(Almost) nobody who does a humanities PhD is doing so for a job. It's wrong, I think, to consider that simply idealism: there still do exist people who consider

(Almost) nobody who does a humanities PhD is doing so for a job. It's wrong, I think, to consider that simply idealism: there still do exist people who consider writing to be a vocation and that their life would be intolerable if it isn't what they pursued on a daily basis. Rationally -- and conscious of the "opportunity costs" -- such a one should seek the best apprenticeship possible, which is really what a humanities dissertation comes down to. I know many more people who pursued STEM PhDs more or less for a job -- and so, in my anecdotal experience, I would say the outcomes for friends who received their doctorates in the humanities are, measured by life satisfaction, greater than those who only at the end of it all realized STEM post-docs are miserable and that their academic programming skills aren't quite up to Silicon Valley standards. It's easy to forget at Hacker News that most life decisions these past few generations that didn't amount to getting an engineering job at a high-growth startup were much closer in outcome to a humanities PhD than retirement at 35. There was a brief period with the dramatic expansion of the university system following World War II during which the need for bodies to teach introductory classes to auditoriums of uninterested students briefly matched the organic production rate of scholars. This period is certainly over. However, I'm not sure that's a bad thing for the humanities. In fact, it's only a matter of centuries in which formalized PhD programs were considered a prerequisite to becoming a researcher at all -- and not even in all Western countries during that time. In Italy, for example, the highest degree was a "laurea" until the 1980s, which was the product of only a five-six year bachelor's program. Humanistic research was largely published by presses outside of the university and so those who for whatever reason wanted to be scholars found a way to support their life, often editorial positions or teaching in high school, and simply got to work, struggling to make their research of interest enough to be published. This system did not at all negatively impact research outcomes and, measured by the numerous Italian works from this period that are still being translated, perhaps even improved them. TLDR I'm not happy with the context in which the most recent changes are being made to the university, but I think it will be a net good if scholarship in the humanities becomes less sequestered from society -- and especially if many of those who might have sought to teach at the university level instead decide to teach in high schools.