8 ms·
Why You Should Not Get a History PhD
- azhenley 5y agoRegardless of field, you probably shouldn't get a PhD. (Disclaimer: I'm a professor.)
- chaosbutters314 5y agoI strongly disagree. A lot of R&D groups at major companies require them since the work is so specialized and you won't be learning that material in udnergrad. In the teams I've worked, every member had a PhD, our manager had a PhD, their director/VP had a PhD... everyone up until the C-suits. It was necessary and expected. So I think it really depends on your field.
- azhenley 5y agoI didn't say that there aren't jobs that require a PhD (even ones with a lot of openings and great pay). I said "you probably shouldn't get a PhD."
- bombcar 5y agoI feel that it would be a great service to prospective students everywhere if colleges (or the government) tracked outcomes and reported on them. Something like "89% of history PhDs are employed in these salary bands (list them with percentages), and 3% are employed in the profession associated with their PhD".
- DiggyJohnson 5y agoI'm not arguing that student's don't stand to benefit from this sort of reporting, but... I bet most history departments would tell you that they are not interested in the commercial success of their PhDs. That's not the purpose of their institution or in alignment with the academic tradition.
- pram 5y agoExactly. I've seen this rationalization so much. It's like practically outrage at the mere suggestion that education should have some kind of functional purpose outside of itself.
- allturtles 5y agoIt is not uncommon for departments to provide placement information for the graduate students that have completed their program. I've never seen salary information though. No one goes into academia for the money. The University of Michigan has a really nice online tool: https://tableau.dsc.umich.edu/t/UM-Public/views/RackhamDoctoralProgramStatistics/ProgramStatistics https://tableau.dsc.umich.edu/t/UM-Public/views/RackhamDocto... According to that 22% of history grad students from 2015-2020 got tenure track positions. That's quite a crapshoot for investing 5+ years in a career path. And of course you could fall off the tenure track. And Michigan has a top history program.
- pkaye 5y agoI seem to recall during the Obama administration they we trying to require this but I think the colleges lobbied to water it down.
- cpp_frog 5y agoI somehow get a feeling that if the prospects were actually good in any sense, colleges would advertise them whenever they had the chance (is there even reliable information about how salaries are distributed? Not just means and standard deviations). I got an undergraduate degree that has 0% unemployment rate with good salaires because there are so few graduates, but for a PhD (that I was thinking of getting) there is no guarantee that even the places where I would work are good enough in terms of research or teaching.
- comicjk 5y agoI'm in an R&D job as well. I agree that a PhD is expected, but I disagree that it's necessary. Most R&D work is so specialized that PhDs are not much closer to it than MS graduates, PhD dropouts, or just people with relevant work experience. Hiring is much easier if you relax the PhD requirement.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bombcar 5y agoThere are some limited fields where a company or university will pay you to get a PhD (usually tied to post-doctorate work) - and pay beyond a stipend; a real salary. Those can be worth pursuing, but otherwise you may want to consider just resting on the incidental Masters you get as part of the PhD program ...
- huitzitziltzin 5y agoI’m a professor too. This really depends on the field. For any field, you need to think about the outside options (I.e., non academic). If they are good and you would be happy, a phd may be a good move. In economics, the outside options include government, policy (foundations and think tanks) and the private sector. Many are lucrative and / or rewarding in other ways. Furthermore, unlike in CS there are some roles in economics and policy which you cannot fill without a PhD. It may be a good move!
- alexgmcm 5y agoI remember seeing an analysis about a decade ago when I was deciding on grad school. And if I recall correctly, Economics was basically the only field where it made financial sense to get a PhD, taking into account opportunity cost etc.
- bachmeier 5y agoI manage our PhD program in economics. We are not highly ranked yet our students do well on the job market. The bigger hurdle is getting into a PhD program. The qualifications of the applicants that we can't make a first-round offer from our program is astonishing. There are definitely some parts of economics you want to avoid though. If you're interested in anything that fits in the "Freakanomics" classification, the job market is going to be challenging, and I'd personally not recommend getting a PhD if that is your area of interest. I chaired a search for a labor economics faculty position a couple years ago and found their job market to be absolutely brutal. Many, many top candidates with good publications were applying as postdocs. Some of them, in spite of their outstanding publications, could not find academic jobs even after completing the postdoc. I don't think any of them will be living in poverty. A tough job market nonetheless.
- vincent-toups 5y agoCounterpoint: I've got a Phd (Physics). I did not pursue physics as a career but I think about and read physics research papers and textbooks _almost every day_ and derive enormous pleasure from the pursuit. Sure, I could teach myself everything I learned in grad school on my own time (I guess) but to me, those stipended years wherein I had no responsibilities other than to learn were the best years of my life, and they have served as the springboard for more learning in this, much more busy, period of my life. Would it be better if I had made full professor somewhere? Sure, but in the end the education was its own reward. I consider the trade offs a bargain.
- dfmooreqqq 5y agoI agree completely with this. I have an Applied Physics Ph.D. and have a similar experience. I think that if you are getting a Ph.D. for a reason other than enjoying the learning and the education, then it doesn't make too much sense. However, if you have a great pleasure in the pursuit of the field and the research in it, then it makes sense to get a Ph.D. We don't give enough credit these days to education being its own reward.
- narrator 5y agoGetting a Physics Phd is fine because it looks great on a resume. It shows that you are very good at applied math. A History Phd is almost a negative, IMHO.
- vincent-toups 5y agoNot really the point I am trying to make: if you love History, getting the PhD might be worth it. Money isn't everything.
- klyrs 5y agoI disagree. In math, I had a survivable wage from TA/RA gigs during my whole graduate career, and I escaped the experience with less than a year's (grad school) income in loans taken out in my undergrad. Saw the writing on the wall, networked a bunch, and found a good job and now I'm making more than my supervisor ever will. Could I do the work without what I learned in my PhD program? Maybe I could have stopped after a Masters... but then I'd have missed the networking opportunities and (given the options available after my Masters) I'd have settled for a job with much lower satisfaction. On the other hand, I feel like I've defined myself in a narrow specialization, so I might miss opportunities because they don't fit that. But definitely don't get a PhD if your plan is to become a professor. Unless nepotism will go in your favor.
- lelanthran 5y ago> Regardless of field, you probably shouldn't get a PhD. (Disclaimer: I'm a professor.) Depends on the field, doesn't it? Some fields, like History, don't open any opportunities other than academia. Other fields, like engineering or medicine, basically lets the student practice their field in industry and commerce. If studying a certain field means that the only thing you can do is teach that field, then that's a pretty sure way to go into poverty.
- BugsJustFindMe 5y agoEverything about this is 100% accurate. The nightmare was super real ~3 years ago when this was posted, and it's even worse now, and it's a horrifying indictment of the entire academic pyramid scheme.
- merpnderp 5y agoThis is the main thrust of the conservative argument against free higher education. It just lets universities continue tricking the smartest of our students into picking career fields with zero room for new participants, only instead of wasting their potential and burying them in debt, they merely waste their potential while sticking tax payers with the debt.
- thenoblesunfish 5y agoOne should be careful when making this argument to distinguish between niche "higher education" like the history PhDs under discussion here (things which people do because they have an overwhelming passion for the "pure" subject and/or for teaching it) and the broader "higher education" which most people pursue (degrees which lower barriers to careers). The post here suggests on the order of 1200 people a year getting history PhDs in the U.S. - multiply that by a few dozen other esoteric fields and that's still not much compared to the millions of people who want to get "higher education" of some kind each year in the U.S.
- merpnderp 5y agoGood point. A free education in most fields might likely be a net gain for society, even if it was troublesome from a justice point of view.
- dfxm12 5y agoI'm having a hard time finding a politician, a mainstream politician at least, putting forth a higher education platform that explicitly includes a free PhD. With that in mind, who are the conservatives arguing against?
- meowkit 5y agoAs the top reddit comment points out, a sad read. Also note this post is 2 years old. It makes me wonder - are there opportunities for a digital hybrid of techie and historian? The data hoarder subreddits come to mind but they tend to be focused on tech itself or unfocused in what data they collect. Though even if you could maintain and do analysis on a digitized archive of a specific subject I wonder what kind of market there is for that since that’s kind of what libraries have become?
- BugsJustFindMe 5y ago> Also note this post is 2 years old. The History job market now is not better than it was 2-3 years ago. If anything it's worse, and schools continue to pump out PhDs like it just doesn't matter that they're tricking kids into burning the better part of a decade for less than nothing (average time to complete in the US is 7-8 years!)
- meowkit 5y agoSorry not to imply otherwise. More as a literal note as I find myself assuming the things I’m reading are recently posted and not 2, 5, 10 or more years old.
- sho_hn 5y agoMakes me wonder: Are we failing to teach how to apply history to present-day problems, or do we as a society really value history so little?
- goda90 5y agoHow can those of us in science and technology support the humanities more?
- Fomite 5y agoFrom the prospective of a STEM professor: Honestly? Don't shit on STEM courses. Encourage programs that produce well-rounded students in the liberal arts tradition. Most humanities departments are dependent on class enrollment - they are so-called "service" departments (vs. research or clinical departments). Enrollment is largely what determines what those departments can support.
- NikolaNovak 5y agoI think, and this is not to be snarky, the predecessor question is "Why should we [in science and technology] support the humanities more". I feel a lot of the answer of "How" will be in the "Why". If area/endevour is not seen as producing value or being rewarding, it'll naturally atrophy. If we have a compelling reason for Why that area is rewarding or producing value, it may need as little as an informational/awareness campaign to promote that value/reward. (note that I am NOT defining "producing value" in dollar terms necessarily, but more generically as "something that somebody or society values". Otherwise, it becomes "something you do for fun for yourself", which is an awesome hobby and everybody should have some, but may not necessarily need to be externally sponsored. I.e. I pay to play music and paint and photograph as a hobby, other people are paid to play music/paint/photograph/etc, and I'm not sure either model is the only right model). I notice the Historian PhD's only track is defined in that article as somebody who will teach history, not as somebody who will research/write/promote history. This makes it a a very small subset of what I would've considered a Historian / History PhD, and as such, again, I return to "Why" they may need external support if their interaction is strictly inward/cyclical.
- alexgmcm 5y agoTo be fair, most STEM PhDs have pretty grim prospects too. There was a famous post, "Don't Become a Scientist!"[1] about Physics in particular. It includes the memorable line: "I have known more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a Ph.D. in physics than by drugs." Which I suspect tells us more about Katz's social circle than anything else but nonetheless shows that it certainly isn't a rosy wonderland in STEM. [1] http://katz.fastmail.us/scientist.html http://katz.fastmail.us/scientist.html
- MrPowers 5y agoMost humanities PhDs don't offer compelling prospects for professors. Accounting is the one PhD that seems to have favorable supply / demand economics. I used to work at a Big 4 accounting firm and they would pay you a generous salary, on top of your stipend, to get an accounting PhD. They were actively looking to fill the shortage of accounting professors that train their workforce. Anyone know of any other PhD programs that have good supply / demand fundamentals. I used to work with a bunch of econ PhDs and the tenure professor track is really hard for them too (but they have much better private sector opportunities than humanities PhDs).
- twic 5y agoI'd never thought about people doing research in accounting. What do they do? What are the frontiers in the field?
- czzr 5y agohttps://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/1475679x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/1475679x
- genericresponse 5y agoAs with most fields a lot of it relates back to the first principles of the field. A lot of it is around what the best way to classify, measure, and show an economic transaction. One example that comes to mind is the development of Activity Based Costing in the late '80s as an improvement on traditional cost accounting.
- Vaslo 5y agoMaybe this works in Big 4 firms but this is my third Fortune 250 Company Finance role and 15 years and I couldn’t imagine any reason why you would need a PhD in accounting to work in it or teach it. I’d rather my employees learn from a controller who worked in accounting for 5 years rather than someone in an ivory tower who has never worked anywhere telling professionals how they should be doing accounting.
- Naga 5y ago
- renewiltord 5y agoI’m glad it’s coming from a history guy because I told people this a lot and they just assumed I was discounting the value, since I have a STEM degree.
- lotsofpulp 5y agoI am confused…are you implying that history is an STEM degree?
- renewiltord 5y agoOh I mistyped. Edited. Thank you.
- Mediterraneo10 5y agoThis post focuses on the job market after the PhD, but another reason to avoid a PhD is that it is just too much work. I have an MA but remain very involved in my field, I publish a paper or two each year and present at conferences. But after seeing my colleagues' workload unrelated to their actual research, I don't want to do a PhD: the students in PhD programmes are expected to help out in the exhausting process of grant application writing, editing the department's publications, teach courses, etc. This is true of all the universities with a department dedicated to my specific field. Even a fully externally funded position doesn't allow you to escape such obligations and focus solely on dissertation writing. My conclusion is that I would actually have less time for research in a PhD program than in my current life where I find time for it around a job outside academia.
- huitzitziltzin 5y agoIf you publish a paper or Two every year in your field... what more do you need to do to actually get the degree? If I had a student like that I would go ahead and graduate him or her. (It takes a very long time to publish anything in Econ so that kind of productivity would be hard to reach though.)
- baron_harkonnen 5y agoThat's not how academia works any more, because academia is not remotely about real research or discovering truths about the world. If it was we wouldn't have a massive reproducibility crisis and things like collusion rings in publishing. Today academia is primarily about achieving and maintaining funding and perpetuating the academic status quo (including insanely cheap labor) as long as possible. Wittgenstein famously got his PhD from Trinity College in Cambridge by basically showing up and handing in the finished Tractatus Logico-philosophicus. Wittgenstein was of course a rare case, but that work was groundbreaking and leading philosophers at the time agreed, he defended and was given a PhD. Moore, one of the people overseeing his defense, stated “I consider that this is a work of genius but, even if it is not, it is well above the standard required for a PhD degree.” Today getting that PhD is a combination of a bizarre hazing ritual and making sure you don't offend any of the other department faculty that will ultimately be deciding if you're worthy. I've seen a few cases from my time in academia where jealous or bitter faculty will do anything to ruin the carer of someone they view as threatening. If Wittgenstein where alive today he probably would have ended up a software engineer writing an engaging blog in his spare time that most academics viewed as hopelessly obscure and amateur.
- tgv 5y agoOne thing. In the disciplines whose PhD shenanigans I'm more familiar with (psychology and biology), women also used maternity leave to work. They actually count on it, which is a problem, because a baby is a lot more work than you think.
- psychlops 5y agoThat's where the father comes in, to take care of the child while the mother works.
- lotsofpulp 5y agoBreastfeeding every 2 hours for the first few months is a little bit of a structural issue that the father cannot mitigate. Such a poisonous system that people cannot feel comfortable enjoying the first few months, much less year or two bonding with their child.
- tgv 5y agoSomething tells me you're childless.
- cletus 5y agoThe poor job prospects for history PhDs in particular and humanities PhDs in general for literally years. I know I've read about history tenure prospects 10+ years ago. I know for history PhDs at least it can often take 8+ years to get your degree as well. So my question is: why do people subject themselves to this? I mean if this is something that's fulfilling to you or you're not that concerned with the poor chances of finding a tenure track position, that's one thing. But we're well beyond the point where people can reasonably be shocked by this. Is this hubris? As in, "sure the odds are bad but I'll be the exception to the rule". I honestly don't understand.
- cfmcdonald 5y agoSure, hubris is part of it. You are also getting paid (hopefully - if you aren't, then you're really screwed). It's not a lot, but enough to live on as a single person. Then, the academic humanities lifestyle is quite cushy for anyone who really loves reading, thinking, and writing. And as a Ph.D. student, you get to live it for 5 years or more. There's very little of the grant race (you just need a few thousand dollars a year to travel to conferences/archives), there's no grueling lab work. There's not much pressure to perform from your advisor, who is likely working on unrelated projects within the same sub-field. It's just reading, thinking, writing, and talking about other people's writing.
- whakim 5y ago> You are also getting paid (hopefully - if you aren't, then you're really screwed). It's not a lot, but enough to live on as a single person. Depends on where you're located. At Stanford, for example, I'm not sure I would consider the PhD stipend "enough to live on as a single person." (It varies by department but humanities are invariably lower.) So much so that "getting a significant other in tech" is a common joke.
- leetcrew 5y agoI have a few friends working on masters and phds in the humanities. it's very tough getting a job in academia, but it's not exactly easy to get a relevant job in the private sector either. I'm sure some of them believe they are the special ones that will actually get tenure-track positions, but I think there's also an element of simply not being ready for school to be "over". I really struggled with school and find employment to be much more straightforward. but these people really thrive in the academic environment.
- pvitz 5y agoStudying anything at a university is not an apprenticeship for any job, but basically learning and doing science. If one loves History as a scientific subject, just go for it. Often, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity that you could regret later of not having taken.
- chrisfosterelli 5y agoI think people who appreciate the pursuit of knowledge really want this to still be true, myself included, but in my experience almost nobody at any modern university considers this to be the case. Most students are there to improve their career prospects. If you go WITHOUT this as your primary goal, at best you spend a very large percentage of your time fighting against bureaucracy designed to reinforce the system as a job training system and end up bitter, and at worst your ability to learn is directly affected when, for e.g., you struggle to find an advisor since most advisors are looking for students who will help improve their own career prospects (i.e. wanting to get as many papers out as possible) > Often, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity that you could regret later of not having taken. FWIW I totally agree with this and I think you CAN enjoy it if only interested in the knowledge itself, but one should really, really know what they're getting in to.
- purple_ferret 5y agoHistory classes in college were amongst the most enlightening for me because they were some of the most different from high school, having to focus almost entirely on reading and analyzing primary sources. They taught me a lot about the historian mindset that you see on places like askhistorians and behind the critical eye when it comes to reviewing history books that might be too opinionated. That said, from a pragmatic perspective, this does explain why there wouldn't be a lot of jobs. How many people do you need to research the same stuff over and over, and how qualified do you have to be to teach somebody how to think in the historian mindset? The unfortunate reality is there should be fewer Phds being churned out in a lot of fields if those degrees can't translate into non-academic positions. If you want to be liberal arts Phd, you better be preparing to be the best of the bunch if you want to remain in academia.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y agoI personally think the humanities education would be better served by divorcing it from making a living (which it actually traditionally was for centuries, and only changed in the last 100 or so years). Making it about supporting yourself, kind of actually hurts humanities education and, I think, inevitably distorts it. Rather, it should be about becoming a well-rounded person independent of making money. I am a software engineer and have a comfortable salary. However, I would love to be able to do deeper study into History, Art, and Philosophy, not because it will enable me to make more money, but simply because it would make me a better person and expose me to a deeper understanding of the ups and downs of being human. Maybe humanities needs to change its target primarily from 18 year olds who are figuring out what to do with their lives, to 40 year olds, who already make money, but want to learn more about what it means to be human.
- Chris2048 5y ago> Maybe humanities needs to change its target primarily from 18 year olds who are figuring out what to do with their lives, to 40 year olds, who already make money, but want to learn more about what it means to be human. I think a lot of higher education would be best life-long learning. The amount of stuff you learn before any real-world XP, only to forget (or cling unhealthily to) feels v. wasteful. A professors time might be best spent on adults in the field. That said, for the humanities, there still needs to be a marketable skill-set that underpins the field.
- ArkanExplorer 5y agoThis is a problem with university education generally, non-technical PhDs are just the epitome of it. We are graduating far more people in various fields than are actually required. We need to scale back education at all levels to match actual demand, and hold students to higher standards. We need to accept once again that only about 20% of the population really need tertiary education. In the anglosphere we seem to struggle with the concept that people are of differing levels of intellectual capability (particularly when trends are seen along racial lines) - and we have figured erroneously that just throwing degrees at people will end inequality. When it has been the fact that only the most qualified and intelligent people were previously granted those degrees that has given them any value.
- karxxm 5y agoIt’s a snowball system. Doing a master. Don’t get a job. Become a phd, teach next generation of students who won’t get a job. They will again do their phd, and so on ;)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- typest 5y agoI did my undergrad at a top 10 university in the US. At the time (around 2015), most students fell into either "come from extremely rich families" or "very poor students on full financial aid". This bifurcation has only increased since I graduated. One thing I have absolutely hated, especially since entering the tech industry, is how many of my friends who came from poorer backgrounds were misled by academia into pursuing things like "education for its own sake" or "studying what you love", and subsequently missed out on opportunities to study something that could have changed the socio-economic trajectory of their lives. It can be hard, at these universities, to see who has invisible safety nets. You might decide to major in education because, well, it changed your life! You look around and, wow, so many other cool people are also majoring in education, it must be okay. What you don't realize, though, is that half of those kids plan to go into consulting or finance or whatnot via their parents connections. I do value learning for its own sake and I don't think the liberal arts should solely be the privilege of the rich! But for a lot of kids from poorer backgrounds who make it into good schools, pursuing a more vocational major is the best chance of making enough money to go on to change their circumstances in life. This is sadly a fact of reality, and those who deny it (such as the professors encouraging these kids to jump into history PhDs) are taking away people's chances at upwards mobility.
- underseacables 5y agoI’m going to say something that might seem provocative: I don’t think anyone should get a PhD in a social science, it doesn’t seem worth the money or time these days. Hard sciences, sure, those academics are very useful. I think we have far too many people racking up debt and wasting time going after a doctorate when they just don’t need it.