Mondo

And this student couldn't "spurn filthy Texas lucre" and ended up at Texas A&M only to leave after one year. And then she's decided to stay far, far away from Texas!: D. Concerns like those of student A above motivated this remarkable student, whose record is described in Section 12, to walk away from her prestigious $34,000 Presidential fellowship at Texas A&M after only one year sans degree to work as a tutor for disadvantaged high school students rather than continue further with "a system of graduate education that encourages students to question the construction and maintenance of injustice -- and then write papers about it rather than attempt to alter it." After winning more than half-a-dozen essay prizes at Pitt she felt that literary academia teems with Ph.D. wannabes who can write such papers as well as she while there are too few people willing to deploy their talents in the educational trenches where real social progress can be made. She tutored bilingual students in Texas for a year, then worked for two years in a charter school in a high needs area of Boston, which she loved. Currently coaching preppies in NYC on how to mount successful applications to Ivy League schools, she finds this less satisfying and has not ruled out the prospect of returning eventually to grad school.

Humanities (especially English) job outlook gets bleaker according to today's NY Times article: http://www.nytimes.c...r.html?_r=1&hpw I was told it is the worst time to get into an English Ph.D. program, and that more grad students started abandoning their study. Is it true?

It can turn deadly. A grad student stabs his supervisor to death over funding at Binghamton: http://www.nytimes.c...1&ref=education

I have run into this website, www.graduatestudentabuse.org Although it's about the grad student abuse at the UCLA Slavic dept, it sounds very familiar, as I have heard similar stories about some English grad programs. A list of abuses is as follows: • physical displays of faculty anger including frequent yelling and even slamming a chair on the floor • students being intimidated into taking particular classes because of enrollment concerns • students who fear writing anything but laudatory comments in the "anonymous" course evaluation forms • a fractious faculty so immobilized by disagreement that no common reading list can be agreed upon (at least for linguistics) to assist the students in preparation for their exams • students who feel compelled to tailor their intellectual approach in exams to the committee membership, and who are advised to "get one on your side" before going into exams • students who don't dare complain for fear of retaliation in the MA or PhD exams, or in obtaining a dissertation signature • students who feel that the only value of their comments is for use as ammunition in the internal squabbles of the faculty • repeated episodes of students being ridiculed for having various deficiencies in their background; e.g. "What the hell are you doing here?" or "Well, you might as well just be an undergraduate!" • students feeling abandoned and with no place to turn • faculty who appear to change their minds about the quality of work in response to unrelated circumstances • ladder faculty conspiring against non-ladder faculty in the presence of students • faculty playing out their rivalries by deprecating students' choices of dissertation advisor • students being threatened with loss of funding in arguments with faculty, e.g. " ... and don't think you are going to get funding next year..." • students being threatened with disciplinary action for voicing disagreement with faculty They also complain about the lack of funding and the high level of attrition, which again sounds very familiar. You can read more about this at http://www.graduates...use.org/4a.html

Most of the English grad program websites don't include any placement records. If there's any, it's often vague. I think it should be mandated that each English grad program post the complete list of all dissertation titles, the complete placement records and the annual cohort size. The lack of transparency is amazing, often misleading applicants or even current students in programs, which makes it almost impossible to predict how you will fit in a program unless you end up there and spend a year. That's probably what many programs aim for, that is, they recruit a highly competitive pool of students by any means possible, and once they're there, they're at their mercy--they're not going anywhere. Greekdaph, faculty turnover is a serious problem. It's more severe in low ranked programs, especially in schools located in undesirable places. I guess your "it-takes-a-village model" refers to top programs' alumni success and network, which less prestigious programs don't have--so if they place their graduates somewhere, it's often through their supervisors' connection. "that said, if you have a specific specialty i'd worry more about a school's reputation in your field than general rankings. of course, if a school you want to go to for, say, 18th century british lit is full of really famous academics who are all 90 and not long for this world i'd reconsider going there." JennyFieldsOriginal, this makes me laugh. Well, I've seen a relatively young professor in his late forties or early fifties die. I think it's taken a toll on him to go through the tenure process after several years of graduate school and years of stressful job search. Good men die young, people say, and I concur. I hope that the NRC rankings are not much different from the US News rankings. I guess it's worth applying to programs ranked below 40 or 50 if they have some track record of success in job placement. UNC must have a nice atmosphere as you both recommend it. They're probably good at placing their graduates in schools in the South because they have strength in Southern lit, which is really not my area.

Purdue is not known for its lit program. I think it has a decent Rhetoric & Comp program. Good luck with MIT, which might be more interested in you than English Ph.D. programs.

I'm dying to see the NRC English graduate program ranking. I don't know why they keep postponing the release date. Does anyone have any idea when it'll come out? Do you think it won't be much different from the US News ranking? And is it really worth applying to programs ranked below 40 or 50, considering the economy and the bleak job prospect?

greekdaph, Thanks for your thoughtful response. From what I hear from people, there are many possible scenarios for ABDs leaving. It's not like they don't want or plan to finish. The majority of them want to, considering several years of hard work, but unexpected things happen. Your supervisor might move to another school, retire, or die. Your relationship with your supervisor might suddenly change, and s/he becomes more and more difficult to deal with and so doesn't cooperate with you anymore, for example, making an unreasonable request for a rewrite of your dissertation, or simply showing almost no interest in what you're doing, leaving you all alone. Funding is one of the issues that might hinder your progrss or unimately force you to leave, like you said, but there're other subtle ways to show you the door even in a later stage. You just simply figure out and leave on your own, realizing that your supervisor won't be there for you anymore. You're at their mercy. I don't know if professors in top programs have a certain ethical standard to uphold, or if they have a better system to handle this kind of issues, but it's hard to shake off the impression that English professors are probably the most selfish people in academia. Mondo

Hello, Do you guys know the completion rate of Ph.D. students in English? English graduate programs rarely release such info. I've heard it's around 50% in a majority of English Ph.D. programs, even in top programs. I can guess this by looking at the number of Ph.D. students a program admits each year and the number of graduates occasionally posted with their dissertation titles. I've heard that it's even worse in some of the programs in the middle or bottom tiers--sometimes less than 25%. I saw some friends leave with only an MA or just drop out even in the dissertation stage. I know there're many obstacles to get over during the course of a Ph.D. study, and that there're many sadistic English professors with weird personalities, preying on grad students, looking for every chance to take you out. Anyway, does anyone happen to know English Ph.D. programs in the top forty or fifty in the US News rankings that are known for their nurturing academic environment--not overly competitive but more inclusive? Thanks, Mondo

"Many of the Suny Schools (Buffalo permits its students a great degree of freedom)Although, there are many many horror stories about this place." Would you mind sharing the horror stories at Buffalo (or other SUNY programs)? Are they funding-related?