Placement at Top 5 Programs

[Desert_Ibex]

I can understand why there are such dire career warnings about most graduate programs in the humanities. And I can understand why even people who really want to teach might be dissuaded from entering a PhD program right now. My question though is whether this holds true for Top 5 or Top 10 programs. Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, etc., seem to have very good placement rates (even for T-T jobs). If you go to one of these schools and perform reasonably well, how much greater is your chance of immediately getting a decent (potentially T-T) job? Also, even in this economy, if you go to a Top 5 program and seem somewhat normal at interviews, would it be standard to have multiple offers from various schools in various regions? In other words, are all the misgivings about the humanities career market also true for these sorts of elite programs?

[joeygiraldo]

What do you mean by "somewhat normal in interviews," perchance?

[lotf629]

Also, even in this economy, if you go to a Top 5 program and seem somewhat normal at interviews, would it be standard to have multiple offers from various schools in various regions?

Nope. For instance, Columbia's placement this year was nothing like what it had been in past years: the economy hurt everybody. Also, even under more normal conditions, students usually expect to get some kind of placement, but it's far from unheard of at those places for students to get no offers at all. Over the last five years or so, I think you'd see an 80-90% job placement rate from those programs, but that's not 80-90% of people getting multiple offers from various schools in various regions: it's 80-90% of people gainfully employed on the other side of the Ph.D.

The people picking and choosing are people who've done really well and also chose a dissertation topic that is all the rage at the time they hit the job market. But it's really hard to know what will be trendy in five or six years, and plus, choosing a topic because it seems trendy is a really dry way to do research. In general, no matter where you go to school, the old rule still applies: don't go into literature fields unless you're willing to live anywhere, at least at the beginning.

Maybe it's easier for Rhet and Comp people.

[joeygiraldo]

In other news, what does everyone think of Harvard English's new web site???

http://english.fas.harvard.edu/

[newcircuitry]

A cursory glance at it confirms that it is better than their old website. Their old website was fully embarrassing, in my opinion.

[ratiocinator]

Agreed. It had the font of a teenager's Myspace profile. No good.

[kfed2020]

Hm. Well, I guess it's sort of exciting because this might be the first time they've updated that website since the Pleistocene era, and change -- after this long -- is a good thing.

Also good to see that they've finally updated some peoples' levels of tenure. And, it looks like they've got some great new creative writing faculty hires this year.

But, the new site seems sort of barren, to me. Maybe they're still in the process of adding more information to it?

[lotf629]

More data to answer this question, through the grapevine. Last year Columbia apparently placed 14 of 14 people on the market, so I was misinformed: I spoke in Feb or Mar to someone who had been away from campus and I guess was speculating. Yale placed 6 of 8 (2 people went jobless). For the rest, I have no stats. Those stats come second-hand from last year's Columbia and Yale recruits: I have not confirmed them officially.

[Minnesotan]

The interview is all you -- no matter where you got your PhD you need to perform. One thing that holds back a lot of folks from top schools are the fellowships that made their lives easy for the last 4-5 years. No teaching experience, or very little teaching experience, is a difficult position to be in when applying outside the ivies, where they care if you can teach.

[kfed2020]

No teaching experience, or very little teaching experience, is a difficult position to be in when applying outside the ivies, where they care if you can teach.

Of the many US colleges and universities, Minnesotan, I'm sure there are a great number of schools that emphasize research experience over teaching experience -- flagship state schools among them. The Ivies aren't the only schools at least partially driven by "big names," and anyway, to imply that these schools don't care about teaching is to promote exaggeration, even myth.

Still, Minnesotan is right to say that the interview is really what makes or breaks you -- much more so than your pedigree. On the other hand, there is the grim subject of getting an interview, and it is there that pedigree and research may matter, to a degree that no one can really predict.

People who teach less may run into some problems at liberal arts schools or schools that demand a lot of teaching of their junior faculty. But ultimately, it's your research that will really need to speak for itself, and if you're teaching so much that it comes at the expense of your having time to think, write, etc., you may be teaching too much. There's a point at which quantity no longer serves to imply a level of quality -- a point of diminishing returns, you could say. You don't need to teach a ton to prove that you're competent.

Either way, everyone's going to ask about teaching, and everyone's going to ask about research, so it helps to kick ass at both.