@al2simon, I’m very glad I had already swallowed my drink when I read that, or I’d have a mess to clean up. 
Al2simon, congrats! You won the internet today.
Just jumping in to correct more misinformation:
I am currently on the academic job market in English Literature. CVs do not always contain information that would reliably indicate whether or not the student had been funded or not, let alone fully funded. If you were selected for a particular scholarship, it goes on your CV. If you just got the same default funding package as everyone else, it generally doesn’t.
Yes, committees who were already acquainted with or took the time to research a program’s funding scheme could probably make a pretty good guess as to whether or not a particular applicant had been funded, but even in the unlikely case that they cared to consider the question, the idea that they would hold this against you years later, when you have completed or nearly completed a program and have a dissertation, a couple of publications, presentations in your field, and a teaching record to show for it is laughable. They care about what your professors have to say about you now, not what they thought of you six years ago when they had to make funding decisions for your first couple of years of graduate study.
That being said: Never, never, never do a PhD program without full-funding.
@apprenticeprof - thanks for confirming. My understanding from many years ago is that in most humanities fields the tradeoff versus sciences and engineering is that you generally don’t need to do a post-doc before a TT position, but the time to completion is 1 (maybe 2) years longer and the funding can be somewhat more precarious and/or involve more teaching. Also, because you guys go directly to TT the competition is more brutal than for a postdoc (doubly so with the crisis in the humanities).
Is this still right for most humanities fields and are there exceptions? Also, I’ve been told that it’s becoming a little more common (though still not the norm by far) for humanities Ph.D’s to do a postdoc. What are you seeing and how are norms changing?
Good luck with the search.
On an English Ph.D.'s cv, a new grad, that is, the funding will be fairly transparent by either named scholarship/grant or TA position. For faculty jobs in English, even at elite schools, some teaching experience is expected, and so even students who have research grants and fellowships want to teach a bit, usually through a TAship as those are better funded than individual courses. Hiring committees do note the nature of the teaching experience, for sure.
I do know of people who have done humanities PhDs as enrichment. I know one person, now the chair of an Englsh department, who started her PhD because TAships provided healthcare benefits and lectureships didn’t. I know people who did PhDs as a path to a green card. I know HS teachers who have done them as an alternative to an ed school credits for continuing education. I know people who have several PhDs because they like the student environment. Academia is not so homogenous and predictable.
@mamalion, but was their course of study “leisurely”? My D is a fourth year Ph.D student. At no point has this experience been “leisurely.” In fact, I worry about her a lot. The stress factor has taken a toll on her. She’s really thin and has a lot of GI issues. After tons of diagnostic tests, the doc finally told her he believes her problems have a lot to do with stress. Which is not going away anytime soon.
Her field is not English. It is heavy on the research side, expectations of publication, and TA duties, in addition to her academic requirements.
Nothing about DH’s program-or that of the students he advised in the past few years- is leisurely. Nor is it easy to get into a good humanities program. And a good program is really what it’s about when you want to remain in the field, post-doc. They are constantly vetting you. You have to justify your place there and keep up. Add that the research is different than in college; (you need to cover new ground, not just report on what’s already done,)
This can be very different for some colleges and some degrees. And the person who just wants the insurance, the green card or already has a paying job in their profession, is going to have a challenge getting admitted to a program that wants to produces future research scholars and professors.
Nrdsb4, i don’t know if I would call graduate school leisure, but some people like stress. They seek it out in “leisurely” activities like sports or political activism. I know that I like chaos and rather be unhappy than bored. Perhaps that’s why I am a professor.
lookingforward, actually all of my cases involved people who were at research intensive schools (AAUs or top 50ish). Lots of smart people are having trouble getting jobs and turning to graduate school as a bridge or even a way of getting by. If you are smart, getting into a good program is perfectly possible. It’s getting a job at the other end that is becoming impossible.
Top 50? DH used to speak of a number much less than that and regret his program fell outside the top ten, though it was/is an intensive, well-reputed program that produces many FT profs and scholars at other top universities and colleges. One poster started this loop by talking about professor jobs. If you think there isn’t enough opportunity in your present job and want to go for a PhD, you darned sure need your eyes open. A masters can different. Some miscellaneous U can be different. Some outlier program, too.
Think about this from the dept perspective. Those professors want qualified, ardent students who can jump through the hoops. One of the key points made to DH, while in his program was: we want to grow profs and scholars we then can be proud of, as their mentors.
D1 is flying to a conference today, where she is giving 3 presentations. This is probably the most “fun” she will have this month.
Another thing related to the advice LH and others are discounting that the Profs I chatted up warned me and my friends about is how their advice is especially applicable to topflight departments where practically everyone who was admitted as a qualified student is funded. In that context, a full-pay unfunded PhD student looks bad in comparison with the majority of department funded classmates.
However, those very same departments will admit a few marginal students provided they are wealthy/foolhardy and are willing to serve as effective “cash-cows” to subsidize the department and their fully funded and by proxy, legitimately qualified admits.
The older college classmate received one such offer as his undergraduate academic record had some serious issues and according to the Profs I chatted up at the academic conference, wanted to see if he’d turn down that offer prudently(the department’s preference) or if he insists on going through, from their perspective…they may as well use him as a cash-cow to subsidize the department and the majority of qualified students with departmental funding while giving him minimal/non-existent mentoring/support in the hopes he’d leave of his own accord or if not…continue serving as a “cash-cow”.
Not all departments/advisers are logical and straightforward about following through on those points.
A good case in point is another college classmate’s father who didn’t know his PhD adviser in a specialized subfield of biology where he was a mover & shaker seriously had it in for him until after he received his PhD sometime in the late '60s/early '70s. Seems like the adviser allowed him to complete his PhD with departmental funding, but then used his great influence to send word that no department was to hire him unless they wanted to put the grants in that subfield at risk as he was the dominant head of that subfield’s grant committee. In short, his adviser allowed him to complete the PhD, but then proceeded to use his influence to effectively force him out of academia altogether not long after he got his PhD.
Said classmate was much more fortunate and is now an assistant Prof in a social science field at a respectable university in the northwest area of the NA continent.
al2, the postdoc route is becoming much more common in the humanities, but it still isn’t a necessary next step. I also have the impression that getting a humanities postdoc means something different from getting a postdoc in the sciences. There are some highly prestigious post-docs in the sciences, but there are also a wealth of “ordinary” postdoc opportunities – someone leaves school A with a PhD in chemistry and immediately moves on to a postdoc with Professor X’s lab at school B. In the humanities, the “ordinary” post-doc doesn’t really exist, which makes some sense, when you think about it: humanities departments don’t have labs to staff, and between faculty, graduate students, and adjuncts/ other non TT professors, don’t need to create special fellowships to put bodies in the classroom. Instead, these research-focused fellowships usually carry a light teaching load, and are therefore offered only to candidates that the committee hand-picks for exceptional scholarship.
More than shifting to a grad-school to postdoc to TT model, the new reality in the humanities is that even PhDs who may ultimately go on to get tenure-track jobs are rarely getting these jobs right out of graduate school – and not because they’ve stopped to do a multi-year, reasonably well funded post-doc in-between. A more typical path to a tenure-track job looks more like this:
Year 1 post graduation: Continue on in the institution from which you received a degree in some capacity (teaching in the first year writing program, teaching a course or two as a “lecturer,” advising current graduate students, research assistant to a faculty member) while picking up adjunct jobs at a couple of local colleges.
Year 2 and possibly 3: Get a one-year Visiting Assistant Professor position at an institution other than the one you attended. You may wind up doing this more than once.
Year 3 or 4: Get a TT job.
@apprenticeprof - Thanks for the thoughtful response. Always good to learn from people who have personal experience and knowledge to share.
Good luck with the search.
P.S. Sounds like the academic job hunt could be a prime opportunity to mingle with billionaire heirs and heiresses. Please send a few my way - I’ve got sons and daughters I could fix them up with 
To continue the helicoptering theme, Bloomberg has a piece on “What Real Scares Helicoptor Parents”:
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-11-30/what-really-scares-helicopter-parents
I know this is an old and inactive thread, but this topic comes up so often that I feel compelled to give my 2 cents. Having read through (the majority of) this thread, I think that there’s a lack of student perspective here. Full disclaimer: I’m a rising senior in HS (so I can’t say anything about impacts into college), and the daughter of 2 Chinese immigrants (which has its own implications, I guess). We live in a very competitive high-income suburb with a growing number of Asian immigrants.
Before I had younger siblings, my parents were very involved. They sat (not participated) in on my piano lessons so that they could help me practice at home. They encouraged me to continue with activities that I chose when things got rough. Sometimes, that meant forcing me to go to practice/lessons. As I got older, their involvement scaled back, but I found their early participation to be immensely helpful. As a child, it’s easy to just quit when things aren’t progressing the way you want them to. At the end of the day, I was the one choosing to commit to my extracurriculars, and my parents were there to ensure that I remembered/honored my commitments. After my siblings got involved in ECs themselves, I was held accountable to keep up with my own practices/competitions. I regularly update my parents on my activities, and sometimes ask for advice when I’m having trouble deciding how to progress. My parents do not expect me to report all of my activities to them, and they’ve never pressured me into making decisions based on their wishes.
Up until HS, I had a very diverse selection of ECs (competitive ballet, competitive swim, speech/debate, student government, piano & oboe). It was busy, but I loved it. However, to make time for schoolwork in high school, I dropped nearly all of them. I’ll echo previous sentiments that school work is a huge factor in preventing students from pursuing a broad range of interests. Virtually everyone that I know has had to drop personal interests for school work (even those in regular classes).
Furthermore, it’s not just students aiming for elite colleges that need to push themselves and give up sleep. I live in Texas, and we have the top 10% auto-admission rule (7% for our state flagship). The cutoff is very high in my high school. Just based off of class ranks from Freshman and Sophomore years, to make the cut you need 95+ UW in all classes, and at least 3 AP’s. By graduation, the top 10% is expected to have at least 10 AP’s and maintain an UW 95+. Again, these aren’t just kids aiming for HYPS. The state flagship admits 75% of their class on the auto-admit rule, and it’s hard to get in outside of auto-admission.
I’m ranked first in my class of 700, and by graduation I’ll have 17 AP’s. I’m president of the speech/debate team and a nationally-ranked debater. Obviously I’m aiming for the elite universities (please spare me on the “elites are overhyped”) but this is a personal goal, not my parents’ goal. The line between involved parenting and helicopter parenting is fine, and often can’t be distinguished by outsiders. One family’s “involved” is another family’s “helicopter”.