Ph.D. students outside top tier programmes in the humanities and social sciences often get admitted without funding and enrol as students. They might get a teac

Ph.D. students outside top tier programmes in the humanities and social sciences often get admitted without funding and enrol as students. They might get a teaching assistantship or they might go into enormous debt. Then if they graduate they’re competing for jobs against people from graduate programmes in their field that are well known and respected. Most of those people don’t get tenure track jobs. The ones from no name programmes are just screwed. Fredrik deBoer got a Ph.D. in English (Rhetoric) from Purdue, applied to more than 300 tenure track jobs and gave up, eventually becoming an administrator at NYU. Unfortunately he’s deleted the essay along with most of his blog but he said that the tenure track job hunt was the worst thing that ever happened to him and he’s an orphan. That’s someone with statistical and programming skills graduating from one of the top programmes in Rhetoric.