Health care is sadly moving towards this model-- there have been a couple of studies looking at the trend of physicians selling their practices to large medical management companies- so in the short term, a big payday for the doctor or small group of doctors who both owned and worked in the practice. But over time- you’ve got the orthopedic surgeons and plastic surgeons making X and pediatricians and gerontologists making 1/5th of X, and a practice manager who runs a big company making twice what the plastic surgeons make even without a medical degree.
No, it isn’t. The schools are responsible for the over supply.
I have a young friend who is an adjunct at one of the CUNYs. (City U of NY). She never knows until the last minute how many classes she will teach each semester and whether or not she will get a summer session job. She has a PhD in English from a school that ranks between 175 and 200 in US News. I don’t think such a college should be able to hand out PhDs at all. Look at this list of schools offering PhDs in English. http://www.chronicle.com/article/NRC-Rankings-Overview-English/124728/ This is just plain silly.
Imagine a med school whose grads were rarely offered a residency. It wouldn’t be in business long. Law schools suffered from an over supply of lawyers and applications dropped. There are statistics for the number of grads who pass a bar and for the number of grads employed within 9 months. People still delude themselves, but the info is out there.
Yet, I’ve never seen stats saying "Of the X# of PhDs in English who received their degrees in the last 5 years from, e.g. the University of Dallas, % have teaching jobs at a 2 year or 4 year college; -% have tenure track jobs; average compensation is $. I don’t know–maybe the U of Dallas gives out that info to its English grad students. My point is that it’s not generally available so somebody outside the academy can say “Look, this isn’t going to work.”
MIT does publish career survey results (including some by-major information) for PhD graduates (as well as SB/SM graduates): https://gecd.mit.edu/resources/survey-data
However, MIT has very few humanities PhD graduates, and is widely considered an elite school in many of the subjects its students study. (But you can compare the difference between biology, EECS, and economics PhD graduates there.)
A quick history lesson- much of the explosion in graduate programs came about as a direct result of the draft during the Viet Nam war. Young men needed educational deferments-- the colleges were happy to oblige.
A young neighbor of mine just completed a doctorate in educational counseling from a third tier university. Her employment prospects are actually worse than they were when she just had a Master’s degree-- there are no faculty jobs at the college level; she is overqualified for most jobs in a K-12 school system, she has just published a dissertation which sheds zero light on the topic with no original research or interpretation.
Now what? Close down her university’s doctorate program? Who advises these young people and do they have any concept of what the job market looks like in their fields?
Part of the problem is that it’s in nobody’s interest to be straight with the young people. I know several faculty at weaker departments with phd programs who are conflicted about the existence of the program, but by the same token the department depends on those students to cheaply teach lower division undergraduate courses.
Universities like the “research university” prestige that comes from PhD programs. Similarly, many undergraduates like the hustle and bustle of being in a department where there are grad students.
And you can tell someone who wants to start a STEM postdoc that the market is crap and that they almost certainly won’t get a TT track job afterwards until you’re blue in the face, but of course it doesn’t apply to them.
Part of the problem is survivorship bias. Almost all the people giving this advice themselves got TT jobs, and so it doesn’t carry much weight. But it’s hard to get an “I was just like you and starting a PhD was the worst mistake of my life” crowd together to advise prospective students!
Something that hasn’t been mentioned is the change in the labor market itself. When I was just starting in higher ed,t the belief was that within 10 years we would see mass retirements of tenured faculty and then jobs would open up. If you could hang on a couple of years, the pickins wouldn’t be so lean. However, that is not what happened. Colleges and universities failed to replace those tenured retirees with tenure track newcomers. They hired adjuncts. They created non-tenure track and short term positions. They cut positions in general.
The last few FT, tenure track hires in my dept have been fully aware of their odds. Their doctoral institutions published hire rates (and they were not optimistic).
Totally agree. The medical profession seems to recognize this and limits the number of medical students accepted in the U.S. The GPA needed to get into some PhD programs is not nearly as high.
Overall, though, it’s not the graduate school’s fault that so much first year comp is taught by adjuncts. Fewer English or Comp-Rhet PhD’s is not going to change the amount of adjuncts needed in my discipline. So the extent that schools rely on adjuncts rather than on full-time instructors is on them. Unless they’re underfunded state schools; then it’s on us.
For low level English composition courses, the instructional needs are also related to the quality or lack thereof in high school courses. A college where most frosh need remedial English composition courses before taking frosh level English composition courses needs more instructors than one where most frosh come in with AP English scores of 5. Even if the college does not accept AP scores as fully completing its writing requirements, the latter students are likely to be able to complete it in fewer courses than former students.
The only way to get US health costs under control is to make doctor and nurse pay closer to the European and Canadian levels which is probably half the current US averages. Will that harm quality of doctors–maybe at some level . And negotiate drug costs to the similar levels.
Doctors in those societies are still well-to-do upper-middle-class and live well. Especially considering they don’t have college/med school loan debts to worry about for the following reasons:
College/med school costs are far lower than in the US (Sometimes nearly free).
In many European countries, med school is far less than the 8 total years it is here(4 years undergrad + 4 years med school). In those countries, one goes straight into med school right after college-prep high school provided one meets the high academic standards for admission.
And the broadening of one’s educational horizons covered in the first two years of distribution requirements here in the US were covered in their respective middle/college prep high school stages of education.
Do we really believe there is a need to restrict the number of new PHDs in these areas? Restrict freedom and the expansion of knowledge? Why on earth? What great social harm are we trying to correct here?
@ucbalumnus --in writing, there is a move away from remedial classes. The school I am at does all sorts of other support, but aims to get everyone through in the same two classes. Schools are judged by that four year grad rate. So though I take your point, even absent the extra classes, there’s just a lot of students in writing classes.
Comparisons to med schools is on shaky ground. It is very expensive to train a MD. Not remotely comparable in terms of the resources and technology involved. Not to mention the potential danger. No one ever died reading a terribly unoriginal essay.
A lot of these comments assume a Phd in humanities should be a professional degree designed to lead to a specific job, like law and medical school. I think many humanities professors would argue getting a Phd is an end in itself, an opportunity to study a field you love for a decade, and what impact it has on your career afterwards is secondary.
In actuality, that’s exactly what a PhD in each field was originally intended for…to lead to a career as a tenured academic in academia or in related research positions.
While that, in practice, has been obscured by some idealistic notions as illustrated above, most people IME pursue PhDs because they have such a deep interest in a given field/subfield that they want to make an entire career out of it…a career best pursued in academia with the wider range of freedom to pursue research topics/define research parameters…especially after getting tenure.
The only folks IME who pursue PhDs with the mentality illustrated in the above quote are scions of wealthy/well-connected families(think Kennedy’s, Rockefellers, etc) who voluntarily enroll as full-pay PhD students at elite/respectable private universities*…including topflight programs as a leisurely pursuit. They can do this without any financial/career considerations because they have support from multi-generational family wealth and/or ginormous trust funds.
A few elite U Profs I've had for summer/grad classes mentioned supervising such PhD students in passing in-class or in the course of dinner at said Prof's home.
What is the core of these problems? Too many PhDs in too many fields; the job markets simply do not need so many PhDs.
Why do we have so many PhDs in so many fields? It is jointed determined by high demands and high supply of PhD education. In too many fields, PhD students are cheap labor for teaching (can be even cheaper than adjuncts) and research assistance; short-sighted schools have incentives to take in too many doctoral students whenever they could. As a result, the supply is too high; this is particularly so in many humanities fields. At the same time, too many humanity students view a PhD path more attractive than all other professional paths available to them. This creates too much demand.
The reality is that no one forces the schools to take in so many doctoral students. No one forces those doctoral students or PhDs to pursue an academic profession. They are all adults who could choose not to make those decisions. It is not like there are too many unemployed humanity PhDs is a secret; a 3-minute google search gets one tons of such information. So let it be; it can not be helped.
From the article posted by the OP: “Adjuncts now do most university teaching and grading at a fraction of the price, SO THAT the ladder faculty have the time and resources to write.”
The author really has no ideal about what does it mean by being a ladder faculty member. Say a ladder faculty member in Humanities earns $60,000 a year. A typical work load may look like: 40% teaching (teaching 4 courses a year), 55% research, and 5% service. This means he/she earns $24,000 on the 4 courses teaching (so $6,000 per course, which is not far away from what an adjunct would earn on a per course basis), $33,000 because of scholarship/writing, and $3,000 for service. This kind of compensation scheme has been in the ladder academic professions for many decades (if not centuries) regardless of whether adjuncts are used. This structure specifically expects/requires the ladder faculty to spend time (55% of their work time) to write, and it is this work load assignment and expectation toward scholarship/writing defines what the tenure system is about.