly_mer on July 13, 2019, 08:14:54 AM
As someone in a field where few people with doctorates like mine go into academia, I was interested to see the message switch from
"Humanities Ph.D.'s could make the transition to alternative careers faster if they had more support from their departments on how to translate their knowledge and skills into nonacademic careers." (2012 article)
to
"For midlevel positions in any profession, employers want someone with direct linear work experience. For entry-level jobs, they prefer someone with a bachelor's degree, a bit of work experience, and a willingness to learn on the job. Applicants with a doctorate — especially those who've spent years as adjuncts or postdocs — find themselves over-credentialed and under-experienced." (2019 article)
It looks like a transition from negotiation to depression.
I am wondering how acceptance would look like
At the same time, changing mood may reflect transformation of the labour market.
In my earth-sciencey sub-field freshly-minted phd used to get mid-level positions merely a decade ago.
Now its entry level instead. So, it may be that employers are less willing to pay extra for surplus credential (to the detriment of my pay cheque).
Quote from: marshwiggle on July 13, 2019, 02:23:24 PM
If many academics read this, he'll be burned at the stake.
As if most academics regularly practice critical thinking in the first place.
I'm becoming less convinced that you can actually teach someone how to think. The spark has to come from within. You can only provide examples and hope they get it. Many academics eat confirmation bias for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
On the CHE fora, someone asked once how many people are really affected by the adjunctification of Higher Ed (a fairly even-handed article outlining the adjunctification situation is https://www.chronicle.com/article/Straight-Talk-About/150881).
I love to run the numbers, so I'll run some here. For perspective, I have selected some broad categories and some fine categories of reporting. The full data set is at https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf19301/data, table 13:
| Field | # of PhDs awarded in 2008 | # of PhDs awarded in 2017 |
| US total for all fields | 48 777 | 54 664 |
| Agricultural sciences and natural resources | 1 198 | 1 606 |
| Anthropology | 483 | 455 |
| Bioengineering and biomedical engineering | 762 | 1 041 |
| Biological and biomedical sciences | 7 797 | 8 477 |
| Business management and administration | 1 421 | 1 522 |
| Chemical engineering | 873 | 936 |
| Chemistry | 2 246 | 2 697 |
| Computer Science | 1 499 | 1 587 |
| Economics | 1 091 | 1 587 |
| Education administration | 2 238 | 1 023 |
| Education research | 2 640 | 2 405 |
| Electrical, electronics, and comm engineering | 1 888 | 1 900 |
| Engineering, total | 7 864 | 9 843 |
| Foreign languages and literature | 627 | 624 |
| Geosciences, atmospheric and ocean sciences | 865 | 1 165 |
| Health sciences | 2 091 | 2 509 |
| History | 971 | 1 066 |
| Humanities and arts, total | 4 736 | 5 290 |
| Letters (English, classics, and related) | 1 420 | 1 465 |
| Materials science engineering | 636 | 958 |
| Mathematics and statistics | 1 400 | 1 856 |
| Mechanical engineering | 1 082 | 1 409 |
| Neurosciences, neurobiology | 883 | 985 |
| Physics and astronomy | 1 835 | 2 219 |
| Political science and government | 628 | 752 |
| Psychology | 3 357 | 3 960 |
| Social Sciences, total | 4 278 | 5 119 |
| Sociology | 601 | 689 |
That table taken as a whole doesn't seem to indicate a huge problem with the US not valuing doctoral education; that table looks a lot more like the humanities being about 10% of the overall picture and yet taking up an inordinate amount of bandwidth during discussions of doctoral education. Even expanding to humanities and social sciences means we're looking at about 20% of the overall picture.
To change gears a little back to the ongoing adjunctification discussions, the data are older now, but http://www.academicworkforce.org/CAW_portrait_2012.pdf (table 8) indicates 44% (i.e., almost half) of courses taught by part-time adjuncts are in the humanities. Yet this table indicates that only about 10% of PhDs awarded every year are in the humanities. Data indicate that about 60% of part-time adjuncts have a degree other than a PhD or JD/MD/MBA (http://www.academicworkforce.org/CAW_portrait_2012.pdf, table 9). Why does that matter? Well, perhaps the adjunct problem is much more of the required general education courses being covered by part-time faculty for a pittance instead of either cutting back on general education that doesn't really benefit people forced marched through it or one of the solutions related to having more full-time faculty covering general education requirements.
I haven't encountered too many first-person accounts regarding death-marching computer science folks or indeed most of the fields on this table. To be fair, I have encountered hundreds of articles bemoaning the lack of academic jobs for biology PhD holders who tend to get stuck in a postdoc trap and then leave for some other job--the message for decades has been don't go into biology expecting to get an academic job. However, those folks tend to get middle-class jobs with benefits when they do leave.
Without commenting yet about this writer's article, she is someone who is running a business aimed at young? PhDs seeking to transition out of academia. Does anyone have any actual first or even second-hand experience with her firm?
Quote from: kaysixteen on July 14, 2019, 06:08:08 PM
Without commenting yet about this writer's article, she is someone who is running a business aimed at young? PhDs seeking to transition out of academia. Does anyone have any actual first or even second-hand experience with her firm?
I know nothing about her firm. I have, though, spent enough time inside and outside of academia to confirm some of the main points in the recent article.
- Career transitions for graduate students cannot be mapped. A career path that a Ph.D. alumnus follows is particular to that person; it may or may not work for you. The education you gain is personal, and how you decide to leverage it is also personal.
- They entered a new profession thanks to internships, unpaid work, volunteering, or entry-level jobs.
- Yes, you will have to start out at the entry level or as an unpaid intern, but unlike adjunct positions, these temporary gigs actually do lead to career advancement in the professional world.
- In championing the doctorate as an "all purpose degree," academics are, in effect, dismissing the expertise acquired on the job in other highly specialized professions.
The biggest message is no clear, well-beaten path exists to a great career using a humanities doctorate exists that isn't already as competitive as a TT academic job. Instead, people will have to use those fabulous critical thinking skills and research abilities to find something that works for them and put in the hard work to get enough experience in that field for people to take them seriously.
I encounter people with various backgrounds doing interesting things in good paying jobs daily. However, what got them there was usually a willingness to learn new things and invest effort to become proficient in something for which others will pay good money.
I also cannot emphasize enough finding out what other professions value as expertise and getting directly related expertise. The term "Do you have 10 years experience or one year experience ten times?" comes immediately to mind. That's usually dismissive of people who don't learn new things as a natural course of living their life. A third option of "I have several 2-4 year chunks of experience in very different professional areas" tends to work very well to help convince employers to take a chance on someone who isn't fresh out of school, but will take full advantage of the entry-level position or internships not tied to undergraduate concurrent enrollment.
As I've stated elsewhere in various forms, working the front register in fast food doesn't impress anyone even if you are employee of the month; becoming assistant store manager may be an important stepping stone to either middle management in the same company or a mid-level job in a different industry that has a similar expectations of managerial skill sets (i.e., related experience).
A key step for those trying to transition to new job types is getting over the idea that already invested grunt work in an academic setting somehow does or even should count as paying dues for another job type. It doesn't. Instead, you'll start at basically the bottom of some other career ladder, but it's possible to move up more quickly that someone who is fresh out of school if you use all those "soft" skills to learn the power structure, use the knowledge of the human factors in addition to the written rules, and invest in what others find important enough to fund.
Quote from: polly_mer on July 14, 2019, 06:18:57 AM
I haven't encountered too many first-person accounts regarding death-marching computer science folks or indeed most of the fields on this table. To be fair, I have encountered hundreds of articles bemoaning the lack of academic jobs for biology PhD holders who tend to get stuck in a postdoc trap and then leave for some other job--the message for decades has been don't go into biology expecting to get an academic job. However, those folks tend to get middle-class jobs with benefits when they do leave.
There are a lot of direct career paths in STEM with a PhD outside of academia. One can work in research in the private sector, foundations, and so forth. They might migrate into product management or other functions, making use of internal connections at the organization and those "transferable skills."
For humanities PhDs, now we are talking about relying on those "transferable skills" from the get-go, with no transitional job or internal connections to ease that transition.
Quote from: polly_mer on July 14, 2019, 06:18:57 AM
I haven't encountered too many first-person accounts regarding death-marching computer science folks or indeed most of the fields on this table. To be fair, I have encountered hundreds of articles bemoaning the lack of academic jobs for biology PhD holders who tend to get stuck in a postdoc trap and then leave for some other job--the message for decades has been don't go into biology expecting to get an academic job. However, those folks tend to get middle-class jobs with benefits when they do leave.
What I've seen more of are people (often immobile for various reasons) in the adjunct trap, particularly after sequestration led to layoffs of civilian contractors from DOD related positions.
It strikes me that attempts to get PhD programs to prepare students for non-academic careers outside of the natural sciences are doing (or did) a huge disservice to students: they miss the entire point of specialization.
If you want to get a tenure track position, you really need to put 110% of your energy into optimizing for an academic career. If you do anything less than that, you won't be competitive with the people who do just that. It's those people who will then take all the available positions. It's pretty close to a "winner-take-all" environment and there's little reward for being the second best applicant everywhere you apply.
When you have a PhD and you're eyeing "entry-level" positions, something went horrendously wrong. Saying you have "critical thinking" skills is pretty worthless without some concrete evidence of having solved problems creatively.
What somewhat surprises me, though, is how few humanities PhDs seem to go into consulting. If there's an industry that depends on quickly processing and synthesizing a lot of information (and fast writing), then it's that one.
Quote from: pigou on July 15, 2019, 08:58:20 AM
What somewhat surprises me, though, is how few humanities PhDs seem to go into consulting. If there's an industry that depends on quickly processing and synthesizing a lot of information (and fast writing), then it's that one.
Good point.
Consulting firms seem to burn through people fairly fast. The travel and intense engagement take a toll after a few years.
That turnover means that there are constantly openings. The work experience creates lots of business connections that can turn into post-consulting employment.
Quote from: pigou on July 15, 2019, 08:58:20 AM
What somewhat surprises me, though, is how few humanities PhDs seem to go into consulting. If there's an industry that depends on quickly processing and synthesizing a lot of information (and fast writing), then it's that one.
Consulting requires domain-specific expertise, or at least a credible interest in that domain whether it's Finance, Healthcare, Strategic Planning, whatever.
Walking out with a PhD in 18th-century literature or whatever doesn't convey that interest.
Quote from: Hibush on July 15, 2019, 09:58:09 AM
Quote from: pigou on July 15, 2019, 08:58:20 AM
What somewhat surprises me, though, is how few humanities PhDs seem to go into consulting. If there's an industry that depends on quickly processing and synthesizing a lot of information (and fast writing), then it's that one.
Good point.
Consulting firms seem to burn through people fairly fast. The travel and intense engagement take a toll after a few years.
That turnover means that there are constantly openings. The work experience creates lots of business connections that can turn into post-consulting employment.
When I was a wee lad, management consulting firms were gobbling up many of my college friends who did not want to immediately pursue graduate school in engineering, chemistry, math, etc. These were top of the line consulting firms like BCG, Bain, McKinsey, and Andersen. The deal was work like a dog for a couple years and one's employer paid the employee's way to an MBA. MBA in hand, they would quit the management consulting treadmill and go to work for defense contractors, tech firms, etc., often in junior middle management positions (in contrast to doing pure engineering or bench research in corporate labs). A few years later more of them started gravitating to Wall Street firms that wanted people with quant skills -- starting salaries and bonuses were much higher than in management consulting. Back then, none of these people had PhDs.
If you poke around the websites of big name consulting firms today, you mainly see people who interned after getting MBAs at places like Wharton and Chicago and were then hired as associates/consultants. Partners, directors, and VPs are often in their 30s and 40s. None of these people have humanities PhDs. There are some firms, like Abt Associates and RAND, that do have some staff with PhDs, but in fields like economics and public policy.
No evidence, but...
I expect that, if a humanities PhD had any interest in consulting, they would have tried it after undergrad and before grad school.
Getting an entry level consulting gig is easier and more financially lucrative than getting into a top-level humanities grad program - wouldn't it make more sense to try that first if you thought you might be interested?
(I did tech consulting before grad school. Would sooner starve to death than do it again.)
As a comment on adjunctification, I'd like to point out that the increasing numbers of PhDs being produced is highly suggestive to me of a serious problem.
It seems to me that lots of colleges are closing due to financial pressures, and birthrates continue to decline. (As a side note, I think sometime in 2018 the best estimates showed that the number of grandparents in the world exceeded the number of grandchildren for the first time in forever.) If we continue to produce large numbers of PhDs chasing after diminishing TT positions, there will be little incentive to hire full-time TT faculty when there will be large numbers of increasingly desperate PhDs wrangling for any paying job at all.
Essentially, supply (of PhD-holding potential faculty) will (continue to) exceed demand, and as a result, competent instructors will be a dime a dozen.
With regard to another point made earlier, I must disagree with my respected colleague, Dr. Mer.
Quote from: polly_mer on July 14, 2019, 06:18:57 AM
Well, perhaps the adjunct problem is much more of the required general education courses being covered by part-time faculty for a pittance instead of either cutting back on general education that doesn't really benefit people forced marched through it or one of the solutions related to having more full-time faculty covering general education requirements.
Speaking as someone who greatly benefited from, and enjoyed, many of the "required general education courses," I see the problem as being less of students not benefiting from them, and more of The System failing to show students where the benefit lies. For myself, I think students should somehow be brought to really appreciate
The Epic of Gilgamesh, the
Bhagavad-Gita, Vasari's
Lives of the Artists, a good overview of Islam and Buddhism, a basic course in Business, musical notation (if not actually proficiency at an instrument), a basic course in psychology, a fair amount of modern (i.e., 20th century or later) literature, ...
Sorry. Started getting carried away there. The point is, students can (should) benefit from any or all of these. The question is, how do we get students to appreciate these things and make them want more? Maybe more full-time faculty are part of the answer, but I don't know. I feel somehow there is something in our society that keeps us from appreciating these ideas as they should be appreciated.
Quote from: Conjugate on July 15, 2019, 03:49:51 PM
Speaking as someone who greatly benefited from, and enjoyed, many of the "required general education courses," I see the problem as being less of students not benefiting from them, and more of The System failing to show students where the benefit lies. For myself, I think students should somehow be brought to really appreciate The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Bhagavad-Gita, Vasari's Lives of the Artists, a good overview of Islam and Buddhism, a basic course in Business, musical notation (if not actually proficiency at an instrument), a basic course in psychology, a fair amount of modern (i.e., 20th century or later) literature, ...
Sorry. Started getting carried away there. The point is, students can (should) benefit from any or all of these. The question is, how do we get students to appreciate these things and make them want more? Maybe more full-time faculty are part of the answer, but I don't know. I feel somehow there is something in our society that keeps us from appreciating these ideas as they should be appreciated.
You could say the same for physics, statistics, criminology, art history, and so on ad nauseum. (Is there anything for which students
wouldn't benefit from an introductory course?) That's a hole with no bottom.
Quote from: Conjugate on July 15, 2019, 03:49:51 PM
The point is, students can (should) benefit from any or all of these.
1) One standalone class is hardly enough to be useful in anything, especially if the class is filled with other people who don't/won't/can't care.
2) Being force marched through some of the most human of the humanities doesn't help people who don't have enough life experience to see the forest for the trees. Reading classics in my forties is a very, very different experience than when I read them in my teens and twenties because they were on a list of what educated people should read.
3) Being force marched through much of anything is to no benefit for anyone unless merely going through the motions counts. Thus, physical exercise is likely to benefit even reluctant participants in ways that trying to force thought will not. The act of being force marched through anything tends to lead us to the situation where people are sure they hate the humanities and the humanities are worthless based on direct personal, unpleasant experience. More people might discover the value of the humanities if they weren't being force fed them.
It's not necessarily that what polly said is worthless, but several things come to mind. First, working for no pay is really often just not feasible. Second, many employers would shy away from hiring a PhD for an entry level slot simply because they'd think he would not accept, or not accept for long, the low wages such a job offers. Heck, i had a phone interview myself three months ago for a position at a classical Christian school, ajob for which I do have extensive experience, where the guy admitted he almost didn't bother to interview me assuming i would not accept the salary. It was really low but I would have considered it, largely because I am fairly desperate, but of course i never heard back from the guy. Indeed, for polly's advice to have any prospect of rational validity, the new PhD probably had better be pretty darn young, more or less for the reasons I articulated above.
CHE has an article today (https://www.chronicle.com/article/Columbia-Had-Little-Success/246989?cid=trend_right_a) about Columbia University's English department thinking about the job readiness of their PhD's.
The lousy job market is even affecting the very elite training grounds that have had some insulation. The story makes is sound as if they graduate faculty is taking some productive steps in communication with the grad students.
I was amused by the quote they chose to use from a graduate student. Does this soon-to-finish scholar sound well prepared for the job market?
"I'm not particularly worried about my future place in the academy as I have never expected the university offer any kind of refuge or even knowledge. Sure I hope I get some kind of a job, but I say that with the opinion that all work under capitalism sucks."
I bet that quote gets circulated widely among the anti-intellectuals.
I'm in a STEM field with many options outside academia, yet many of the graduate students in my department I have spoken to decide to stop at the MSc. They feel that the MSc opens as many, or more, doors than a PhD. I see this reflected in job ads too, where more list an MSc as a requirement and fewer list the PhD. I have even spoken with one of my industry research partners that said he would never hire a PhD again, providing one example of a door closing for people with a PhD.
I guess the point is that the PhD by nature trains you for very specific jobs. While there are transferrable skills, these are secondary and would not be a good reason to do a PhD. You would likely get further ahead by doing other things. One should really only do a PhD if they are aiming for one of the few jobs that require it, otherwise there are much better ways to prepare.
Quote from: kaysixteen on July 15, 2019, 06:35:33 PM
It's not necessarily that what polly said is worthless, but several things come to mind. First, working for no pay is really often just not feasible. Second, many employers would shy away from hiring a PhD for an entry level slot simply because they'd think he would not accept, or not accept for long, the low wages such a job offers. Heck, i had a phone interview myself three months ago for a position at a classical Christian school, ajob for which I do have extensive experience, where the guy admitted he almost didn't bother to interview me assuming i would not accept the salary. It was really low but I would have considered it, largely because I am fairly desperate, but of course i never heard back from the guy. Indeed, for polly's advice to have any prospect of rational validity, the new PhD probably had better be pretty darn young, more or less for the reasons I articulated above.
My question then is what do people do for years (decades?) after the PhD if they don't take a bill-paying job somewhere? Do they starve in the streets?
Realistically, people are doing something. The question is whether that something builds to a good enough future or whether that something just continues at not quite starving in the streets. Yes, the earlier one takes a building position instead of a not starving position, the easier that transition will be.
But, people death-marching as adjuncts are already working hard for practically no pay. Most entry-level positions that require a college degree will be less work for more pay.
Quote from: fast_and_bulbous on July 13, 2019, 07:14:41 PM
Quote from: marshwiggle on July 13, 2019, 02:23:24 PM
If many academics read this, he'll be burned at the stake.
As if most academics regularly practice critical thinking in the first place.
I'm becoming less convinced that you can actually teach someone how to think. The spark has to come from within. You can only provide examples and hope they get it. Many academics eat confirmation bias for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
I teach critical thinking. I think these courses best serve as filters. Those who can think critically learn to give labels to different patterns and issues and they hone their talents. Those who have little initial ability to think critically don't learn much.
I also think it is a bit like learning a new language. You can't do it in a semester. It takes a lot of practice.
Columbia University's English PhD program placed zero of its graduates in academic jobs, yet admitted nineteen more doctoral students:
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Columbia-Had-Little-Success/246989?key=HngGmpmDh1Ozp8Ik-2G6XHySqX_eIyntLHDsUToHiM4qbHR66OXJb53JuPx1X6zCRlYtODhZd1FrMnExY2lHb0NQYThWeDMyc1JmSmFhRUowNU5KVHhGMFRWNA (https://www.chronicle.com/article/Columbia-Had-Little-Success/246989?key=HngGmpmDh1Ozp8Ik-2G6XHySqX_eIyntLHDsUToHiM4qbHR66OXJb53JuPx1X6zCRlYtODhZd1FrMnExY2lHb0NQYThWeDMyc1JmSmFhRUowNU5KVHhGMFRWNA)
(Paywalled article, but free via Twitter for now.)
From the article:
"On the one hand, Kramnick said, it is vital for departments like Columbia and Yale to think about how the training that's specific to obtaining a Ph.D. in English might provide skills that lend themselves to jobs off the tenure-track, or outside university walls altogether. At the same time, he said, departments need to be honest about how many of those kinds of jobs exist. It might not be many, he said . . .
With that context in mind, Kramnick said, limiting enrollment is a difficult question, but one that Ph.D.-granting departments 'need to think seriously about.'"
Sorry to differ, but it's not that difficult. The academic jobs don't exist anymore. Either admit that the program's purpose is to generate revenue through tuition and the use of grad students as instructors, or close it.
Quote from: spork on August 26, 2019, 04:54:38 AM
Sorry to differ, but it's not that difficult. The academic jobs don't exist anymore. Either admit that the program's purpose is to generate revenue through tuition and the use of grad students as instructors, or close it.
From the article, it looks like the incoming grad students are very much aware of their job prospects. If someone wants an Ivy League PhD, let them have one.
Quote from: tuxthepenguin on August 26, 2019, 07:57:07 AM
Quote from: spork on August 26, 2019, 04:54:38 AM
Sorry to differ, but it's not that difficult. The academic jobs don't exist anymore. Either admit that the program's purpose is to generate revenue through tuition and the use of grad students as instructors, or close it.
From the article, it looks like the incoming grad students are very much aware of their job prospects. If someone wants an Ivy League PhD, let them have one.
Given the vacuous statements in that article, I doubt the program can offer the kind of training that will realistically improve the chances that its students will obtain non-academic jobs that require a PhD in English.
How many non-academic jobs require a PhD in English? Preparing people for an "alt-ac" career should consist solely of telling them not to get that PhD in the first place. Just not worth forgoing a real income for 6-10 years.
But also: people entering these programs are adults and can make their own decisions. I doubt they're actively being deceived about the chances of obtaining a tenure track position. Whatever reason they have for pursuing a PhD is on them. I suspect a sizable share of people in these programs have parental wealth to fall back on and are doing this as a leisure pursuit -- and why not? Probably a more productive use of privilege than traveling from one beach to another as an Instagram influencer.
Quote from: pigou on August 26, 2019, 11:40:37 AM
But also: people entering these programs are adults and can make their own decisions. I doubt they're actively being deceived about the chances of obtaining a tenure track position. Whatever reason they have for pursuing a PhD is on them. I suspect a sizable share of people in these programs have parental wealth to fall back on and are doing this as a leisure pursuit -- and why not? Probably a more productive use of privilege than traveling from one beach to another as an Instagram influencer.
That's my point. It's not just parental wealth (my son has an Ivy League PhD!), it's spousal wealth (there are a lot of rich people in NY, some of whom are married), or people that don't really care about what comes later (they're being funded to teach college classes at an Ivy for a few years, while living in NYC, and that's an experience unlike any they'll ever have again). There's no chance I'd ever go for it, but it doesn't sound like a bad idea for someone interested in that field.
Of course a humanities PhD ought not just keep adjuncting in the likely fruitless expectation of landing a ft academic job, but my point is that such folks are not engineering doctorates who have loads of non academic options. Really, they don't. So adjuncting while working grunt survival type jobs, all the while while searching for some sort of permanent professional job is more or less going to be their lot. It certainly has been for me, even though I also have an MLS and have extensive k12 teaching experience as well. And every year that goes by gets me further and further from being a 32 year old newbie PhD, as well.
Quote from: tuxthepenguin on August 26, 2019, 12:01:57 PM
Quote from: pigou on August 26, 2019, 11:40:37 AM
But also: people entering these programs are adults and can make their own decisions. I doubt they're actively being deceived about the chances of obtaining a tenure track position. Whatever reason they have for pursuing a PhD is on them. I suspect a sizable share of people in these programs have parental wealth to fall back on and are doing this as a leisure pursuit -- and why not? Probably a more productive use of privilege than traveling from one beach to another as an Instagram influencer.
That's my point. It's not just parental wealth (my son has an Ivy League PhD!), it's spousal wealth (there are a lot of rich people in NY, some of whom are married), or people that don't really care about what comes later (they're being funded to teach college classes at an Ivy for a few years, while living in NYC, and that's an experience unlike any they'll ever have again). There's no chance I'd ever go for it, but it doesn't sound like a bad idea for someone interested in that field.
There are also many that are not really wealthy but are going with the advice that many of us received; do what you love and success will follow. A PhD in many fields in the humanities takes this to the extreme, but as I mentioned this was the type of advice I had always had growing up and I can see how people would just go with it.
Forunately for me, what I love is relatively marketable in and out of academia so it was good advice.
AAU has announced pilot programs for PhD programs that will include non-academic strands of some sort. It's not clear from the IHE article what that means. (https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2019/09/13/new-student-centered-phd-initiative-aau)
Reading the website didn't help all that much, either, other than the assertion that data transparency is important. (https://www.aau.edu/education-community-impact/graduate-education/phd-education-initiative/phd-initiative-activities)
The announcement of the 8 institutions participating in the pilot programs is somewhat entertaining based on what departments were chosen and what isn't being said about any sort of details of the pilot program. (https://www.aau.edu/education-community-impact/graduate-education/phd-education-initiative/phd-education-initiative-pilot) For example, only a few of the programs being chosen are in fields where the primary PhD market is academia. "Ensuring that students know all their options" is much easier in something like physics and chemistry where the professional societies are very strong and have materials/programs that one can easily adopt, if for some reason the graduate programs weren't already engaged with the relevant professional societies that have been embracing non-academic options for decades.
Quote from: polly_mer on September 15, 2019, 06:16:34 AM
AAU has announced pilot programs for PhD programs that will include non-academic strands of some sort. It's not clear from the IHE article what that means. (https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2019/09/13/new-student-centered-phd-initiative-aau)
Reading the website didn't help all that much, either, other than the assertion that data transparency is important. (https://www.aau.edu/education-community-impact/graduate-education/phd-education-initiative/phd-initiative-activities)
The announcement of the 8 institutions participating in the pilot programs is somewhat entertaining based on what departments were chosen and what isn't being said about any sort of details of the pilot program. (https://www.aau.edu/education-community-impact/graduate-education/phd-education-initiative/phd-education-initiative-pilot) For example, only a few of the programs being chosen are in fields where the primary PhD market is academia. "Ensuring that students know all their options" is much easier in something like physics and chemistry where the professional societies are very strong and have materials/programs that one can easily adopt, if for some reason the graduate programs weren't already engaged with the relevant professional societies that have been embracing non-academic options for decades.
At UVa, to pick one arbitrarily, they are working with four graduate programs: Biomedical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, English, and Religious Studies. I am curious how students in the four fields will interact! The first two fields are training grounds for industry, probably the most industry-oriented. The latter two are probably at the opposite extreme, with no equivalent to Exxon or Medtronic in their sphere.
One to their trainings this week, organized through the library, is to help these scholars have basic competence in coding Python (https://phdplus.virginia.edu/phd-introduction-programming-python-machine-learning-more-advanced-data-types). Python is a skill that helps research and employability in many fields. How widely will grad students in the targeted fields realize this, and sign up?
Quote from: Hibush on September 16, 2019, 05:47:50 AM
One to their trainings this week, organized through the library, is to help these scholars have basic competence in coding Python (https://phdplus.virginia.edu/phd-introduction-programming-python-machine-learning-more-advanced-data-types). Python is a skill that helps research and employability in many fields. How widely will grad students in the targeted fields realize this, and sign up?
While I agree that Python is a useful skill, it's not a high-level skill that only graduate-trained researchers use. There are online, self-paced Python classes that are good enough my sixth grader is doing one for his own entertainment.
People who had adequate, recent undergraduate mathematical training should already know at least one language like Python because that's what a modern undergraduate curriculum teaches. I suppose someone in English or religious studies may not have that tool in their intellectual toolbox, but that's a weird thing to be advertising as a new initiative for a chemical engineering graduate program. 20 years ago, we all knew Fortran and/or C; now, we all know Python as well as Fortran and/or C. Many of us are also pretty good at R (or some other statistical package) and probably Excel as a quick first pass.
Quote from: Hibush on September 16, 2019, 05:47:50 AM
[. . . ]
At UVa, to pick one arbitrarily, they are working with four graduate programs: Biomedical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, English, and Religious Studies. I am curious how students in the four fields will interact! The first two fields are training grounds for industry, probably the most industry-oriented. The latter two are probably at the opposite extreme, with no equivalent to Exxon or Medtronic in their sphere.
One to their trainings this week, organized through the library, is to help these scholars have basic competence in coding Python (https://phdplus.virginia.edu/phd-introduction-programming-python-machine-learning-more-advanced-data-types). Python is a skill that helps research and employability in many fields. How widely will grad students in the targeted fields realize this, and sign up?
I'd say that by the time people reach the doctoral program stage in English or religious studies, it's too late. The programs self-select for those who generally don't
want to become proficient in something like programming with Python.
Why would anyone spend 6-10 years on an English or History PhD to then become a mediocre programmer? Just... become a programmer and read books for fun.
Quote from: pigou on September 16, 2019, 02:21:30 PM
Why would anyone spend 6-10 years on an English or History PhD to then become a mediocre programmer? Just... become a programmer and read books for fun.
Digital humanities? Quantitative histriography? AI-assisted literary analysis?
Employment as a programmer would be unlikely. Polly's sixth-grader might underbid them on the job.