9 ms·

Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go

76 points by banned_man 18y ago

pchivers 18y ago
The author has written a follow-up article here: Just Don't Go, Part 2 http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2009/03/2009031301c.htm http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2009/03/2009031301c.htm
- banned_man 18y ago
  Thank you.
- hack_edu 18y ago
  Author's Suggested readings: How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation, by Marc Bousquet (New York University Press, 2008); Generation Debt: Why Now Is a Terrible Time to Be Young, by Anya Kamenetz (Riverhead Books, 2006); Academic Keywords: A Devil's Dictionary for Higher Education, by Cary Nelson and Stephen Watt (Routledge, 1999); Ghosts in the Classroom: Stories of College Adjunct Faculty — and the Price We All Pay, edited by Michael Dubson (Camel's Back, 2001); The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities, by Frank Donoghue (Fordham University Press, 2008).
tokenadult 18y ago
Missed by the HN duplicate detector: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=484013 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=484013
zcrar70 18y ago
Pretty depressing reading, but good on him for trying to spread the word. I'm sorry that the chances of getting a professorship in humanities is small, but I'm even sorrier that there doesn't seem to be many/any viable careers for a humanities student aside professorship.
- anamax 18y ago
  > I'm even sorrier that there doesn't seem to be many/any viable careers for a humanities student aside professorship. What do you think that they can do for "the rest of us" by virtue of said training that we should want to pay for?
  - etal 18y ago
    That's problem #1 in the current format of humanities graduate education. The assistantships train students to teach classes and grade papers, and the research and dissertation process teach students how to get an academic paper published. It's optimized for generating new professors (tenure-track or otherwise), and there's not much demand to tailor it in other directions since the dream career of most humanities grad students is being a tenured professor. This is less of a problem in subject areas where entering students already have a different career in mind, e.g. engineering. I won't speculate what those alternative careers could be, but in other improbable fields that attempt to reassert their relevance, applied career paths have a tendency to pop out and eventually be reincorporated into academia as a new, related discipline. For example, psychology has already forked and merged a few times.
    - gaius 18y ago
      the dream career of most humanities grad students is being a tenured professor Well that kinda sorta is the problem. The dream career of a science grad student is to make some great discovery and win a Nobel prize - academia is a means, not an end in itself. Academia for the sake of academia is fine in principle - but who's going to pay for it?
  - zcrar70 18y ago
    Our society as a whole benefits from diversity, in the same way that humanity benefits from a wide gene pool. If you bias heavily towards similarity, you end up with a highly specialised but weak society. Like etal, I won't speculate on what alternatives might be, but not having them is our collective loss.
GavinB 18y ago
Don't start a start-up or apply for seed funding. There are lots of great hackers out there, and only so many spots for top websites. The odds of putting together both a solid product, good marketing, and the right timing are incredibly slim. I talk to people all the time who are working on start-ups with no benefits, no salary, and only a small chance of hitting it big and becoming profitable. Even if you do get accepted to one of the top seed start-up firms, you're still not guaranteed to be successful. You have to realize that you're really just an exploitable resource for venture capitalists. On a more serious note, I'd say that anyone who's thinking of going to grad school should read this. Then, if they're still certain they want to go, they should go for it. Just because something's hard or might not work doesn't mean you shouldn't try.
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
- ShardPhoenix 18y ago
  The difference is that a startup has a much bigger potential upside.
  - GavinB 18y ago
    If you measure success exclusively in money, then that's true. Grad school isn't for me, but it's the right choice for the right people.
    - banned_man 18y ago
      Academia is the right job environment for a certain set of people, but they deserve decent living conditions. They shouldn't be exploited just because society views them (correctly or otherwise; mostly otherwise, I believe) as naive pansies. Few are arguing that academics ought to be millionaires (although they're certainly more deserving of that than most of the assholes running Wall Street, the Fortune 500, and Hollywood) but they should be paid well enough to support a lifestyle comfortable enough to enable a "life of the mind" (which most professors, for what it's worth, don't get to have). The phrase, "we don't pay you to work here, we pay you so you can work here" seems to have been lost on academia.
nihilocrat 18y ago
I can't vouch for any other generations, but it's hard to tell people my age (born 1985) that they /can't/ accomplish anything even if they try their hardest. Life is a lot more fatalistic and free will a lot weaker than we've been taught. It's very sobering and depressing to learn that scarcity is a very real thing. There are only so many spots for the jobs that people want, and most of the time people get there through personal relationships, luck, or other things most people just can't realistically be expected to have.
- jacoblyles 18y ago
  I call the mindset of my peer group the "Disney culture". It is characterized by magical thinking, such as "if you follow your heart, everything will turn out for the best!" To some extent, this is valuable. It encourages people to take risks and be creative. The wonderful explosion of technology and prosperity in the 1990s was an expression of magical thinking. But I think we place too little value on financial stability, independence, and other more boring traditional values. This could be because we've never really had to face hard times until now. I wonder if we will pick up these traits during the recession.
  - Ardit20 18y ago
    I doubt it, necessity is the mother of invention and that magical thinking you mentioned otherwise we might riot like the Greek teenagers :P
- danbmil99 18y ago
  This is not unique to your generation. Mine (I'm 49) had different but similar myths -- the rock star, the uber-athlete, the astronaut. This is part of our collective human culture, and to some extent it's sort of a larger extension of what the article is about. It's very difficult to be honest with young people about their odds of making a large-scale difference in a world of six billion people. Even just the opportunity to 'do what you love' is simply not in the cards for the majority. I'm not sure what we can do about that if anything, but it's a fact and it often takes 30+ years before it starts to sink in. Maybe that's evolution's way of keeping us from feeling hopeless before we've had children. Once you have kids, all that ambition can be transferred to them. That might explain why some parents seem to be completely insane when it comes to their kids.
jacoblyles 18y ago
On the other hand, I have a hard time thinking of a better grad degree than a CS master's program. Your job prospects are better than an MBA's or a JD's, you will spend a lot less time in school than an MD, and you will have a much broader employment market than your friends in other engineering and science disciplines. I was quite impressed by the number of firms at UCSD's job fair interested in recruiting CS students.
- sketerpot 18y ago
  A master's degree in computer engineering could give CS a run for its money. There's enough overlap with CS that a Computer E grad student can learn as much CS as they like, while still having job prospects in a bunch of nice hardware-related jobs. And really, computer hardware is just plain fun.
  - jacoblyles 18y ago
    My software can break your hardware.
    - sketerpot 18y ago
      My hardware will probably break your software. Beat that. This is actually one of the drawbacks of learning both hardware and software: when something breaks, you can never say that's not your department. You can get away from that by simply buying stuff from other people, but you can't always trust it; I was using some off-the-shelf hardware yesterday that literally exploded. Like in Star Trek.
      - jacoblyles 18y ago
        I guess that is what separates software people from hardware people. You say "my homework literally blew up yesterday". I think that's a little scary, a hardware guy thinks that's pretty cool.
- danbmil99 18y ago
  Are you sure an advanced CS degree will matter as much as they do today in 5 or 10 years time? Then again it's only a 2 year commitment so it's a pretty different level of investment than a PhD.
daveambrose 18y ago
Does anyone not see the irony in the author's premise when applied to an undergraduate's search for their first big job? Just replace "universities" with "companies" in the sentence below: "It's hard to tell young people that universities recognize that their idealism and energy — and lack of information — are an exploitable resource."

76 points by banned_man 18y ago

The author has written a follow-up article here: Just Don't Go, Part 2 http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2009/03/2009031301c.htm http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2009/03/2009031301c.htm

banned_man 18y ago
Thank you.
hack_edu 18y ago
Author's Suggested readings: How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation, by Marc Bousquet (New York University Press, 2008); Generation Debt: Why Now Is a Terrible Time to Be Young, by Anya Kamenetz (Riverhead Books, 2006); Academic Keywords: A Devil's Dictionary for Higher Education, by Cary Nelson and Stephen Watt (Routledge, 1999); Ghosts in the Classroom: Stories of College Adjunct Faculty — and the Price We All Pay, edited by Michael Dubson (Camel's Back, 2001); The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities, by Frank Donoghue (Fordham University Press, 2008).

tokenadult 18y ago

Missed by the HN duplicate detector: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=484013 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=484013

zcrar70 18y ago

Pretty depressing reading, but good on him for trying to spread the word. I'm sorry that the chances of getting a professorship in humanities is small, but I'm even sorrier that there doesn't seem to be many/any viable careers for a humanities student aside professorship.

anamax 18y ago
> I'm even sorrier that there doesn't seem to be many/any viable careers for a humanities student aside professorship. What do you think that they can do for "the rest of us" by virtue of said training that we should want to pay for?
- etal 18y ago
  That's problem #1 in the current format of humanities graduate education. The assistantships train students to teach classes and grade papers, and the research and dissertation process teach students how to get an academic paper published. It's optimized for generating new professors (tenure-track or otherwise), and there's not much demand to tailor it in other directions since the dream career of most humanities grad students is being a tenured professor. This is less of a problem in subject areas where entering students already have a different career in mind, e.g. engineering. I won't speculate what those alternative careers could be, but in other improbable fields that attempt to reassert their relevance, applied career paths have a tendency to pop out and eventually be reincorporated into academia as a new, related discipline. For example, psychology has already forked and merged a few times.
  - gaius 18y ago
    the dream career of most humanities grad students is being a tenured professor Well that kinda sorta is the problem. The dream career of a science grad student is to make some great discovery and win a Nobel prize - academia is a means, not an end in itself. Academia for the sake of academia is fine in principle - but who's going to pay for it?
- zcrar70 18y ago
  Our society as a whole benefits from diversity, in the same way that humanity benefits from a wide gene pool. If you bias heavily towards similarity, you end up with a highly specialised but weak society. Like etal, I won't speculate on what alternatives might be, but not having them is our collective loss.

GavinB 18y ago

Don't start a start-up or apply for seed funding. There are lots of great hackers out there, and only so many spots for top websites. The odds of putting together both a solid product, good marketing, and the right timing are incredibly slim. I talk to people all the time who are working on start-ups with no benefits, no salary, and only a small chance of hitting it big and becoming profitable. Even if you do get accepted to one of the top seed start-up firms, you're still not guaranteed to be successful. You have to realize that you're really just an exploitable resource for venture capitalists. On a more serious note, I'd say that anyone who's thinking of going to grad school should read this. Then, if they're still certain they want to go, they should go for it. Just because something's hard or might not work doesn't mean you shouldn't try.

deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
ShardPhoenix 18y ago
The difference is that a startup has a much bigger potential upside.
- GavinB 18y ago
  If you measure success exclusively in money, then that's true. Grad school isn't for me, but it's the right choice for the right people.
  - banned_man 18y ago
    Academia is the right job environment for a certain set of people, but they deserve decent living conditions. They shouldn't be exploited just because society views them (correctly or otherwise; mostly otherwise, I believe) as naive pansies. Few are arguing that academics ought to be millionaires (although they're certainly more deserving of that than most of the assholes running Wall Street, the Fortune 500, and Hollywood) but they should be paid well enough to support a lifestyle comfortable enough to enable a "life of the mind" (which most professors, for what it's worth, don't get to have). The phrase, "we don't pay you to work here, we pay you so you can work here" seems to have been lost on academia.

nihilocrat 18y ago

I can't vouch for any other generations, but it's hard to tell people my age (born 1985) that they /can't/ accomplish anything even if they try their hardest. Life is a lot more fatalistic and free will a lot weaker than we've been taught. It's very sobering and depressing to learn that scarcity is a very real thing. There are only so many spots for the jobs that people want, and most of the time people get there through personal relationships, luck, or other things most people just can't realistically be expected to have.

jacoblyles 18y ago
I call the mindset of my peer group the "Disney culture". It is characterized by magical thinking, such as "if you follow your heart, everything will turn out for the best!" To some extent, this is valuable. It encourages people to take risks and be creative. The wonderful explosion of technology and prosperity in the 1990s was an expression of magical thinking. But I think we place too little value on financial stability, independence, and other more boring traditional values. This could be because we've never really had to face hard times until now. I wonder if we will pick up these traits during the recession.
- Ardit20 18y ago
  I doubt it, necessity is the mother of invention and that magical thinking you mentioned otherwise we might riot like the Greek teenagers :P
danbmil99 18y ago
This is not unique to your generation. Mine (I'm 49) had different but similar myths -- the rock star, the uber-athlete, the astronaut. This is part of our collective human culture, and to some extent it's sort of a larger extension of what the article is about. It's very difficult to be honest with young people about their odds of making a large-scale difference in a world of six billion people. Even just the opportunity to 'do what you love' is simply not in the cards for the majority. I'm not sure what we can do about that if anything, but it's a fact and it often takes 30+ years before it starts to sink in. Maybe that's evolution's way of keeping us from feeling hopeless before we've had children. Once you have kids, all that ambition can be transferred to them. That might explain why some parents seem to be completely insane when it comes to their kids.

jacoblyles 18y ago

On the other hand, I have a hard time thinking of a better grad degree than a CS master's program. Your job prospects are better than an MBA's or a JD's, you will spend a lot less time in school than an MD, and you will have a much broader employment market than your friends in other engineering and science disciplines. I was quite impressed by the number of firms at UCSD's job fair interested in recruiting CS students.

sketerpot 18y ago
A master's degree in computer engineering could give CS a run for its money. There's enough overlap with CS that a Computer E grad student can learn as much CS as they like, while still having job prospects in a bunch of nice hardware-related jobs. And really, computer hardware is just plain fun.
- jacoblyles 18y ago
  My software can break your hardware.
  - sketerpot 18y ago
    My hardware will probably break your software. Beat that. This is actually one of the drawbacks of learning both hardware and software: when something breaks, you can never say that's not your department. You can get away from that by simply buying stuff from other people, but you can't always trust it; I was using some off-the-shelf hardware yesterday that literally exploded. Like in Star Trek.
    - jacoblyles 18y ago
      I guess that is what separates software people from hardware people. You say "my homework literally blew up yesterday". I think that's a little scary, a hardware guy thinks that's pretty cool.
danbmil99 18y ago
Are you sure an advanced CS degree will matter as much as they do today in 5 or 10 years time? Then again it's only a 2 year commitment so it's a pretty different level of investment than a PhD.

daveambrose 18y ago

Does anyone not see the irony in the author's premise when applied to an undergraduate's search for their first big job? Just replace "universities" with "companies" in the sentence below: "It's hard to tell young people that universities recognize that their idealism and energy — and lack of information — are an exploitable resource."