There is a widespread belief that humanities
Ph.D.s have limited job prospects. The story goes that since tenure-track
professorships are increasingly being replaced by contingent faculty, the vast
majority of English and history Ph.D.s now roam the earth as poorly-paid
adjuncts or, if they leave academia, as baristas and bookstore cashiers. As
English professor William Pannapacker put it in Slate a few years back, “a
humanities Ph.D. will place you at a disadvantage competing against
22-year-olds for entry-level jobs that barely require a high-school diploma.”
His advice to would-be graduate students was simple: Recognize that a
humanities Ph.D is now a worthless degree and avoid getting one at all cost.
Since most doctoral programs have never
systematically tracked the employment outcomes of their Ph.D.s, it was hard to
argue with Pannapacker when his article came out. Indeed, all anecdotal
evidence bade ill for humanities doctorates. In 2012, the Chronicle of Higher
Education profiled several humanities Ph.D.s who were subsisting on food
stamps. Last year, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette eulogized Margaret Mary Vojtko,
an 83-year-old French adjunct who died in abject poverty after teaching for
more than two decades at Dusquesne University, scraping by on $25,000 a year
before being unceremoniously fired without severance or retirement pay.
Recent studies suggest that these tragedies do not
tell the whole story about humanities Ph.D.s. It is true that the plate
tectonics of academia have been shifting since the 1970s, reducing the number
of good jobs available in the field: “The profession has been significantly
hollowed out by the twin phenomena of delayed retirements of tenure-track
faculty and the continued ‘adjunctification’ of the academy,” Andrew Green,
associate director at the Career Center at the University of California,
Berkeley, told me. In the wake of these changes, there is no question that
humanities doctorates have struggled with their employment prospects, but what
is less widely known is between a fifth and a quarter of them go on to work in
well-paying jobs in media, corporate America, non-profits, and government.
Humanities Ph.D.s are all around us— and they are not serving coffee.
The American Historical Association (AHA) and the
Modern Language Association (MLA) have staked out the position that the lack of
reliable data about employment outcomes is hindering any productive discussion
about the future of academia. Both organizations are currently undertaking
major studies that will comprehensively document the career trajectories of
generations of humanities Ph.D.s. Preliminary reports released in the past few
months show that 24.1 percent of history Ph.D.s and 21 percent of English and
foreign language Ph.D.s over the last decade took jobs in business, museums,
and publishing houses, among other industries.
ACESSE NA ÍNTEGRA: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/03/what-can-you-do-with-a-humanities-phd-anyway/359927/
