<p>mimk, the job situation for humanities academics is really, really awful right now because the recession has put hiring on hold almost everywhere. Even in the best of times jobs are very scarce. You can’t be picky about where you’re going to live, especially in the early years; in most humanities fields nowadays, people start out in one-year replacement positions for several years before moving into tenure-track jobs. For the many people who find partners in their own or related fields, the difficulties of finding jobs in the same, or more or less the same, place are daunting. When I was an asst. prof many years ago, I’d meet all my friends on the train to the airport on Fridays–we were all going to visit our spouses who were teaching elsewhere in the US and Canada. My husband and I commuted for a total of seven or eight years before negotiating jobs in the same institution. Most of our friends’ marriages fell apart under the strain; ours didn’t but could have.</p>
<p>Non tenure-track teaching can be very exploitative; “adjuncts” at many schools are paid hardly minimum wage and often lack benefits. There’s a worrisome trend for schools to use adjuncts more and more for economic reasons.</p>
<p>That said, when everything works out, the job is extremely rewarding and varied. I love almost everything about my job at a research-intensive graduate institution: the teaching, the advising, the mentoring students, the reading, the writing, the colleagues, the presenting papers at conferences, even the administrative work. I work long hours but it doesn’t matter to me because I love what I do, and my hours are very flexible–I can do a lot of work from my home office, and I can easily take a day off if a family emergency arises. I make a comfortable salary–certainly more than I expected starting out.</p>
<p>Your son does not need to make up his mind now. It sounds like his interests are mainly in the humanities rather than in technical fields, and it’s not as if, say, publishing or journalism are exactly the high road to riches right now either. He should go to college, take the most rigorous program he can, and plan to write an honors thesis (if he’s not good enough to get into the honors program, he’s not going to get into a PhD program). That will give him a sense of whether he has aptitude for the work.</p>
<p>My own feeling, lo these many years ago when the job market was similarly terrible, was that I was going to give it my best and then do something else if it didn’t work out. I went to grad school immediately after finishing my undergrad degree so that I wouldn’t be too old if I did need to end up going to law school. I also attended a PhD program that awarded me a full fellowship–tuition and a stipend for room and board–so that I did not have to borrow any money. Then I worked very, very hard. I figured the worst thing that could happen was that I would spend five years doing something interesting but nonremunerative.</p>