“I’ll be the one who gets the job” and Other Lies We Tell Ourselves
1/ I Was Told There’d Be Food
Do you hear clopping coconuts? “Run away! Run away!”
Monty Python and the Holy Grail might have had a different theme in mind, but it’s surprisingly applicable to decisions about grad school. For starters, if you are thinking about going to grad school — Run away!
I’m only half kidding. There are a great number of reasons to go to grad school, but if you are considering a doctorate or a masters in the humanities, there are some scary — scarier than killer rabbits and insulting Frenchmen — reasons to fear grad school. The outcome might not be all you want it to be.
The culture of academia glorifies busyness. We are fed a steady diet of the importance of sacrificing our time and accepting low pay because of the need and desire to produce and protect knowledge. The trouble is, that’s not very healthy. All of this is going to beat you down and wear you out.
You will read a lot, write responses, pass terrifying exams, work on research, and prep teaching. Then you will grade, write quizzes, maybe exams, and mentor students. In the meantime, you are going to be reminded that you need to build your CV, so you will be encouraged to write articles, publish book reviews, and present at conferences. Many of you will be searching for outside funding for travel and research. All of this takes time. There will be days that the rush of doing-all-the-things fulfills you, but there are going to be days that it all crashes down on you and you feel like you are drowning.
On those days, what is going to sustain you? I doubt a single grad student has made it through without questioning their decision to go to grad school. The longer you are in, the harder it is to imagine not doing it. Once you have passed your exams, it is harder to say to yourself you will just stop and move on. Understandably, you will want something to show for the time and effort you have already put into school. All of this is to say, don’t take the decision to go or not to go lightly. Once you are in it will get much harder to move on if you realize that you don’t have to have a PhD, and you realize the job numbers are not on your side.
The truth is, it breaks my heart to try talking people out of entering academia. We need more ideas and new creative ways of getting those ideas to the public. So we are going to lose something by turning people away from programs. Also, I don’t want to suggest that you are not capable. You probably are. It’s not about ability, but rather it’s about what will work for you in the long run. It just doesn’t make sense to expend so much time and possibly take on a greater financial burden only to find yourself with no job prospects at the end of it all.
Clop-clop. Clop-clop.
Some programs are beginning to recognize that the model of preparing PhD students for a job market that simply doesn’t exist needs to change. Institutional change happens slowly though. The American Historical Association has begun to promote changes to help grad students diversify. However, job prospects in non-academic fields are not always better. For example, historians are often told to find museum work. But museum jobs often require specialized training rather than a PhD. Diversifying yourself is a great idea, but plan for it. Don’t just expect your ‘transferable skills’ to be enough to land the non-academic job. Find out what is required of you in fields that interest you before you leave grad school. So, all of this is to say that I want you to be very deliberate about why you would enter grad school and what the outcome is going to be. We need to stop kidding ourselves by believing that we will be the exception to the crappy job market.
Sir Lancelot: We were in the nick of time. You were in great peril.
Sir Galahad: I don’t think I was.
Lancelot: Yes, you were. You were in terrible peril.
Galahad: Look, let me go back in there and face the peril.
Lancelot: No, it’s too perilous.
Galahad: Look, it’s my duty as a knight to sample as much peril as I can.
Lancelot: No, we’ve got to find [a real, paying job]. Come on.
Remember how I didn’t say money was the concern earlier, but I said delayed earnings? Let’s talk about that. If you are doing post-graduate studies in any humanities field, or any other field, you should not pay for tuition. The only exceptions I can think of are teachers who are required by the state to do continuing education. Other than perhaps law school or medical school it is hard to think of a field wherein the cost-benefit analysis says “yes, it is worth tuition dollars to go to grad school.” You are strongly encouraged to only go into a fully funded program, which means you won’t be spending money, so we will consider what I meant by delayed-earnings and time.
The average PhD program in history takes eight years. The average grad program in general takes six years. And most programs guarantee funding for 4–5 years. That means that many people are going to be unfunded for one or more years, and that’s a concern on its own.
Assuming you enter grad school straight out of undergrad (possibly a poor choice, but we will tackle that question later) and complete your degree within the fastest time possible or average time, you will be between the ages of 26–30 years old when you are done. Quite a bit of life happens during those years, and it is important to consider that at the end of that time you will enter the workforce hardly, if at all, above the average starting salary coming out of undergrad. So, that’s basically just a loss of around $200,000–400,000 salary (not to mention benefits!) if we assume a yearly salary of $50,000 (the average for BA-holders in 2017). That’s money that you are very likely never going to earn because your starting salary if (and it’s a big if) you get a solid tenure-track position is still unlikely to be enough to recover the lost wages. Currently the mean for a college history professor is $95,000 with $126,000 for professorships generally. However, that number is widely variable. If you are teaching at the community college or small state school level, you should expect to start in the $50,000 to $60,000 range. And, still that varies more widely than that. The truth is, you should not expect to leave grad school with a full-time tenure-track position.
More than 50% of faculty are part-time and fixed-term appointments. These people are teaching the equivalent of a full load in many cases but being paid far less with fewer, if any, benefits. In 2014, the Atlantic reported that non tenure-track faculty could expect to make about $40,000 per year. As a comparison, the same year people who had a bachelor’s degree could expect an annual salary of $45,478. Those who are adjuncts often only piece together a full load of courses by teaching at multiple institutions, but still in the end only earn minimum wage, and in 2017, 70% of all faculty were some form of non-tenure-track appointments.
We can dream it will get better. Many universities are tightening their belts, first due to the recession and now due to lower enrollments. We can dream of rising wages and readjusted tuition rates that make higher education more attainable. But the American Association of University Professors notes that the increase in contingent faculty has actually grown in times of economic prosperity, not downturns. So the dream is just a dream. We cannot expect improvement alongside economic growth.
Clop-clop. Clop-clop.
While trying to decide if that is a worthwhile gamble, you should factor in whether you have student loans from undergrad. One benefit of continuing in school is that you can defer repayment of any student loans. Deferment might be nice, but it also means waiting five to ten years to begin paying that down. The average student loan debt is $37,172. Of course that varies quite a bit by location and type of school. More than half of the graduates from a public university have an average of $25,550 in student loan debt. Depending on whether your loans are subsidized or unsubsidized and what interest rate you are paying, your monthly payment will also vary, but in 2016 the Federal Bank Reserve of Cleveland reported the average monthly payment for student loan debt was $393.
To make life easy, let’s call it $400. Over the course of the five years that you did not go to grad school, you could have paid $20,000 on your loans. If you go to grad school and defer these payments, it will still be hanging over you when you are done, and if you didn’t pay the interest while in school, you are making it take that much longer later to climb out of the debt spiral.
It’s possible your path to grad school will be less direct. The benefit of leaving school to have a career for some time first, or even staying home with children, is that you view the world through a different lens. That can help as you analyze materials, but it also will have changed your approach to work completion. If you return to school with a family in tow, you likely have time management skills that a fresh-out-of-undergrad only dreams of at this point. The other benefit is that you didn’t delay all your earnings, and hopefully you have some savings and retirement accounts in place. Maybe you have a partner to help shoulder the financial burden and offer general support. But even if all of that is true for you, you are still going to be delaying earnings just to go back on the job market at a salary that’s probably not much more than you left it. Unless your career path demands grad school, don’t expect higher pay for the advanced degree.
Now, I know, I know. For those of you in the humanities, you are going to argue that you can’t get a good paying job in your field without a graduate degree. It may be true, but you need to really investigate that by doing job searches because the reality is that a PhD is not necessarily going to help you get a good job in your field either.
What we know is that as of 2017, universities were cranking out more than twice as many doctorates as there were tenure-track jobs available.[1] Despite dismal prospects, there has not been a real slow-down on the production of PhDs. The numbers are bleak in science fields as well even though there has been a public and nationwide push for more STEM in education.
Across the board, tenure-track positions are down. This is due to several factors, one of which is demographic shifts. According to Pew, population growth is slowing down and expected to slow significantly. If fewer babies are born, there will be fewer young adults entering college soon enough. Many school administrators are already planning for this adjustment by not hiring replacements now because they don’t think that in the next decade they will need as many professors.
It seems likely that regardless of population declines, the model for higher education has become unsustainable. The middle class continues to get squeezed between stagnant wages and rising tuition costs. It has become a real challenge for parents to save for their children’s college expenses, and this is likely to get worse as parents have their own student debt to worry about. Tuition increases as states continue to reduce spending on higher education, but somehow the administrative level keeps ballooning. Then at the end of all of it, those stagnant wages mean that there is much less of a return on the investment of school. What was a once a sure bet, no longer is.
Looking to cut costs without touching the lucrative admin positions, universities love contingent employees. The adjunctification of higher education is a real problem. Once a means to fill a short-term gap, now universities are just enjoying the cost savings of underpaying professionals by relying more heavily on adjuncts. Often we are told that it is due to the high costs of hiring faculty and the need to keep tuition low. And yet while adjuncting has proliferated, administrations have only grown. This isn’t really the place to argue over that, but it needs to mentioned lest anyone thinks a sea change is coming any time soon. And while I argue that the current model is unsustainable, recognize that higher education doesn’t turn on a dime, so expect these numbers to get worse before they get better.
Then depending on your field of study, enrollments for humanities classes are declining. According to the American Historical Association, history course enrollments have had yearly declines since 2014 (Brookins, Perspectives, 2018). There are many factors to this, such as a change in general elective requirements, and the data doesn’t exactly tell us why. But the important thing about this as you consider whether to enter grad school is that if enrollments continue to decline there are going to be fewer classes to teach, which means less funding for graduate students as well. Fewer classes to teach means fewer faculty members needed and tenure-track jobs are going to continue to decline.
Sir Galahad: Is there someone else up there we can talk to?
French Soldier: No. Now go away or I shall taunt you a second time.
Remember, the average PhD in the humanities takes six years to complete. During that time the grad student is paid a subsistence level salary in exchange for teaching or research. It is very unlikely the student will receive any benefits beyond tuition remission. So, no matter what program you are in, you have worked hard and made some sacrifices.
Then you hit the job market and find out that across disciplines, most tenure-track hires are coming from eighteen elite universities. Eighteen! But, wait. It gets worse if you are in the humanities. For history professorships, half of all hires come from only eight elite schools. Think about this. At least two PhD are produced for every job. Say there are 10 jobs. So there are 20 PhDs, but 5 of those jobs are going to people from only 8 schools. Let’s just say those schools produced one PhD this year. So 5 of those 8 have jobs. So, of the 10 jobs, 5 are for sure taken. It’s not crazy to think that if the other 3 want academic jobs, they have a strong shot. If they do, that leaves 2 jobs for 12 people to fight over. It’s not great math. Even 5 jobs for 15 to fight over is not great math. It’s super depressing math. And we haven’t even begun to add the 10 leftover PhDs from last year who are going to compete for those academic jobs as well, continuing to compound the problem.
And the hits just keep on coming. It turns out that at least one study demonstrates that there is a hiring bias in higher ed: “Across disciplines, we show that faculty hiring follows a common and steeply hierarchical structures that reflects profound social inequality among institutions.” Aaron Clauset, Samuel Arbesman, and Daniel Larremore concluded in 2015 that the inequality is so profound that doctoral prestige is a better predictor of job placement than U.S. News & World Report, which is supposed to be the predictor. They also found that prestige of the university that conferred the degree opened up greater opportunities to those recipients which led to better placement, more productivity, and more influence. All of this was irrespective of quality of work (not to say these people did not produce quality work, but that they aren’t necessarily doing better work than people at non-elite schools). In other words, don’t kid yourself, it’s not a meritocracy.
Clop-clop.
If you haven’t yet entered grad school, be absolutely sure you understand the outcomes for your field and the university you are choosing. If you are already in, consider getting out, which is a desperately difficult choice. And if you are hitting the job market, I wish you luck and the presence of mind to remember that you are worthy even if the market makes you feel like all your limbs are chopped off. ’Tis but a flesh wound…
[1] There were approximately 1,150 PhDs produced for 500 advertised job openings as reported by Dylan Ruediger, The AHA Jobs Report,” Perspectives on History, vol. 56:3, March 2018, pg. 24.
