7 ms·

Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go

106 points by Arun2009 17y ago

pwnstigator 17y ago
(Disclaimer: Read this when it came out, haven't re-RTFA.) Sad, but accurate. On one hand, some humanities academics are directly responsible for this; the attitude of many academicians that research was the "real work" and teaching was just commoditized grunt work ended up hosing the humanities. Physicists can afford to cop that attitude, because if they're great researchers the university will put up with poor/no teaching, but those in the humanities can't, because the transfer of culture to rising generations (e.g. education) is the raison d'etre of humanities departments. On the other hand, the corporatization of the university and research world in general has been an unmitigated disaster, and it'd be better for all of us if the trend reversed.
- joe_the_user 17y ago
  It's not a matter of the general attitude of academics, it's criterion imposed by the institution - as the article says, it's an incredibly competitive world. Humanities must work extremely hard to achieve the requirement for tenure. A lot of them know quite well that teaching gets slighted in this process but simply don't have the time to do everything. If by "some humanities academics", you mean the deans and heads of departments, you might be right but otherwise you're blaming the soldiers for the large-scale situation.
- yters 17y ago
  We've lost belief in all the principles that underlay the humanities, and thus we're succumbing to corporations. Plato's guardians were made to live like commoners precisely so they wouldn't subvert their skills to making a quick buck.
mtinkerhess 17y ago
What about graduate school in computer science? Surely a Ph.D. in CS would have fallback options at places like Google or Microsoft where their graduate work won't have been wasted?
- rms 17y ago
  Most of the technical PhDs do just fine. There are too many biology PhDs though.
  - ratsbane 17y ago
    I have the vague impression that PhD computational biologists, bioinformaticists, are in demand and probably will be for a long time.
    - rms 17y ago
      That's definitely true, I mean non-programming, regular biologists, molecular biologists, etc.
- Nosferax 17y ago
  I hope so ! I'm still pondering whether to do a Ph.D. or not myself. Almost done with M.Sc...
- timwiseman 17y ago
  There are generally plenty of positions for PHDs in technical fields, and I have known of many employers that will pay the tuition for at least the masters in a technical field if you don't already have one (mine is, for instance.) Humanities tend to have fewer direct applications in business though. History at least is seen as some value in certain types of analysis and historians are often used as consultants in some fields. On the other hand, perhaps I just run in the wrong circles, but I cannot think of any direct use for a PHD in say English Literature other than teaching.
- anonjon 17y ago
  The problem in humanities is that the market is saturated, also, the majority of undergraduate classes are taught by graduate students (they're cheap!), further reducing the number of potential hiring positions. So you have to actually be exceptional and have published something interesting to even have a good chance at making it as a professor. You could do other things as well, write books or work for various foundations (teach high school!), but you can do those things without a Phd in medieval English literature. You also are spending 8+ years not getting paid or putting yourself into debt, and that you still might end up working at Arby's (or what have you). He left out that the pay for a starting professor sucks. (Considering that you just spent 8 years of your life getting the degree). Computer science is a bit of a different ballgame in that it is applicable (well, vaguely) to software development. So you might be able to get a job that is orthogonally relevant to whatever it was that you passionately studied in graduate school. The sad truth, however, is that the majority of software development does not come anywhere close to requiring a Phd. And you still come out up to your eyeballs in debt or flat broke. The good thing about it is that it looks pretty good on a resume. (Although weighing 8 years writing software against 8 years in grad school, I might go with the guy who has work experience... is kind of a toss up). The google/ibm/microsoft research positions are few and far between, in any event.
jimbokun 17y ago
A lot of highly trained, unemployed talent pool of people available for teaching pretty much any humanities subject. Over priced tuition to be taught by a grad student or adjunct anyway. The situation is looking very ripe for a disruptive business model offering the same quality of education online for a much lower price.
- gaius 17y ago
  You aren't paying for the knowledge but the brand name on your resume. One student's fees alone probably covers two TAs salaries...
  - Rod 17y ago
    Exactly. Universities sell credentials, not knowledge. If universities actually did sell knowledge, they would have been put out of business by public libraries long ago.
    - jseliger 17y ago
      "Universities sell credentials, not knowledge." This is true if you're saying that universities sell credentials among other things but false if you're implying that universities _only_ sell credentials. They also sell a rich learning and networking environment; _structured_ knowledge that you're presumably acquiring from people who've already mastered a field and thus can bring you through it faster than you could on your own; motivation in the form of deadlines and so forth, which is often difficult for most people; editing / mentoring relationships that help you dialectically develop your skills; and a way to guide figuring out what you might be interested in. None of that is to deny that universities sell credentials too, but if that were their only function, they wouldn't be essential to our society.
      - rdtsc 17y ago
        > They also sell a rich learning and networking environment ... That is worth anything only if it will help achieve future profesional goals. You are probably thinging of a rich start-up culture. It can be awesome for engineering and business majors. But for humanities, I am not so sure. > motivation in the form of deadlines and so forth, which is often difficult for most people; There is some value in that. Universities used to play the 'in loco parentis' role in the past (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_loco_parentis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_loco_parentis). In other words they provide an environment where discipline and certain norms are enforced. I am just not so sure it is worth $120k worth of debt at the end.
asolove 17y ago
I think the title is wrong. Should read: Don't go if you're planning to get a job as a professor and would mind wasting ten years of your life waiting. On the other hand, if you actually enjoy what you're studying and have any reasonable amount of skill in something else (as many humanities majors who read HN probably do), then graduate school can be fantastic. You want to use computers to solve problems, but unless you're a low-level systems programmer or a CS researcher, you'll need some specific thing to make websites or computer programs about. School is great for that. Last year I finished my MA in classical Chinese literature. The problems of OCR'ing, transcribing, and translating Chinese are enormously interesting. Even simply trying to present digitized versions of ancient Chinese texts is difficult (no one told Confucius that only so many characters would be in the Unicode standard). I got a lot of attention (and should have productized it) by making free information available in a more convenient way with a simple Rails app. There's a huge gap in the field for a young grad student who wanted to digitize information, present it attractively, and sell it back to libraries or individual researchers. And these gaps exist in most traditional humanities fields. Aside: I went to UW, which has the most rigorous Chinese lit. program outside of China. Obviously don't go to graduate school in the Humanities at a school that is only theory--you're probably smart and coherent enough to make your way through it without really learning anything--go somewhere that has a difficult program where you learn linguistics, philology, or serious history. I also got all of tuition, a nice stipend, and optional health insurance by doing some PHP programming for a lab at the school--don't go into serious debt for a masters in the humanities.
- brendano 17y ago
  Hi - is your Rails app for ancient Chinese literature? Is it public anywhere?
  - asolove 17y ago
    I have a couple of things up with demos/screens and code available: - A mapping tool that searches for Chinese placenames through about 2500 years of history and shows you when/where that name existed, what level of the administration it was in, etc.: http://www.digitalsinologist.com/places http://www.digitalsinologist.com/places - Beginnings of a Cocoa-based critical text editor. http://www.digitalsinologist.com/blog/index.php?id=40 http://www.digitalsinologist.com/blog/index.php?id=40 - One attempt to format a critical version of a text online: http://digitalsinologist.com/texts/XieLingyun/text.html http://digitalsinologist.com/texts/XieLingyun/text.html
tkahn6 17y ago
Are any Humanities Ph.Ds under the impression that they can actually do anything with their degree (besides teach)? A Ph.D in CS is not, as I understand it, a prerequisite for success in a technological field, but PG was able to make use of it to start Viaweb. Could a Humanities Ph.D do anything like that?
- hyperbovine 17y ago
  Could a Humanities Ph.D do anything like that? Of course--but that same person could do it without the Ph.D.
- CWuestefeld 17y ago
  In college we had a joke: Those who study engineering learn to ask "how does that work?". Those who study the sciences learn to ask "why does that work?" Those who study account learn to ask "how much will that cost?" Those who study liberal arts learn to ask "do you want fries with that?" This is a bit self-serving, it having come from an engineering school (where I was a CS student), but there's some truth in there.
  - maximumwage 17y ago
    Not everyone has the mathematical intelligence, willpower, mental health, and emotional stability required to make it through an engineering, science, or even business degree. In addition, many students feel they have to go to college just to get a job. For those reasons (and others) many students end up studying for a liberal arts degree. What should those students be doing instead?
    - apsec112 17y ago
      There are lots of trade jobs and civil service jobs that pay very well. "Many paths can lead to riches, few in sunlight, most in ditches."
  - nostrademons 17y ago
    We had the same joke at the liberal arts college I went to...
philk 17y ago
There's a huge oversupply of candidates because humanities is 'exciting' and thus will attract a certain number of people regardless of how bad the conditions are. Ultimately the less glamorous a job/career and the higher the barrier to entry the better the conditions. (This is one of the reasons why businesses are often the best way to make money; it's an unpleasant and uncertain slog which few are willing to take on and navigate).
- rdtsc 17y ago
  > There's a huge oversupply of candidates because humanities is 'exciting' and thus will attract a certain number of people regardless of how bad the conditions are. I often wonder how much of the 'exciting' part is actually 'math was too hard so any hard sciences are out of the question'. Some students know for sure what they love and want, but some are in the undecided major for 2 years and then are forced to pick. The decision they make sometimes is influenced by their level of proficiency in the subject not by the love of the subject itself.
  - surgesg 17y ago
    I'm not sure that people seriously considering graduate school (in any subject) would be influenced in their choice by a (perceived) lack of math skills.
    - elq 17y ago
      many families strongly encourage children to get a graduate degree.
- exit 17y ago
  maybe there's just an oversupply of human beings in general.
  - nfnaaron 17y ago
    To put that another way: The average level of talent in people is average. We've nailed average in the first world, automating or off-shoring much of what the average person can do out of existence. What are we going to do with all of us average people?
mbrubeck 17y ago
A friend of mine in academia recently commented that jobs for liberal-arts Ph.D.s are so scarce that their grad school programs are basically Ponzi schemes.
- stevenbedrick 17y ago
  http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1144 http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1144
tokenadult 17y ago
Previously submitted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=558424 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=558424
- RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
  And it would've been detected as such by this idea: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1012215 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1012215
  - tokenadult 17y ago
    Have you put your idea in the Feature Requests http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363 thread? I strongly support beefing up duplicate detection.
    - Goronmon 17y ago
      In this case I don't really see the problem. The previous submission was from 8 months ago. I don't understand why it's inherently bad if a decent topic is reposting a couple times a year? It allows for people to catch an interesting article they might not have seen the first time around.
      - robryan 17y ago
        Actually it would be good if a resubmission includes the previous submissions comments.
teeja 17y ago
Sorry to say, this article is very realistic about a lot of things. Since tuition got so high and heavy debt became common, starting college without a realistic idea why you're there is a bad idea. There's nothing new about PhD's leaving school to find nothing, except that there are more of them chasing fewer opportunities. Don't expect colleges to clue you into these realities: it would be bad for business.
marltod 17y ago
A lot of the same things are true for law school. I think a lot of people go into PhD programs/Law school because it sounds prestigious and assume with prestige comes money.
ahi 17y ago
If you go to a top ten school in your field and have a prestigious advisor with some weight behind their recommendations then you'll be fine. The problem is that every school wants to hand out graduate degrees. If you're getting your phd in history from Northeastern Wichita State you're fucked.
blasdel 17y ago
As somebody who hangs out with a lot of English PhD Candidates, I can attest that their job is way better than yours. Here’s what they do: http://squashed.tumblr.com/post/316844790/dont-go-to-graduate-school-in-the-humanities http://squashed.tumblr.com/post/316844790/dont-go-to-graduat...
- yters 17y ago
  Yeah, humanities discussions are a lot more interesting that sciency type discussions. Having my degrees is nice, but I sorta wish I'd gone the arts route instead of the science.
- stevenbedrick 17y ago
  The problem is that, eventually, the ride stops and you have to get off... and, then what? That's the point of the original article.
pgbovine 17y ago
i'm a bit late to this thread, so not many people will end up reading this, but i'm very much against overloading of the term "graduate school". in particular a Master's degree and a Ph.D. are not (not, not, not) merely different shades of the same beast. it's not like you do 4 more years of master's level coursework and suddenly get a Ph.D. A master's degree is technical training in an applied field (e.g., a master's in software engineering), whereas a Ph.D. is training to become an academic researcher. I'm not trying to say that one is better than the other, but they are different. Thus, this article should really be named "Ph.D. in the humanities: Just don't go". Master's in humanities is a completely different beast altogether. just my 2 cents!
- fan 17y ago
  Yes -- this is absolutely key. While the first couple of years in a PhD program can be like a Master's program, once you get to the independent research portion, it's completely different. There is no more "standard formula" to follow, there is no more just being satisfied getting classwork done. You have to find your own ideas, your own schedule, and your own plans.
netcan 17y ago
"The reality is that less than half of all doctorate holders — after nearly a decade of preparation, on average — will ever find tenure-track positions" That doesn't sound too bad at all. Presumably some percentage of doctorate holders do not want "tenure-track positions." Some might be good at things other then academia to which their academic expertise is useful. Some are probably already wealthy or old & do not want to work full time. Some are just not very good at being academics. You have that in every field regardless of training. Being a history researcher is probably a less wonderful career path then Laws or engineering but I assume the students know this going in & prefer history anyway. Besides, I know several PHDs working as academics with comfy 6 figure jobs that I would never hire for anything. This article seems to be assuming that all PHD candidates are all of the highest "quality" and that even the bottom 10% would be flying high anywhere else and are wasting their talents in Academia. That's just not true. I'm sure that many are. These get their cushy professor jobs or do something else that they like.

106 points by Arun2009 17y ago

(Disclaimer: Read this when it came out, haven't re-RTFA.) Sad, but accurate. On one hand, some humanities academics are directly responsible for this; the attitude of many academicians that research was the "real work" and teaching was just commoditized grunt work ended up hosing the humanities. Physicists can afford to cop that attitude, because if they're great researchers the university will put up with poor/no teaching, but those in the humanities can't, because the transfer of culture to rising generations (e.g. education) is the raison d'etre of humanities departments. On the other hand, the corporatization of the university and research world in general has been an unmitigated disaster, and it'd be better for all of us if the trend reversed.

joe_the_user 17y ago
It's not a matter of the general attitude of academics, it's criterion imposed by the institution - as the article says, it's an incredibly competitive world. Humanities must work extremely hard to achieve the requirement for tenure. A lot of them know quite well that teaching gets slighted in this process but simply don't have the time to do everything. If by "some humanities academics", you mean the deans and heads of departments, you might be right but otherwise you're blaming the soldiers for the large-scale situation.
yters 17y ago
We've lost belief in all the principles that underlay the humanities, and thus we're succumbing to corporations. Plato's guardians were made to live like commoners precisely so they wouldn't subvert their skills to making a quick buck.

mtinkerhess 17y ago

What about graduate school in computer science? Surely a Ph.D. in CS would have fallback options at places like Google or Microsoft where their graduate work won't have been wasted?

rms 17y ago
Most of the technical PhDs do just fine. There are too many biology PhDs though.
- ratsbane 17y ago
  I have the vague impression that PhD computational biologists, bioinformaticists, are in demand and probably will be for a long time.
  - rms 17y ago
    That's definitely true, I mean non-programming, regular biologists, molecular biologists, etc.
Nosferax 17y ago
I hope so ! I'm still pondering whether to do a Ph.D. or not myself. Almost done with M.Sc...
timwiseman 17y ago
There are generally plenty of positions for PHDs in technical fields, and I have known of many employers that will pay the tuition for at least the masters in a technical field if you don't already have one (mine is, for instance.) Humanities tend to have fewer direct applications in business though. History at least is seen as some value in certain types of analysis and historians are often used as consultants in some fields. On the other hand, perhaps I just run in the wrong circles, but I cannot think of any direct use for a PHD in say English Literature other than teaching.
anonjon 17y ago
The problem in humanities is that the market is saturated, also, the majority of undergraduate classes are taught by graduate students (they're cheap!), further reducing the number of potential hiring positions. So you have to actually be exceptional and have published something interesting to even have a good chance at making it as a professor. You could do other things as well, write books or work for various foundations (teach high school!), but you can do those things without a Phd in medieval English literature. You also are spending 8+ years not getting paid or putting yourself into debt, and that you still might end up working at Arby's (or what have you). He left out that the pay for a starting professor sucks. (Considering that you just spent 8 years of your life getting the degree). Computer science is a bit of a different ballgame in that it is applicable (well, vaguely) to software development. So you might be able to get a job that is orthogonally relevant to whatever it was that you passionately studied in graduate school. The sad truth, however, is that the majority of software development does not come anywhere close to requiring a Phd. And you still come out up to your eyeballs in debt or flat broke. The good thing about it is that it looks pretty good on a resume. (Although weighing 8 years writing software against 8 years in grad school, I might go with the guy who has work experience... is kind of a toss up). The google/ibm/microsoft research positions are few and far between, in any event.

jimbokun 17y ago

A lot of highly trained, unemployed talent pool of people available for teaching pretty much any humanities subject. Over priced tuition to be taught by a grad student or adjunct anyway. The situation is looking very ripe for a disruptive business model offering the same quality of education online for a much lower price.

gaius 17y ago
You aren't paying for the knowledge but the brand name on your resume. One student's fees alone probably covers two TAs salaries...
- Rod 17y ago
  Exactly. Universities sell credentials, not knowledge. If universities actually did sell knowledge, they would have been put out of business by public libraries long ago.
  - jseliger 17y ago
    "Universities sell credentials, not knowledge." This is true if you're saying that universities sell credentials among other things but false if you're implying that universities _only_ sell credentials. They also sell a rich learning and networking environment; _structured_ knowledge that you're presumably acquiring from people who've already mastered a field and thus can bring you through it faster than you could on your own; motivation in the form of deadlines and so forth, which is often difficult for most people; editing / mentoring relationships that help you dialectically develop your skills; and a way to guide figuring out what you might be interested in. None of that is to deny that universities sell credentials too, but if that were their only function, they wouldn't be essential to our society.
    - rdtsc 17y ago
      > They also sell a rich learning and networking environment ... That is worth anything only if it will help achieve future profesional goals. You are probably thinging of a rich start-up culture. It can be awesome for engineering and business majors. But for humanities, I am not so sure. > motivation in the form of deadlines and so forth, which is often difficult for most people; There is some value in that. Universities used to play the 'in loco parentis' role in the past (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_loco_parentis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_loco_parentis). In other words they provide an environment where discipline and certain norms are enforced. I am just not so sure it is worth $120k worth of debt at the end.

asolove 17y ago

I think the title is wrong. Should read: Don't go if you're planning to get a job as a professor and would mind wasting ten years of your life waiting. On the other hand, if you actually enjoy what you're studying and have any reasonable amount of skill in something else (as many humanities majors who read HN probably do), then graduate school can be fantastic. You want to use computers to solve problems, but unless you're a low-level systems programmer or a CS researcher, you'll need some specific thing to make websites or computer programs about. School is great for that. Last year I finished my MA in classical Chinese literature. The problems of OCR'ing, transcribing, and translating Chinese are enormously interesting. Even simply trying to present digitized versions of ancient Chinese texts is difficult (no one told Confucius that only so many characters would be in the Unicode standard). I got a lot of attention (and should have productized it) by making free information available in a more convenient way with a simple Rails app. There's a huge gap in the field for a young grad student who wanted to digitize information, present it attractively, and sell it back to libraries or individual researchers. And these gaps exist in most traditional humanities fields. Aside: I went to UW, which has the most rigorous Chinese lit. program outside of China. Obviously don't go to graduate school in the Humanities at a school that is only theory--you're probably smart and coherent enough to make your way through it without really learning anything--go somewhere that has a difficult program where you learn linguistics, philology, or serious history. I also got all of tuition, a nice stipend, and optional health insurance by doing some PHP programming for a lab at the school--don't go into serious debt for a masters in the humanities.

brendano 17y ago
Hi - is your Rails app for ancient Chinese literature? Is it public anywhere?
- asolove 17y ago
  I have a couple of things up with demos/screens and code available: - A mapping tool that searches for Chinese placenames through about 2500 years of history and shows you when/where that name existed, what level of the administration it was in, etc.: http://www.digitalsinologist.com/places http://www.digitalsinologist.com/places - Beginnings of a Cocoa-based critical text editor. http://www.digitalsinologist.com/blog/index.php?id=40 http://www.digitalsinologist.com/blog/index.php?id=40 - One attempt to format a critical version of a text online: http://digitalsinologist.com/texts/XieLingyun/text.html http://digitalsinologist.com/texts/XieLingyun/text.html

tkahn6 17y ago

Are any Humanities Ph.Ds under the impression that they can actually do anything with their degree (besides teach)? A Ph.D in CS is not, as I understand it, a prerequisite for success in a technological field, but PG was able to make use of it to start Viaweb. Could a Humanities Ph.D do anything like that?

hyperbovine 17y ago
Could a Humanities Ph.D do anything like that? Of course--but that same person could do it without the Ph.D.
CWuestefeld 17y ago
In college we had a joke: Those who study engineering learn to ask "how does that work?". Those who study the sciences learn to ask "why does that work?" Those who study account learn to ask "how much will that cost?" Those who study liberal arts learn to ask "do you want fries with that?" This is a bit self-serving, it having come from an engineering school (where I was a CS student), but there's some truth in there.
- maximumwage 17y ago
  Not everyone has the mathematical intelligence, willpower, mental health, and emotional stability required to make it through an engineering, science, or even business degree. In addition, many students feel they have to go to college just to get a job. For those reasons (and others) many students end up studying for a liberal arts degree. What should those students be doing instead?
  - apsec112 17y ago
    There are lots of trade jobs and civil service jobs that pay very well. "Many paths can lead to riches, few in sunlight, most in ditches."
- nostrademons 17y ago
  We had the same joke at the liberal arts college I went to...

philk 17y ago

There's a huge oversupply of candidates because humanities is 'exciting' and thus will attract a certain number of people regardless of how bad the conditions are. Ultimately the less glamorous a job/career and the higher the barrier to entry the better the conditions. (This is one of the reasons why businesses are often the best way to make money; it's an unpleasant and uncertain slog which few are willing to take on and navigate).

rdtsc 17y ago
> There's a huge oversupply of candidates because humanities is 'exciting' and thus will attract a certain number of people regardless of how bad the conditions are. I often wonder how much of the 'exciting' part is actually 'math was too hard so any hard sciences are out of the question'. Some students know for sure what they love and want, but some are in the undecided major for 2 years and then are forced to pick. The decision they make sometimes is influenced by their level of proficiency in the subject not by the love of the subject itself.
- surgesg 17y ago
  I'm not sure that people seriously considering graduate school (in any subject) would be influenced in their choice by a (perceived) lack of math skills.
  - elq 17y ago
    many families strongly encourage children to get a graduate degree.
exit 17y ago
maybe there's just an oversupply of human beings in general.
- nfnaaron 17y ago
  To put that another way: The average level of talent in people is average. We've nailed average in the first world, automating or off-shoring much of what the average person can do out of existence. What are we going to do with all of us average people?

mbrubeck 17y ago

A friend of mine in academia recently commented that jobs for liberal-arts Ph.D.s are so scarce that their grad school programs are basically Ponzi schemes.

stevenbedrick 17y ago
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1144 http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1144

tokenadult 17y ago

Previously submitted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=558424 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=558424

RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
And it would've been detected as such by this idea: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1012215 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1012215
- tokenadult 17y ago
  Have you put your idea in the Feature Requests http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363 thread? I strongly support beefing up duplicate detection.
  - Goronmon 17y ago
    In this case I don't really see the problem. The previous submission was from 8 months ago. I don't understand why it's inherently bad if a decent topic is reposting a couple times a year? It allows for people to catch an interesting article they might not have seen the first time around.
    - robryan 17y ago
      Actually it would be good if a resubmission includes the previous submissions comments.

teeja 17y ago

Sorry to say, this article is very realistic about a lot of things. Since tuition got so high and heavy debt became common, starting college without a realistic idea why you're there is a bad idea. There's nothing new about PhD's leaving school to find nothing, except that there are more of them chasing fewer opportunities. Don't expect colleges to clue you into these realities: it would be bad for business.

marltod 17y ago

A lot of the same things are true for law school. I think a lot of people go into PhD programs/Law school because it sounds prestigious and assume with prestige comes money.

ahi 17y ago

If you go to a top ten school in your field and have a prestigious advisor with some weight behind their recommendations then you'll be fine. The problem is that every school wants to hand out graduate degrees. If you're getting your phd in history from Northeastern Wichita State you're fucked.

blasdel 17y ago

As somebody who hangs out with a lot of English PhD Candidates, I can attest that their job is way better than yours. Here’s what they do: http://squashed.tumblr.com/post/316844790/dont-go-to-graduate-school-in-the-humanities http://squashed.tumblr.com/post/316844790/dont-go-to-graduat...

yters 17y ago
Yeah, humanities discussions are a lot more interesting that sciency type discussions. Having my degrees is nice, but I sorta wish I'd gone the arts route instead of the science.
stevenbedrick 17y ago
The problem is that, eventually, the ride stops and you have to get off... and, then what? That's the point of the original article.

pgbovine 17y ago

i'm a bit late to this thread, so not many people will end up reading this, but i'm very much against overloading of the term "graduate school". in particular a Master's degree and a Ph.D. are not (not, not, not) merely different shades of the same beast. it's not like you do 4 more years of master's level coursework and suddenly get a Ph.D. A master's degree is technical training in an applied field (e.g., a master's in software engineering), whereas a Ph.D. is training to become an academic researcher. I'm not trying to say that one is better than the other, but they are different. Thus, this article should really be named "Ph.D. in the humanities: Just don't go". Master's in humanities is a completely different beast altogether. just my 2 cents!

fan 17y ago
Yes -- this is absolutely key. While the first couple of years in a PhD program can be like a Master's program, once you get to the independent research portion, it's completely different. There is no more "standard formula" to follow, there is no more just being satisfied getting classwork done. You have to find your own ideas, your own schedule, and your own plans.

netcan 17y ago

"The reality is that less than half of all doctorate holders — after nearly a decade of preparation, on average — will ever find tenure-track positions" That doesn't sound too bad at all. Presumably some percentage of doctorate holders do not want "tenure-track positions." Some might be good at things other then academia to which their academic expertise is useful. Some are probably already wealthy or old & do not want to work full time. Some are just not very good at being academics. You have that in every field regardless of training. Being a history researcher is probably a less wonderful career path then Laws or engineering but I assume the students know this going in & prefer history anyway. Besides, I know several PHDs working as academics with comfy 6 figure jobs that I would never hire for anything. This article seems to be assuming that all PHD candidates are all of the highest "quality" and that even the bottom 10% would be flying high anywhere else and are wasting their talents in Academia. That's just not true. I'm sure that many are. These get their cushy professor jobs or do something else that they like.