4 ms·

The 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+ ye

by cletus 5y ago

The 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 ago
Sure, 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 ago
I 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.
bachmeier 5y ago
> The 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. In 1996, I was talking to a history professor about going to grad school. I was probably going to go to grad school in economics, but I wanted to make sure I checked out all my options, so I was also looking at some humanities fields. His answer was simply to not give any consideration to grad school in the humanities. It was very difficult to get a job, and if you did you probably wouldn't want to live there, and if you got lucky on the first two, you'd be broke your whole life. I've seen humanities PhD's claim the job market died with the Great Recession. No, the job market for humanities has been terrible for decades. Maybe it's gone from terrible to something even worse, but it's been a bad idea to go to grad school in the humanities for decades.
- soco 5y ago
  I have no idea about the field so I am curious, was the job market for humanities ever better? I mean in numbers, maybe comparing with the number of graduates...
  - cfmcdonald 5y ago
    Yes, in the 1960s. Universities were expanding rapidly to respond to the influx of baby boomers, and humanities majors were much more popular, so it was relatively easy to get hired.[0] It's pretty much been varying degrees of bad since then, but as the first chart in [1] shows, it got a lot worse after 2008. [0]: https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/april-1997/precedents-the-job-crisis-of-the-1970s https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/pers... [1]: https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/february-2016/the-troubled-academic-job-market-for-history https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/pers...
  - bachmeier 5y ago
    Within the field of history, the graph at the beginning of this post from the AHA shows that the 1970s was an absolutely terrible decade: https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/january-2010/a-grim-year-on-the-academic-job-market-for-historians https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/pers... What happened was a big drop in the number of new PhDs. That is why the 1980s and early 1990s might have had okay job markets. By about 1991/1992 the job market was once again saturated.
michaelt 5y ago
Well, for a start if you’re just finishing your history undergrad you’ve probably already heard “no jobs lol” many times and it hasn’t dissuaded you. Second, as you’re in college 100% of the PhDs you know have won the jobs lottery. You don’t know any that haven’t. Easy to get a biased impression. And if you really respect professors and you’ve grown up as a high achiever academically, it sounds like a giant complement when a professor says you’re phd material.
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  Why wouldn't "no jobs lol" dissuade you though? Unless you already have money or a connection to it you're probably going to need a job so getting an education that doesn't help with that seems like a huge problem. When I was in school I took a triple major so I could study two unemployable things I liked and computer science so I could get a job. I had the benefit of wealthy parents paying my way so it didn't matter that I took extra time to complete my triple major. Still, in my unemployable studies I'd often meet people saying things like "I'm studying English, so going to be unemployed, ha ha" like it was a joke. I always wanted to grab them by the shoulders and shake them and scream "This is real life. You really will be unemployed!"
  - maximus-decimus 5y ago
    I think what he's saying is there's a survivorship bias i.e. 100% of history bachelors don't care about job prospects because the people who did already quit the field or never entered it. As to why it wouldn't dissuade them... some people are more passionate than other I suppose.
    - ALittleLight 5y ago
      I don't believe it's passion. You could easily study history at the undergraduate level for zero cost. Nevermind reading on your own - if you just showed up on the first day of class and acted like you are a student nobody would check. You could probably just tell the professors you just wanted to listen. I can't imagine they'd say no. I think very few people do that. I think it's not passion but just a general social pressure towards getting a college degree. On top of that, history, or the humanities, is a pretty easy degree to get. Students who like history more than their options will go there, not from passion, but a desire to get a degree at least cost.
fennecfoxen 5y ago
One factor? Not the only factor, but one factor that helps actually really make the experience happen? People are familiar with school in general, and with the university experience and lifestyle specifically. The "Real World™" is where you start paying off loans, pay rent, report to a desk job, and the like. If you're taking a step into this strange new world, where you abandon your status and the lifestyle you know, there's a real psychological barrier there, and it's only stronger for many of the people who excel in academics and know it. Far easier to stay in the realm of the familiar. As a CS student, I took multiple internships, had some idea of what "real work" would be like, made a reasonable amount of money during the summers, and had a job offer in hand before I graduated. A few students of the humanities might be this lucky; most won't be.
calebm 5y ago
I wonder how many people pursuing advanced degrees do so in an attempt to prove they are smart ("I want to be called Doctor Whatever"). I considered pursuing an advanced degree, and realized it was only for my own vanity, so skipped it.
- jjgreen 5y ago
  No idea as to the number you're looking for, but (at least in the UK) most of those with doctorates wouldn't dream of using the title outside their department for fear of being though a medic (and so called in whenever someone collapses).
  - mensetmanusman 5y ago
    Same in the US (as a doctor of materials engineering). I wonder why new vocab hasn’t been invented yet, but it’s probably for the better; few care if you have a doctorate, which is fine by me.
baron_harkonnen 5y ago
> why do people subject themselves to this? Just like military recruiters are able seduce 16 years without much of a future to join an exciting career in the military academics are able to sell academically inclined ungrads on some fantasy that being a PhD in history in 2021 is anything like it would have been in 1921. By the time your realize you've been scammed you're at least 4+ years into a PhD, and so committed to the sunk cost fallacy, combined with very strong academic conditioning that nothing will ruin your life more than leaving academia, that you can't fathom the idea of stopping at this point. Once you have the PhD and done your time in post-doc purgatory, and start on your tenure track hazing, you start babbling about how it's impossible for anyone to do real research without a PhD, even though the general state of "independent research" in academia is increasingly a bad joke. People often fail to mention that the fantasy of a PhD as someone who spends their time working on hard problems and collaborating with other brilliant-like minded thinkers, is derived from an era when a precondition to getting a PhD was largely based on having a well-off family and a good upbringing. It was a time when PhDs where respected, not because it was a better world, but because only an elite group could reasonably be expected to follow that path. If you talk to any undergrads starting a PhD today the level of naivete is almost endearing. They unquestionably believe that they are pursuing knowledge for its own sake and starting a path to enlightenment. Academia benefits tremendously from this illusion and has absolutely zero interest in breaking it. It doesn't hurt that they mark anyone who has left academia as a failure. I've seen so many people in the PhD life cycle absolutely devastated when they decide to not take the abuse anymore.
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  For young people without options the military isn't a horrible choice. Especially as we wind down the mid-East war. For young people with options a History PhD is a horrible choice and if you have the brainpower to be in the cognitive elite you should be able to figure that out pretty easily.
munificent 5y ago
> So my question is: why do people subject themselves to this? People, as a rule, do not make all of their choices from first principles. When you wake up in the morning hungry, you don't wander out to the back yard and begin conducting methodical experiments to determine which plants growing there are safely edible. We rely on culture to give us default answers to most of life's questions. If not answers, culture will at least winnow down our choices to a few and nudge towards the safest options. We lean on this so heavily that we can't even perceive ourselves doing it. It's as if the options not handed to us by our culture don't even exist. We pick up culture from our parents and peer group. It changes all the time, but relatively slowly. If you're roughly the age of a Gen-xer, then you're the offspring of Boomers. That generation grew up in a world of post-WWII economic prosperity surrounded by colleges flush with cash from the GI Bill. Boomers were raised in an era of optimism to believe in following their dreams. They experienced a reality where they could easily afford to go to college for whatever struck their fancy. When they got out, well-paid jobs were ripe for the picking regardless of education. They passed all of that onto their children as a cultural assumption that college is always good, you should follow your passions, and that it will work out economically. Then corporations destroyed the labor movement, economic inequality skyrocketed, and government funding of education withered and died. Unfortunately, our prevailing culture was slow to get that memo. TL;DR: We tacitly assume it's safe to do what worked for our parents even when we don't live in the same world they did.
- cletus 5y ago
  > Boomers were raised in an era of optimism to believe in following their dreams. It depends on what you mean by "boomers". If you mean "baby boomers" then no, that's not true at all. Baby boomers entered the workforce in the 60s and 70s with an expectation they'd probably work for the same company for their entire working lives. Sure there was the countercultural hippie movement but most of the hippies reverted to the mean. If you mean GenXers then again I don't think that's true either. I think the first generation to really buy into this "follow your dreams" mentality and end up with $175k in student loan debt for a theater arts degree but ending up as a barista is the nillenials.
  - 5y ago

by cletus 5y ago

cfmcdonald 5y ago

Sure, 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 ago

I 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.

bachmeier 5y ago

> The 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. In 1996, I was talking to a history professor about going to grad school. I was probably going to go to grad school in economics, but I wanted to make sure I checked out all my options, so I was also looking at some humanities fields. His answer was simply to not give any consideration to grad school in the humanities. It was very difficult to get a job, and if you did you probably wouldn't want to live there, and if you got lucky on the first two, you'd be broke your whole life. I've seen humanities PhD's claim the job market died with the Great Recession. No, the job market for humanities has been terrible for decades. Maybe it's gone from terrible to something even worse, but it's been a bad idea to go to grad school in the humanities for decades.

soco 5y ago
I have no idea about the field so I am curious, was the job market for humanities ever better? I mean in numbers, maybe comparing with the number of graduates...
- cfmcdonald 5y ago
  Yes, in the 1960s. Universities were expanding rapidly to respond to the influx of baby boomers, and humanities majors were much more popular, so it was relatively easy to get hired.[0] It's pretty much been varying degrees of bad since then, but as the first chart in [1] shows, it got a lot worse after 2008. [0]: https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/april-1997/precedents-the-job-crisis-of-the-1970s https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/pers... [1]: https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/february-2016/the-troubled-academic-job-market-for-history https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/pers...
- bachmeier 5y ago
  Within the field of history, the graph at the beginning of this post from the AHA shows that the 1970s was an absolutely terrible decade: https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/january-2010/a-grim-year-on-the-academic-job-market-for-historians https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/pers... What happened was a big drop in the number of new PhDs. That is why the 1980s and early 1990s might have had okay job markets. By about 1991/1992 the job market was once again saturated.

michaelt 5y ago

Well, for a start if you’re just finishing your history undergrad you’ve probably already heard “no jobs lol” many times and it hasn’t dissuaded you. Second, as you’re in college 100% of the PhDs you know have won the jobs lottery. You don’t know any that haven’t. Easy to get a biased impression. And if you really respect professors and you’ve grown up as a high achiever academically, it sounds like a giant complement when a professor says you’re phd material.

ALittleLight 5y ago
Why wouldn't "no jobs lol" dissuade you though? Unless you already have money or a connection to it you're probably going to need a job so getting an education that doesn't help with that seems like a huge problem. When I was in school I took a triple major so I could study two unemployable things I liked and computer science so I could get a job. I had the benefit of wealthy parents paying my way so it didn't matter that I took extra time to complete my triple major. Still, in my unemployable studies I'd often meet people saying things like "I'm studying English, so going to be unemployed, ha ha" like it was a joke. I always wanted to grab them by the shoulders and shake them and scream "This is real life. You really will be unemployed!"
- maximus-decimus 5y ago
  I think what he's saying is there's a survivorship bias i.e. 100% of history bachelors don't care about job prospects because the people who did already quit the field or never entered it. As to why it wouldn't dissuade them... some people are more passionate than other I suppose.
  - ALittleLight 5y ago
    I don't believe it's passion. You could easily study history at the undergraduate level for zero cost. Nevermind reading on your own - if you just showed up on the first day of class and acted like you are a student nobody would check. You could probably just tell the professors you just wanted to listen. I can't imagine they'd say no. I think very few people do that. I think it's not passion but just a general social pressure towards getting a college degree. On top of that, history, or the humanities, is a pretty easy degree to get. Students who like history more than their options will go there, not from passion, but a desire to get a degree at least cost.

fennecfoxen 5y ago

One factor? Not the only factor, but one factor that helps actually really make the experience happen? People are familiar with school in general, and with the university experience and lifestyle specifically. The "Real World™" is where you start paying off loans, pay rent, report to a desk job, and the like. If you're taking a step into this strange new world, where you abandon your status and the lifestyle you know, there's a real psychological barrier there, and it's only stronger for many of the people who excel in academics and know it. Far easier to stay in the realm of the familiar. As a CS student, I took multiple internships, had some idea of what "real work" would be like, made a reasonable amount of money during the summers, and had a job offer in hand before I graduated. A few students of the humanities might be this lucky; most won't be.

calebm 5y ago

I wonder how many people pursuing advanced degrees do so in an attempt to prove they are smart ("I want to be called Doctor Whatever"). I considered pursuing an advanced degree, and realized it was only for my own vanity, so skipped it.

jjgreen 5y ago
No idea as to the number you're looking for, but (at least in the UK) most of those with doctorates wouldn't dream of using the title outside their department for fear of being though a medic (and so called in whenever someone collapses).
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  Same in the US (as a doctor of materials engineering). I wonder why new vocab hasn’t been invented yet, but it’s probably for the better; few care if you have a doctorate, which is fine by me.

baron_harkonnen 5y ago

> why do people subject themselves to this? Just like military recruiters are able seduce 16 years without much of a future to join an exciting career in the military academics are able to sell academically inclined ungrads on some fantasy that being a PhD in history in 2021 is anything like it would have been in 1921. By the time your realize you've been scammed you're at least 4+ years into a PhD, and so committed to the sunk cost fallacy, combined with very strong academic conditioning that nothing will ruin your life more than leaving academia, that you can't fathom the idea of stopping at this point. Once you have the PhD and done your time in post-doc purgatory, and start on your tenure track hazing, you start babbling about how it's impossible for anyone to do real research without a PhD, even though the general state of "independent research" in academia is increasingly a bad joke. People often fail to mention that the fantasy of a PhD as someone who spends their time working on hard problems and collaborating with other brilliant-like minded thinkers, is derived from an era when a precondition to getting a PhD was largely based on having a well-off family and a good upbringing. It was a time when PhDs where respected, not because it was a better world, but because only an elite group could reasonably be expected to follow that path. If you talk to any undergrads starting a PhD today the level of naivete is almost endearing. They unquestionably believe that they are pursuing knowledge for its own sake and starting a path to enlightenment. Academia benefits tremendously from this illusion and has absolutely zero interest in breaking it. It doesn't hurt that they mark anyone who has left academia as a failure. I've seen so many people in the PhD life cycle absolutely devastated when they decide to not take the abuse anymore.

ALittleLight 5y ago
For young people without options the military isn't a horrible choice. Especially as we wind down the mid-East war. For young people with options a History PhD is a horrible choice and if you have the brainpower to be in the cognitive elite you should be able to figure that out pretty easily.

munificent 5y ago

> So my question is: why do people subject themselves to this? People, as a rule, do not make all of their choices from first principles. When you wake up in the morning hungry, you don't wander out to the back yard and begin conducting methodical experiments to determine which plants growing there are safely edible. We rely on culture to give us default answers to most of life's questions. If not answers, culture will at least winnow down our choices to a few and nudge towards the safest options. We lean on this so heavily that we can't even perceive ourselves doing it. It's as if the options not handed to us by our culture don't even exist. We pick up culture from our parents and peer group. It changes all the time, but relatively slowly. If you're roughly the age of a Gen-xer, then you're the offspring of Boomers. That generation grew up in a world of post-WWII economic prosperity surrounded by colleges flush with cash from the GI Bill. Boomers were raised in an era of optimism to believe in following their dreams. They experienced a reality where they could easily afford to go to college for whatever struck their fancy. When they got out, well-paid jobs were ripe for the picking regardless of education. They passed all of that onto their children as a cultural assumption that college is always good, you should follow your passions, and that it will work out economically. Then corporations destroyed the labor movement, economic inequality skyrocketed, and government funding of education withered and died. Unfortunately, our prevailing culture was slow to get that memo. TL;DR: We tacitly assume it's safe to do what worked for our parents even when we don't live in the same world they did.

cletus 5y ago
> Boomers were raised in an era of optimism to believe in following their dreams. It depends on what you mean by "boomers". If you mean "baby boomers" then no, that's not true at all. Baby boomers entered the workforce in the 60s and 70s with an expectation they'd probably work for the same company for their entire working lives. Sure there was the countercultural hippie movement but most of the hippies reverted to the mean. If you mean GenXers then again I don't think that's true either. I think the first generation to really buy into this "follow your dreams" mentality and end up with $175k in student loan debt for a theater arts degree but ending up as a barista is the nillenials.
- 5y ago