graduatingPhD

I presume it is a visiting 1 or 2-year appointment. Visiting lectures generally don't pay a great deal, often require you (and your family) to move across country, and are short-term.

A poignant reflection: http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2014/03/10/essay-about-inability-find-tenure-track-job-academe

A poignant reflection: http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2014/03/10/essay-about-inability-find-tenure-track-job-academe

A poignant reflection: http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2014/03/10/essay-about-inability-find-tenure-track-job-academe

"I mean, I've lost the point of your argument." 1) the job market in the humanities is terrible - find specific data in your subfield and for your institution, 2) getting a tt-job often involves a PhD + several more years in a precarious position and even then may not lead to a job, 3) with concrete knowledge about your subfield and your options, consider the trade-offs that you are making. In response to (3), many commentators, including yourself, suggested that the job prospects of a PhD aren't much different than the job prospects of the job market as a whole. But such overly binaristic thinking (the market is good or bad!) is in fact not true. Yes, the job market in many fields and industries is hurting. Compared to many fields that potential PhDs students can go into, however, the job market in the humanities look especially bad. If you are considering a very strong JD program, say, vs a equally ranking PhD (not so uncommon for humanities people), the humanities program is probably much less likely to give you a job in your intended field, and is more likely to require scraping by for several years after gettomg the degree. For many people—especially people who can get into elite ones—PhD programs will be significantly more "high risk" than other careers that are likely--depending, yes, on their skill set, desires, alma mater, age, etc,--open to them. (See Hashlinger's post where s/he introduced high-risk venture vs getting a corporate lawfirm.) If that is a bet you are willing to make, great! If you don't understand someone's point, try asking before mounting your soap box and unleashing ad hominems.

"I really do have to look askance at a person who throws his (or her) hands up at this whole thing. There are no jobs for PhDs. No jobs for people who don't go to Harvard. 30 is old. Five years is an unrecoverable loss. No one outside of academia will hire a PhD except for private boarding schools. If only I'd gone to law school." You have a persistent problem exaggerating what I am saying so as to make my points absurd and give yourself a self-righteousness high. I said none of those things.

I totally agree, ComeBackZinc. I am not suggestion that a JD or an MBA per se is safer than a PhD. It all depends on a lot of factors. But the job outlook of a Harvard JD or MBA is world’s better than the job outlook of many Harvard PhDs. Here are Yale Law statistics. Note that “Judicial Clerkships,” which employ 41% of students, are generally very prestigious positions (esp. the ones Yale law students get) that make them even more competitive for highly sought jobs. http://www.law.yale.edu/studentlife/cdoprospectivestudents2012employstats.htm Here is an article from 2011 – when the market was even worse off – suggesting that 95% of Harvard MBAs got jobs that year. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424053111904563904576588583893732362 Now if you want to compare a middle-ranked humanities PhD, JD, and MBA – I have no idea what that comparison would look like. Exponentialdecay, I'm not suggesting you go get a JD or that you a wrong to pursue a PhD. We each have to make our own decisions based on our values, skills, desires, etc. (P.S. Way to get personal about whether I could get a Harvard MBA or not! Whether I could is hardly the point. Some people can.)

1. No I didn't assume you can't launch a career after getting a PhD. 2. Yes, getting older and having a PhD does shut yourself out of careers. And the older you are when you graduate, the more likely you are to face obstacles in getting into certain careers. 3. You may or may not recover the money you could have made in those 5 (??) years. But compound interest means money you save in your twenties produces more substantially more savings when you retire than money you make, say, in your thirties. Even if you save the same amount of money in your thirties as you would have in your twenties and thirties together, having saved money in your twenties will result in significantly more retirement savings. The MBA example is a choice one. Students from elite MBAs, for the most part, walze into Wall Street jobs -- and if they don't, there are many other highly paid jobs for them too choose from, though of course this varies somewhat by year. 25% of Harvard humanities PhDs who graduated from 2006-2011 were "unemployed and seeking" in the fall of 2012. Do you think the same is true of their MBAs?

"Not to mention, you can have the grades and the acumen to get into both the Harvard PhD and the Yale JD, but you might not have the skills necessary to perform in one or both of the jobs that follow from those degrees." Yeah, I totally agree. And so? Also, the job prospects of JDs from elite institutions is worlds different than the job prospects of humanities PhDs from elite institutions. (And so is the career compensation, unless you go into public service law. $150K of debt is frankly not that much in the career of a corporate lawyer.)

For all those who know the odds and have decided to get a PhD: great! I am really happy I am getting my PhD, and I am happy for those of you who are or will do likewise. There is much to recommend this path, and I hope those of you who are choosing between programs are enjoying the thought of starting an incredible intellectual journey. "You really have to conceptualize the academic job market as a very high-risk venture, much like landing a job as an associate at a top law firm . You have to understand that you're going to have to apply multiple times, multiple years, and perhaps take undesirable gigs before you get something better. And, oh yeah, have something else going on in your life, or else you are going to feel really shitty. But jobs take time to get." Well, it depends. Yes, the academic job market is high-risk. Whether it is like getting into a top law firm depends on which law school you are coming from. Getting into Yale Law will almost guarantee you a presitigious law firm (or equivalent) when you graduate; getting into Harvard English, on the other hand, doesn't give your nearly such odds of landing a tt-job, especially fi what you want is a R1. Also, once you graduate from a PhD program, the clock is ticking if you are trying to get a tt-job at a school that emphasizes research. You need to publish or perish. But publishing is very difficult when you need to have an alternative career to put money on the table. Getting a PhD and pursuing a tt-job means, for many, not only getting a PhD but then spending several years trying to scrape by in order to publish and thus become more attractive job candidates while not knowing if your bet is going to turn out. This period of limbo causes a lot of people to feel anxious and like a failure and often stresses family relationships, etc. Do other jobs entail similar stresses and level fo stress? Yes of course some do, though there are stresses that a probably relatively unique to PhD programs due to their unusually long periods of training. If you are choosing between a PhD program and a career with an equal amount of uncertainty, a PhD program may entail relatively little opportunity cost. On the other hand, if your choosing between a Harvard English PhD over a Yale Law degree, you are not only giving a large salary differential--obviously--but you are opting for 1) a career path that is much less likely to result in a job in the career for which you've been explicitly trained, 2) much more likely to entail years of limbo and scraping by. I by no means am saying that those contronted with such a decision should pick a Yale JD. (Yes, of course class is important here. That is because our higher educational system is a way of reproducing class and providing some, albeit limited, upward mobility. And if you go to an elite PhD program, you are participating in an institution saturated with privilege and aimed at part in serving it: your stipend is made possible by it, in fact, and you will teach students in courses which have as one of their chief, de facto functions preparing those students to go be upper-middle or upper class professionals.) So my only point--which I wish I expressed more clearly in my first post--is to 1) have a good sense of what the odds are (I posted some Harvard data I thought was particularly helpful as genuine and reputable stats are relatively hard to come by -- the MLA numbers, for intance, tell us that hte job market dramatically shrank, but we don't know how that translates into PhD placements at different sorts of schools) -- especially in your specific subfield, 2) have a good sense of what you are signing up for and what you are trading off in pursuing that. And if you've thought about these things, and decided to get your PhD: great!

TDazzle - You claim its not about your anxiety--but your carttons and words (you've spent "countless hours" preparing, your family has badgered you everyday, you've put so much time into a MFA, people have told you literature won't put food on the table--you've led a rough life!) tells us otherwise. If this isn't useful info to you, then move on. Furthermore, rather than reducing conversation to snark and cartoons, perhaps you can actually engage in conversation. My point is neither that you should or shouldn't get a PhD. Nor is it that books don't put food on the table. It is that something like only 33-40% of Harvard PhDs (which is an imperfect proxy of the market as a whole) in the humanities have gotten a tt-job. It is not the case, as exponential decay claims, that the humanities job market was in "slightly better shape" than before 2008 -- it was in substantially better shape. Many disciplines have reported 35-50% drops in the total number of jobs, and within that there have been shifts (which are hard to get good numbers on) towards adjunct hiring. Those numbers may or may not matter to your decision, but they will matter to those for whom getting a tt-job is an important goal.

Applying to a PhD program is not making a decision to go. I know several people who have gotten into programs and have decided not to go into them. The suggestion that I should have either warned people in Novemember or not at all is, I think, a bizarre one. Yes, it would be excellent to warn people then rather than now. But that doesn't mean it is wrong to warn people now--which is when, after all, the idea occurred to me. Furthermore, some people are going to be better informed than others -- someone who has 459 posts on here, for instance, hopefully already knows what they are getting into. More casual readers, or those brought here just for acceptance season may not. (Look at how few people comment vs those who click on a post.) I certainly don't intend to give anyone a knife in the stomach. I can't account for whether some people's co-workers and family are hounding him about his choice. When I was applying, I got none of that from my coworkers or my friends. I do intend to give them helpful information--and protecting those who might feel anxious and angry doesn't outweigh the benefit to those for whom actual data about the job market might be helpful. The notion that it isn't my "place" to spread useful info in a public forum doesn't resonate with me.

Kamisha - I'm close with several students choosing between PhD programs at this very moment and in talking with them have gotten the sense that applicants do not have a fully realistic picture of what the job market is like--nor do many admitting programs provide that data for them. I'm also an interested observer of the job market as I prepare to go on it in the fall. Also, I have a lot of friends who have gone through the job market--some of whom have been spectacularly successful, some who are fighting to get by. Many of them felt that they had little knowledge about the job market when they started (though it was certainly better than) and many of them feel they would have made different decisions had they known. In his fit of immaturity, TDazzle suggested that these statistics are known to all. In actually, getting numbers on the situation is rather hard. There are aggregate level numbers like those reported by the MLA, etc, but those don't really tell us what it looks like on the ground. Few schools actually report reliable numbers too. The Harvard numbers I posted are the best quality and timespan I've see for what it looks like to get a PhD from a top department. No, as I said at the end of my post, I am not at all inclined to steer people away from choosing a PhD program. In fact, all things considered, I would very likely choose to do it again. My point is not to dictate peoples' choices--each of us have to decide for ourselves, obviously, and what you value may not be what I value--but since a tt job is the endgoal of many pursuing PhD programs, data that helps people on the verge of committing to a career figure out how likely that is may be very useful to some. Unfortunately, as TDazzle's snark makes clear, such information is, for many, also anxiety provoking.

p.s. if you want to get a sense of what the job market is today, here is where most US jobs get posted: http://academicjobs.wikia.com/wiki/English_Literature_2013-14 Keep in mind that some subfields will have much bigger applicant pools than others.

p.s. if you want to see what the job market looks like today--and what jobs you could have applied to--here is where most US jobs get listed: http://academicjobs.wikia.com/wiki/History_2013-14 When you look at these postings, you need to keep in mind how large your subfield is, i.e. how many people who are likely to be applying for any given job. For tiny subfields, a few job posting coud give everyone in that subfield a pretty good shot. In the largest fields like US history, however, a job can easily get 300+ applications...