Academia Is a Cult

[Tybalt]

A lot of excellent points in this thread, that I hope newly-admitted PhD students are taking to heart.  One I will add:

Take advantage of the resources at your school, not just the resources of your program.  Odds are, the people in your program won't know a thing about preparing for a non-academic job.  The vast majority of English faculty at PhD granting institutions have never held/applied for one.  But your school will have tons of resources, and quite probably a whole office, for job placement/development.  Don't dismiss those resources just because they are intended for the undergrads.  Develop a resume alongside your CV and keep both updated accordingly.  Do an internship during your program.  If you make a point of contributing just one thing to each world (ac and alt-ac) in every semester and every summer, then by the time you finish your program, you'll be ready to put your best foot forward regardless of the path you decide to walk (and you'll be better prepared to pivot if you start down a path and realize that it's not what you'd hoped).

[dr. t]

I had forgotten about this meme...

[mashatheicebear]

I find this thread very interesting. A little insight from a (much) older PhD student...

I got my MA back in 2009. My colleagues who went on to complete their PhDs in 2015  all landed jobs at excellent (top-tier) universities, because we went to an top-tier university. (Many of you probably already know this but, historically, you educate up to work down. Those who get PhDs at Ivy League schools have the largest application pool, from the Ivies to really excellent liberal arts colleges or state schools, all the way down the rankings. Those who get PhDs at great state schools will have to look lower down the line, and so on. This, however, may not be as rigorous a rule as it once was in the future...)

After watching my professors for a year, I decided that, at 23, that life was not for me. I wanted to have a LIFE, not just to live my job. So I went and got a regular job and lived my life. Now, at almost 37, I am going back to school, because I love my areas of study and want to teach. The program I chose (in Comp Lit) is good, but not hyper competitive. If students want to become professors, they will support that, but they also support other types of career development. I want to become a professor, but I don't have any illusions about where I may be able to teach. If I can get tenure at a community college, that would be great. 

I think one of the problems with the traditional, academic approach to PhDs is that the vision of what one can do with the degree is so very limited. Teaching jobs exist at all levels and many pay a livable wage, but the life of a professional academic (especially at the highest levels) is grueling. It is not just teaching a few days a week and summers off. It is a full-time job and then some. And it is political as all hell. It is fascinating and consuming and challenging and definitely not for everyone. My MA program was very clear about that and they wanted their students to know what they were getting themselves into. I will be forever grateful to them for that.

While I know I want to teach, I also know that I have other options. Since I study languages, I could go into a field using those skills (research, translation, tutoring/teaching, etc). As I've done in the past, I could run my own small business combining a variety of my interests, or I could go back to my previous career in retail and restaurant management. Former graduates from my department have gone into the private sector, doing HR and non-profit work. I could do freelance writing/research or I could get a university job that is a staff rather than a faculty position (and those jobs are abundant). I have the advantage of age and experience here, and I know I will never be without options, but there is no reason why even young grad students, fresh out of undergrad, can't find other alternatives. It is up to us to change the established approach to PhDs. (And, no, that won't be easy either. Academia is rather stuck in its ways...) The job market is forcing a revision, especially in the humanities, and I believe those with passion, vision and enthusiasm are definitely up to the task.

Best of luck to all. I hope you enjoy your educational process and that you find ways to use your knowledge to make a positive impact on our world. 

[Bumblebea]

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.

Edited May 7, 2021 by Bumblebea
typo

[Stat Assistant Professor]

6 hours ago, Bumblebea said:

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.

@Bumblebea This is all very fascinating to me. I read your post with great interest (although I am not in the humanities, it is always interesting to read others' accounts who have also braved the academic job market). I definitely agree with you that aspiring faculty should give themselves a time limit for amount of time they are willing to be on the academic job market. In my field, it is commonly the case that PhD graduates need to do a postdoc or two in order to land a TT position. In my specific field, I would strongly encourage PhD alumni to weigh their other options if they come up empty-handed on the academic job market after a second postdoc (~4-5 years out of the PhD). This is not to say that my field is comparable to English lit, but in any field, there does seem to be a time limit before a PhD becomes too "stale," and it's best to cut your losses.

I also agree with you that it may be worthwhile to pursue a PhD even with all of the sunk costs, but it is also important to have realistic expectations re: job market and not to romanticize the professorship (or any job). There can certainly be a lot of tedium in academia, just like any other job, and I often have to devote a substantial amount of my day-to-day doing paperwork and working on things unrelated to research/teaching. And you do have to deal with constant rejections (rejections for articles, grants, book contracts, job applications, etc.). I think this can be tough for some people's egos, if they are used to excelling in school. I've gotten used to it by now, but it was really demoralizing for me at first. 

Anyway, I don't want to venture "out of my lane" too much. But I wanted to say that I really appreciated your detailed post, and a lot of the things you said ring true universally in academia, not just in English lit!

[Sigaba]

7 hours ago, Bumblebea said:

[...]

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.  

Three very slight wrinkles to this outstanding post.

First, if you seek work experience before going to graduate school, find a job that will teach you skills that will be relevant five or ten years from now. AI and ASI are raising the bar on technical jobs while simultaneously pushing many roles towards obsolescence. As an example, during and after the Great Recession, there was demand for "medical coding." Now, it seems that insurance company platforms have it all figured out.  Knowing how to do more with ever less, how to manage projects and budgets and risk, how to get along swimmingly with everyone from the C-Suite to the mail room, how to solve ambiguous problems under pressure, and how to do a job with minimal training are have been consistently sought on job listings since the Great Recession.

Second, at least in history, the internal outsourcing of academic jobs started started in the early 1990s. My two cents are the outsourcing is the byproduct of the end of the Cold War, the unending "culture wars," America's unceasing anti-intellectualism, and, to be fair, ongoing mistakes made within the Ivory Tower. The pendulum may swing back eventually but will it in the lifetime of anyone on this BB is anyone's guess.

Third, the pandemic exposed the impoverished status of financial and strategic planning in the Ivory Tower and has accelerated the impact of lessons unlearned from the Great Recession. Some institutions have thrived and will recover while others may end up failing utterly. The point here is that if you're a current or aspiring graduate student trying to figure out how "marketable" your expertise may be by the time you graduate, there is so much going on in the background that even if you're a rockstar who is going to put asses in seats, publish game changing works, and appear on nightly news shows, you still may not find a job because the bean counters are measuring completely different key performance indicators. And down the line, the job market @Bumblebea forecasts may include newly minted holders of Ph.Ds competing against displaced professors with proven track records of publishing, committee work, and teaching.

[Bumblebea]

Well, a few small quibbles with your quibbles. 

21 hours ago, Sigaba said:

First, if you seek work experience before going to graduate school, find a job that will teach you skills that will be relevant five or ten years from now.

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!"). 

21 hours ago, Sigaba said:

Second, at least in history, the internal outsourcing of academic jobs started started in the early 1990s.

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. 

21 hours ago, Sigaba said:

Third, the pandemic exposed the impoverished status of financial and strategic planning in the Ivory Tower and has accelerated the impact of lessons unlearned from the Great Recession. Some institutions have thrived and will recover while others may end up failing utterly.

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.

Edited May 8, 2021 by Bumblebea

[merry night wanderer]

Just want to chime in to second Bumblebea on the point that you don’t need to have “relevant” job experience. The modern economy changes constantly and is forever inventing new positions and even just new names for positions that sound trendier. (My old position has about three different names, and I made a point of putting all of them on my resume, lol.) It means jack. Everyone, even people who currently have jobs, needs to be updated in a general sort of way about where the industry is going, what the new (and generally idiotic) lingo is, and what software skills are required going forward. Some tech valley nonsense startup might be calling a perfectly viable position for you “Solutions Ninja.” You never know.

(This reminds me of one of my most Office-Space-y stories, where one of the absolutely essential members of my department at a very big company, a web developer, told me he’d been on contract for seven years because he hadn’t realized that they were calling web developers “Communications Analysts” for some reason and hadn’t seen any benefitted web developer positions available at the company!)

You don’t need to overcomplicate researching jobs. Just literally go into Indeed and type in keywords of skills you have. “Writing” and “content” are a good start, but don’t shy away from learning some basic software so you can do something more specialized or getting a certification. You just do need some kind of job experience, so get that for yourself one way or another.

Edited May 9, 2021 by merry night wanderer

[dr. t]

5 hours ago, Bumblebea said:

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

There's this story of a man who jumps of a sky scraper, and, as he falls past the 40th floor, is heard to shout "STILL DOING OK!"

[Sigaba]

I don't know that we're in disagreement, @Bumblebea and @merry night wanderer. The skills I described are cross transferable.

On 5/7/2021 at 4:51 PM, Sigaba said:

  Knowing how to do more with ever less, how to manage projects and budgets and risk, how to get along swimmingly with everyone from the C-Suite to the mail room, how to solve ambiguous problems under pressure, and how to do a job with minimal training are have been consistently sought on job listings since the Great Recession.

However, IRT to forecasting the future of the workplace, there are data from the U.S BLS while some newspapers like The Economist have spent years and years projecting "the future of work."

IRT the financial peril of the Ivory Tower, IME, it's the uncounted billions of deferred maintenance of certain components of the physical plant, especially public institutions. YMMV.

[ExponentialDecay]

On 5/7/2021 at 7:51 PM, Sigaba said:

First, if you seek work experience before going to graduate school, find a job that will teach you skills that will be relevant five or ten years from now.

Not really:

1. Trying to predict what will happen 5-10 years from now is a fool's errand. You can make an educated guess, but the degree of field-specific perspective you would need to do that is not typically available to the average entry-level applicant. Also, in 5-10 years, any technical skills you have will be out of date anyway. 

2. The vast majority of jobs don't require any special skills, or require such that are easy to pick up in a couple months. 

3. Just in my personal experience, the bigger benefit of having work experience as an applicant with a PhD is that it gives employers the confidence that you can work in an office. Hiring is a risk-mitigation activity, as in employers are not so much interested in hiring the objectively best-skilled person as they are interested in hiring the person that minimizes their risk of a problem employee or having to repeat the search, and that's why stuff like employers fretting about PhDs being overqualified comes in. Something in the same vein that gets discussed less is the inherent contradiction in hiring someone with a terminal degree, who is likely highly technically skilled (even if those skills are transferable), but having no empirical evidence that the person can navigate an office environment - something that most people learn as interns or entry-level employees. It feels silly to hire this person on to do entry-level tasks, but at the same time, when you have no confidence that they can do basic but critical things like appropriately interact with their boss, appropriately interact with the client, etc, you can't hire them on to higher-level roles where the cost to the company of them messing up is much higher. So that's really why it is important for PhD applicants to invest time in getting "real-world" work experience - to demonstrate that they have the basics down.

[Sigaba]

16 hours ago, ExponentialDecay said:

Not really:

1. Trying to predict what will happen 5-10 years from now is a fool's errand.

IME, solving ambiguous problems under duress, completing projects on time and under budget, getting along with others, seeing the big picture while paying attention to detail have been relevant skills in jobs in three different industries over ten plus years. YMMV.

[ExponentialDecay]

11 hours ago, Sigaba said:

IME, solving ambiguous problems under duress, completing projects on time and under budget, getting along with others, seeing the big picture while paying attention to detail have been relevant skills in jobs in three different industries over ten plus years. YMMV.

If those are the types of skills you mean, I am not sure why you advocate for some involved selection process - you can learn these skills at any job.

Edited May 19, 2021 by ExponentialDecay

[xdfaddsbads]

There is no guarantee that going to Ivy League schools equals high paying jobs.
In reality people from schools outside the top 10 in their field or sub field or even outside their discipline get jobs. Because they have connections, make friends and have maybe some luck.

Those who don’t should adjunct or maybe try one of the really appealing real-world jobs they’ve been denied the pleasure of during their run towards tenure from privileged undergrad to super expensive masters to Ivy. 
 

Get out there. Teach. Write. Or do something really valuable and organize for a real Revolution. That likely will need some rethinking about how to form a collective with the “real world” who won’t understand the academic oppression as a catalyst towards change 

Edited September 30, 2022 by zzzmegzzz

[dr. t]

On 9/30/2022 at 2:06 AM, zzzmegzzz said:

In reality people from schools outside the top 10 in their field or sub field or even outside their discipline get jobs. 

I take a very hard line on this confusion of possibility and probability, and not only because I've done the numbers—though the numbers do suck generally.

Can people from non-elite programs get a TT job? Sure. Are they likely to? No. Are they anywhere near as likely to as non-elite programs to get a TT job? No. From the Where Historians Work Dataset, on which I have done independent analysis, between 2004 and 2017, the top-10 schools when scored by placements are:

1. Cornell (70% of PhDs found TT jobs)
2. Princeton (68%)
3. Harvard  (66%)
4. MIT (64%)
5. NYU (61%)
6. UMich (61%)
7. Johns Hopkins (60%)
8. Yale (60%)
9. Columbia (58%)
10. Stanford (58%)

Note that the WHW data is a full survey of all PhDs earned in that period.

These 10 schools account for 38% of all TT jobs found in that period, despite the schools constituting only 6% of all PhD-awarding institutions. Only around 30 programs (18%) find jobs for more than half of their graduates. And as the total number of available jobs dwindle, this disparity is only getting worse. Only 14 schools (9%) have placed more than 50% of their graduates after 2009. Fewer jobs mean those at the bottom, not the top, struggle to find jobs first. And on a related note, of the 10 programs worst hit by the reduction in job availability, 7 are state schools (Arkansas, Kentucky, Nebraska, Arizona, West Virginia, Georgia, Mississippi).

 

[amyyyyyy]

On 4/14/2021 at 4:44 AM, Ramus said:

While I caution y'all from placing too much stock in anecdotal data, allow me to share two brief examples of other recent PhD outcomes from my subfield. I imagine you all know the stories about those who end up in adjunct hell, but I wanted to share these two stories because they help illustrate what can happen even when you do everything "right."

Person A: Graduated from the University of Michigan three years ago with two publications in hand, had participated in one of the keynote panels at the national conference in our field, and was well connected with all the big names in our historical period. A brilliant, brilliant guy. Person A won the lottery in his first year on the job market: he got a TT position at one of the better programs hiring that year (an R2 in the Midwest). But Person A has been absolutely miserable in his job. He lives in a place without the intellectual life he enjoyed in Ann Arbor; he lives in a place without any kind of city life; and he's stuck with students who aren't terribly smart or engaged. Every time I talk to person A, he talks about how he wishes he could leave his job but that he feels like he has no way to escape. The takeaway: even when you get achieve "the dream," you may realize that, in reality, it's not quite all it was cracked up to be.

Person B: Is graduating this year from Yale University with two publications and multiple national conference presentations. Person B struck out entirely on the academic job market this year (which isn't saying much, as there were three jobs posted in our subfield). Person B is now scrambling to accomplish the transition to an alternative -- which he had always thought would be an easy one. He's now in a position to graduate with no job lined up, having struck out thus far on "alt-ac" jobs, too. Person B, who had dreams of being the next Stanley Fish, resorted to calling me a couple months back to ask how to break into technical writing, and he now seems resigned to volunteer to gain experience, taking on personal debt in the process. The takeaway: don't buy into "you can just do something else if it doesn't work out," as though employers are waiting around to hire English PhDs. Moving out of higher ed takes time, dedication, and hard work, often requiring you to seek and participate in internships or learn new skills before you can find a job. Though it often gets framed as the easy back-up option, it can take months or years to develop the kind of resume that would make you competitive for the jobs that can put you on a path toward stability.

Regarding what Ramus said about a PhD graduate from UMich with two publications and a national conference and a PhD graduate from Yale with two publications and multiple conference presentations, I think there is a misunderstanding of the sign of academic vigor in the humanities. Journal publication is a major indicator of academic success in natural sciences. As an English PhD, however, what's most important is whether you can transfer your dissertation into your first published book, or academic monologue. Published books are mostly the sole indicator of academic preparedness in the English subject. Journal articles and conferences are but supplements and could be fairly frequently achieved by PhD students in their first or second years of study. The most important output in an English PhD program is the dissertation a student writes and whether that can be revised into a first book ready to be published. Usually, you if get a TT job, with your first published book, you can apply for securing the tenure. It is true that an English PhD graduate having several marvelous journal articles but not academically prepared for writing book-length monologues may not be competitive in the academic job market.