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FWIW, I recommend designing one's outside field so that it builds skills that can transfer laterally to the private sector: technical writing, graphics design, digital cartography, data analysis, marketing, communication, and project management come to mind.
I also recommend keeping an eye open for internships at consultancies--even ones (very) far from one's comfort zones. The competition for these positions is intensifying. At my job, before the recession, internships used to go to collegians entering their junior or senior years. Now, they're going to individuals with masters and professional degrees, and, on occasion, with years of industry experience. That being said, if you can make the cut, you may have a foot in the door to a permanent position down the line.
The BLUF is that there's a tremendous amount of work to be done in the private sector, especially for those who can learn as they go, communicate effectively, complete projects on time and under budget, and be a good team mate. Sometimes the work is mind numbing and soul crushing, but the same can be said about evaluating blue books.
I should add that if you're going to try route you may want to get started sooner rather than later. Drones and various forms of AI are altering the landscape and will make obsolescent skills that are relevant today. Those skills are the ones you will need to learn and master while demonstrating the critical thinking skills that, IMO, set historians apart from most other domains of knowledge.

http://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/february-2016/the-troubled-academic-job-market-for-history
Every grad student and applicant should read this. There are plenty of ways to respond, but everyone should read it.  One important remark: "The recent drop in the share of faculty at the assistant professor level points to a larger shift in demographics, which suggests deeper challenges for new PhDs looking to enter academia in the near future. From the late 1990s to 2008, job advertisements listed with the AHA reached unprecedented heights as a result of a significant wave of retirements....But as of 2015, that wave has largely passed...."
 

I agree with TMP and Katzenmusik - there is no jobs crisis unless the point of the PhD is to get a TT job. Unfortunately, most programs are still designed that way (especially the top four or eight or 20 that seem "safest").  For admits, I think it is so important to accept that non-academic work is likely at the end of the PhD.  (Septerra, you might be working in the "corporate world" after your PhD. I wonder why it is so repulsive to you?). As many scholars have pointed out, non-academic careers should be Plan A for PhDs.  TMP, you're very lucky your adviser is supportive.  I hope that everyone finds such an adviser, and regardless, spends as much or more time cultivating a non-academic career as a they do in professional development for the TT.  It's not easy to transition into other fields after 6+ years in academia, but it could be much easier if advisers, departments, and doctoral students embraced the reality.
Ashiepoo: I agree that its hard to know what will happen in 5-10 years. But, I'm skeptical that the reasons you cite (i.e., some programs reducing cohort size) will make a difference. For one, some departments did that in the early 2000s and it didn't help.  Unless all departments got on board in a systematic way, it seems like it might just slightly change lottery odds.  Again, though, I don't think this is a crisis -- unless as Katzenmusik said, "PhDs work hard with the tenure-track in mind only to fall flat and then feel like they have been cut off from their entire lives." 

I think universities are businesses in the sense of not-for-profit businesses where public funding is managed. Unfortunately, for decades public funding has decreased, hence the double digit or greater tuition increases and the student debt crisis. Also, in the humanities there are about one-half the TT jobs as compared to 30 years ago. Enough of my sweeping generalizations, I think it's a great concept to meet and discuss this predicament, but unless the public and legislators are on-board, you might as well cloister in a room and theorize. And just to be more pessimistic, institutions in general, certainly including academia, have been in decline for decades. 
And I agree this is a great community until this kind of thread comes along. Some people don't like being called an ass-clown making shit posts. Really, really disappointing.

You all have been far nicer to OP than I am about to be.
OP, you are an asshole. What motivated you to post this? Is it some sort of patriarical bullshit (or, more likely, a fear of competition in an admittedly tight job market) that caused you to post this? Is it a desire to mansplain something that any potential PhD student already knows because no one else listens to you? I know it isn't a case of "learn from my mistake" because you've failed to critically evaluate what your own mistakes even were.
It's the worst kind of ivory tower blindness that makes people think that their situation is somehow unique. I've worked in industries that collapsed, and saw people who worked 10, 15 years in the field fail to find jobs outside of retail. I've worked with adults trying to raise kids on $8/hr without any real hope of personal improvement or job advancement. I've been on the market as both a college dropout and a college graduate, and experienced difficulty finding 9-5 work in both situations.
I'm going to say something ridiculous here, and the OP is going to hate it: Getting a PhD is the best decision for me because it provides a level of security I have never had. I know that for the next four years I will have a regular paycheck,insurance, respect and responsibility. I still believe that I'm in a field that's generally "market proof" (it's not as good as it was even five years ago, but there were still more R/C jobs than English jobs this year, for a smaller number of graduates). I'm only considering programs with 90% placement rates (not hard at the top 20+ r/c programs, while making sure that I will have opportunities to teach business and technical writing, assume administrative responsibilities, and do other work that isn't as "pure" academically but better situates me for the market as it is developing.
Maybe the question the OP should ask isn't why do we want to be like him, but what are we doing to avoid being the sort of sad, underemployed person who trolls people excited about the opportunity to go on.

I'm sorry to have snakily done the quote-the-rank-dropping thing; I was about to remove that, having thought better of it, when I saw you'd already replied. The reason it rankled is precisely because, as you say, the conversation about jobs gets tied up in really disgusting ways with conversations about prestige, and so--and possibly also as a result of the fact that I'm hyperaware of being one of the few students at my program who didn't come from an elite undergraduate background, and as a result of wanting to be equally hyperaware not to be a turd and go on about my own program's ostensible (and utterly meaningless) top ranking in English--I tend to get knee-jerky whenever someone uses that sort of language. But my knee-jerk reaction needn't have made me a jerk, so I'm sorry.
As someone who does do traditional work by day and take programming classes by night (I am deeply implicated in all that I criticize), I certainly hope I'm not producing subpar scholarship! My unease with the discourse surrounding the restructuring of the humanities PhD doesn't have to do with individual student agents producing subpar work as much as it does the fear that more traditionally literary modes of knowing and researching are devalued as more ostensibly "objective" methodologies are brought to bear on formerly humanistic objects--this idea you sometimes get from DH administrative people (and I say this as a--deeply conflicted, yes, but still--DH person) that the humanities finally matter because they can be quantified, that they shall only be valuable to the extent to which they become like the sciences, that all our readings shall be distant and not close. There's a way in which I am thus deeply ambivalent--in the etymological sense--about the preparation of students for careers in industry (or Industry): the part of me that thinks the traditional system of graduate education is, if not actively predatory, certainly unsustainable wars with the part that wants to fight the neoliberal university's idea of the importance of the utility and instrumental value of knowledge.
ETA: Which is not really an answer so much as a ramble, but it's late and I think we agree for the most part.

I'm going to respond to something that @mvlchicagosaid a while ago, now that I've spent a bit more time around this website and have seen similar responses.
I find this to be a troubling way for humanists and social scientists to deal with difficult information. On the one hand, I have learned a bit about the giving and receiving of upvotes/downvotes and see that reputation matters a great deal here.  This makes sense for an online forum trafficking advice among strangers. So, I guess it's not surprising that mvl assumed I had bad intentions because I hadn't posted a lot.
On the other hand, I'm disappointed that so many are so quick to make assumptions about malicious intentions on the part of posters. In one similar forum, someone said this: "Your concern for my (our?) well-being is admirable, if a bit odd. If you aspire to be the voice in the wilderness, then kudos for your selflessness. Short of that, or perhaps directly because of it, I'm not sure why you're at all concerned with what I do with my life. Surely it can't matter to you that you could save another soul, could it? It's not a question I plan to ponder. Take care, and good luck."  This shocked me.
First, these posters are all grad students and recent PhDs, the same people that each of us have talked to when we were looking for advice about entering a certain program or pursuing a certain degree. So, in some situations, we do trust that they have "concern for our well-being." It seems that trust only breaks down when the information being communicated-- like job market stats--is undesirable. This trust also appears to hinge on the status of the messenger. Ashiepoo said something interesting earlier in this thread about arming ourselves with information, "the well-meant warnings from professors and also the snarky and bitter warnings from many others." This repeats an idea that's been presented here many times: we all know this, our professors told us, we don't need to hear it repeated here. To do so is, simply, cynical, negative, or (most oddly) driven by ulterior motives. Oftentimes, when the information comes from professors, the professors are celebrated for being honest. When it comes from others (current students and adjuncts/postdocs), they are derided. Does this trouble anyone else?
Finally (with apologies for repeating something I said elsewhere): I understand that the value of the humanities is, in part, to learn how to treat one another more humanely. So, why, I wonder, are grad students all-too-quick to dismiss the idea that one PhD might simply be concerned for his/her colleagues?
 
 

Me, too.  Thanks for the link, ProfLorax.  
The following is not directed to you, particularly, but more generally to the group here.   From what I can see, the subcommittee is more about theory than practice.  Which is fine, of course.  But I wonder whether theorizing the job market is not another way of avoiding looking at the bigger picture.  
For me, that's this: universities are businesses, and the intellectual work we do is supported by some combination of undergraduate tuition, taxes, and donated dollars. I like doing that work, presumably you all like doing that work, and we'd all like to see things change so that more people can do that work with job security and a decent salary.  Someone has to pay for that.  It won't happen if the people responsible for distributing tuition, taxes, and donations see humanities enrollments going down and the (well-funded) other side is arguing, as they have, with increasing success, for at least 20 years, that the problem is ivory-tower deconstructionists who can't or won't even speak plain English, and can't teach undergraduates to write a cover letter and resume. Acknowledging that, and figuring out what practical steps to take in response, does not inherently imply submission to the dominant neoliberal narrative - no more, in any event, than signing on as an employee or quasi-employee of the university does.  
If we think what we're doing matters, outside our narrow subfields, isn't it a good thing to be able to articulate that in plain language, even to an audience that doesn't particularly think they believe in what we're doing?  For example, my advisor told me a story the other day about a bunch of faculty going to Annapolis a few years ago, when funding for the nascent LGBT studies program was threatened for the usual reasons, and testifying in front of the legislature about why the program should matter to them and their constituents.  The funding reappeared.  The same outcome might not happen everywhere, or all the time, but one reason the right has won more often than not during my lifetime is that they show up and talk about why what they believe matters to other people, in language other people can understand.  (If your response is, "Yes, but they lie," I'm with you, and I say showing up gives you the chance to point out the lies.)  
I actually think there are hopeful indicators: for example, in a recent faculty meeting, the chair said that undergraduate majors in English on my campus are diversifying, and at a faster rate than the college overall.  This is good in itself, of course.  It is also a useful bit of information to include in a proposal to XYZ Foundation or a presentation to the state legislature.  We do no one, least of all these undergraduates, a favor by refusing to quantify this information for bean-counters, if that's what it takes to get the funding to support them.
Anyway, for what it's worth, my experience both over the last year and earlier, in my MA program, has been that faculty, especially those moving toward tenure or who've recently gotten tenure, tend to be refreshingly practical about balancing the how-to-get-a-job part with the how-to-maintain-scholarly-integrity part.  Overall, the faculty at my institution seem a bit baffled by the challenges they face, but I see them attempting to take practical steps (like speaking with English departments at other public research Us about their responses to threatened budget cuts), which at least means they're trying to look the problems in the face.

Hi all,
Thanks for these thoughtful responses. @greenmt I think your ideas are commendable, and if I were in a discipline involved with MLA, I'd definitely meet you there.
I was the one who posted about preparing for "alt-ac" jobs (although I would simply call them jobs) throughout your PhD. I say this for a number of reasons. First, in response to the OP and many other threads, many (most?) new PhDs asserted that they are not expecting or planning on getting a TT position. I believed them, and consider non-academic professional development a wise move in that scenario.
Second, I am echoing the advice of the MLA, the AHA, and departments that have recently studied the issues of adjunctification, attrition, and employment difficulties among PhDs. Stanford created a task force on this issue with strong recommendations for PhDs to train for non-academic careers.  Harvard held a conference on this point. Individual faculty have called upon their colleagues to support their students' pursuit of non-academic work - here's one, and here's another for English PhDs. My guess is that these organizations and departments and faculty support this training because they do not consider it a detriment to the chances of securing TT employment or their scholarly fields.
Third, I'm not convinced that professionalization helps scholars produce quality academic work or (significantly) helps them secure TT jobs. The latter point is probably too difficult to make, but its informed by studies like this, and anecdotal knowledge on the importance of advisers or committee's relationship with those conducting a search, and the luck of writing the right dissertation at the right time in the right field. I also tend to think that the number of PhDs who get academic jobs will be determined by the number of jobs advertised in their field, not the number of articles or conferences each candidate produced. On the former point, I've heard a number of scholars -- including the chair of my top-ranked department- lament how many empty articles and conference presentations saturate scholarly fields. More publicly, at least one scholar has claimed that it narrows students' interests and scopes of inquiry (though I've heard this argument made elsewhere). If I understand correctly, Abrasax's argument, and unraed's, too is that getting a humanities phd is professional training for a TT position. That is not necessarily in line with the goal of cultivating the most original contributions to the community of scholars, present and future. These are distinct aims. While they might sometimes be commensurate, they aren't always. Perhaps I would ask: would [insert incredible scholar here] have achieved what they did when they did if they were preoccupied with professionalization during their first decade in the field (I'm thinking of Natalie Zemon Davis, but this will be field-specific)? 
Finally, I suggested that option because it's really rough to see so many friends struggling, and I think their struggle would have been lessened if they had cultivated outside interests, networks, or professional tracks.  I take it from previous posts that everyone knows that the numbers of academic jobs in their field, and they are fully prepared to weather it. What really troubled me about the academic job market was not my own run--(I'm not yet scheduled to go on). It was seeing so many really hardworking, accomplished, committed, and intelligent friends in cohorts above me go through a really hard time.

My statement that most 20C US historians will not land jobs is based on two data sets, both of which independently corroborate the point: 1) my familiarity with the placement of several top departments in the last few years, 2) reverse estimates based on the number of jobs posted. There are a handful of 20C jobs this year, for instance; and yet most decently sized programs are producing at least one 20C americanist a year, if not several more. And then there is the substantial backlog of postdocs, lecturers, and unemployed academics to contend with. Unless the market changes dramatically, we can say with relative certainty that most recent 20C americanists from elite programs are not going to get tt-jobs within the next few eyars. (Anecdotally, a number of professors in their 60s have also told me that this is the worst year they have ever seen.)
Complicating generalization, of course, is that the job market segments according to prestige level of program and hiring institution; non-elite programs may have better placement rates.
Be careful looking at AHA studies: They tend a) not to break out subfields within US history, b ) be many years old (one of the most cited, for instance, averages data from the completely different era of 1998-2009.)  
The question about other periods is more difficult to answer. My sense is that the job market for colonial historians, especially, but also 19C historians, has been generally better, though still not great. In addition, the subfields of African American and Gender history tend to be the healthiest. Within 20C, US & the world has been somewhat healthy, though it too is pathetic this year.
p.s. one department whose placement record I do not know is Columbia. It just so happens they haven’t updated their placements on their websites since the relatively halcyon 2012. Anyone know if they’ve placed any 20C Americanists lately?
 
 

Hi all,
Thanks for these thoughtful responses. @greenmt I think your ideas are commendable, and if I were in a discipline involved with MLA, I'd definitely meet you there.
I was the one who posted about preparing for "alt-ac" jobs (although I would simply call them jobs) throughout your PhD. I say this for a number of reasons. First, in response to the OP and many other threads, many (most?) new PhDs asserted that they are not expecting or planning on getting a TT position. I believed them, and consider non-academic professional development a wise move in that scenario.
Second, I am echoing the advice of the MLA, the AHA, and departments that have recently studied the issues of adjunctification, attrition, and employment difficulties among PhDs. Stanford created a task force on this issue with strong recommendations for PhDs to train for non-academic careers.  Harvard held a conference on this point. Individual faculty have called upon their colleagues to support their students' pursuit of non-academic work - here's one, and here's another for English PhDs. My guess is that these organizations and departments and faculty support this training because they do not consider it a detriment to the chances of securing TT employment or their scholarly fields.
Third, I'm not convinced that professionalization helps scholars produce quality academic work or (significantly) helps them secure TT jobs. The latter point is probably too difficult to make, but its informed by studies like this, and anecdotal knowledge on the importance of advisers or committee's relationship with those conducting a search, and the luck of writing the right dissertation at the right time in the right field. I also tend to think that the number of PhDs who get academic jobs will be determined by the number of jobs advertised in their field, not the number of articles or conferences each candidate produced. On the former point, I've heard a number of scholars -- including the chair of my top-ranked department- lament how many empty articles and conference presentations saturate scholarly fields. More publicly, at least one scholar has claimed that it narrows students' interests and scopes of inquiry (though I've heard this argument made elsewhere). If I understand correctly, Abrasax's argument, and unraed's, too is that getting a humanities phd is professional training for a TT position. That is not necessarily in line with the goal of cultivating the most original contributions to the community of scholars, present and future. These are distinct aims. While they might sometimes be commensurate, they aren't always. Perhaps I would ask: would [insert incredible scholar here] have achieved what they did when they did if they were preoccupied with professionalization during their first decade in the field (I'm thinking of Natalie Zemon Davis, but this will be field-specific)? 
Finally, I suggested that option because it's really rough to see so many friends struggling, and I think their struggle would have been lessened if they had cultivated outside interests, networks, or professional tracks.  I take it from previous posts that everyone knows that the numbers of academic jobs in their field, and they are fully prepared to weather it. What really troubled me about the academic job market was not my own run--(I'm not yet scheduled to go on). It was seeing so many really hardworking, accomplished, committed, and intelligent friends in cohorts above me go through a really hard time.

@unraed:  We do agree. For what it's worth, I wouldn't advise taking the Digital Humanities route as an attempt to professionalize. Of course, people should follow their intellectual interests -- so if it's in DH, then by all means!  I actually meant to argue for the opposite approach to the TT jobs shortage. I wonder how much the humanities and individual scholars have to gain from disentangling their scholarship from a tight job market (academic or non-academic). So, why not maintain and celebrate the "traditionally literary modes of knowing and researching," as the object of the PhD and, in off-hours, cultivate another professional interest? Then scholarship doesn't have to be a means to wrack up CV lines, and nor does the individual scholar need to single-mindely pursue an often impossible career, with potential injury to their labors-of-love.  In any case, thanks for the chat, and good night!

No ragging assumed!
And Berkeley's placement is certainly as good as anyone else's--although an important thing to remember about the yearly figures is that students on the market now matriculated before UCB contracted their cohort sizes, so they're coming from a larger pool. The part that made me pause about your initial statement was less the "tend" than the "easily." But yes, I suppose given the probabilistic capaciousness of "tend" it's more or less accurate--my hesitance is just because of how hard the market nonetheless is on the friends here I have on it currently and for those here on the other side of that "tend," and I don't want to diminish that or make it sound like it isn't. 
And, to be fair, it's probably as much my own reflexive apotropaic tic--irl I never discuss future career possibilities without saying something like "assuming we should be so lucky to get jobs"--that I use to try to inure myself against even the possibility of the coming horror, and to try to disarticulate the fiction of meritocracy that being at a place like Cal can set up in your brain.
 

Hi Unraed,
On the whole, I agree with you, with some qualifications.  (I'd also quickly note that I added the descriptor "the chair of my top-ranked department" only because much of the dialogue I've read on gradcafe concerns rank, and much of the discussion on jobs has been dismissed as the murmurs of unsuccessful, marginal students. I don't put much stock in these rankings as indicators of quality, but they do indicate influence.)  I wrote my post in response to an admit, who claimed that she was advised to prepare for alternative careers, and reassured that those "with cool skills often performed better on the TT market" (or something similar). In my own limited experience, this point seems accurate. Those that have desirable language skills, solid programming skills, or managerial experience do often perform well on both markets. I guess I would say this: I am as convinced that a scholar in the humanities will help themselves get a TT job as much by knowing how to administer a budget or fund-raise or program as they will having another conference paper or publication. The budget/fund-raising/programming skills will help them in any market, the latter, only their TT market. Is that fair?
As to your second point: "that much of the discourse surrounding the rethinking of the humanities PhD is just as focused on professionalization at the expense of doing good scholarship as programs focused on traditional preparation for the academy; it's simply neglecting careful research and thought in the service of professionalization for a different kind of of job." I agree that the discourse is, indeed, geared towards employment and not towards scholarship. But I'm not sure about the results. I did find Jan Goldstein's essay on this point convincing.  I suppose that I'd need to see more students focused on their work for its own sake vs. those professionalizing for the academy from day one before I could judge. My sense is this: if you're treating your scholarship as your passion rather than a career path, it's possible you'd take more risks and be more creative. But, you may be right that someone treating their dissertation as a labor of love while taking night-classes in programming produces subpar scholarship. I'm just not sure.
On the publications issue -- I take it we're not in the same field, but your argument may hold in yours better than mine. The recent placements in my department that got R1 positions did not have publications beyond book reviews.  I've met a number of assistant professors without publications. But again, this is field-specific.
 
 

Hi pro Augustis,
I share συγχίς's surprise. Admittedly, I'm in another field, and I also entered a few years back. But even this year, my department only offered group statistics (or at least, they said they were going to).  They also did not account for attrition, which is sizeable (at least 30%).  I'm curious about one point. You mention that the departments provided information on "all PhDs granted in the last decade or so along with the present employment of the individual, specifying whether tenure track or not." Does that mean they provided information only on academic employment?  If so, I'm dubious that its "all PhDs" - I've never encountered a department in the humanities that places 100% in academic positions -- including Princeton, Yale, Harvard, etc.
Completely agree. Statistics are relevant to a degree, and absolutely must be presented to elucidate the vague statements presented up from front -i.e., "the job market is tight, but most do well." But, they can also occlude a lot.  For instance, a recent internal review presented statistics in my department. They showed that 100% of Medieval Historians were placed in TT jobs within a give-year period.  I was shocked, as were my colleagues.  But a little asking around revealed this: there was only 1 graduate from our top department during that time, and s/he had received a position by the time the review was conducted.  All of the others (at least 3) had left the program before graduating.  People can interpret that information as they want, but it just demonstrates how statistics hide as much as they reveal.

This is good information for programs to be providing, and it makes me glad to hear. Nothing this specific was provided by any of the schools to which I was accepted (although that was now a fair number of years ago). At most I was given general statistics, "we've had x number of graduates, of whom y% are in TT jobs."
But, nevertheless, department-provided statistics are still not the same as a discipline-wide survey-- and there is a fair amount of wiggle room even in the seemingly straightforward numbers. For research and discussion about the German job market that reveals some of the complexities of this situation, see the series of posts here: http://zugunglueck.blogspot.com/2014/03/how-job-market-in-german-really-works.html 
I suppose the thing I've realized is this: the job market issues become less and less clear-cut, the more information you have. I'm torn, because I truly believe that we need better data about job placement for our field, and more conversation about what post-PhD life looks like in this era of contracting higher education hiring. But at the same time, the number of graduates in our discipline is and always will be so very small, and extrapolating from this data seems quite risky to me-- departments also change quite fast, so the results of a student 7 years earlier might not have much bearing at all on your own experience. In any case, I don't have any real answers, just some reflections about how my own perspective has changed over the last few years. 

Sappho, this is an excellent post. I see that this year places such as Yale, Harvard, and Princeton are offering quite a few more offers than in previous years (or at least a few years ago when I was an applicant). Once upon a time, 3 or 4 admittances were par for the course. Does this signal renewed faith in the potential job market, 5-8 years down the track from now? Perhaps. Perhaps not. This season, two ABD candidates at our school landed tenure-track assistant professorships at very solid schools. A few years ago, even to land a VAP would have been a major win. So perhaps the job market is becoming stronger. Maybe some of our teachers will rebuild their retirement funds and feel that they can retire in another 5-10 years. Perhaps then our generation will see opportunities again.
 
But note: I never went into this process without knowledge that it would be tough, financially, and in many other ways too. Granted, if you are not in a top 10 school, then you have a much harder task ahead of you. I once had a conversation with an Emeritus Professor who told me about their hiring process (at a well known North American Classics Dept.): 1 T-T job,  400-500 applicants; cull them down to 50 by throwing out any application that was from a university they had never heard of (Ivies/top 10 to the front of the line), then create the short list for interviews, and so on. The key moment: the culling process.

Yet even though I am at an institution, a top 10 one, I am still thinking about alternate career possibilities for when I have the PhD in hand: Higher Education administration, or even working for a major consulting company. The money will be better, but I doubt the intellectual satisfaction of teaching and research will compare.
 
And so, as you can see: I do care. I care that every single person should be warned about what they are getting themselves into when they accept an offer. The DGS, the faculty, the graduate school, have an ethical responsibility to discharge such a warning to their students. Yet many graduate programs, especially the best ones, will rarely disclose their drop out rates; and you will usually only hear from them about their successful placements. 
 
Well, there's my two-cents, as incoherent as they may be.

I think what I am talking about is the notion of your job being something that you have be "passionate" or "fulfilled" by.  I'm not going to pull punches here, I'm knocking it.  I think it is a stupid way to make a decision about what you are going to do, and usually ends up being a quixotic pursuit.  I bring it up because it is in many ways the sine qua non given for pursuing something like doctoral studies.  It becomes an easy way to willfully disregard the grim, meathook realities of employment, academia, and what these actually involve.  For instance, go and scan this and any other forum here for statements to the effect of "I know the job market sucks/I know that my chances for getting a job are really low/I know how shitty academic life, even in the tenure track often is...BUT...I'm just so passionate about this field/I would be unfulfilled by just working a 'regular' job/I love what I do so much."  My issue with this narrative is that it makes it seems like your options are to either go through the process of getting a PhD (kind of hard), getting a TT job (really hard), and then being fulfilled/passionate/etc. about it (how the hell do you quantify, or even qualify this calculus?), ~or~ doing some proletarian, workaday 'job' where you have to go in from 9-5, have to do budgets, have to manage people, etc. 
What I'm arguing is that I have passions and things that fulfill me - yes, everyone does, but I don't need to do them for my job to have a good life, and I think I could make a convincing argument that many people who mistake their passions for what they need to be employed at might recognize the same thing.  This is to say that I don't think that doing a PhD for the sake of doing it, or because you are passionate about the subject is a good enough reason to engage yourself in the process.  It is part of it, but if you aren't doing it to get some kind of employment at the end, I think there should be a careful look at why you are actually putting yourself through this process.  I say this with such conviction because I didn't examine these motives very carefully going into my program, I made a lot of excuses for myself that were built on notions of the 'inherent worth' of what I was doing.  One doesn't necessarily need to have academic, or tenure track employment in mind when doing a PhD, but if you don't why do one?  You can read every book you read in a PhD by yourself.  You all have M.* degrees, you know how to find every book on the subject you are interested in!  You can listen to podcasts, go to lectures, and even go to SBL/AAR if you want - I did this year, and it was a lot of fun, because I (1) didn't have to network with anyone unless I wanted to (2) had plenty of money to attend, eat out, and enjoy Atlanta (3) could go to a panel on post-structuralism without having worry whether it was going to somehow advance my dissertation or other research. 
I don't know if this is convincing, it just want to be a voice that says you can just do a job that you generally enjoy.  I'm not passionate about what i do during the week for work, I like it, I like my co-workers, I'm good at what I do, and I get paid a lot more money than I probably could have expected to make as an academic outside of a tenured prof at a top-tier institution.  I read Derrida, Butler, and every book I own on Late Antiquity during my ample free time, I go to SBL/AAR if I want to, and I guess I could probably even give a paper if I so desired (which i don't, because I also think these are mostly for people who need CV lines, and I have no need for such).  It isn't all about money, or about pure pragmatics, but I just think we ought to be sure we're not calling skubala Shinola.

@rising_star told me to come on over from the Religion boards to say a bit from perspective of someone who just about finished a PhD and then decided to straight up quit.  Just about finished as in halfway through my dissertation.  I'm not going to chastise anyone here, or make vague admonishments about "you don't know what it's like" or "wait until you get where I am!"  because I don't think they are helpful.  I also don't think any of you would really listen to more of this, as you all seem to be well-knowledgeable about the grim, meathook realities of academia and everything that it involves, and don't need another white guy hanging around wagging fingers.
All that I would say is that it is ok to do something else.  You can quit your PhD at any point in the process.  Don't sit around being miserable, developing avoidance problems of various sorts while you make excuses based on the finest of all fallacies, that of the sunk cost.  It has already been said here, but you can be passionate about something and find it fulfilling and not have to do it as a job.
I don't regret my time moving towards a PhD, it gave me some nice getting paid a rela time reading and writing and thinking about interesting problems, and taught me plenty.  I don't blame my advisors, or my program, nor did I feel exploited by them.  I made the choices that I did, including to go to graduate school in the first place, and I take my excessively idealistic self to task for those.  What I will say is that I think you should look at the PhD as leading to a job.  If you don't, how the hell will anyone take you seriously enough to actually give you one when the time comes to apply?  Don't make excuses about the inherent worth of your program, or your path of study.  It isn't inherently worthy of anything, it is shit until you take it and put it through the alembic to spin gold.  I think this is where I do look strongly at my five years in a graduate program and have some regrets.  I spent a lot of time trying to convince myself and others that I didn't care if I got a job when I was done, or that the study of religion (insert your field here) was just so interesting and diverting that studying it was reward enough.  Go read through my earlier posts and you'll see me doing it left and right. 
I don't know if this is convincing, it just want to be a voice that says you can just do a job that you generally enjoy.  I'm not passionate about what I now do during the week for work, I like it, I like my co-workers, I'm good at what I do, and I get paid a lot more money than I probably could have expected to make as an academic outside of a tenured prof at a top-tier institution.  I read Derrida, Butler, and every book I own on Late Antiquity during my ample free time, I go to SBL/AAR if I want to, and I guess I could probably even give a paper if I so desired (which i don't, because I also think these are mostly for people who need CV lines, and I have no need for such).  It isn't all about money, or about pure pragmatics, but I just think we ought to be sure we're not calling skubala Shinola.
You can flame me out of here or question my motives if you would like, and as has already been done.  Who knows, maybe I'm a PhD applying for jobs a full month or so after most of them have already been offered and I'm trying to thin the herds.  I suppose if you really don't believe me, I can send you a redacted copy of my withdrawal form or something.  Anyhow, I'm glad to talk more or PM, etc.  so please do reach out.

Ashiepoo, I agree that the trends don't look good for those hoping for TT  jobs and that US is easily the most impacted field. But I also appreciate you providing stats on your East Asianist and Medievalist searches.  Recent searches in my top-3 department yielded similar results, and I know many alum from fields including Latin America, Southeast Asia, East Asia, Europe (late & early modern) and Ancient that are resuming adjunct positions.
I actually don't think grads should spend time freaking out. I think admits and current grads should be very well informed. Level-headed, data-driven information (not heated pleas) is the best way to lessen the emotional impact of unsuccessful job searches at the end of a 6-10 year tenure. I am 100% in agreement with you about making ourselves competitive for two job markets. But, I would probably suggest that people prepare primarily for non-TT jobs, and then professionalize academically. As you said, many with skills applicable to non-academic jobs often do well in academic searches. I'm not sure the reverse is true. 

Ashiepoo, I agree that the trends don't look good for those hoping for TT  jobs and that US is easily the most impacted field. But I also appreciate you providing stats on your East Asianist and Medievalist searches.  Recent searches in my top-3 department yielded similar results, and I know many alum from fields including Latin America, Southeast Asia, East Asia, Europe (late & early modern) and Ancient that are resuming adjunct positions.
I actually don't think grads should spend time freaking out. I think admits and current grads should be very well informed. Level-headed, data-driven information (not heated pleas) is the best way to lessen the emotional impact of unsuccessful job searches at the end of a 6-10 year tenure. I am 100% in agreement with you about making ourselves competitive for two job markets. But, I would probably suggest that people prepare primarily for non-TT jobs, and then professionalize academically. As you said, many with skills applicable to non-academic jobs often do well in academic searches. I'm not sure the reverse is true. 

I agree with TMP and Katzenmusik - there is no jobs crisis unless the point of the PhD is to get a TT job. Unfortunately, most programs are still designed that way (especially the top four or eight or 20 that seem "safest").  For admits, I think it is so important to accept that non-academic work is likely at the end of the PhD.  (Septerra, you might be working in the "corporate world" after your PhD. I wonder why it is so repulsive to you?). As many scholars have pointed out, non-academic careers should be Plan A for PhDs.  TMP, you're very lucky your adviser is supportive.  I hope that everyone finds such an adviser, and regardless, spends as much or more time cultivating a non-academic career as a they do in professional development for the TT.  It's not easy to transition into other fields after 6+ years in academia, but it could be much easier if advisers, departments, and doctoral students embraced the reality.
Ashiepoo: I agree that its hard to know what will happen in 5-10 years. But, I'm skeptical that the reasons you cite (i.e., some programs reducing cohort size) will make a difference. For one, some departments did that in the early 2000s and it didn't help.  Unless all departments got on board in a systematic way, it seems like it might just slightly change lottery odds.  Again, though, I don't think this is a crisis -- unless as Katzenmusik said, "PhDs work hard with the tenure-track in mind only to fall flat and then feel like they have been cut off from their entire lives." 

You're right about the ratio of the proportion of PhDs awarded to proportion of full-time job ads. (You're also right that US history is the most impacted field).  But those are rates, not absolute numbers.  There were about 1/2 as many jobs advertised as PhDs awarded. So, even though the proportion of, say, Asian history PhDs among all PhDs awarded to Asian history job ads among all job ads is more or less 1:1, the number of Asian history PhDs to Asian history job openings is, at best, 2:1.  But, this probably presents an overly rosy picture, because the cohort of PhDs is also competing with previous cohorts as well as postdocs and assistant professors. (In my department, we haven't hired an ABD in five years -- all of our assistant-professors positions go to assistant professors or postdocs).  The AHA has discussed this elsewhere. http://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/january-2014/the-2013-jobs-report-number-of-aha-ads-dip-new-experiment-offers-expanded-view

Thank you, klader, for bringing a bit of balance to this thread! There is no reason that someone casting light on these issues should be derided as comparable to an "assclown" or someone whose "bitter is showing."  Every professional scholarly organization in higher education that I've looked at is addressing the same problem - including the Modern Language Association, the AAR, and the AHA (not to mention the Atlantic, PBS, the New Yorker, Slate etc.)  Most of those organization are calling for diversified training, and for more information to be disseminated to new admits about the prospects of obtaining jobs in the academy.  Simply put: the official voice of those organizations does not seem a whole lot different from js17981's (at least from what I've read). Humanities departments at Stanford, Harvard, and Columbia are calling into question why they're training PhD's and how they should change their programs. (Stanford convened a panel to redesign the PhD; Harvard held a conference on the aim of doctoral training, Columbia holds regular series on this).
Of course, it's fair to say that you don't need to explain your personal decision to get a PhD. It's also fair to say that you don't want or expect an academic job at the end of it. It's understandable that so many reacted to js17981's "you are making a huge mistake" comment. But, does her/his entire post warrant such hostile responses? Her (his?) first question is "Just genuinely curious to know why you would pursue a PhD knowing that you won't get a tenure track job." Top R1s have recently opened up offices to ask this exact question. I have yet to see a scholarly professional society that does not concede that PhDs in the U.S. are being trained largely for academic careers and suggest that departments take a different approach. In fact, at least one president of a humanities society has presented this issue  - departments training people for jobs that don't exist, only to turn around and offer precarious employment as adjuncts - as a moral crisis. 
It's worrisome that so many on this thread suspect that js17981 is writing out of "ulterior motives" and can't possibly be writing out of concern for her/his colleagues.  As I understand it, part of the value of studying the humanities is to understand and hopefully be more humane to one another. rising_star responded while I was writing this -- he's apparently more experienced in this type of hostile conversation, and has already learned not to speak up.
 
 
 
https://www.mla.org/Resources/Career/Career-Resources/Career-and-Job-Market-Information/Reports-from-MLA-Committee-on-Professional-Employment/Final-Report-from-the-Committee-on-Professional-Employment/Careers-outside-the-Academy
 
http://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/january-2003/budget-cuts-and-history-jobs-many-problems-no-easy-solutions

As someone that has gone on the job market, I'll just say that 80 jobs is a low number to apply for, especially for people in English. It can be an agonizing process because applying for jobs basically becomes a full-time job and then you hear nothing back for months on end, except when you check the wiki and learn that others have advanced to phone/Skype interviews or that they're being invited to campus. It really can be soul-crushing, especially given the sheer volume of work that goes into it. There's basically nothing else in grad school that prepares you for it, nor does having been un(der)employed before grad school because sending in 80 standard job apps is a lot less work than 80 academic ones which may require your teaching philosophy, teaching evals, research statement, statement about how you work with diverse populations, plus a 2-3 pg cover letter, each of which must be tailored to the specific institution. I thought I was prepared for lots of rejection and waiting when I went on the market but, having done it, I can say without a doubt that I was not. Others who have actually been on the market may agree with me.