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BE THANKFUL YOU AREN'T IN THE HUMANITIES
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POST DATE
January 19, 2010, 6 PM
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The title says it all: "Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go". A particularly grim line:
...some responsible observers expect that hiring may be down 40 percent this year. What is 40 percent worse than desperate?
Something that rings true beyond the humanities is the author's characterization of the reasons that people go to graduate school in spite of poor career prospects afterwards (hello life scientists):
I have found that most prospective graduate students have given little thought to what will happen to them after they complete their doctorates. They assume that everyone finds a decent position somewhere, even if it's "only" at a community college (expressed with a shudder). Besides, the completion of graduate school seems impossibly far away, so their concerns are mostly focused on the present. Their motives are usually some combination of the following:
- They are excited by some subject and believe they have a deep, sustainable interest in it. (But ask follow-up questions and you find that it is only deep in relation to their undergraduate peers — not in relation to the kind of serious dedication you need in graduate programs.)
- They received high grades and a lot of praise from their professors, and they are not finding similar encouragement outside of an academic environment. They want to return to a context in which they feel validated.
- They are emerging from 16 years of institutional living: a clear, step-by-step process of advancement toward a goal, with measured outcomes, constant reinforcement and support, and clearly defined hierarchies. The world outside school seems so unstructured, ambiguous, difficult to navigate, and frightening.
- With the prospect of an unappealing, entry-level job on the horizon, life in college becomes increasingly idealized. They think graduate school will continue that romantic experience and enable them to stay in college forever as teacher-scholars.
- They can't find a position anywhere that uses the skills on which they most prided themselves in college. They are forced to learn about new things that don't interest them nearly as much. No one is impressed by their knowledge of Jane Austen. There are no mentors to guide and protect them, and they turn to former teachers for help.
- They think that graduate school is a good place to hide from the recession. They'll spend a few years studying literature, preferably on a fellowship, and then, if academe doesn't seem appealing or open to them, they will simply look for a job when the market has improved. And, you know, all those baby boomers have to retire someday, and when that happens, there will be jobs available in academe.
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I wonder if soon the widespread realization will arise that education, like houses, is not an "investment" that can only increase in value over time. At some level and in some areas, education, like housing, is a luxury consumer good.
If they haven't figured it out by now...
I've recently been reading up on [cognitive biases](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias), and there are several important ones that come into play in the decision to attend grad school. The Wikipedia summary is pretty good (particularly their [big list](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases)). Something for a later post.
Not only the Humanities- also the Sciences. Why Are There Still Too Many Graduate Students?
As the economy tanks the number of new graduate students is going up. In Sept 2009 the Council of Graduate Schools reported a 4.7% rise in the number of US national students, beating out the increase in foreign students for the first time in several years. Its not surprising that more young Americans are choosing graduate school as a refuge in times of economic uncertainly, what is surprising is that our universities and our federal funding agencies are allowing this to happen in the face of extensive evidence that we are training far too many PhD students. Despite shrinking opportunities in the academic world and massive layoffs of PhD scientists by the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and other high-tech industries, our universities continue to pump out new PhDs at an ever-increasing rate.
What drives this heedless increase in PhD production? Most likely it is the very nature of current ultra-competitive scientific research combined with an outmoded approach to faculty advancement prevalent in universities. This leads senior investigators (PIs) to build up their labs with as many students and postdocs as possible irrespective of whether this is really beneficial to the trainees.
What is to be done? First of all graduate training needs to be uncoupled from the drive of PI ambition. The goal of training should be training, not PI advancement. A good way to do this would be to end support for graduate research assistants on federal research grants. Graduate students could be supported on individual competitive fellowships or as part of university wide training grants. Work in the labs would then become more dependent on postdocs and technicians rather than students. This would also give granting agencies a better way to align the number of PhD candidates to the expected demand in various fields by controlling the number of training slots. A second thrust would be to reconstitute the Master’s degree as an essential element of graduate training. Increasing the pool of individuals with Master’s degrees in the sciences would help industry and government to fill those middle management positions that require an element of scientific sophistication, but not a PhD. Finally, universities need to develop stable, non-replicating research career pathways. Contemporary science depends on a large cohort of postdoctorals, research associates, and research track faculty who perform the day-to-day work in the laboratories in a highly skilled manner. However, these types of positions almost uniformly depend on the success on an individual PI in obtaining grant funding; thus they have no stability and no status in the university aside from the connection to the PI. This needs to change. For more information see http://scienceforthefuture.blogspot.com/.