ExponentialDecay

according to USNR, there are about 140 ranked English PhD programs in the United States. Let's assume each one graduates 10 students a year. That's 1400 newly-minted PhDs. According to the Chronicle, there were about 200 English PhD jobs on offer in 2007, which means that, assuming only new PhD's compete for these jobs, 200/1400= 14% of them get those jobs. REALLY BRO, REALLY?

Hold on to your bonnets, ladies. What you're saying that if you're lucky to live in a certain state, or lucky to get into a certain company within a certain industry, your degree may pay off. This is not the situation with non-humanities degrees. If you get a degree in sociology, you are hireable for all positions that require a master's degree, and all the positions that require specifically a sociology degree. Surprisingly enough, there are jobs that want sociology degrees. Secondly, we can look at more efficient paths arriving at the same, say, teaching or editorial position. MEd. MPub. Not to mention, you're studying English, and you're gonna end up mopping up snotty noses or fact-checking legal documents, which is not your training. Additionally, depending on your background, an MA may be a detriment. This is all very circumstantial. The OP wants to do a PhD in the humanities, so for them the MA makes sense. But I wouldn't make a blanket statement that the MA makes sense for anyone who's considering a PhD in the humanities, maybe, and if not, well, I only wasted 2 years of my life and now I can become a pre-K teacher in Nebraska. I'm not sure what data you're going on, since there haven't been any studies published on specifically this subject.

I am seriously convinced that professors tell you to start looking at grad schools in your first semester of senior year because they want to see if you have the intelligence and attitude to do the requisite work. I made my first gradcafe account in my freshman year, and most of my friends that got into grad school in their senior year have gone into college knowing what they want to do. There's a lot of chips that have to fall into place for a person to be successful in such a competitive environment. I wish that were acknowledged more broadly than it is now.

This statistic is an aggregate of all master's degrees and all bachelor's degrees, so on an individual basis it can provide very limited insight. Anecdotally, it does not hold for humanities degrees. Because most teaching positions now require either an MEd or a PhD, you're coming out of the English masters just as employable as you were coming into it - except 1 or 2 years older, which is a detriment due to a series of factors. OP: I think you're quite right in carefully weighing your options like you are now. I further think you are right in your hesitation to pay $50 000 out of pocket for MAPH. I wouldn't listen to your parents regarding this choice, as you said that they have no experience with graduate school. My own parents both have PhDs, but since they are in a different field and they got their PhDs in like the 70s or 80s or whatever and haven't been in academia since, they cannot navigate the current trends, practices, and so on in the academic humanities - nor do they need to, since it will be my ruined life and my non-dischargeable debt, not theirs. If you want somebody to mentor your decision, it's better to ask a trusted professor, grad student, or adjunct, preferably in your field, but ultimately you must do what you think is right, even if it's crazy. Since this is your first round of applications, I wouldn't get upset that you didn't get into your programs. Like you said, the programs you chose are highly competitive - not to mention, this is your first time doing this. You still have a couple attempts before you should despair. I would ask for feedback from adcomms and professors on your materials, refine your choice of schools, your writing, and your knowledge of the field and your intended subfield (having a cache angle or area of study, like literature and neuroscience or whatever it is that's fashionable now, doesn't hurt). Learning a new language (French, German, and the ancient languages are your first ports of call) will be an asset. If you're really serious about this, you should build connections with existing professors and grad students where possible. Reach out to the alumni of your school, perhaps? All this sounds tedious and very daunting, but at least if you work a lot, you often forget about how sucky this limbo is. If I am in your position next year, I will concentrate on applying to two or three good, funded Master's programs in case my next round of applications also goes through - but I wouldn't necessarily lower my sights from the top20s. I'm gonna get slammed for this, but all my professors have been pretty unanimous in their advice to avoid PhD programs that aren't "prestigious". I think that, especially in the case of the applicant having very popular or well-known research interests, as in the OP's case, this advice holds true.

I think that, in facing the daunting reality of the academic job market, some people have lost sense of the general economic reality. Middle-income earnings have plateaud in the 1970s. That means that, in real terms, a middle-income person today can afford fewer things than a middle-income person in the 1970s. Thus, the time when the statistically average person could make 50 times what his parents made is gone forever. America is back to the level of existence that other countries have never left - of most people working too much for too little pay. This is true equally for engineers and lawyers and doctors. Maybe before 2008, the humanities market was in slightly better shape - but after 2008, the humanities PhD is less of a risk compared to other jobs in terms of opportunity cost! However you cut it, most of us will end up in unfulfilling, underpaid jobs - whether we do a PhD in cultural theory, join a marketing firm, or get a CS degree. Now, to make it in the corporate or the professional world, you have to work really, really hard at shit that bores you to the skin of your teeth. It strikes me that your average English major who is successful enough to get accepted to the top 5 graduate schools isn't greatly talented at enduring grunt work. You can't be risk-averse as a humanities graduate student. But if you truly have a lot of potential, you actually lose more by being risk-averse than you do by being pleasure-maximizing.

1. Me 2. Me 3. Me 4. Derrida is dead, but if he weren't, I'd totally do him.

An idea to sell Christmas cards on Easter occurred to me once, but I didn't make much money. That's why I'm applying to grad school.

the academic job market sucks, the data are undocumented, the transparency of the institutions involved couldn't rival a middle eastern dictatorship's. what else is new?

but you have to, have to, have to read the original articles once you are comfortable with the academic style. seriously, people who try to talk about concepts they haven't encountered in the original context deserve their own special scholarly hell.

sorry, i tend to assume cisgender heterosexuality unless otherwise indicated. but i wasn't being all stepford wife on you. what i thought was that you somehow feel that her voice in your life choices can veto yours. idk. would you resent this down the road? but anyway, couldn't you live separately for the 1-2 years it takes her to do her degree? absence makes the heart &etc &etc

no shit, brother. i had no idea that professors and graduate students were once people too.

now, i'm neither a graduate student nor a fiancee, but bear with me: i've always had the impression that, if you want to be successful in grad school, you should expect to deprioritize your personal life. i mean, you're gonna be living on 20 grand a year for the next 5-10 years, most of which will be spent in the library, working, alone. then, if you graduate, you will most definitely have to move out of your current location, probably across the country, maybe even across the world. if you keep landing postdocs and visiting professorships, you will have to do that several more times. the problem you and your fiancee are having now pales in comparison to what might be down the road, when you are offered a position on the west coast, and she on the east coast, say. will you feel like you are locking her out of a career - or will she resent you for turning down a paying job and instead electing to mope around the house while she becomes the newest and lowest-paid addition to the faculty of Revered University N? i believe this is called the two-body problem. example one: i had a professor whose husband taught at Penn. they were both highly successful career academics at prestigious institutions, but i simply don't know how they did it - it's a five-hour drive from here to Philly. most divorced couples live closer together than they did. i don't think that phrasing your dilemma as "locking her out of her education" will contribute positively to solving it. whether to choose grad school over your relationship is, of course, your decision, and you should make it as you see fit. but i wouldn't make her the victim of your decision. if she chooses to follow you to Program 1, that's her free choice. she is not your indentured servant and is not obliged, like you are not, to choose her relationship over her education. i'm sure you love each other very much, but it is perhaps fortunate that this dilemma came up when it did, because if both of you go to grad school, the going's only going to get tougher. i think you need to assess your priorities and address whatever your girlfriend thinks only once you've done that.

actually, Marx is much more widely known than Veblen, even in corporate settings. Wildly! Out! Of! Control! seriously, you should take a chill pill and stop trolling the forums

What I wonder is whether it's a sociological or AI approach.

Economic Theory in Retrospect, Mark Blaug

You can get a BA and an MA in it as well. They're quite popular and useful degrees everywhere except the US, where some Harvard fuck said that Geography is useless and everybody listened to him. My college has a Landscape Studies program for undergraduates. It's like critical theory of space with some architecture thrown in. And don't do an MPhil at Cambridge in anything. They need that money to pay their adjuncts. Speaking of Cambridge, it offers a BA and D Phil in Land Economy, which is a mixture of economics, geography, and law. It's really cool and I was gonna do it for undergrad.

@bhr i'm not calling you a liar. i am calling your argument logically inconsistent. you might want to fix that defensiveness if you hope for a successful career in academia. here's your logic: 1. a person is worried that their foreign degree counts for less than an equivalent degree from a US institution 2. i, bhr, believe that foreign degrees count for less than their equivalent from a US institution --- 3. U MAD BRO??? you're basically calling her out for observing exactly what you have observed. again, i agree with most of what you're saying. like duh, ceteris paribus, a foreign applicant will have to work harder to get where they need to be than a US applicant - i don't think you understand how much harder, really, if you're comparing their plight to the plight of an american citizen from podunk u. but you can't blame people for figuring out what affects their position. and of course she can fix it - she can get an MA in the states, which is what she wants to do. absolutely, any glaring errors in her application materials will hold her back, MA or no MA - but, from what I understand, the purpose of the MA is either to mask poor undergrad grades, or to get acclimatized to the system. the academic culture here is very abstruse for those who weren't coached in it. this argument has been rehashed like 4 times on this topic, so i'll stop. my purpose in this reply was more to ask you to watch where you're going. that said, what school ever has a placement rate of 100%?? that's a statistical impossibility, because to get an odds of 1 you would need infinitely strong evidence, which is impossible. i get that it will be harder for you to get accepted into Harvard because of x, y, z, but we at selective schools, for all our famous professors, track records, and salmon board shorts, we also face gambling odds.

thank you for your support of my statement, but you're coming across as very rude. i hope you're not this dismissive and xenophobic to your residents. not only do i not see how your residents would be making these comments if you're RA at a US institution, since they'll be getting, presumably, degrees from that institution - but you just said yourself that you believe adcomms to be biased towards US degrees. i believe that the latter is generally true, even if i haven't heard of a sorbonne or oxbridge BA having a hard time. but i am lost as to how that compels you to be a dick. we're just asking questions here. nobody's biting 'murica in the ass.

on the contrary, theory and journal articles are the easiest to read quickly. those pesky novelists tend to hide their greatest insights in the most innocuous scenes, whereas in your average journal article, you can get away with reading the introduction, conclusion, noting down who was namedropped, and improvising the rest. the other day, i gave an hour presentation on the multicultural politics of seyla benhabib while knowing nothing but what i read in a 2-page book review.

reporting for duty:)

if you hadn't already done so, i would urge you to research the cvs of current graduate students in the programs you are applying to. after a brief search of grad students in the harvard, princeton, and columbia programs, i found quite a few people with BAs and MAs from China, so it doesn't appear that the adcomms have an overwhelming preference for non-developing country degrees. however, more education, if you're trying to enter academia, is never a bad thing. that said, based on your syntax, your english writing samples may not be as stylistically strong as other applicants'. maybe comp lit programs give leeway to non-native speakers, but since the writing is a significant part of the scholarship, i would err on the side of skepticism. in light of that, maybe an MA in the states wouldn't be a bad thing, for general fluency and for an understanding of the nuances of the western standards of scholarship.

Noobish question: Where does one find these mythical rankings? Are people going off USNR? What if I'm applying to Comparative Literature? Why is Maryland-College Park ranked 1st for Comparative Literature when it only gives 4 years of funding contingent on maintaining a 3.5 GPA??? That said, the general state of innumeracy in this topic is astonishing. Every time somebody goes like WELL MY FRIEND AT HAWAII-MANOA GOT A TT OFFER AT WHITMAN 2 YEARS AFTER COMPLETION, I am reminded of that great romantic comedy, He's Just Not That Into You: we are not the exception; we are the rule. There is a perception that, as a rule, people at lower-ranked programmes will have a difficult time on the job market. The onus of the debate, however, is whether this perception is statistically significant. I myself am very interested to find out whether the hypothesis that people at Top 50 programmes get more and better jobs holds at 5% SL. I don't want to hear about the lucky bastards who happened to choose a field that will boom in 5 years, but in 2014 is only taught at Utah. I don't want to hear about the kid that has his life planned out on a spreadsheet into 2050. I don't care about your friend doing Jewish Studies at Loyola who has an uncle at YU. There was a very worthwhile comment to the Poli Sci article that said that these data are not available, in fact they seem to be pointedly avoided, in the humanities. It's not just the USA that's pushing all and sundry into higher education - this is a global phenomenon. Nobody will be shutting down third-rate programmes. There is a way to profit from this situation, but we can't do that, collectively, as a society, until we know what the situation actually is.

or you could just translate chaadaev.

Specifically, I have an interest in urban geography, migration studies, land economy type stuff. Most Geo departments in the US have well-developed political or environmental outlets, but I don't don't seem to find anything that's more in the direction of urban studies, perhaps, but at a more theoretical, economic level.