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I have no specific information on the humanities side aside from anecdotes and personal experience, so I'd be interested if you could elaborate. Is it perhaps p

by _dps 15y ago

I have no specific information on the humanities side aside from anecdotes and personal experience, so I'd be interested if you could elaborate. Is it perhaps possible that most of the students that are accepted are fully funded, but that there are far fewer positions and so de facto there are far fewer opportunities for humanities students? Also, my specific example of a friend in Eastern European Political Economic Thought was at an Ivy League school, where he has a tuition waiver but no stipend (so one could call that "fully funded, but unpaid"). Just to elaborate on my limited view of the funding landscape, in STEM disciplines I can name 5-10 major public funding organizations easily (NSF, DARPA, DOE, ONR, AFOSR, NASA, ARL, DHS off the top of my head). My uninformed guess is that there are not nearly as many organizations for humanities, and that they are not nearly as well funded, but that's just based on my hypothesized motivations for the funding (military industrial complex, communists/terrorists/whateverists etc.). If you have any light to shed on the subject, I'd be interested :-)

FreakLegion 15y ago
Sorry for not seeing this before! To the first part of your question: You're absolutely correct, good humanities PhD programs typically admit only 10-15 students per year, all of them fully funded. My question about your friend would be what program was he in (schools in themselves aren't indicative of much)? It sounds like it might be a niche program. I'd be stunned if an Ivy had unfunded PhDs in English, History, Philosophy, etc. The thing about humanities programs is that they're funded de facto because graduate students do most of the teaching. If you look at the class schedule for a given term, for example, you're likely to see more basic writing classes than all other English classes combined (or math classes, or...). This is because writing is the only class in the US system that virtually every college student will have to take. The result is ample funding for humanities PhDs and, in many cases, MAs. Don't get me wrong, though. Humanities PhDs face a whole host of other problems later on, like poor job prospects, mediocre pay, and politicking like you thought only existed in the Dune novels!

by _dps 15y ago

FreakLegion 15y ago

Sorry for not seeing this before! To the first part of your question: You're absolutely correct, good humanities PhD programs typically admit only 10-15 students per year, all of them fully funded. My question about your friend would be what program was he in (schools in themselves aren't indicative of much)? It sounds like it might be a niche program. I'd be stunned if an Ivy had unfunded PhDs in English, History, Philosophy, etc. The thing about humanities programs is that they're funded de facto because graduate students do most of the teaching. If you look at the class schedule for a given term, for example, you're likely to see more basic writing classes than all other English classes combined (or math classes, or...). This is because writing is the only class in the US system that virtually every college student will have to take. The result is ample funding for humanities PhDs and, in many cases, MAs. Don't get me wrong, though. Humanities PhDs face a whole host of other problems later on, like poor job prospects, mediocre pay, and politicking like you thought only existed in the Dune novels!