I strongly disagree. A lot of R&D groups at major companies require them since the work is so specialized and you won't be learning that material in udnergrad.
In the teams I've worked, every member had a PhD, our manager had a PhD, their director/VP had a PhD... everyone up until the C-suits.
I feel that it would be a great service to prospective students everywhere if colleges (or the government) tracked outcomes and reported on them.
Something like "89% of history PhDs are employed in these salary bands (list them with percentages), and 3% are employed in the profession associated with their PhD".
I'm not arguing that student's don't stand to benefit from this sort of reporting, but...
I bet most history departments would tell you that they are not interested in the commercial success of their PhDs. That's not the purpose of their institution or in alignment with the academic tradition.
Exactly. I've seen this rationalization so much. It's like practically outrage at the mere suggestion that education should have some kind of functional purpose outside of itself.
It is not uncommon for departments to provide placement information for the graduate students that have completed their program. I've never seen salary information though. No one goes into academia for the money.
The University of Michigan has a really nice online tool:
According to that 22% of history grad students from 2015-2020 got tenure track positions. That's quite a crapshoot for investing 5+ years in a career path. And of course you could fall off the tenure track. And Michigan has a top history program.
I somehow get a feeling that if the prospects were actually good in any sense, colleges would advertise them whenever they had the chance (is there even reliable information about how salaries are distributed? Not just means and standard deviations).
I got an undergraduate degree that has 0% unemployment rate with good salaires because there are so few graduates, but for a PhD (that I was thinking of getting) there is no guarantee that even the places where I would work are good enough in terms of research or teaching.
I'm in an R&D job as well. I agree that a PhD is expected, but I disagree that it's necessary. Most R&D work is so specialized that PhDs are not much closer to it than MS graduates, PhD dropouts, or just people with relevant work experience. Hiring is much easier if you relax the PhD requirement.
There are some limited fields where a company or university will pay you to get a PhD (usually tied to post-doctorate work) - and pay beyond a stipend; a real salary.
Those can be worth pursuing, but otherwise you may want to consider just resting on the incidental Masters you get as part of the PhD program ...
This really depends on the field. For any field, you need to think about the outside options (I.e., non academic). If they are good and you would be happy, a phd may be a good move.
In economics, the outside options include government, policy (foundations and think tanks) and the private sector. Many are lucrative and / or rewarding in other ways. Furthermore, unlike in CS there are some roles in economics and policy which you cannot fill without a PhD.
I remember seeing an analysis about a decade ago when I was deciding on grad school.
And if I recall correctly, Economics was basically the only field where it made financial sense to get a PhD, taking into account opportunity cost etc.
I manage our PhD program in economics. We are not highly ranked yet our students do well on the job market. The bigger hurdle is getting into a PhD program. The qualifications of the applicants that we can't make a first-round offer from our program is astonishing.
There are definitely some parts of economics you want to avoid though. If you're interested in anything that fits in the "Freakanomics" classification, the job market is going to be challenging, and I'd personally not recommend getting a PhD if that is your area of interest. I chaired a search for a labor economics faculty position a couple years ago and found their job market to be absolutely brutal. Many, many top candidates with good publications were applying as postdocs. Some of them, in spite of their outstanding publications, could not find academic jobs even after completing the postdoc. I don't think any of them will be living in poverty. A tough job market nonetheless.
Counterpoint: I've got a Phd (Physics). I did not pursue physics as a career but I think about and read physics research papers and textbooks _almost every day_ and derive enormous pleasure from the pursuit.
Sure, I could teach myself everything I learned in grad school on my own time (I guess) but to me, those stipended years wherein I had no responsibilities other than to learn were the best years of my life, and they have served as the springboard for more learning in this, much more busy, period of my life.
Would it be better if I had made full professor somewhere? Sure, but in the end the education was its own reward. I consider the trade offs a bargain.
I agree completely with this. I have an Applied Physics Ph.D. and have a similar experience. I think that if you are getting a Ph.D. for a reason other than enjoying the learning and the education, then it doesn't make too much sense. However, if you have a great pleasure in the pursuit of the field and the research in it, then it makes sense to get a Ph.D.
We don't give enough credit these days to education being its own reward.
Getting a Physics Phd is fine because it looks great on a resume. It shows that you are very good at applied math. A History Phd is almost a negative, IMHO.
I disagree. In math, I had a survivable wage from TA/RA gigs during my whole graduate career, and I escaped the experience with less than a year's (grad school) income in loans taken out in my undergrad. Saw the writing on the wall, networked a bunch, and found a good job and now I'm making more than my supervisor ever will. Could I do the work without what I learned in my PhD program? Maybe I could have stopped after a Masters... but then I'd have missed the networking opportunities and (given the options available after my Masters) I'd have settled for a job with much lower satisfaction.
On the other hand, I feel like I've defined myself in a narrow specialization, so I might miss opportunities because they don't fit that.
But definitely don't get a PhD if your plan is to become a professor. Unless nepotism will go in your favor.
> Regardless of field, you probably shouldn't get a PhD. (Disclaimer: I'm a professor.)
Depends on the field, doesn't it? Some fields, like History, don't open any opportunities other than academia. Other fields, like engineering or medicine, basically lets the student practice their field in industry and commerce.
If studying a certain field means that the only thing you can do is teach that field, then that's a pretty sure way to go into poverty.
Everything about this is 100% accurate. The nightmare was super real ~3 years ago when this was posted, and it's even worse now, and it's a horrifying indictment of the entire academic pyramid scheme.
This is the main thrust of the conservative argument against free higher education. It just lets universities continue tricking the smartest of our students into picking career fields with zero room for new participants, only instead of wasting their potential and burying them in debt, they merely waste their potential while sticking tax payers with the debt.
One should be careful when making this argument to distinguish between niche "higher education" like the history PhDs under discussion here (things which people do because they have an overwhelming passion for the "pure" subject and/or for teaching it) and the broader "higher education" which most people pursue (degrees which lower barriers to careers). The post here suggests on the order of 1200 people a year getting history PhDs in the U.S. - multiply that by a few dozen other esoteric fields and that's still not much compared to the millions of people who want to get "higher education" of some kind each year in the U.S.
I'm having a hard time finding a politician, a mainstream politician at least, putting forth a higher education platform that explicitly includes a free PhD. With that in mind, who are the conservatives arguing against?
As the top reddit comment points out, a sad read. Also note this post is 2 years old.
It makes me wonder - are there opportunities for a digital hybrid of techie and historian? The data hoarder subreddits come to mind but they tend to be focused on tech itself or unfocused in what data they collect.
Though even if you could maintain and do analysis on a digitized archive of a specific subject I wonder what kind of market there is for that since that’s kind of what libraries have become?
The History job market now is not better than it was 2-3 years ago. If anything it's worse, and schools continue to pump out PhDs like it just doesn't matter that they're tricking kids into burning the better part of a decade for less than nothing (average time to complete in the US is 7-8 years!)
Sorry not to imply otherwise. More as a literal note as I find myself assuming the things I’m reading are recently posted and not 2, 5, 10 or more years old.
The application of history to the vast majority of people's lives is probably pretty low on the list of priorities. Shelter, food, water, air, income, healthcare, childcare, vacations, and then maybe history comes into play as a component of entertainment.
To contextualize, I'm an archaeologist by education and consider that a subfield of 'history'.
Most people have incredibly strong attachments to (specific bits) of history. It's often be inseparable from culture, national identity, and religion. However, it's difficult to justify that funding politically over things like building another warship (to keep us safe!), building a supercomputer (to keep us innovative!), or subsidizing corporate entities (to save jobs!). There's also no commercial market for building national identity. Accordingly, most funding comes out of relatively small culture/arts budgets that don't have to answer directly to constituents, except for a very few things that meet the incredibly high bar of direct political support like the national parks and pyramids.
But if you're interested in how humans have adapted to climate change in the past, or how to design a resilient society, or how pandemics spread, you're going to need historical studies at some point.
Stories are incredibly valuable to humans, on the same level as survival.
People see themselves continuously as playing a role in a story than spans millenia. That's what "identity" is really about, and it underlies war, crime, achievement, religion, raising of families, etc.
Historians could be the leaders here, but for whatever reason they are not. Historians haven't put themselves in a position where they could guide human stories for society overall.
So do they have potential value? Yes. But either they aren't able to provide it, or we aren't able to accept it.
Instead we have media narratives, which are a sad substitute.
The intersection of tech and history is known as 'digital humanities'. It's been in a recession for social/funding reasons the past few years, but it'll come back eventually.
There are certainly digital archivists at many institutions/organizations that are digitizing archives and things. The problem comes in from the fact that for most of human history things have not been digital, so there is only a very limited set of data that people can really "hoard." The problem is getting things digitized in the first place, and then not having the results just stuck behind yet another paywall.
In many cases what is already digitized, much like what is shown at museums, is just the tip of the iceberg of information kept in non-digital forms.
Honestly? Don't shit on STEM courses. Encourage programs that produce well-rounded students in the liberal arts tradition.
Most humanities departments are dependent on class enrollment - they are so-called "service" departments (vs. research or clinical departments). Enrollment is largely what determines what those departments can support.
I think, and this is not to be snarky, the predecessor question is "Why should we [in science and technology] support the humanities more".
I feel a lot of the answer of "How" will be in the "Why".
If area/endevour is not seen as producing value or being rewarding, it'll naturally atrophy.
If we have a compelling reason for Why that area is rewarding or producing value, it may need as little as an informational/awareness campaign to promote that value/reward.
(note that I am NOT defining "producing value" in dollar terms necessarily, but more generically as "something that somebody or society values". Otherwise, it becomes "something you do for fun for yourself", which is an awesome hobby and everybody should have some, but may not necessarily need to be externally sponsored. I.e. I pay to play music and paint and photograph as a hobby, other people are paid to play music/paint/photograph/etc, and I'm not sure either model is the only right model).
I notice the Historian PhD's only track is defined in that article as somebody who will teach history, not as somebody who will research/write/promote history. This makes it a a very small subset of what I would've considered a Historian / History PhD, and as such, again, I return to "Why" they may need external support if their interaction is strictly inward/cyclical.
that first one is extremely strange (didn't bother reading the second). the entire argument is that homosexuality is wrong because promiscuous homosexual men spread disease. but what about exclusive homosexual relationships? also wrong, merely by association. what?
This is a fundamental supply and demand problem for history PhD degrees which is out of balance by at least a factor of 4 or 5. There is nothing anyone can do to fix that, nor do I think we should (further subsidize tulips). Encouraging everyone to go to college who possibly can and to get a PhD is dystopian! The faster we correct the actual problem the better for everyone.
Most humanities PhDs don't offer compelling prospects for professors.
Accounting is the one PhD that seems to have favorable supply / demand economics. I used to work at a Big 4 accounting firm and they would pay you a generous salary, on top of your stipend, to get an accounting PhD. They were actively looking to fill the shortage of accounting professors that train their workforce.
Anyone know of any other PhD programs that have good supply / demand fundamentals. I used to work with a bunch of econ PhDs and the tenure professor track is really hard for them too (but they have much better private sector opportunities than humanities PhDs).
As with most fields a lot of it relates back to the first principles of the field. A lot of it is around what the best way to classify, measure, and show an economic transaction. One example that comes to mind is the development of Activity Based Costing in the late '80s as an improvement on traditional cost accounting.
Maybe this works in Big 4 firms but this is my third Fortune 250 Company Finance role and 15 years and I couldn’t imagine any reason why you would need a PhD in accounting to work in it or teach it. I’d rather my employees learn from a controller who worked in accounting for 5 years rather than someone in an ivory tower who has never worked anywhere telling professionals how they should be doing accounting.
I'm probably one of the few people to have experienced both the accounting program in university and the history program in university. My original degree is in history, and I ended up going back to school to train as an accountant (I'm a CPA now working at a non-Big 4 public accounting firm).
It could be just my school, but the quality of professors in each program were light years apart. To a person, the history professors were personable, smart and good lecturers. They cared about their students and helped them succeed. Accounting professors, on the other hand, largely stood up in front of the class, read directly from their slideshows, and answered any questions with "read your textbook".
My thought is that this is related to the supply and demand between the two fields. In history, universities can afford to hire the best of the field. They can picky and wait for the right person to come along. In accounting, the best of the field go make big bucks somewhere else. Professors pay well, but not nearly as well as working at a firm. I can't imagine working at a Big 4 firm and teaching as well, just with the hour commitment of their full time job!
As an aside, when I was completing my history degree and considering next steps, I consulted with one of my professors who basically told me I should give up my dream of becoming a PhD just because of how horrible the job market is. I ended up applying for my masters anyways and was rejected, which I take now as a blessing. I made more in my entry level job in accounting that I probably would be making now if I had ended up with my PhD.
Every student I have supervised has had a job lined up immediately after graduating and often had multiple offers. The jobs outside academia in industry R&D pretty much all required a PhD and as a masters student you would be more like a technician (there are exceptions but only very few). I work in optical telecommunications, so at the interface of engineering and physics.
So if you want to do actual R&D work in this area you absolutely should be doing a PhD. Considering that you are quite well paid during the studies as well is also a plus.
I’m glad it’s coming from a history guy because I told people this a lot and they just assumed I was discounting the value, since I have a STEM degree.
This post focuses on the job market after the PhD, but another reason to avoid a PhD is that it is just too much work. I have an MA but remain very involved in my field, I publish a paper or two each year and present at conferences. But after seeing my colleagues' workload unrelated to their actual research, I don't want to do a PhD: the students in PhD programmes are expected to help out in the exhausting process of grant application writing, editing the department's publications, teach courses, etc. This is true of all the universities with a department dedicated to my specific field. Even a fully externally funded position doesn't allow you to escape such obligations and focus solely on dissertation writing.
My conclusion is that I would actually have less time for research in a PhD program than in my current life where I find time for it around a job outside academia.
If you publish a paper or Two every year in your field... what more do you need to do to actually get the degree?
If I had a student like that I would go ahead and graduate him or her. (It takes a very long time to publish anything in Econ so that kind of productivity would be hard to reach though.)
That's not how academia works any more, because academia is not remotely about real research or discovering truths about the world. If it was we wouldn't have a massive reproducibility crisis and things like collusion rings in publishing. Today academia is primarily about achieving and maintaining funding and perpetuating the academic status quo (including insanely cheap labor) as long as possible.
Wittgenstein famously got his PhD from Trinity College in Cambridge by basically showing up and handing in the finished Tractatus Logico-philosophicus. Wittgenstein was of course a rare case, but that work was groundbreaking and leading philosophers at the time agreed, he defended and was given a PhD. Moore, one of the people overseeing his defense, stated “I consider that this is a work of genius but, even if it is not, it is well above the standard required for a PhD degree.”
Today getting that PhD is a combination of a bizarre hazing ritual and making sure you don't offend any of the other department faculty that will ultimately be deciding if you're worthy. I've seen a few cases from my time in academia where jealous or bitter faculty will do anything to ruin the carer of someone they view as threatening.
If Wittgenstein where alive today he probably would have ended up a software engineer writing an engaging blog in his spare time that most academics viewed as hopelessly obscure and amateur.
I feel like I should mention that the GP was asking something of me, and little of what you write here is relevant to my own situation. (Maybe it is relevant to people in other fields.)
When you choose to compile a dissertation from peer-reviewed articles, only those articles count which are written after you start the PhD program, discussed in seminar, and published. For me to write sufficient material for a dissertation and see it published would take about three years. So, that is three years I would be expected to do various administrative drudgery within the department.
I work as a freelancer with some specialized skills that command a high rate, and I live in a country with low cost of living. That means that I typically only work 2–4 hours per day (and not even every weekday), and the rest of time can be dedicated to research. Over the years I have managed to scan virtually every publication relevant to my field, so I don’t even need to make the expensive trek to an academic library very often.
One thing. In the disciplines whose PhD shenanigans I'm more familiar with (psychology and biology), women also used maternity leave to work. They actually count on it, which is a problem, because a baby is a lot more work than you think.
Breastfeeding every 2 hours for the first few months is a little bit of a structural issue that the father cannot mitigate. Such a poisonous system that people cannot feel comfortable enjoying the first few months, much less year or two bonding with their child.
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".
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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!"
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.
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.
Obviously if 100% of students were free loaders, they just wouldn't offer the class so it's not a real option. Even then, you wouldn't have the assignment, the dissertations, the feed-back and I doubt the teacher will be as available.
A big part of the cost of doing a degree is the opportunity cost of not working anyway. If your university fees are 10k per year (not unrealistic in Canada), but you could be working a 40k/year job instead, the real cost is 50k/year so you would only really be saving 20%... 20% for the privilege of an incomplete experience, no testing to verify you grasp the concepts, no possibility of doing a masters and no diploma to show for it.
Roaming classes is like buying a Mitsubishi mirage. Sure, it's a car... but you can have a car that's twice as good for 20% more.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
I mean Boomers. Yes, they entered the workforce at a time of rising wages and quality of life and in an environment where they expected their employer to take care of them for life even through retirement thanks to pensions.
I think you're interpreting my "following their dreams" in an anti-corporate "not into corporate America" way but that is itself a modern framing. I meant more the belief that they could go to college for what they were interested in with the assurance that plenty of jobs would be available afterwards regardless of their major.
Studying anything at a university is not an apprenticeship for any job, but basically learning and doing science. If one loves History as a scientific subject, just go for it. Often, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity that you could regret later of not having taken.
I think people who appreciate the pursuit of knowledge really want this to still be true, myself included, but in my experience almost nobody at any modern university considers this to be the case.
Most students are there to improve their career prospects. If you go WITHOUT this as your primary goal, at best you spend a very large percentage of your time fighting against bureaucracy designed to reinforce the system as a job training system and end up bitter, and at worst your ability to learn is directly affected when, for e.g., you struggle to find an advisor since most advisors are looking for students who will help improve their own career prospects (i.e. wanting to get as many papers out as possible)
> Often, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity that you could regret later of not having taken.
FWIW I totally agree with this and I think you CAN enjoy it if only interested in the knowledge itself, but one should really, really know what they're getting in to.
History classes in college were amongst the most enlightening for me because they were some of the most different from high school, having to focus almost entirely on reading and analyzing primary sources. They taught me a lot about the historian mindset that you see on places like askhistorians and behind the critical eye when it comes to reviewing history books that might be too opinionated.
That said, from a pragmatic perspective, this does explain why there wouldn't be a lot of jobs. How many people do you need to research the same stuff over and over, and how qualified do you have to be to teach somebody how to think in the historian mindset?
The unfortunate reality is there should be fewer Phds being churned out in a lot of fields if those degrees can't translate into non-academic positions.
If you want to be liberal arts Phd, you better be preparing to be the best of the bunch if you want to remain in academia.
I personally think the humanities education would be better served by divorcing it from making a living (which it actually traditionally was for centuries, and only changed in the last 100 or so years).
Making it about supporting yourself, kind of actually hurts humanities education and, I think, inevitably distorts it.
Rather, it should be about becoming a well-rounded person independent of making money.
I am a software engineer and have a comfortable salary. However, I would love to be able to do deeper study into History, Art, and Philosophy, not because it will enable me to make more money, but simply because it would make me a better person and expose me to a deeper understanding of the ups and downs of being human.
Maybe humanities needs to change its target primarily from 18 year olds who are figuring out what to do with their lives, to 40 year olds, who already make money, but want to learn more about what it means to be human.
> Maybe humanities needs to change its target primarily from 18 year olds who are figuring out what to do with their lives, to 40 year olds, who already make money, but want to learn more about what it means to be human.
I think a lot of higher education would be best life-long learning. The amount of stuff you learn before any real-world XP, only to forget (or cling unhealthily to) feels v. wasteful. A professors time might be best spent on adults in the field.
That said, for the humanities, there still needs to be a marketable skill-set that underpins the field.
This is a problem with university education generally, non-technical PhDs are just the epitome of it.
We are graduating far more people in various fields than are actually required.
We need to scale back education at all levels to match actual demand, and hold students to higher standards. We need to accept once again that only about 20% of the population really need tertiary education.
In the anglosphere we seem to struggle with the concept that people are of differing levels of intellectual capability (particularly when trends are seen along racial lines) - and we have figured erroneously that just throwing degrees at people will end inequality.
When it has been the fact that only the most qualified and intelligent people were previously granted those degrees that has given them any value.
It’s a snowball system.
Doing a master. Don’t get a job.
Become a phd, teach next generation of students who won’t get a job. They will again do their phd, and so on ;)
I did my undergrad at a top 10 university in the US. At the time (around 2015), most students fell into either "come from extremely rich families" or "very poor students on full financial aid". This bifurcation has only increased since I graduated.
One thing I have absolutely hated, especially since entering the tech industry, is how many of my friends who came from poorer backgrounds were misled by academia into pursuing things like "education for its own sake" or "studying what you love", and subsequently missed out on opportunities to study something that could have changed the socio-economic trajectory of their lives.
It can be hard, at these universities, to see who has invisible safety nets. You might decide to major in education because, well, it changed your life! You look around and, wow, so many other cool people are also majoring in education, it must be okay. What you don't realize, though, is that half of those kids plan to go into consulting or finance or whatnot via their parents connections.
I do value learning for its own sake and I don't think the liberal arts should solely be the privilege of the rich! But for a lot of kids from poorer backgrounds who make it into good schools, pursuing a more vocational major is the best chance of making enough money to go on to change their circumstances in life. This is sadly a fact of reality, and those who deny it (such as the professors encouraging these kids to jump into history PhDs) are taking away people's chances at upwards mobility.
I’m going to say something that might seem provocative: I don’t think anyone should get a PhD in a social science, it doesn’t seem worth the money or time these days. Hard sciences, sure, those academics are very useful. I think we have far too many people racking up debt and wasting time going after a doctorate when they just don’t need it.
105 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] threadIn the teams I've worked, every member had a PhD, our manager had a PhD, their director/VP had a PhD... everyone up until the C-suits.
It was necessary and expected.
So I think it really depends on your field.
Something like "89% of history PhDs are employed in these salary bands (list them with percentages), and 3% are employed in the profession associated with their PhD".
I bet most history departments would tell you that they are not interested in the commercial success of their PhDs. That's not the purpose of their institution or in alignment with the academic tradition.
The University of Michigan has a really nice online tool:
https://tableau.dsc.umich.edu/t/UM-Public/views/RackhamDocto...
According to that 22% of history grad students from 2015-2020 got tenure track positions. That's quite a crapshoot for investing 5+ years in a career path. And of course you could fall off the tenure track. And Michigan has a top history program.
I got an undergraduate degree that has 0% unemployment rate with good salaires because there are so few graduates, but for a PhD (that I was thinking of getting) there is no guarantee that even the places where I would work are good enough in terms of research or teaching.
Those can be worth pursuing, but otherwise you may want to consider just resting on the incidental Masters you get as part of the PhD program ...
This really depends on the field. For any field, you need to think about the outside options (I.e., non academic). If they are good and you would be happy, a phd may be a good move.
In economics, the outside options include government, policy (foundations and think tanks) and the private sector. Many are lucrative and / or rewarding in other ways. Furthermore, unlike in CS there are some roles in economics and policy which you cannot fill without a PhD.
It may be a good move!
And if I recall correctly, Economics was basically the only field where it made financial sense to get a PhD, taking into account opportunity cost etc.
There are definitely some parts of economics you want to avoid though. If you're interested in anything that fits in the "Freakanomics" classification, the job market is going to be challenging, and I'd personally not recommend getting a PhD if that is your area of interest. I chaired a search for a labor economics faculty position a couple years ago and found their job market to be absolutely brutal. Many, many top candidates with good publications were applying as postdocs. Some of them, in spite of their outstanding publications, could not find academic jobs even after completing the postdoc. I don't think any of them will be living in poverty. A tough job market nonetheless.
Sure, I could teach myself everything I learned in grad school on my own time (I guess) but to me, those stipended years wherein I had no responsibilities other than to learn were the best years of my life, and they have served as the springboard for more learning in this, much more busy, period of my life.
Would it be better if I had made full professor somewhere? Sure, but in the end the education was its own reward. I consider the trade offs a bargain.
We don't give enough credit these days to education being its own reward.
On the other hand, I feel like I've defined myself in a narrow specialization, so I might miss opportunities because they don't fit that.
But definitely don't get a PhD if your plan is to become a professor. Unless nepotism will go in your favor.
Depends on the field, doesn't it? Some fields, like History, don't open any opportunities other than academia. Other fields, like engineering or medicine, basically lets the student practice their field in industry and commerce.
If studying a certain field means that the only thing you can do is teach that field, then that's a pretty sure way to go into poverty.
It makes me wonder - are there opportunities for a digital hybrid of techie and historian? The data hoarder subreddits come to mind but they tend to be focused on tech itself or unfocused in what data they collect.
Though even if you could maintain and do analysis on a digitized archive of a specific subject I wonder what kind of market there is for that since that’s kind of what libraries have become?
The History job market now is not better than it was 2-3 years ago. If anything it's worse, and schools continue to pump out PhDs like it just doesn't matter that they're tricking kids into burning the better part of a decade for less than nothing (average time to complete in the US is 7-8 years!)
The new policy seems to be to throw the (digital) archives down the memory hole to avoid lawsuits.
Most people have incredibly strong attachments to (specific bits) of history. It's often be inseparable from culture, national identity, and religion. However, it's difficult to justify that funding politically over things like building another warship (to keep us safe!), building a supercomputer (to keep us innovative!), or subsidizing corporate entities (to save jobs!). There's also no commercial market for building national identity. Accordingly, most funding comes out of relatively small culture/arts budgets that don't have to answer directly to constituents, except for a very few things that meet the incredibly high bar of direct political support like the national parks and pyramids.
But if you're interested in how humans have adapted to climate change in the past, or how to design a resilient society, or how pandemics spread, you're going to need historical studies at some point.
People see themselves continuously as playing a role in a story than spans millenia. That's what "identity" is really about, and it underlies war, crime, achievement, religion, raising of families, etc.
Historians could be the leaders here, but for whatever reason they are not. Historians haven't put themselves in a position where they could guide human stories for society overall.
So do they have potential value? Yes. But either they aren't able to provide it, or we aren't able to accept it.
Instead we have media narratives, which are a sad substitute.
This area is called digital archival: https://ndsa.org/conference/ https://www.imaging.org/site/IST/Conferences/Archiving/IST/C...
I used to hate history, but it's much more interesting to read when compared against "common knowledge" of what people believe.
In many cases what is already digitized, much like what is shown at museums, is just the tip of the iceberg of information kept in non-digital forms.
Guy I knew was doing some really cool history work around German settlers in early America based on data collected by early life insurance companies.
Honestly? Don't shit on STEM courses. Encourage programs that produce well-rounded students in the liberal arts tradition.
Most humanities departments are dependent on class enrollment - they are so-called "service" departments (vs. research or clinical departments). Enrollment is largely what determines what those departments can support.
I feel a lot of the answer of "How" will be in the "Why".
If area/endevour is not seen as producing value or being rewarding, it'll naturally atrophy.
If we have a compelling reason for Why that area is rewarding or producing value, it may need as little as an informational/awareness campaign to promote that value/reward.
(note that I am NOT defining "producing value" in dollar terms necessarily, but more generically as "something that somebody or society values". Otherwise, it becomes "something you do for fun for yourself", which is an awesome hobby and everybody should have some, but may not necessarily need to be externally sponsored. I.e. I pay to play music and paint and photograph as a hobby, other people are paid to play music/paint/photograph/etc, and I'm not sure either model is the only right model).
I notice the Historian PhD's only track is defined in that article as somebody who will teach history, not as somebody who will research/write/promote history. This makes it a a very small subset of what I would've considered a Historian / History PhD, and as such, again, I return to "Why" they may need external support if their interaction is strictly inward/cyclical.
There was a famous post, "Don't Become a Scientist!"[1] about Physics in particular.
It includes the memorable line: "I have known more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a Ph.D. in physics than by drugs."
Which I suspect tells us more about Katz's social circle than anything else but nonetheless shows that it certainly isn't a rosy wonderland in STEM.
[1] http://katz.fastmail.us/scientist.html
Accounting is the one PhD that seems to have favorable supply / demand economics. I used to work at a Big 4 accounting firm and they would pay you a generous salary, on top of your stipend, to get an accounting PhD. They were actively looking to fill the shortage of accounting professors that train their workforce.
Anyone know of any other PhD programs that have good supply / demand fundamentals. I used to work with a bunch of econ PhDs and the tenure professor track is really hard for them too (but they have much better private sector opportunities than humanities PhDs).
It could be just my school, but the quality of professors in each program were light years apart. To a person, the history professors were personable, smart and good lecturers. They cared about their students and helped them succeed. Accounting professors, on the other hand, largely stood up in front of the class, read directly from their slideshows, and answered any questions with "read your textbook".
My thought is that this is related to the supply and demand between the two fields. In history, universities can afford to hire the best of the field. They can picky and wait for the right person to come along. In accounting, the best of the field go make big bucks somewhere else. Professors pay well, but not nearly as well as working at a firm. I can't imagine working at a Big 4 firm and teaching as well, just with the hour commitment of their full time job!
As an aside, when I was completing my history degree and considering next steps, I consulted with one of my professors who basically told me I should give up my dream of becoming a PhD just because of how horrible the job market is. I ended up applying for my masters anyways and was rejected, which I take now as a blessing. I made more in my entry level job in accounting that I probably would be making now if I had ended up with my PhD.
So if you want to do actual R&D work in this area you absolutely should be doing a PhD. Considering that you are quite well paid during the studies as well is also a plus.
My conclusion is that I would actually have less time for research in a PhD program than in my current life where I find time for it around a job outside academia.
If I had a student like that I would go ahead and graduate him or her. (It takes a very long time to publish anything in Econ so that kind of productivity would be hard to reach though.)
Wittgenstein famously got his PhD from Trinity College in Cambridge by basically showing up and handing in the finished Tractatus Logico-philosophicus. Wittgenstein was of course a rare case, but that work was groundbreaking and leading philosophers at the time agreed, he defended and was given a PhD. Moore, one of the people overseeing his defense, stated “I consider that this is a work of genius but, even if it is not, it is well above the standard required for a PhD degree.”
Today getting that PhD is a combination of a bizarre hazing ritual and making sure you don't offend any of the other department faculty that will ultimately be deciding if you're worthy. I've seen a few cases from my time in academia where jealous or bitter faculty will do anything to ruin the carer of someone they view as threatening.
If Wittgenstein where alive today he probably would have ended up a software engineer writing an engaging blog in his spare time that most academics viewed as hopelessly obscure and amateur.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/pers...
[1]: 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.
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.
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!"
As to why it wouldn't dissuade them... some people are more passionate than other I suppose.
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.
A big part of the cost of doing a degree is the opportunity cost of not working anyway. If your university fees are 10k per year (not unrealistic in Canada), but you could be working a 40k/year job instead, the real cost is 50k/year so you would only really be saving 20%... 20% for the privilege of an incomplete experience, no testing to verify you grasp the concepts, no possibility of doing a masters and no diploma to show for it.
Roaming classes is like buying a Mitsubishi mirage. Sure, it's a car... but you can have a car that's twice as good for 20% more.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I mean Boomers. Yes, they entered the workforce at a time of rising wages and quality of life and in an environment where they expected their employer to take care of them for life even through retirement thanks to pensions.
I think you're interpreting my "following their dreams" in an anti-corporate "not into corporate America" way but that is itself a modern framing. I meant more the belief that they could go to college for what they were interested in with the assurance that plenty of jobs would be available afterwards regardless of their major.
Most students are there to improve their career prospects. If you go WITHOUT this as your primary goal, at best you spend a very large percentage of your time fighting against bureaucracy designed to reinforce the system as a job training system and end up bitter, and at worst your ability to learn is directly affected when, for e.g., you struggle to find an advisor since most advisors are looking for students who will help improve their own career prospects (i.e. wanting to get as many papers out as possible)
> Often, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity that you could regret later of not having taken.
FWIW I totally agree with this and I think you CAN enjoy it if only interested in the knowledge itself, but one should really, really know what they're getting in to.
That said, from a pragmatic perspective, this does explain why there wouldn't be a lot of jobs. How many people do you need to research the same stuff over and over, and how qualified do you have to be to teach somebody how to think in the historian mindset?
The unfortunate reality is there should be fewer Phds being churned out in a lot of fields if those degrees can't translate into non-academic positions.
If you want to be liberal arts Phd, you better be preparing to be the best of the bunch if you want to remain in academia.
Making it about supporting yourself, kind of actually hurts humanities education and, I think, inevitably distorts it.
Rather, it should be about becoming a well-rounded person independent of making money.
I am a software engineer and have a comfortable salary. However, I would love to be able to do deeper study into History, Art, and Philosophy, not because it will enable me to make more money, but simply because it would make me a better person and expose me to a deeper understanding of the ups and downs of being human.
Maybe humanities needs to change its target primarily from 18 year olds who are figuring out what to do with their lives, to 40 year olds, who already make money, but want to learn more about what it means to be human.
I think a lot of higher education would be best life-long learning. The amount of stuff you learn before any real-world XP, only to forget (or cling unhealthily to) feels v. wasteful. A professors time might be best spent on adults in the field.
That said, for the humanities, there still needs to be a marketable skill-set that underpins the field.
We are graduating far more people in various fields than are actually required.
We need to scale back education at all levels to match actual demand, and hold students to higher standards. We need to accept once again that only about 20% of the population really need tertiary education.
In the anglosphere we seem to struggle with the concept that people are of differing levels of intellectual capability (particularly when trends are seen along racial lines) - and we have figured erroneously that just throwing degrees at people will end inequality.
When it has been the fact that only the most qualified and intelligent people were previously granted those degrees that has given them any value.
One thing I have absolutely hated, especially since entering the tech industry, is how many of my friends who came from poorer backgrounds were misled by academia into pursuing things like "education for its own sake" or "studying what you love", and subsequently missed out on opportunities to study something that could have changed the socio-economic trajectory of their lives.
It can be hard, at these universities, to see who has invisible safety nets. You might decide to major in education because, well, it changed your life! You look around and, wow, so many other cool people are also majoring in education, it must be okay. What you don't realize, though, is that half of those kids plan to go into consulting or finance or whatnot via their parents connections.
I do value learning for its own sake and I don't think the liberal arts should solely be the privilege of the rich! But for a lot of kids from poorer backgrounds who make it into good schools, pursuing a more vocational major is the best chance of making enough money to go on to change their circumstances in life. This is sadly a fact of reality, and those who deny it (such as the professors encouraging these kids to jump into history PhDs) are taking away people's chances at upwards mobility.