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

[Ruralguy]

Universities want to keep up enrollments, but they can't hire TT faculty (or don't want to) to cover the load, nor do they want to lose competitive research edge by increasing the teaching load per existing faculty member. So, they turn to funding at least some grad students for this purpose and departments are quite willing to oblige (they can always chuck them later if they fail comps, stay too long, do badly with course work, or are utterly negligent with teaching duties).

[downer]

Universities want to keep up enrollments, but they can't hire TT faculty (or don't want to) to cover the load, nor do they want to lose competitive research edge by increasing the teaching load per existing faculty member. So, they turn to funding at least some grad students for this purpose and departments are quite willing to oblige (they can always chuck them later if they fail comps, stay too long, do badly with course work, or are utterly negligent with teaching duties).

Don't the grad students have at least to get to ABD stage before they can teach their own courses? Before then, they can be TAs, which makes it possible for the FT faculty to teach larger courses.

Is this a new phenomenon? Or increasing? Seems like it has been going on a long time.

[Ruralguy]

Definitely not new.

Whether or not you can lead a course (as a lecturer) depends on relevant credit hrs in subject. It usually ends up being something like Masters level, so, if a student gets a Masters along the way (and some do just for this purpose) or otherwise get to enough credits and can prove it, then they can usually teach a course solo (but most depts. only let a student do this if they've gotten rave reviews as a TA first). Labs are an exception. TAs can lead lab sections. So, this means you don't need full time faculty to teach lab sections, and, yes, in all subject areas, this allows bigger sections and can hire 1 or more (sometimes many more) TA's to divide up the grading or "recitation" work. 

[Wahoo Redux]

Universities want to keep up enrollments, but they can't hire TT faculty (or don't want to) to cover the load, nor do they want to lose competitive research edge by increasing the teaching load per existing faculty member. So, they turn to funding at least some grad students for this purpose and departments are quite willing to oblige (they can always chuck them later if they fail comps, stay too long, do badly with course work, or are utterly negligent with teaching duties).

Don't the grad students have at least to get to ABD stage before they can teach their own courses? Before then, they can be TAs, which makes it possible for the FT faculty to teach larger courses.

Is this a new phenomenon? Or increasing? Seems like it has been going on a long time.

This is also discipline dependent.

English GTAs are generally on fellowships to teach, sometimes in their second year of the MA degree, sometimes from the first school day of their graduate program.  Not all grad programs offer these, particularly at the more prestigious schools.  Most English teaching fellowships come with tuition remission and at least a partial stipend.  I got a living stipend from my program, although it definitely hand-to-mouth.  Other programs provide, say, $600 a month which is not enough to live off of, obviously, and this is where student loans come in.

[kaysixteen]

Hell, I taught Latin 101 at the age of 21, as a first semester grad student in a terminal MA program... in 1989.

[Ruralguy]

Our accreditors would never allow this, or certainly not on a regular basis.