(Lack of) Employment for PhDs

Here are some articles on the recent economic recession and its effect on the job market. As one of the "victims" of this downturn, I can say that in past years, I was able to apply to over 50 tenure-track positions per year in my subfields (Romantic, Victorian, long nineteenth-century British literature). This year, that number dropped to fewer than 20--counting those jobs that were later cut after posting because budgets were cut.

1) Patricia Cohen, "Doctoral Candidates Anticipate Hard Times": an article in The New York Times describing how the current economic situation has slashed tenure-track university positions, and not just in the humanities fields.

The anticipated wave of retirements by faculty members who are 60-something is likely to slow as retirement savings accounts and pensions wither, administrators and professors say. That means that some students who have finished postdoctoral fellowships and who expected to leave for faculty positions are staying put for another year, which in turn closes off an option for other graduate students coming up the ladder.

What's strange is that although this article was reported recently in The New York Times, this issue of oversupply of PhDs/lack of full-time, tenure-track jobs has existed for 20 (or is it now 30?) years. This is not news. One also begins to wonder how many non-academic readers of journalism would actually care about the plight of academics.

2) Nicole Brooks, "Unemployment and the Toil of Sisyphus": A recent Ph.D. in history decides to end the masochistic track of debt and unemployment given this year's practically nonexistent academic job market.

Since the 1990s, it has been considered par for the course for history Ph.D.'s to spend several years after graduation publishing and teaching, whether as visiting assistant professors, postdocs, or adjuncts, in order to secure entry-level jobs as tenure-track faculty members. Nonetheless, despite years of emphasis on positive job growth in history, even the AHA has recently admitted that most doctoral recipients will never achieve a position with the possibility of tenure. Worse still, many of the remaining history Ph.D.'s will fail to even obtain a full-time, untenured faculty position.

Paula Foster Chambers, PhD, founder and list manager of Work For Us, a national email discussion list about post-academic careers for people with graduate education in the humanities and social sciences, sent me the following links to sources on employment statistics for those who pursue graduate work in these disciplines. In her email, Paula wrote:

Here are some online resources for you to check out and see if they might be interesting to your class. The major researcher I would like to introduce you to is Maresi Nerad, who has collaborated with several others over many years to study career outcomes of PhDs. Nerad created CIRGE, the Center for Innovation and Research in Graduate Education, through which she has conducted a number of longitudinal studies of employment outcomes after the PhD. Though these resources focus on the value and outcomes of graduate degrees, not undergraduate degrees, I suspect they would enrich your class anyway because many of the concerns are the same. You can also cheer your students up by telling them that very few college grads end up working in the field of their major, so they can probably lighten up and major in whatever they want.

1) Center for Innovation and Research in Graduate Education (CIRGE)'s Social Science PhDs: Five+ Years Out Survey

2) Career Outcomes for English PhDs (Ten Years Later Study, includes statistics for PhDs in other fields, including the social sciences and "hard" sciences)

3) A Plethora of Other Studies of Graduate Education and Employment Statistics by CIRGE