Is It Time To Close All But The Top Humanities Ph.D. Programs?

[Wahoo Redux]

We all know what is going on.

If Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Columbia, Stanford, UC Berkeley, U of Chicago and a handful of other "top ranked" institutions continued their healthy output of Ph.Ds in subjects such as English, history, and philosophy they would probably meet the market need.

Maybe it is time to do that?

[Parasaurolophus]

Philosophy maintains its own reputational ranking, and that particular list is somewhat inapt. More importantly, the subject coverage it would allow would be quite narrow, and the same would be true (though to a smaller extent) if you just took our actual T5-10 US PhD programs.

I know your broader point doesn't hinge on the particular list of departments you offered, but I think it suffers from the same serious problem: giving that much power to so few departments is a recipe for total scholarly insularity and stagnation. Just to give you a concrete example, Oxford has the #2-ranked philosophy department in the world (it's also the largest), but faculty there work on some really weird, esoteric shit that nobody cares about anywhere else. If you cut all PhD education in the UK down to Oxbridge, you'd end up artificially populating and propping up that kind of dead-end research programme, at the cost of lots of excellent work in other areas that are popular with students, professionally important, etc. That's a bad result, and is basically guaranteed to drive down undergraduate student numbers.

Oxford can get away with it because they have over 100 faculty, so it doesn't matter if a dozen or so work in totally weird niches because the other 90 faculty make up for it, as do other faculty trained elsewhere. But when Oxford becomes one of just two destinations to do your PhD work in the UK, it's going to churn out a lot more of those weirdos. 

But also, the job market in the Anglosphere is fully international (this is not at all true in other linguistic areas, by the way; in several eastern European countries, for example, someone who earns a PhD is expected to take up a position at the university that trained them). That means that the competition isn't just coming from the other 100 PhD-granting departments in the US, it's coming from Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, France, the Netherlands, etc. Absent coordination, then, you still have a problem; but crucially, there's absolutely no reason why other countries should consent to having their students trained exclusively in the US (among other things, it would further entrench the first problem above), which means that they're going to be keeping their top-however-many departments open, too. So while you might cut down the supply significantly, you should still expect an oversupply.

Finally, the unfortunate fact is that philosophy has had very low PhD admissions numbers for decades, and yet we still have horrific job prospects (to put it into perspective, the average number of applicants disclosed during my job search was 650, with some jobs getting as many as 1200; things seem to have slowed in the last few years, but we're still getting 350+ applicants to jobs that aren't particularly desirable). Incoming classes are typically about four students; classes of six or more are unusually large. When I applied to my program, I was one of 400 applicants for four slots. And yes, it's true, multiply that by the number of programs in the US (120 or so) and you've got about two and a half times more students than jobs each year. But you shouldn't forget that our attrition rates are also very high (40-50%, often much more: for the year ahead of me, it was 75%; my year was just 25%, but the year after me was 60%).

[Caracal]

There's also a lot of variation, not just by subject, but by field. There are programs in history that are in the middle overall but have really top notch reputations in African History or Western US History. The problem is less that there are too many places admitting students and more that too many places admit too many students-often without full guaranteed funding. To some extent, I think there has been a move to admit fewer students and to provide them with more guaranteed funding. Part of that might also involve some departments deciding that they should concentrate on the areas they are strong in and stop having programs in other areas.

[ciao_yall]

I know your broader point doesn't hinge on the particular list of departments you offered, but I think it suffers from the same serious problem: giving that much power to so few departments is a recipe for total scholarly insularity and stagnation.

This.

Same reason "zero-cost-textbooks" are not really free, are they?

[Sun_Worshiper]

I don't know the exact number of programs that should exist, or where the cutoff should be, but there is obviously an oversupply relative to demand.

[RatGuy]

Because the only acceptable goal of a graduate from a humanities PhD program is a faculty position in a different humanities PhD program?

[mleok]

Well, given that there is no central administrative body in charge of universities in the US, it's not as if this could be imposed from above, unlike say in the UK.

[downer]

If a department gives up its graduate program, then the faculty will worry that they will be given higher teaching loads. Some places would keep going with Master's programs -- that will vary a lot from one discipline to another. Has a department ever voluntarily given up a graduate program that benefits the faculty? I'd be surprised. Presumably these decisions are mostly made by Provosts and Deans, maybe under pressure to cut costs. But they don't look at the wider problems in the US -- they just look at the balance sheet. No one is really looking at the big picture.

[dismalist]

It's not as though we, whoever we are, close down colleges or departments. That is good. If they can't support themselves, for whatever reason, they close. That is good, too.

Otherwise, this would just become a stream of demanding subsidies. That politicizes, and the voters would decide rather than the market. Does anyone want that? I understand that State funding for higher ed is not what it used to be.

[mamselle]

You really should email Harvey Cox and ask him what he thinks about THAT!

;--》

M.

[marshwiggle]

I don't know the exact number of programs that should exist, or where the cutoff should be, but there is obviously an oversupply relative to demand.

The answer is here:

The problem is less that there are too many places admitting students and more that too many places admit too many students-often without full guaranteed funding.

Short answer- graduate students that can't be fully funded shouldn't be admitted. (Professional programs are a different ball of wax, so this wouldn't apply to them.) Any program that can be sustainable with only fully funded students should continue.

[Caracal]

I don't know the exact number of programs that should exist, or where the cutoff should be, but there is obviously an oversupply relative to demand.

The answer is here:

The problem is less that there are too many places admitting students and more that too many places admit too many students-often without full guaranteed funding.

What's tricky about this is that the incentives are all messed up. Most of the top tier programs-at least in my discipline-fully fund all admitted students. They do this both because if they don't, they are going to really struggle to compete for the best students-but also because they can. Grad students generally do have TA service bound up in their contracts, but that really isn't that important for the department. At least, where I went there were usually more grad students who had to be TAs than sections for them to cover. If that's the case, you can decide-as my school did while I was there-to admit fewer students and give them more generous funding-without causing too much pain.

Often, when you go down a tier to places that are actually quite good, you stop seeing the guaranteed funding but you also see a much higher reliance on grad students for teaching and TA duties so if a department like that decided to dramatically cut the number of grad students they admit, they'd have to restructure a lot of other things too.

[Parasaurolophus]

There's not a single reputable PhD program in philosophy in the US or Canada that doesn't fully fund its PhD students (the UK, Australasia, and Europe are different matters). That's around 75-100 programs. Moreover, it's been this way for decades.

So if you think oversupply is the problem, and you think unfunded students cause the oversupply... uh... those beliefs clearly don't track reality. It turns out you'd be advocating almost no program closures. So much for that solution.

[Ruralguy]

So is there oversupply at all in Philosophy (or pick your favorite small field)? if eveything is funded for grad students, but there still arent enough jobs in academia for them, then why is there so much funding at the supply end?  I am thinking of every single TT job, including at remote colleges with questionable students.

[marshwiggle]

There's not a single reputable PhD program in philosophy in the US or Canada that doesn't fully fund its PhD students (the UK, Australasia, and Europe are different matters). That's around 75-100 programs. Moreover, it's been this way for decades.

So if you think oversupply is the problem, and you think unfunded students cause the oversupply... uh... those beliefs clearly don't track reality. It turns out you'd be advocating almost no program closures. So much for that solution.

Interesting. So is the grad student debt problem mainly in fields like English? I seem to recall it being one of the complaints in adjunct porn; huge student debt including grad school debt.  In fields where that is a problem, reducing the oversupply of PhDs by eliminating positions without full funding seems like it would have a significant impact. (This is assuming that the number of those complaints is reflective of the size of the problem.)