Bumblebea

Huh, I did not know that ASU's English department hired seven TT professors--I was under the impression that they hired three on the tenure track and two visiting/contingent. (And three is actually a lot, considering the massive cuts to higher ed last year.) I was also basing my assessment on an article I read in the Chronicle this summer: https://www.chronicle.com/article/arizona-states-success-story-model-or-mirage Then there’s the fact that three-quarters of ASU’s online instructors are off the tenure track. If they are like other non-tenure-track instructors at ASU, they teach many more classes and at much lower pay than do their tenured colleagues, contributing to the cheapness of the operation. Still, remarkably, the nearly 40 percent of ASU students who learn exclusively online pay the same tuition as students on the physical campuses. And: Technology is substituted for labor wherever possible, including in advising (through the “eAdvisor” system), in introductory mathematics (where much instruction is self-paced and machine-based), and elsewhere in the online program. Labor is also highly differentiated, including legions of non-tenure-track faculty members, some of whom teach more courses than are typical at public research universities. ASU’s budget allocations are made with market incentives in mind. The goal for 2025 is to produce 60 percent of all the “high-demand” degrees (STEM, health, and business) awarded in the entire state. That emphasis on moving away from the humanities again looks more like an accentuation of a long-term nationwide trend than a prototype. This article is pre-pandemic, but it discusses how the business model runs at ASU: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/12/16/arizona-state-tells-non-tenure-track-writing-instructors-teach-extra-course-each Hopefully additional students will indeed translate into more tenure-track hires, that would be great. But as education keeps going online, I'm not optimistic. Also, cynically, I wonder if ASU could reasonably justify hiring many MORE TT faculty for their 120,000 undergrads, but has decided to save money by consigning most of the labor to adjunct and contingent faculty.

@nocapheremakes excellent points. If your goal is to go to graduate school to go to graduate school (a perfectly valid choice, btw!), then find a funded program and go. If your goal is to become a professor ... well, it's true that you may have a better chance coming from an elite school, but that "better chance" is largely meaningless when there are only two jobs in your field. I think that English graduate studies is suffering a bit from "boy who cried wolf" syndrome. I mean, everyone has been saying for years--no, decades--that there are no jobs. It's true that the academic job market has been terrible for decades, but saying "there are no jobs!" when there were, in fact some jobs, now makes the cry of "there are no jobs! no, seriously, no jobs!" feel hyperbolic. It's not hyperbolic. There are literally next-to no jobs. To give some perspective: the first year I went on the market, I think there were ~25 TT jobs in my area, and that was considered a bad year (the profession obviously produces more than 25 PhDs in this area each year). Last year, there were two TT jobs in North America in my area. And it's not an obscure field. And one of those jobs was cross-listed with another area. (That's happening more and more--the Hamilton job, for instance, was advertised as an 18th-19th c. position of either British or American. I can't imagine how many applications they received.) This disconnect between perception and reality was driven home last week when I had a conversation with an old friend whose significant other is completing a PhD at an Ivy and preparing to go on the market. Significant other is freaked out about his chances. My friend said, "But it'll be better for him than it was for you, right? He's coming out of [very prestigious program], and that'll make a difference. He can write his own ticket." And I was like, "Um, right now, no. There are literally no jobs and therefore no ticket to write." And friend said, "But they've been saying 'there are no jobs' for years. Are you telling me it's not just an exaggeration? That there are really no jobs?" People were saying there were no jobs when there were 25 jobs. But now there are almost no jobs, and many people are still behaving as though "no jobs" is a bit of an exaggeration. It's not. And yes, of course Covid has played a major role in the tanking of the job market, and I suppose the market could come back. But all indications point in the other direction, as the pandemic has been extremely good for certain universities. Other universities are using it to justify all kinds of austerity measures, which always hurt tenure-track prospects in A&S the most. I saw the same thing happen with the Great Recession. At the time, everyone said, "the job market will bounce back once the economy does." It didn't. Instead, it showed universities that they could get away with consolidating TT lines, replacing retiring faculty with adjuncts and contingents, paying junior faculty less, and, in some cases, doing away with TT hires altogether. (A department where I taught previously hasn't made a TT hire in more than ten years despite multiple retirements; they just hire a series of "visiting" professors for a few years at a time, kicking them out after three years. When I went to our new faculty orientation, 90% of the new faculty were NTT.) These things didn't stop happening when the Recession ended. They got worse because they benefited universities. I won't be surprised if Covid has a similar impact in the long-run, where universities end up prospering while job prospects get even worse for PhDs. I'd look to Arizona State as a bellwether--they're actually thriving due to the pandemic by combining faculty downsizing with online courses: https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-colleges-that-prospered-during-the-pandemic

Who gets into prestigious PhD programs? Well, I don't meant to sound flip here, but if I'm going to be completely frank ... those who get into prestigious PhD programs are, most of the time, people who went to prestigious undergrad institutions. Yes, there's a pipeline. There is nepotism. There is an attitude of "these people have what it takes to make it because they already made it--they were able to get into a prestigious school in the first place." Branding is powerful. Familiarity is powerful. The "benefit of the doubt" is powerful. Confirmation bias is EXTREMELY powerful. A person with a BA from University of Scranton is a bit of an unknown quantity; a person with a BA from Amherst with a connected adviser already has the bona fides and doesn't have to prove that they'll be able to pull their weight in a seminar room at Columbia. People look at the Amherst BA's writing sample with a different attitude from the one they take with the Scranton BA's. That's just basic human psychology, and no one's immune. I read this book a while ago, and it explains the thought process of a lot adcom members of prestigious PhD programs (and it can be rather shocking to read, tbh): https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/01/06/new-book-reveals-how-elite-phd-admissions-committees-review-candidates In academia, prestige breeds prestige breeds prestige, and what you do--as either an undergrad or a grad student--is looked at through the lens of which schools you went to. That's why the faculty pipeline has remained closed to many who don't fit the elite mold. When asked why faculty continue to remain so homogenous, a professor from Penn spoke frankly: "We don't want [diverse candidates]. We don't want them": https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/09/26/an-ivy-league-professor-on-why-colleges-dont-hire-more-faculty-of-color-we-dont-want-them/ Does that mean that no one from less-elite institutions can get into a prestigious school? No, of course not. We see exceptions every year. Hell, I've met many. But to be quite honest with you, they were often very, very exceptional. Just to give a rundown (and it goes without saying that this is all based on my personal anecdotal experience): - I knew one guy who went to an unknown state school and ended up in the PhD program an at Ivy. He was extremely brilliant and hardworking and managed to publish a peer-reviewed article in a major journal by the time he was a senior in college. He also had excellent mentoring at his state school--something that is very rare in most off-the-beaten-path places where professors are less likely to be "in the research loop" (i.e. know what makes for compelling, cutting-edge research that is going to get the attention of Ivy League adcoms). -I knew a couple other people who managed to "trade up" from the state school where we got our master's. Neither had gone to very good undergrad institutions, but both had sky-high test scores. More importantly, both had faculty mentors who contacted faculty members at the schools to which they were applying and lobbied for them very strongly. (To give you an indication--one guy applied only to three schools, which I thought was a suicide mission at the time. But he was absolutely CERTAIN of his chances ... and sure enough, he got in to the most prestigious university in the country. Later it came out that his adviser had really pulled some strings.) -I know someone who started off at a community college but managed to transfer those credits to a very prestigious public university in their state. Again, they made connections at this university. Working with somewhat famous faculty, they published a paper and won a major undergrad research fellowship. They ended up getting into three Ivies. Also had sky-high (nearly perfect) test scores. By contrast, most of the people I've known who went from prestigious undergrad institution to prestigious PhD institution rarely had to show the same kind of "evidence" of their brilliance. Not that they weren't brilliant--but they certainly weren't published or winning research fellowships by the time they were seniors in college. But it was accepted that they could hack it at Penn because they were already at Swarthmore, etc. So my main takeaway is that it's possible for people from more modest backgrounds to get into elite programs, sure. But many of those people often had to work much, much harder, score higher on those stupid tests, and make valuable connections along the way. In sum, their application package had to be near-flawless to merit serious consideration at the nation's top schools. Some other reading on the topic: https://sarahkendzior.com/2015/03/06/institutional-bias-in-academia-hiring/

Well, a few small quibbles with your quibbles. I don't think this is really necessary, unless you have your heart set on a very specialized field. It's very difficult to predict what the nonacademic world is going to value in ten years, and I would argue that work experience for the sake of work experience is valuable enough. Full disclosure: between getting my Ph.D., doing a postdoc, and teaching for five years, I was away from the nonacademic workforce for a whopping twelve years. The job I worked after graduating college? No longer exists. But it gave me some transferrable skills and, more importantly, it proved to employers that I wasn't just some "Ivory Tower academic" who didn't know how "the real world" worked. (It's an unfair perception, but one that a lot of employers still hold.) Having said that, I did do a few things after I lost my TT job to "freshen my skills"--I took some online courses through the Society of Technical Communication. I also volunteered to write press releases and copy for some nonprofit orgs, just so I could start to put together a portfolio of more recent "deliverables" (I hate that word, but that's the word we use). I reworked an academic paper to make it a "think piece" that got published in a major venue--another thing for my portfolio, and one that raised my profile. If you're nearing the end of grad school right now and aren't sure what you want to do next, I'd recommend looking through your old papers, projects, and syllabi, and think about what can be remade as public writing or "copy" that you can put in a portfolio. Especially syllabi blurbs and course advertisements, since we spend a lot of time pimping our classes to uninterested undergrads--something I stressed in interviews ("oh, you want someone to write copy? I persuaded 40 students to take a class in 18th-century literature by doing X, Y, and Z!"). I did not mean to imply otherwise. Adjunctification is a long, slow process that started a few decades ago. My point was simply that many of us who entered grad school around the time of the recession were told that things would turn around in four or five years and there'd be a big hiring boom once the economy came back. That never happened. Universities just learned how to exploit people better, and the number of TT jobs dropped while the number of NTT jobs ballooned. Even after the economy rebounded, university hiring did not. And why would it? With an army of adjuncts and lecturers to exploit, they have no incentive to act ethically or humanely. Having said that, I don't have a crystal ball. Maybe hiring will come back in five or ten years. But based on past experience, I'm guessing that this pandemic demonstrated to universities just how much they can get away with in terms of labor exploitation. Hopefully I'm wrong. Interestingly, this hasn't yet happened on the scale that people predicted. Last year, everyone predicted mass closures of smaller, less-elite colleges. It didn't happen. Universities are apparently more resilient than we thought. This article from the Chronicle really lays this out: https://www.chronicle.com/article/why-havent-more-colleges-closed It was predicted that somewhere between 500 and 1,000 colleges would close due to the financial strain of the pandemic. Only ten have closed so far. It's possible that more will close, but so far universities have proved to be pretty durable. That being said, financially "unhealthy" institutions tend to not spend a lot of money hiring humanities professors. This paragraph sums it up: Colleges have also reduced or transformed certain programs and practices in response to evolving environments — as well as to reduce their costs. For example, over the years, the proportion of tenure-line faculty has declined while the proportion of lower-cost contingent faculty has increased. Colleges have also eliminated or restructured departments and degree programs to make their offerings more marketable to prospective students. In short, institutions have proved they are willing to make adjustments, reorganizations, and even substantial cuts to lower expenses and keep up with market demand. This willingness to adapt has no doubt been a factor in keeping many colleges financially afloat. I think it's safe to say that, as long as institutions remain financially unhealthy, we won't see a lot of growth in programs such as English, history, philosophy, religion, or classics. But these institutions will probably remain in business because they've learned that they can just yell "we're running out of money" and shrink humanities programs while growing their more "professional" programs. There's also the Johns Hopkins situation. A year ago, JHU proposed a series of budget cuts and austerity measures in response to the pandemic, including cutting benefits and laying people off. Faculty called bullshit on the idea that the university was running out of cash. As it turned out, the faculty were right. They demanded a forensic audit, which revealed a much rosier picture of the university's financial health than the administration had tried to paint. https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-era-of-artificial-scarcity Obviously, Johns Hopkins is a major prestige university. It's not Caldwell University or Ohio Dominican or some other college that's barely hanging on, so JHU professors have a lot more clout to throw around ... but the situation demonstrates how universities often justify making cuts--by telling everyone that they're on the brink of financial ruin. And faculty tend to fall in line. JHU represents one situation where the faculty didn't fall in line, and they discovered just how badly the university administration was lying to them. My point in all this is to say that the hiring situation in the humanities seems to operate independent of whatever the economy is doing, and more in tandem with how people perceive the humanities to be doing, and, more importantly, with what administrators can get away with. And right now? Administrators know they can get away with murder. They can get away with paying professors very little and making deep cuts to the humanities under the banner of "we don't have enough money and not enough people are majoring in history/English/foreign language." But all this is beside my point. What I want to say to prospective graduate students is this: It is totally your life. If you decide you want to go to graduate school despite the dim forecast, then that is your choice and you have every right to make it. If you decide not to go, then that is also your choice. Probably a wiser one! But you won't ruin your life by getting a PhD. Now, when you graduate into nothing, you might feel that way. You may indeed feel like "I have ruined my life by giving up seven years for nothing." But you'll be okay. If you can write a dissertation and survive grad school politics, lol, then you can weather the nonacademic job market. Trust me on that one.

So, I have debated whether to weigh in here. I see a lot of merit to both sides of the debate here ... but my own perspective is very much colored by my own experience. In terms of these debates, I can never come down on one side or the other. Tl;dr: People need to just do what's best for them. Long version: I am one of the few people who made it through a lower-ranked program, spent a gazillion horrible years on the job market while a VAP, secured a tenure-track job ... only to lose that TT job when the pandemic began and my university had to make "significant cuts." Last hired, first fired, all that jazz. And I'm not the only one I know who lost a TT job last spring. You can make it all the way and grasp the brass ring only to have it taken away because universities are currently in love with austerity measures and out-of-love with the humanities. I currently have a nonacademic job doing something else entirely. I don't call this an "alt-ac" job. In fact, I don't really see any merit to calling it anything other than what it is. It's a job. It pays the bills. In fact, it pays me far, far better than anything in academia ever did and--get this--gives me more time to write. I actually have more time to write now, while making more money, than I ever did as a professor. I have a feeling that I'm very lucky in that sense, though. I was lucky to land this kind of job in the middle of a pandemic. While I might have been extremely UNLUCKY on the job market, I lucked out in other ways. To give more of a rundown: I come from a working-class background. I didn't go to grad school right out of college. Instead, I worked. I worked at the kind of "soul-sucking" jobs I see that other posters have already described here. I HATED these jobs. Going to grad school was my escape hatch and something I really idealized. I felt that my talents were being wasted in the ordinary working world, and they were--but so are everyone else's. I struggled just to get into grad school, and it took me a couple years. I had very few mentors to guide me along the way. My undergrad institutions did not open doors at the best programs. But once I got in, I thrived. I LOVED grad school--all of it. Most of all, I loved the research/writing aspects, which are highly important. I think part of what made me successful in grad school was the memory of the "soul sucking" work I'd done beforehand. I didn't want to end up back in that kind of job. Whenever grad school got bad--like my prospectus got shot down for the fifth time, or I got humiliated at a conference--I reminded myself that my life was so much better than the alternative I'd already experienced. Other than going to a school that wasn't well ranked, I did everything "right" in grad school. I published. I won paper prizes at conferences and from journals. I got research fellowships, etc. etc. But for me, the job market was a brick wall. I came in second or third a few times, often losing to someone who was better pedigreed or younger or had an "Mst" from Oxford or was just a better "fit" or whatever ... In any case, I spent way too long on the job market, and those were the worst years of my life. After being laid off my academic job, I discovered that finding a nonacademic job was surprisingly easy. This goes against what a lot of others have said here, and obviously YMMV, but I got a lot of interest in my resume and had many job interviews (even in the pandemic!) sometimes because of my PhD. Now, to be clear, part of that, I think, was because I had previous work experience. I'd already demonstrated that I knew how to show up to a job and work five days a week. I had other skills. I'd been successful in the workplace. So that's one of my biggest recommendations: If you're considering a PhD, get work experience first. Any kind of "professional" type work experience will do. Your future self will thank you. A lot of people here are talking about doing internships during their grad school summers--that wouldn't have worked for me. I needed every ounce of energy to write my dissertation and finish my program while I was still funded. Many of you will also find the same thing is true. Getting a PhD is extremely grueling and takes everything you have. And teaching takes a huge bite of whatever energy you have left. A couple other pieces of advice: The job market is never coming back. It's just not. I went to grad school at the beginning of the Recession, and everyone talked about how it would turn around in a few years. It sort of did ... for a year. But not really. What happened was that universities discovered they could get by on less, pay professors less, and exploit people more. Even when the economy came back, universities didn't give a hot fuck. Instead of offering tenured lines, they transitioned to these endlessly renewable lecturer positions. (If you think you'll be happy in one of those once you're done, you won't. Trust me. They pay far less than a TT job and expect one to work much harder. You get treated like a second-class citizen in your department and have zero room for advancement.) My prediction is that the pandemic will have the same effect on universities. In the past year, they've figured out how much they can get away with in terms of online teaching and labor diversification. What I see for the future are a very small tenured few and a whole lot of everybody elses, teaching hybrid or online classes to students who figured out that they really don't need a brick-and-mortar to get the piece of paper, thank you very much. And I have to admit that I've been shocked, on some level, to see that people are still trying to apply to graduate school despite these conditions. When most of the programs are flat-out refusing to admit people, that's a sign, guys. They know that the party is over and the music has stopped. Going to grad school right now may indeed be really dumb decision. And if these programs were honest and ethical, most of them would have closed their doors already. I mean, my former PhD program isn't publishing their job placement statistics anymore, they're so bad. But they're still admitting people. I find this deplorable. Having said that: I don't regret getting my PhD. Yes, that's right. After everything. After losing my TT job in the pandemic, after all the years of exploitation and heartbreak and humiliation, I don't regret it. The experience of having gotten a PhD informs every aspect of my life, and the weird little world to which I was a party was interesting as hell. It gave me a new vocabulary to describe my current situation, which I surprisingly find a lot more bearable than I would have BEFORE I got my PhD. Yes, the work I do is currently very boring and unstimulating. But I'm not as rattled by this as I was in my 20s. Grad school taught me how to look for fulfillment elsewhere. I still write and just had an article accepted to a major journal. I may finish my monograph anyway--we'll see. I do regret spending so much time on the academic job market. Seriously, give it two years, no more than three. Being on the job market made me a miserable person. It also doesn't get any better. My first year out, I interviewing for 2/2 loads at departments with graduate programs. My last year out, I was viewed as "stale" and tainted by my own VAP experience. (This is how academia thinks--if you don't land a job your first year out, you probably didn't deserve one anyway.) Also, even though I refused to adjunct, I still allowed myself to be exploited by VAP positions. These schools act as though they're doing you a favor by paying you a salary with benefits. They're not. They're paying you far less and working you far harder than they are their permanent faculty. I wish I had seen this more clearly. I wouldn't go to graduate school right now. However, no one would have been able to dissuade me from going to graduate school when I did. I think a lot of these discussions--in terms of convincing people not to go to graduate school--are largely pointless. People do what they want to do. I've never understood the point of trying to get people to give up on their dreams, because dreams are a highly personal, emotional thing. The me from 2011 wouldn't have been dissuaded from going to grad school regardless of how clearly the data showed I wasn't getting a TT job. Who in the history of the world has ever been persuaded away from such a personal decision by the existence of data? Getting married is usually a bad idea too, and we all have those friends who chose bad spouses, and the decision seemed obviously terrible to everyone looking on. Did they change their minds after hearing our objections? Seeing the data? Lol. Same goes for grad school. You have to experience it for yourself. The life of a professor is not all it's cracked up to be. Others have already said this here, but it bears repeating. Yes, it's rewarding. Yes, it can be fulfilling. Yes, teaching is more interesting than churning out TPS reports. But it's also low-paying and very draining and often demoralizing. I worked far, far harder as a professor--for far less money--than I do now. Moreover, the academic life is one with a lot of roadblocks, in that you work hard for very little payoff. You spend all year writing an article, just to wait six months to get it back with snarky readers reports. You make all the changes the snarky readers wanted and send it back, just to wait another six months and have the article rejected anyway with even snarkier reports. Same with getting your book published. In no other sector did I sink so much time into projects for absolutely no payoff whatsoever (no money, nowhere else to submit, no credit toward anything, no "billable hours," etc.). It also goes without saying that academia has deep problems regarding equity and inclusion. I often got treated like a second-class citizen because of where I went to school--and that never stopped, regardless of how many awards I won or where I published. I'm actually glad to be away from that now, because it was just so damn toxic. I got so tired of having to justify my existence in a field that really didn't have any place for "people like me"--despite paying a lot of lip-service to the contrary. So that's all I've got. And, oh yeah, Karen Kelsky is terrible at what she does for a living. Don't hire her.

I was actually going to recommend the same thing. For one thing: statistics may not seem useful for an English PhD, but I've seen some innovative dissertations in the past few years that make use of quantitative analysis and data mining. (If you're doing a project on, say, how a periodical changed across time, then statistical analysis may indeed be helpful. English people do tend to be math phobic, so a lot us are "blown away" by someone who can combine math with literary analysis.) And for another thing--yes, quantitative analysis is a hugely desirable skill in the nonacademic workforce and the nonacademic workforce is, in fact, where most people are headed. The 10% figure everyone's been quoting for how many PhDs will get tenure-track is probably a generous estimate--I've heard the percentage is more like 6%.

It depends on where you want to apply. Not going to lie, but if you want to go to one of the field's prestige programs, then a BA from an unknown undergrad will make things an uphill climb. (Yes, there are people from obscure places who get into Harvard and Yale every year, but they're usually not the norm.) But there are a lot of other programs out there that won't make it a huge factor in their decision. I went to two universities, both public, and people came from undergrads that ranged from large public to small "never heard of it" public/private/wherever. I knew one person who was a GED-holder and several who started out at community college.

No. As others have said, you absolutely do not need an MA in English (let alone a PhD) to get an editing job. If you're interested in the technical side of editing, you might look at taking online courses in technical writing--Oregon State has a really reputable course for under $500. You might also look at joining the Society for Technical Communication, which also has seminars and certifications. But if you're looking to get into journalism, your best bet is to try to publish some pieces so that you have a portfolio, and keep a lookout for internships.

I don't think attending this MFA program will impact your PhD chances in any tangible way. IME PhD programs don't really consider the prestige of one's MFA as a factor in making decisions. If you are going for a literature PhD (and not a creative writing PhD), they don't really care that much about any creative publications or your creative writing life in general. They view it as almost a completely different discipline. Having said that ... If this is how you feel about this program, I don't think you should go there. And I'm coming from a place of experience here. I did a creative writing degree right out of undergrad, and it was seriously the worst experience of my life. The professors had zero interest in my writing (and I honestly didn't like theirs either), the workshop was a mean, hostile place (probably because I wasn't doing the type of writing everyone else was, but also because there was loads of misogyny* and women in general were looked at as incapable of writing Real LiteratureTM) ... and it just sucked. And to be honest, I was so traumatized by my experience that it took me years--I mean, goddamn years--for me to start writing creatively again. Now, I realize my story is an extreme example here, and that you probably won't have the same experience, and YMMV and all that. But I do think that having good writers/mentors to work with is EXTREMELY important when you're doing creative writing. I mean, it's really the whole enterprise in a nutshell. If you can't trust your adviser/mentor with this thing that comes from a very personal part of you, then you really can't get the guidance and support you need. If you don't think you can do that at this MFA program, then you absolutely should not go. Go to this program, for the funding if nothing else. 2x the funding you'd get at the MFA program is nothing to sneeze at, and congratulations. Plus, a lower teaching load is SO important. I can't stress that enough. More importantly, if you finish the MA and decide that you then want to do an MFA (instead of a PhD), you will still have that option, and you may, by that point, have a portfolio that gets you into a dream MFA program rather than your last choice. Better to hold off and get your MFA from, say, Michigan or UC-Irvine, than from hole-in-the-wall University of Dingdongs with an MFA program that's just a few years old. *This English department (department--not the entire university) recently settled a massive Title IX lawsuit due to its pervasive culture of sexual harassment, and for its willful choice to do jackshit to stop it. It wasn't just me (yay, I guess?).

Ah, okay, I get what you're saying, and I'm sorry for overreacting. No, I completely agree with this. For a long time I have been critical of the "top 10 or bust" mentality of some of these internet "getting into grad school" communities. I have been beaten out for jobs by people who graduated from programs much, much "lower ranked" than mine (in quotation marks because who really knows about the value of certain programs). I think when people peddle this narrative of "it's not worth going to grad school if you don't get into a top-10 (or top-12 or top-20) school," we not only ignore diverse career goals (teaching-focused school, community college, independent scholar) but also create kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy that carries on into the next generation. It's widely believed that "nothing good" comes out of "lower-ranked" programs because it has been decided that nothing ever has and nothing ever will. And that's BS. I mean, in some ways I'm living proof--I didn't go anywhere special (a program ranked about the 20s-30s) and have won fellowships and national awards and been published in the best journals. So obviously I was capable of producing good scholarship, even if the admissions committees didn't think so at the time (or I didn't present myself as an applicant who could do so). As I've said elsewhere, the job market works both ways. Slippery Rock University is probably going to be more keen on hiring someone from Duquesne or Rochester than they are someone from Princeton. Cleveland State is going to be more receptive to a Case Reserve U. grad than a Berkeley grad. The job market is very much about "fit," and graduating from a high-ranked school is not going to guarantee you employment at universities looking for someone who "fits in" and understands where the students are coming from. If I could wave a magic wand and turn my 30ish ranked PhD into a Yale PhD, would I do so? Probably. But I also wouldn't have the job I have right now. Moreover, I am not certain I would have worked so hard or done the scholarship I did if I hadn't been at 30ish.

I did not think you were aiming this at me. After all, I do indeed have a job. But I spent a large chunk of my life trying to get one, so I'm eye-rolling at some of the statements people make that imply that the market is self-sorting and that those who didn't get a job didn't deserve one in the first place because they made some "gaffe" along the way that ensured their unhireability, just as those who got hired somehow did everything "right" and deserve their success. Such as: I mean, really? Yes, of course there are hundreds of people who enter the job market every year who are published in respected journals, who win grants, who are qualified (really??? you think this comes down to who's the most qualified??), who don't make interviewing mistakes (!!! if it only came down to interviewing mistakes so that people could fix them!), who have interesting research that "matters" (always a subjective thing anyway), who aren't "narrow specialists" (my years and years of teaching at a non-Ivy League program ensured that), and who have taught a wide range of classes (lol, again, after years on the market and VAP circuit, just ... lol). And as far as being "over-qualified"--I mean, sit down. Honey, we're all over-qualified these days. After my own years on the job market, though, I vowed never to engage in this kind of blaming. I realize just how insanely arbitrary the market is, and that anyone who has a job just got lucky. There were 200 people who could have gotten my job and were just as qualified, and they didn't. I'm not a special unicorn. I do not have a special brain. Yeah, I did a lot of "right things" along the way, and I worked hard, but so did a lot of other people. It almost didn't work out for me, and if it hadn't, it would not really have been my fault. The experience was extremely humbling. What's distressing to me, though, is that successful job seekers still want to see less successful candidates as responsible for their own lack of success. That doesn't exactly fill me with optimism for the future of the discipline.

So here's the thing. If you feel that Columbia (or Harvard) are great fits for you, then I wouldn't worry about the job placement record right now as much. First of all, NO ONE is placing these days. It's just really bad everywhere. Second of all, you don't know what things are going to look like in 5-7 years. If you pick a program you're not as wild about and decide to go there because they seem to have a stronger placement rate ... their stronger placement rate might not hold up over the course of six years. That actually happened to me--I attended a program that, though not a top-ranked school, had a better placement than Penn. That is no longer true. Third, and most important of all, whether or not a job hopeful gets placed in a given year often has to do with what schools are hiring in that given year. I was on the market for years, and there were some years I really wished I had an Ivy League PhD because most of the jobs were at high-end SLACs or elite R1 universities. Those are the schools that hire Ivy League PhDs. During other years, the majority of schools hiring were much more modest institutions--lower-ranked regional comprehensives or less elite private colleges. I ended up getting hired at an institution like that. I don't think I would have been hired if I'd had a PhD from a super elite school. Like tends to hire like, and at more teaching-focused institutions, Ivy League or elite PhDs are not looked at as "fitting in." So, it just depends on the year. I think your chances are much better in the long run if you're coming out of an elite school, but if it's a year where UC-Irvine isn't hiring but Lindsey Wilson College is, then you're probably not going to get that job. I beat out Ivy League candidates for my job because I seemed like a better "fit"--but of course an Ivy League candidate beat me out for a job at Brandeis. Again, it just depends on what kind of schools are hiring that year.

I was not speaking literally. My point was that, no, there aren't EVEN 20 "safe" programs you can graduate from that will give you a better shot at tenure-track works because oftentimes these days there aren't even 20 TT jobs in any given cycle! So of course there's no safe program, nor is there a magic bullet that will get you a job. This last couple years have been, hands down, the worst on record, and according to some experts we haven't hit bottom yet. Yes, there are anecdotal cases of people graduated from X program and getting hired at elite Y school. There are always anecdotal cases and always have been. In fact, I would venture to say that at this point ALL WE HAVE are anecdotal cases--not patterns anymore. We don't see enough people getting hired to even begin to quantify things. Some of the Ivy programs haven't made a TT placement in a couple years. The fact that someone outside the Ivy League gets a good job does not negate the overall pattern, nor should it be taken as evidence that "if you work really hard that's all that matters and you will get a job." It should more like be taken as evidence of "sometimes miracles happen, but statistically speaking they will probably not happen for you." I mean, I also had a lot of those things--major publications (one which won an extremely elite award), a prestigious national dissertation fellowship, presenting at sometimes 7-8 conferences at year, teaching experience out the wazoo and glowing teaching evaluations, and, yes, relationships with professors, many of them leaders in the field. And oh yeah, now I've got an article forthcoming from the tip-top journal in the entire field. And I still spent six years on the market, coming in second for a lot of jobs. So no, I am not going to sit here and say that some people get jobs because they worked hard and accrued experience and made connections. A lot of us do those things. And a lot of people still go home empty-handed. The job market these days is about being lucky. Extremely lucky. No more of this bootstraps stuff.

So, I don't necessarily agree with "B"--obviously some people get jobs, and those who go to the best programs are more likely to get jobs--but it is accurate to say that we have no idea what the profession will be like in six years. Six years ago we thought the market was just in a slump. Six years later, people are like, "Wow, the 2013-14 cycle was great! Those were the good old days!" Lol. Yeah, it's bad out there. So I'm going to add something to what "B" said: consider where in the country you would like to be if the professor thing doesn't work out. If push comes to shove and you have to get a job doing something other than academia ... where would you ideally like to be? New York? Boston? New Haven? San Francisco? Because where you get your PhD might matter for whatever non-acc or alt-acc path you might choose, and universities have deep connections to particular areas. Case in point: I know someone who got a PhD at Stanford and ended up writing for the SF Chronicle by leaning on a connection they made through the English department's career service. I know another person who went to Berkeley (dropped out without finishing) who ended up writing copy for a tech company in exchange for a salary that most junior faculty could only dream about. Obviously these "alt-acc" tracks seem far removed from your ultimate goal right now (and for good reason) ... but this is just one more factor you might consider in making your decision. Good luck!

I am ? about the fact that UConn now makes people teach 2:2. When I applied (and got in, but didn't go) they were really adamant that their grad students should only teach 1:1 in order to stay competitive with other programs. Anyway, I would highly recommend looking into Villanova. I know a lot of people who have gone there and then moved to really great PhD programs. If the funding is good, I would take a much longer look at that program than Miami of Ohio. The thing with MA programs--they don't necessarily set you up for a particular PhD program (and their ranking means absolutely nothing), but a lot of programs do have regional connections. Since Villanova is on the East coast, it may help you make contacts with other professors in that general region, and your professors will probably have contacts. If you want to try for a PhD program in the mid-Atlantic area, Villanova would be a better bet than Miami. If you want to be in the Midwest for a PhD, though, then Miami might be a better bet. Full disclosure: I did my MA at a Midwestern university that was very similar to Miami, and Midwestern PhD programs were interested in me, while East/West Coast schools not as much. When I visited one of the programs to which I'd been admitted, I figured out pretty quickly that that program felt that I was a "known quantity" thanks to where I'd done my MA. Obviously my experience is anecdotal, though.

Honestly? I'd say there aren't even 20 programs you can graduate from to find TT work these days. At the risk of sounding like That Person ... that's how bad the job market is. There is no job market. I'm no longer on the job market, but in my particular field--which was once very robust and considered a "must have" for almost all university English departments--there were a total of seven tenure-track jobs this year. Seven. Back in 2013, there were 35 ... and that was considered a "bad year" at the time. My point is that we've basically moved into uncharted territory. None of this is even showing up in the rankings yet because it's such a new reality. And yes, it's new, but it's not turning around. It's the new normal, rapidly becoming just "the normal." Since the two programs you're weighing are much better known for their rhet/comp programs than their literature programs, you might want to think about doing something rhet/comp adjacent. Not that you should give up specializing in literature (if that's non-negotiable for you), but maybe look at cultivating a side-specialty in rhet/comp--not to mention helping with the writing center, working with the first-year writing program (they need lit PhD input too), learning how to teach technical or developmental writing. That kind of activity will make you more attractive to the kind of universities that will actually seek to hire a PhD from a less-elite program. And yes, there are universities that would rather have a Ball State or Miami PhD rather than a Cornell PhD. A community college or large open-admissions regional university is going to value relevant teaching experience and "fit" over pedigree. But even this dynamic is changing in certain places, as schools and departments are taking advantage of the "buyer's market" to burnish their credentials with an Ivy hire. A friend of mine just took a sabbatical from her small public college in North Dakota, and the department hired a one-year VAP from Princeton to take her place. It's wild out there these days.

Option 1, period point blank. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. Absolutely no equivocation here whatsoever, from someone now on the other side of the process. Money talks. If this program is recognized and has funding to throw at you (and the other program doesn't), then that tells you how you'll be valued, and that's it, end of discussion.

Oh, I definitely didn't think you were trying to game the system. I was just trying to point out how the market demands (if one can even call them "demands" anymore) change when the wind blows. I mean, ten years ago if you said you wanted to specialize in American/British 20th-21st c., everyone would kinda go quiet as this funereal mood swept through the room, and then someone would venture ... "You DO realize how bad the market is for that, right?"

English went through an "eco-criticism" thing a couple years ago. Now I hardly see any advertisements for eco-criticism jobs. "Medical humanities" has also rapidly cooled. The job market is just extremely quirky. I can't even enumerate how many times I've said to myself, "Oh, I wish I'd done That Thing!" ... only to see that next year's job market has moved on and is no longer into That Thing anymore. Just ... don't even bother gaming the market. Certain things will always *help* you, to some extent--if you are a literature person and can work as a WPA or in a writing center ... that might help you land a generalist job that's looking for someone who can run a writing center or train other writing teachers. These days schools look to kill as many birds as possible with one stone.

Yes, there is some truth to this. English class enrollments are at an all-time low, so classes have had to get "trendier" to attract non-English major students. So you start to see a lot more classes these days in science fiction, Harry Potter, graphic novels, film adaptation, etc. Anything to entice students who "hate to read" to sign up for an English class. The only students who take things like Chaucer and Shakespeare and Milton and 18th-century novels are English majors, and we don't have many English majors anymore. Truly, that's what's driving the slump in the job market. People aren't eager to drop $200k on a degree in a major they perceive (wrongly) as qualifying them only to teach high school or work at Starbucks.

I don't mean to sound glib, but ... honestly, you might as well just get out your Tarot cards and ask the universe. That's about the extent to which you can predict what the market will be doing 6-7 years from now. I was told the exact opposite when I was applying 11 years ago. Modern/contemporary was so over-saturated that doing it was a suicide mission. I actually really wanted to do those fields ... but like I said, suicide mission. I specialized in a field that was considered relatively "safe" back in those days and was told that "every English department will need someone who does ___________, so while it will still be extremely difficult to get a job, your chances are better." Well. ___________ went through a "hiring boom" (relatively speaking) about six or seven years ago before I was on the market. And now no one needs anyone who does ____________. Right now multi-ethnic literatures are advertising a lot of positions (relatively speaking--I mean, no one's really advertising "a lot" of positions)--especially Latinx and Chicanx. But again, that's what the market is doing right now. Five years from now, who knows. DH was very promising a few years ago, but now I'm pretty sure it has peaked.

Yup, English had a slight "boom" in the 2012-2013 hiring year. (I think people were feeling positive because of Obama's reelection [don't ask me why that makes a difference but apparently it does] and the Recession seemed behind us). Then things went back to sucking. Now not even rhet/comp is safe. Yay for me, I missed that "economic miracle" of a year went on the job market in 2014-2015 and then 2015-2016. And it's been a shit show ever since. According to some experts we haven't even "hit bottom" yet. I joked to a friend three years ago that one of these days there would be approximately one TT job advertised in my field. This year there were three, so I'm getting close. (And I specialized in a field that was at one time considered almost as robust as rhet/comp). I wish we lived in a world where talent and hard work prevailed, but that is really not the case. This is now a game of Russian roulette but backwards--instead of having one bullet in the cylinder, you've got all the cylinders filled except one. I loved grad school for its own sake, and I love academia for its own sake. Unfortunately, as much as you tell yourself "I will be happy just to spend five years studying something I love, even if it doesn't work out"--well, when you get to the other side of that, coming to terms with the loss is something of a grieving process. I try to remind myself of how lucky I have been to publish things that people cite and read, to present at conferences, and to even have a book deal ... but on the inside it's actually really devastating.

How I wish this were true.

I went to a "lower-ranked" program (I guess? It was ranked somewhere between #25-#35 in USNWR, with its exact placement shuffling around every few years). I have to say that I would not attend that specific program now, knowing what I know and what I've been through. I know people all over the place who didn't go to the world's greatest programs and still managed to find TT jobs. (Like anything, getting hired comes down to luck and nebulous ideas about "fit"--which are quirkier on the job market than in admissions). But yeah, it can be a lot harder to get a job. Or get into a conference. Or find the time to publish (since those who go to lower-ranked schools teach so much). And postdocs are extremely difficult to secure, because many of them are indeed "prestige obsessed." But the worst thing about going to a low-ranking program is that you're always judged by where you got your PhD. Always. The obsessing over credentials and Ivies that goes on here? It doesn't go away after you start grad school, finish grad school, or get a job. There are a lot of people out there who believe quite strongly in Top Ten or Bust. Thing is, they don't believe it just for them. They believe it for the rest of us too. So when you bump into that person at a conference ... or during a fellowship ... or, worst of all, on a search committee, they are going to be holding you to the standard to which they held themselves. They are going to be thinking to themselves, "Why did this person decide to go to Fredericksburg State for their PhD? Didn't they understand that it's Top Ten or Bust? What were they thinking? Or maybe they just couldn't get into to a good school? Then why did they even bother to go? I would have applied a million times over so as not to go to Fredericksburg State." The most demoralizing thing of all is when the faculty at your own program feel this way about you and your fellow grad students. I actually ran into that a lot at my program. Like most R1 schools, our faculty was recruited almost completely out of Ivies. And there were a lot of subtle and not-so-subtle digs about our prospects. One guy who served as our JPO went to Berkeley--without funding. And he really looked down at us because of the program we were attending. I know many people who went to the top programs and who hold varying attitudes about people who attend lower-ranked schools (or some of them are at least good about keeping their real feelings under wraps), but two of them stick out to me. One is a person who applied three times in order to go to a top program, actually "dropping out of life" completely while she was trying to get in and incurring a lot of debt in the process. She turned down solid and well-ranked programs on the way. I thought this was insane. In the time it took her just to get into grad school, I was already through coursework and exams at my lower-ranked program. But she did eventually get into her top choice, and she's by far the most ruthless person I know about all this. She'll definitely be on admissions committees and search committees in the future--IMO to the detriment of more "working class" or non-traditional people in the field. The other person looks down on all people who went to a program outside the top 5. She once referred to Princeton as "not a fab English program." I kinda didn't know what to say to that. But anyway--that's what you'll encounter out there with a degree from a lower-ranked school. The people you bump up against at this stage who don't think there's life outside the top 10? They don't go away, and they don't learn, and they aren't disabused of their notions. They stick around and get the good jobs, and from that vantage point they continue to replicate the same kind of attitudes that make it difficult for low-ranked PhDs in the first place. That is what I wish I had known.

I applied to grad school so long ago (and have had my PhD for five years) that I don't think I could be of any help in talking about the structure of specific programs. A lot has changed in the last 10 years. I think the best thing to do is, once you have your list of possible programs, investigate them to see what kinds of degree-holders they favor. Call the graduate office and speak to the administrative assistant. (I did this a few times and was able to get answers.) Or, if possible, have your adviser reach out to colleagues in different programs to see if they take people with an MA vs. BA.