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

[Caracal]

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.

I'm not in philosophy, but in history lots of programs do not give 5, or even 4 years of guaranteed funding. By guaranteed, I mean funding that isn't competitive and is reserved for the student as long as they make satisfactory progress. When I got accepted into grad school programs, I certainly had several offers from well respected-just short of top tier-programs that did not include guaranteed funding. You had to apply separately for funding and there were no promises. To be clear, I'm not saying I think unfunded students are the primary cause of oversupply in my discipline. I do get the impression that there are programs who find it advantageous to admit more students and give them less.

[Caracal]

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.)

Well, regardless of the big picture, its a harm reduction strategy. When I told my undergrad mentor that I was considering applying to grad school, he gave me the spiel about the job market and told me I should think take a few weeks and think about whether I wanted to do this in the full knowledge that not getting a tenure track job was a very real possibility. When I came back and told him, I still wanted to go forward, the next thing he said was that I should never, never take an offer without full guaranteed funding. It's one thing to spend seven years in grad school and have no stable job in your field to show for it, but you certainly don't want to be in that position with large amounts of debt.

[Parasaurolophus]

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.

From memory, there are something like 400-500 new philosophy PhDs awarded in the US each year (compared to 1k-2k for English). Our central jobs database has about 250 jobs advertised on it each year worldwide, although community colleges and a number of international institutions tend not to advertise there. So it's hard to estimate quite how many jobs there are each year, but there's no question that it's fewer than the number of PhDs awarded (again, the market is international). The numbers of applicants for each job tell a lot of the story, after all: you don't get 650+ applicants for podunk jobs (or even 300+, as in the pandemic years) when there isn't a glut of applicants.

Why is there so much funding? Because it's pretty cheap. A typical philosophy PhD stipend is around $20k. That includes TAing and, in the US, it usually means teaching a minimum number of courses every year after your second year (usually 2-3). With an intake of about four students a year, you can offset a huge part of the department's teaching load and still end up well in the black. Add in the prestige bump of having grad students, and there you go.

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.)

I don't know enough about other fields to say definitively, but my sense is that yes, it's overgeneralized from English, where a number of prominent departments decided long ago to use their grad programs as cash cows. IIRC, history tends to fund its students. That's not to say there aren't unfunded philosophy PhDs out there: there are. But they're pariah programs (some are quite good on paper, but the lack of funding is a huge professional black mark against them).

[downer]

In what way is an oversupply a problem?

Maybe some grad students go into debt. Do they regret their choices?

Is it that some people who get a PhD but don't get a TT job are less employable in the general non-academic job market after their PhD than they were before? Do we have any data on how many graduate students regret their choice to go to grad school?

Is that universities are wasting money training people to be academics when many of them will never become academics?
(Given how much unpaid or low paid teaching or other work some universities get their grad students to do, are they really making a loss?)

[dismalist]

An oversupply is always a problem for those employed in their field. Their wages would rise if medieval guild like supply restrictions were imposed.

[marshwiggle]

In what way is an oversupply a problem?

Maybe some grad students go into debt. Do they regret their choices?

Given the number of adjunct porn stories, many seem to feel that they've been misled or ripped off in some way by the system. Whether they feel their choices should have been different isn't always clear. Some seem to feel that the lack of jobs is the only problem, not the oversupply of applicants for the existing jobs.

[kaysixteen]

Ok, you have a point, though this is largely a 21st c, and esp post-Great Recession issue.  Many of us Gen Xers did in fact go to grad school in an era where we were regularly and explicitly told, from reputable higher ed sources, that the world would be our oyster, academic jobs-wise, when we completed our PhDs.  Heck, a regular-ish feature of modern adjunct porn, usually written by people younger than Gen X, is that even nowadays a lot of grad school (and to a lesser extent undergrad) profs still tell PhD candidates and prospective candidates things regarding their job prospects that, like it or not, just are not true.

[apl68]

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.

I'm not in philosophy, but in history lots of programs do not give 5, or even 4 years of guaranteed funding. By guaranteed, I mean funding that isn't competitive and is reserved for the student as long as they make satisfactory progress. When I got accepted into grad school programs, I certainly had several offers from well respected-just short of top tier-programs that did not include guaranteed funding. You had to apply separately for funding and there were no promises. To be clear, I'm not saying I think unfunded students are the primary cause of oversupply in my discipline. I do get the impression that there are programs who find it advantageous to admit more students and give them less.

Tell me about it!  My own experience of being a grad student in history convinced me that the main purpose of grad schools in our discipline was to guarantee a ready supply of cheap TA (and later adjunct) labor to supplement the core of expensive TT instructors.  I don't think that the profs in the department were so cynical in their exploitation of students, but I believe that there were higher-ups at the university who knew and approved of the exploitative nature of the system.  I still believe that grad school effectively strip-mined several years of my life for the school's benefit.

[apl68]

Ok, you have a point, though this is largely a 21st c, and esp post-Great Recession issue.  Many of us Gen Xers did in fact go to grad school in an era where we were regularly and explicitly told, from reputable higher ed sources, that the world would be our oyster, academic jobs-wise, when we completed our PhDs.  Heck, a regular-ish feature of modern adjunct porn, usually written by people younger than Gen X, is that even nowadays a lot of grad school (and to a lesser extent undergrad) profs still tell PhD candidates and prospective candidates things regarding their job prospects that, like it or not, just are not true.

Yes, there were a lot of people making good-faith choices in which their faith proved very misplaced.  Certainly in the late '80s-early '90s, and perhaps still.  I believe that there is at least some conscious exploitation of grad students going on, and it makes me angry.  In the long run I believe that my personal grad school experience ended up like Joseph being sold into bondage by his brothers--they meant it for evil, but God turned it to good.  Still doesn't justify the exploitative actions.

[Ruralguy]

Similar in the sciences. What they did was to accept somewhat more students than could really be supported from research grants alone. The thought is they needed TA's anyway, and they'd be supported through university funds (which of course were partly funded through grant indirects anyway). Most students would eventually get their PhD, but a handful would either fail out by course grade or qualifying exam, or just decide to go. Either way, at least in my program, and probably many others in late 80's, and early 90's, you'd end up with slightly more grads than could realistically be supported even by post docs, let alone TT positions. And there was barely a mention ever of any TT job that wasn't at an R1, which was weird, because we had no problem getting speakers from other types of places.

[dismalist]

My own experience of being a grad student in history convinced me that the main purpose of grad schools in our discipline was to guarantee a ready supply of cheap TA (and later adjunct) labor to supplement the core of expensive TT instructors.  I don't think that the profs in the department were so cynical in their exploitation of students, but I believe that there were higher-ups at the university who knew and approved of the exploitative nature of the system.

That cannot be correct, for two reasons:

1) Any single university pursuing such a strategy would see it fail as other universities hired away the graduates. There are too many universities in the US for all universities to produce for the purpose of getting TA's and later adjuncts, without explicit coordination, which is illegal, and vigorously pursued by the DoJ.

2a) University administrators have much too short a time horizon to make anything like this a consideration to them.
2b) University administrators ain't that bright.

What is going on is very straightforward:

Enough people want to do graduate work with full fare, partial fare, or no fare, and there is enough money around to pay for the training of these people. Unless the graduate students come because they're uninformed, there is no problem. Even then, word got around in Athens, and they didn't have cell phones there.

My own take on the matter is that there are people who are less risk averse than some of us are. Perhaps some whine about it afterwards, like after losing one's bets at the horse races.

No problem; system working.

[mamselle]

Read Harvey Cox.

M.

[mleok]

Similar in the sciences. What they did was to accept somewhat more students than could really be supported from research grants alone. The thought is they needed TA's anyway, and they'd be supported through university funds (which of course were partly funded through grant indirects anyway). Most students would eventually get their PhD, but a handful would either fail out by course grade or qualifying exam, or just decide to go. Either way, at least in my program, and probably many others in late 80's, and early 90's, you'd end up with slightly more grads than could realistically be supported even by post docs, let alone TT positions. And there was barely a mention ever of any TT job that wasn't at an R1, which was weird, because we had no problem getting speakers from other types of places.

This is still much less cynical than Berkeley's math department, which at one point had a reputation for admitting far more students into their PhD program than they expected to graduate, so that they could fill their TA ranks, and fail some significant fraction of them out at the qualifying examination stage with a Master's degree. I believe this is no longer the case.

[dismalist]

Similar in the sciences. What they did was to accept somewhat more students than could really be supported from research grants alone. The thought is they needed TA's anyway, and they'd be supported through university funds (which of course were partly funded through grant indirects anyway). Most students would eventually get their PhD, but a handful would either fail out by course grade or qualifying exam, or just decide to go. Either way, at least in my program, and probably many others in late 80's, and early 90's, you'd end up with slightly more grads than could realistically be supported even by post docs, let alone TT positions. And there was barely a mention ever of any TT job that wasn't at an R1, which was weird, because we had no problem getting speakers from other types of places.

This is still much less cynical than Berkeley's math department, which at one point had a reputation for admitting far more students into their PhD program than they expected to graduate, so that they could fill their TA ranks, and fail some significant fraction of them out at the qualifying examination stage with a Master's degree. I believe this is no longer the case.

Failing some significant fraction of students is not cynical, it is a quality searching strategy! It is not written at the outset who will fail. The Master's is the insurance policy. Everyone entering knows this.

Famously, in economics, the University of Chicago pursues this strategy. A typical econ PhD program will admit 30 or a little fewer students per year. At Chicago they will admit 60 or a little fewer, of which 30 or so are fully funded and the rest pay their own way. At the orientation session, I have heard, people were asked to look at the persons next to them and told: Half of you won't be here next year! One graduate student where I studied thought we, the students, were all stupid, and the faculty wasn't all that great either. He transferred to Chicago after one semester. The following semester, he was back! He said he didn't like the atmosphere, which is likely true, but maybe he was kicked out.

The eternal struggle over resources ... .

[Caracal]

He transferred to Chicago after one semester. The following semester, he was back! He said he didn't like the atmosphere, which is likely true, but maybe he was kicked out.

The eternal struggle over resources ... .

It would tend to create a really unpleasant environment if you value collegiality and camaraderie...