"Doctoral Downsizing"

Naomi Schaefer Riley's recent article "So You Want to Be a Professor" discusses the oversupply of PhDs, the recent trend of certain graduate programs reducing the incoming classes of doctoral students (bravo!), and the way that overmanufacture of PhDs results in "ruined lives" through the relegation of bright teachers and researchers to adjunct status. Certainly this is a move in the right direction: graduate programs should be downsizing in order to prevent overproduction of degrees that will not lead to productive employment; to accept more students than can be eventually placed in a career is part of the current unethical character of academia. But this is also reiterative: we've known about these issues for a long while now, such as the effect on teaching quality and student learning or the skewing of the purpose of higher education. We also read again about William Bowen, who gets named in most of these articles concerning the miasma that is the academic job market: one almost pities the former Princeton president who predicted twenty years ago that there would eventually be a shortfall of humanities PhDs (big whoops)--almost. So Riley's article may not really say anything new . . . but perhaps with continued publication of articles of a range of venues generating greater awareness, policies can be implemented that will actually start to change the system, hopefully for the better?

Of course, in addition to reading about scaling back graduate departments, one longs to read more about such programs that also support students who do not necessarily plan on staying in academia but would rather like to apply their skills in research and teaching to other careers. These programs would do well to provide jobseeking help directed toward professions beyond just "professing," especially since the number of doctoral students who end up in tenure-stream academic positions continues to dwindle. Of course, this would mean that these departments would need to have access to and welcome professionals who have made the transition out of the ivory tower instead of vilifying those with master's and doctoral degrees who end up following an alternate track, either purposely or not, for "wasting their time" ("their" is an intentionally ambiguous pronoun). Many (most?) graduate departments currently fail to offer jobseeking resources to students leaving academia because the faculty staffing such departments usually have no "real world" experience. But perhaps one way of rectifying the situation of graduate study and the horrendous job market is to, say, encourage more diverse opportunities rather than limiting them even more. And if we were to convert graduate work into an effective conduit to a wider range of nonacademic careers, then perhaps we wouldn't have so much trouble fortifying and defending the walls of academe from the onslaught of outside criticism since the distinction between "inside" and "outside" would be more fluid, the relationship between them more mutually cooperative and collaborative than miscommunicative and adversarial.