dr. t

For those applying to graduate programs in history in the fall of 2024.

Generally no. If the school you're hoping for has released some results and you haven't heard, that's almost certainly bad news.

For all things related to applying to graduate school in history in the fall of 2023.

How much money are each offering? Which is more of a livable wage? Which offers better opportunities to fund travel to your archive?

Look at the median 1BR rent in Boston before you get too excited.

Wait until you apply for jobs and you never hear back 😑

I wrote this: https://www.historians.org/ahajobsreport2022 Let me know if you have questions.

See if you can defer from school 1 for a year, and then use the time to reapply to school 2.

?You got silenced for trying to troll the troll. If you want to post your AO3 stories here, enjoy I guess.

Funding is the most important criteria; you can't write a dissertation if you can't get to your archive. If you think school 2 is ok in that regard, there's your answer.

You don't know that, actually. They might have taken a mediocre application to a good one, but it's not about the quality of your applications, it's about the quality of the application relative to others. And a professor doesn't know what other applications they're getting. But it is useful information to know that a professor is enthusiastic and communicative. Anyway, my signature line seems applicable here. Congrats on your acceptances; don't let them go to your head. Getting through grad school is pretty difficult if your entire cohort won't talk to you. This will vary wildly based on the specific department and person.

Cleaned up this thread a bit. We are aware of the trolling problem and are doing the best we can with the tools we have. Please report posts but do not engage; troll feeding will result in a 1 week silence.

Separate department.

Files come in, profs look over those in their specialties, and then send them on to the overall committee, who makes the final selections. A professor can sometimes know if a file they've forwarded is going to make it through or not, e.g. if the three Americanists in the dept. all decide that Jane Smith is their number one pick for that year. That's likely what these acceptances are.

Also, getting into Yale means having to live in New Haven ? Really, rejection is the better option.

ND is one of the few schools wealthy enough to have a medieval studies center, but there aren't generally that many medievalists in any specific subdiscipline at any one school. It's not something that should worry you about ND, but it is something that should worry you when it comes to the state of academic employment. If you can tolerate South Bend for 7 years, though, you're probably pretty immune to suffering.

As I understand it, the existing finances and infrastructure of the organization could not legally be used to establish a trade union, no.

I take a very hard line on this confusion of possibility and probability, and not only because I've done the numbers—though the numbers do suck generally. Can people from non-elite programs get a TT job? Sure. Are they likely to? No. Are they anywhere near as likely to as non-elite programs to get a TT job? No. From the Where Historians Work Dataset, on which I have done independent analysis, between 2004 and 2017, the top-10 schools when scored by placements are: Cornell (70% of PhDs found TT jobs) Princeton (68%) Harvard (66%) MIT (64%) NYU (61%) UMich (61%) Johns Hopkins (60%) Yale (60%) Columbia (58%) Stanford (58%) Note that the WHW data is a full survey of all PhDs earned in that period. These 10 schools account for 38% of all TT jobs found in that period, despite the schools constituting only 6% of all PhD-awarding institutions. Only around 30 programs (18%) find jobs for more than half of their graduates. And as the total number of available jobs dwindle, this disparity is only getting worse. Only 14 schools (9%) have placed more than 50% of their graduates after 2009. Fewer jobs mean those at the bottom, not the top, struggle to find jobs first. And on a related note, of the 10 programs worst hit by the reduction in job availability, 7 are state schools (Arkansas, Kentucky, Nebraska, Arizona, West Virginia, Georgia, Mississippi).

Nah, it's not like... classics, which has deliberately and obstinately written itself into irrelevancy. I think what you're actually seeing is the death of tenure, outside of R1s at least.

The moral arc of the universe is long and bends towards Joe Biden.

This is a thing I struggle with, particularly being on the staff of an organization that's in a position to advocate but not to dictate. I can list off so many things that would fix academia, if only everyone would just magically agree to do them. At work we get tons of these. "You should mandate that..." (we have no enforcement power). "You shouldn't accredit..." (we don't accredit). "You should unionize..." (we're a 501c with a charter from congress). This is the Bernie Bro approach to academic policy, and the reality of the situation calls for a Liz Warren to actually get shit done.

I am also hostile to badly-implemented policies. But what's the solution to the problem posed by the Graph of Doom, i.e. PhDs are overproduced vs. the prevalence of academic jobs? Ban programs outside the top-20 from having PhD programs? That's both antidemocratic and insufferably elitist. It would really be the death-through-isolation of history within the academy. Create more academic jobs? Sure, are you paying? Without a solution - or even a possible solution - what's the point of emphasizing the data?

Ah, the "Graph of Doom (tm)". No, for a lot of reasons, chief among which is that it is built on the assumed truth that the only thing one can do with a PhD in history is become a professor.

No.

FYI: https://www.historians.org/ahajobsreport2022