Arts education really needs to decouple from vocational education, however this happens (tracked system like Germany? Just split Arts and STEM apart? Plenty of STEM is closer to Arts than vocational training).
If a literature PhD isn't going to land you a six-figure job then maybe it should re-calibrate its tuition and time expectations to be something that a professionally active adult can pursue simultaneous to their career.
Serious question... Why don't these active adults just read some books and watch free online lectures instead? I fail to see the value a university is providing here.
Actual interactions with faculty and other students are what the university provides. Watching lectures and reading books isn't the same thing as "getting your hands dirty" with other people in the same room who are interested (or are experts) in the same topic.
I can go to meetups and get a university experience for an evening in terms of the quality of talks, the people I can meet, the help I can get. IRC has loads of great channels to share information. Even Reddit.
Flipside is at uni, I found most students more interested in beer and parties and not much support outside of tutor groups. I.e. not much different from watching a bunch of videos and reading books, with a bit of a meetup now and then.
I am learning CS stuff online for free and because I can focus on the areas I am interested in, pace myself and not study for an exam it is much more fun.
Funny enough it would seem weird to people to take 2 years off work to watch youtube videos about CS but OK to do a masters degree. I guess the piece of paper is defintiely worth something.
The purpose of a Ph.D. is to create and advance human knowledge, not just to learn some stuff and get a certificate.
You generally can't get a Ph.D. without conducting and then communicating original research. Watching videos and reading books might help with that but are not sufficient by themselves.
In literature you of course do have to read in order to do your research. But the hard part is not the reading, it is the originality. That's what you need an advisor, committee, professors, and colleagues for: to challenge you to prove you're not just reiterating what someone else already said.
Human experience and history is circular. In the old days, only the upper classes could send their second, third, n-th sons to uni to read books. Once the middle classes figured out they could hang with the upper classes just by paying (cheap) tuition, it sent all aspirational and up and coming middles to uni, to hang out with the uppers, who were promptly overrun outside the ivies. We're now slowly and painfully rotating back to the stage of only independently wealthy uppers will read books at uni as a career.
Then maybe 2, 3, 4 generations in the future some bright spark in the middle classes will notice a lit degree lets a middle class kid social climb and hang out with the upper classes, the uni admins will notice they can literally charge the middle class kids anything they feel like charging just like medical, rotating the system back to where we are now.
To slightly re-frame what you said: The upper classes could have their children educated in a way that wouldn't result in a well-paying job, because they were upper class and the children didn't need a well-paying job in order to have a reasonable life. The middle class jumped in when association with the upper class was the ticket to a better life. But now, technical training is the ticket, and those who are reading literature are condemned to mostly low-paying jobs, so literature becomes the province of those who don't have to work for money.
Arguments about the humanities versus the hard sciences aside, we'll need fewer and fewer PhDs as the teaching tools become better and distance and "free" courses become more commonplace and accepted.
It wasn't difficult to see coming. Supply and demand; when one great professor can teach thousands over the internet, who wants to learn from a half-ass instructor (of which there are many)?
The evidence I've seen suggests the opposite: the self-motivated natural autodidacts that do well in MOOCs would do well in nearly any educational setting, whereas the many people who need more scaffolding, support, and personal instruction do much, much worse.
Teachers do add an extraordinary amount of value: if what you're doing can be summed up as a reading list and lecture series, rather than a conversational interaction and personal attention, then it isn't actually adding a whole lot of value to the instructional setting.
The problem is that while university teachers add can add huge amount of value, their profession makes actual teaching a chore to be foisted off on graduate students and adjuncts rather than a goal, in favor of really dubious publication.
I don't disagree with your conclusion, but I think your evidence is wrong. A PhD is first and foremost a research degree and for many research is their primary responsibility. More educational resources won't reduce research in any way.
Much of this holds true in other fields as well, even technical fields if you intend to go into academia rather than industry. I realized about halfway through grad school in math that I was preparing to enter a field where I'd literally have to wait for someone to die before I got a job. Even if a suitable opening existed, since there are so many more candidates than jobs, it wasn't likely I'd end up with one. And, even if I did, I wouldn't get to choose where I lived, because I'd have to go where the job was. I'm glad I got off that track.
I'm not the person you asked, but from my observation there is demand in the financial industry for math/physics/engineering PhDs serving as some combination of quant, business analyst, and QA. They typically start as summer interns while working on their doctorate and are hired when they graduate. The internship is effectively an extended interview process.
I went into software engineering. It was rough. I didn't have a CS degree and I went to no-name schools and had no contacts in SV, so I spent a lot of time cold applying until someone took a chance on me. I'm now 3 years into my software career and things are just starting to get easier.
Math PhD here. I was pretty scared by what I saw in a potential career in academia. I went into industry and then gov't doing mostly scientific computer in support of aerospace engineering research instead. It's been better paying and far more stable then the postdoc-to-postdoc game that I would still be playing if I had wanted to start the marathon towards becoming a tenured professor.
For my area (numerical linear algebra), the jump into doing what is essentially software engineering was a very straightforward one. In fact, most of the research that I had been doing was applicable in some way or another. For those in pure mathematics (Analysis, Algebra, Topology, etc.), I could see there being more of a hurdle.
When I started, in 2008, the market wasn't fantastic but wasn't as catastrophically bad as it's become. Fortunately, I now work as a grant writing consultant and do some teaching that's more for a change of pace than for serious, keep-your-head-above-water income.
Academia is brutal, and grad school literally gets medieval on your __. In some fields though, (Biosciences in particular) if you want to be anywhere near R&D it's hard to be taken seriously and have a real career without one.
Source: I got a PhD, it wasn't especially pleasant, I don't regret it, but I'd definitely do it very differently if I got to go back in time.
This is the logical product of turning what should be the product of blissful idleness (pontificating about Kafka) into a fucking job, where you must work X hours a week Y weeks a month and churn out enough "value" that your university can charge people money to pay your salary. I.e., the world is a Kafka-esque nightmare where something perfectly straightforward and natural (reading good books, having deep, worthy thoughts about them) has been connected to a soul-sucking apparatus that reduces everything to monetary value.
This is about humanities PhDs, written by a lit PhD. The English PhDs have long been the most vocal of this line of criticism, where the problem has been most extreme.
English and humanities BAs are eminently hireable, as the author points out, but the academy has decided to so relentlessly overproduce professors as to make it untenable as a profession. 75%+ of humanities courses are taught by adjuncts and graduate students—and the graduate students are just adjuncts-in-training. The MLA recently had a big symposium about this, which concluded that there was basically nothing wrong, they should continue to train professors (and benefit from their underpaid teaching), and make more of a show to go on about jobs outside traditional academia (in museums? libraries? It's unclear). While the norms of the academy is that anyone who isn't a professor is a failure.
Yeah, my sister just recently got tenure at a regional state school, and was able to parlay it into a tenured position at a large state school in the midwest where her husband also works. It's brutal out there. It was brutal even for them.
They didn't go to top-10 Ph.D programs. They went to top-2 Ph.D programs.
If you're not getting a Ph.D from one of the 3 absolute best-regarded programs, the odds are just insane.
I received my doctorate in English Language and Literature in 2002 and landed a tenure-track job.
The university was an R2 (according to the Carnegie-Mellon Research classification) [0]; I graduated from an R1. Most my colleagues graduated from R1s.
I was very unhappy in my Midwestern University town and left my academic post (having declined to pursue tenure) to return to my native state.
Faculty at such highly-ranked research institutions use graduate students because such high-achieving graduate students
1. Are a pleasure to teach, able to understand the highly complex and intricate theories about literature and culture we faculty research.
2. Are able (and thrilled to teach the low-level classes (e.g. Composition) which we would rather not teach.
The lie many faculty tell themselves is that such students are apprentices to the profession. That lie has been called out for the last 20 years and is, slowly, being accepted by younger faculty at such institutions. The problem is that tenure, as the article mentions, is dying with the faculty when they retire and these tenure lines are being replaced with graduate students and adjunct faculty.
Tenure will not completely go away. It will simply be restricted to the R1s and R2s. Every other institution can expect their ranks of faculty to be poorly compensated and to have no job security.
Universities are taking measures to trim faculty pay and job security, and meanwhile tuition is increasing at a rate much faster than inflation and has been for a long time. It's disgusting.
I left as an ABD in French lit and now work as a software engineer. I recently found out that my former department put me on a list of "recent placements" as an example of an alternative career open to French lit scholars because OF COURSE it's reasonable to expect humanities PhDs to be able to pass a whiteboard interview when they can't land a professorship.
I have an advanced degree in the Humanities and it has served me extraordinarily well career-wise. The thesis-centered thinking, concise communication, and artistic drive in my work has always set me apart, and I owe that to my training. Even more specifically, learning from high-integrity journalists taught me that a complete and honest rendition of the facts is very rare and valuable in the business world.
Both myself and my partner from the same program have coveted positions in no small part because of this training.
That being said I went to a #1 program at UC Berkeley, did not even consider becoming a professor, and worked hard at technical skills in the background. I too would have failed miserably on the tenure track.
There is such a huge disconnect between people humanities professors and humanities PhDs who are successful but did not seek to become a professor. Programs don't keep track of them, there is a general disdain for anything not tenure-track, there are no "scripts" to prepare students. Professors think there are jobs for PhDs outside the academy, but in general have to way to prepare grad students for them.
I and my partner were socially shunned from my program for leaving the field, not tracked, and never invited to an event... until suddenly when they wanted money.
After coming back and visiting, I found the vast majority of professors shallow and self centered, coddled by positions that afforded them little to no emotional growth or challenge that is demanded of the rest of humanity.
I have a doctorate in a technical field, and work as a software developer. Fifteen years after finishing, I can say with confidence that the degree was not a good deal. It wasn't useless, mind you, but what I learned wasn't worth the five or six or eight years it took, depending on when you start counting. It might have been worth two.
The problem is the same as in any field dominated by unions. The incumbents conspire to create a caste system in which newcomers are kept out or relegated to secondary roles and taken advantage of. In academia this is magnified 100x because tenure makes it into a winner-takes-all game with no second shots.
I'm very glad that where she wrote "Multiply that 0.6 percent chance of getting any given job by the 10 or so appropriate positions in the entire world, and you have about that same 6 percent chance of “success.”" she was in the regime where p*n ~= 1-(1-p)^n and her conclusion was still correct.
When I was applying for academic jobs upon finishing my PhD, I said to one of my professors "every time I apply for a job, I feel like I have probability epsilon of getting it".
His response: "apply for one over epsilon jobs".
I told him I wasn't willing to accept such a large probability of not getting a job...
My point is that the time it takes to correct a mistake in person's name is correlated to the popularity of the article times the popularity of the person.
If it takes a long time, one of those values is low, possibly both.
I mean, at some point, one I think we have crossed, there is a moral issue with this.
Those PhD selection committees and professors have an obligation to at the very least, educate students on the truth, much as a doctor must tell patients that smoking is bad for them or that they need to run more. What that exactly looks like, who knows, but it really feels ... scummy. As other commenters state, unless you go to a top 3 program, you factually have a 0% chance. Even then you have little hope. Where is the, pardon the pun, humanity of these professors? Who would want to be taught by such hypocrites that willfully ignore, and possibly make money off of, the lives of their students? It boggles my lesser mind.
60 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 99.6 ms ] threadIt is a pity that this is missing in the HN title.
I find the (so it seems to me, anyway) diversity on HN to be a huge part of the appeal in reading comments.
Thoughts?
If a literature PhD isn't going to land you a six-figure job then maybe it should re-calibrate its tuition and time expectations to be something that a professionally active adult can pursue simultaneous to their career.
Congrats on rattling the hornets nest!
Academics have the gaul to set up an extortionist racket, and then find someone else to pay the costs of running it!
Flipside is at uni, I found most students more interested in beer and parties and not much support outside of tutor groups. I.e. not much different from watching a bunch of videos and reading books, with a bit of a meetup now and then.
I am learning CS stuff online for free and because I can focus on the areas I am interested in, pace myself and not study for an exam it is much more fun.
Funny enough it would seem weird to people to take 2 years off work to watch youtube videos about CS but OK to do a masters degree. I guess the piece of paper is defintiely worth something.
You generally can't get a Ph.D. without conducting and then communicating original research. Watching videos and reading books might help with that but are not sufficient by themselves.
In literature you of course do have to read in order to do your research. But the hard part is not the reading, it is the originality. That's what you need an advisor, committee, professors, and colleagues for: to challenge you to prove you're not just reiterating what someone else already said.
Then maybe 2, 3, 4 generations in the future some bright spark in the middle classes will notice a lit degree lets a middle class kid social climb and hang out with the upper classes, the uni admins will notice they can literally charge the middle class kids anything they feel like charging just like medical, rotating the system back to where we are now.
Thesis Hatement
Getting a literature Ph.D. will turn you into an emotional trainwreck, not a professor
Suggest new HN title: "A literature PhD will turn you into an emotional trainwreck, not a professor"
It wasn't difficult to see coming. Supply and demand; when one great professor can teach thousands over the internet, who wants to learn from a half-ass instructor (of which there are many)?
Teachers do add an extraordinary amount of value: if what you're doing can be summed up as a reading list and lecture series, rather than a conversational interaction and personal attention, then it isn't actually adding a whole lot of value to the instructional setting.
The problem is that while university teachers add can add huge amount of value, their profession makes actual teaching a chore to be foisted off on graduate students and adjuncts rather than a goal, in favor of really dubious publication.
For my area (numerical linear algebra), the jump into doing what is essentially software engineering was a very straightforward one. In fact, most of the research that I had been doing was applicable in some way or another. For those in pure mathematics (Analysis, Algebra, Topology, etc.), I could see there being more of a hurdle.
Yeah. That's why I posted it. In 2012 I wrote my own version about why going to grad school in the humanities is a bad idea: http://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-befor....
When I started, in 2008, the market wasn't fantastic but wasn't as catastrophically bad as it's become. Fortunately, I now work as a grant writing consultant and do some teaching that's more for a change of pace than for serious, keep-your-head-above-water income.
-Max Planck
Academia is brutal, and grad school literally gets medieval on your __. In some fields though, (Biosciences in particular) if you want to be anywhere near R&D it's hard to be taken seriously and have a real career without one.
Source: I got a PhD, it wasn't especially pleasant, I don't regret it, but I'd definitely do it very differently if I got to go back in time.
English and humanities BAs are eminently hireable, as the author points out, but the academy has decided to so relentlessly overproduce professors as to make it untenable as a profession. 75%+ of humanities courses are taught by adjuncts and graduate students—and the graduate students are just adjuncts-in-training. The MLA recently had a big symposium about this, which concluded that there was basically nothing wrong, they should continue to train professors (and benefit from their underpaid teaching), and make more of a show to go on about jobs outside traditional academia (in museums? libraries? It's unclear). While the norms of the academy is that anyone who isn't a professor is a failure.
Source: I dodged this bullet.
They didn't go to top-10 Ph.D programs. They went to top-2 Ph.D programs.
If you're not getting a Ph.D from one of the 3 absolute best-regarded programs, the odds are just insane.
The university was an R2 (according to the Carnegie-Mellon Research classification) [0]; I graduated from an R1. Most my colleagues graduated from R1s.
I was very unhappy in my Midwestern University town and left my academic post (having declined to pursue tenure) to return to my native state.
Faculty at such highly-ranked research institutions use graduate students because such high-achieving graduate students
1. Are a pleasure to teach, able to understand the highly complex and intricate theories about literature and culture we faculty research.
2. Are able (and thrilled to teach the low-level classes (e.g. Composition) which we would rather not teach.
The lie many faculty tell themselves is that such students are apprentices to the profession. That lie has been called out for the last 20 years and is, slowly, being accepted by younger faculty at such institutions. The problem is that tenure, as the article mentions, is dying with the faculty when they retire and these tenure lines are being replaced with graduate students and adjunct faculty.
Tenure will not completely go away. It will simply be restricted to the R1s and R2s. Every other institution can expect their ranks of faculty to be poorly compensated and to have no job security.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_research_universities_...
Both myself and my partner from the same program have coveted positions in no small part because of this training.
That being said I went to a #1 program at UC Berkeley, did not even consider becoming a professor, and worked hard at technical skills in the background. I too would have failed miserably on the tenure track.
After coming back and visiting, I found the vast majority of professors shallow and self centered, coddled by positions that afforded them little to no emotional growth or challenge that is demanded of the rest of humanity.
When I was applying for academic jobs upon finishing my PhD, I said to one of my professors "every time I apply for a job, I feel like I have probability epsilon of getting it".
His response: "apply for one over epsilon jobs".
I told him I wasn't willing to accept such a large probability of not getting a job...
So it took exactly a year to find that spelling mistake. That's kind of funny, in a sad way.
If it takes a long time, one of those values is low, possibly both.
Those PhD selection committees and professors have an obligation to at the very least, educate students on the truth, much as a doctor must tell patients that smoking is bad for them or that they need to run more. What that exactly looks like, who knows, but it really feels ... scummy. As other commenters state, unless you go to a top 3 program, you factually have a 0% chance. Even then you have little hope. Where is the, pardon the pun, humanity of these professors? Who would want to be taught by such hypocrites that willfully ignore, and possibly make money off of, the lives of their students? It boggles my lesser mind.