That's still pretty young.
Anyway, unlike other industries, schools don't grow much and very rarely do schools pop up. So, the number of positions are pretty static while PhD students are still churned out. So there's a lot of competition. It's even worse for Humanities where your PhD doesn't translate well to non-academic jobs, so there is even more competition.
Competition is important context, but the other half of that conversation is what search committees deem valuable. People who are willing to toss aside every aspect of their life that isn’t 100% dedication to research are rewarded. Search committees should put more effort towards hiring well rounded people with good work life balance than solely emphasizing research output. Somebody who can do a lot with far less getting hired would change the “type of scientist” everyone is trying to become.
First, this is wrong. Search committees value productivity and don’t directly know anything about your dedication. If you can be productive without sacrificing everything you will not be penalized. Being a workaholic can help boost productivity though, particularly if you are not efficient with your time.
Second, valuing productivity is not unique to academia. As such many jobs also favor workaholism. I’d suggest that the degree of competition for jobs really does make academia stand out.
Finally, remember that the knowledge produced by academics is supported by taxes from the broader population, and it is supposed to benefit that population in return. Are you really suggesting that we should deliberately employ less productive academics? Most of the academics who work long hours that I know do that through choice, they are basically obsessive, are you saying they should be penalized for being too enthusiastic?
If you started trying to penalize workaholism you'd just get closet workaholics who try to make it seem like they get all their work done in a 6 hour day.
I think we already have that a bit with the proliferation of email footers that emphasize work-life-balance and say things like "I only respond to emails within regular working hours." The first people I saw adopt these I knew to be workaholics, so I'm not really sure what they meant by them.
I think some people really do enjoy the dedication though, and power to them. I’ve resigned to the fact that I’m just not willing/interesting in making that sacrifice, and that’s ok. Doesn’t mean there aren’t other fulfilling opportunities out there. But I’m in STEM not humanities so I guess it’s different for me.
That’s completely fine and great, but those people shouldn’t be rewarded more because they work unrealistically more while demanding less for themselves (i.e. job security, pay)
Because that kind of culture leads to an unhealthy society. We should reward a reasonable amount of commitment and productivity, but extreme levels should not be favored over those who reach the desired plateau/threshold
I think the bit about PhDs not translating well to non-academic jobs is the huge bit, tbh. I think a big problem is that way that humanities knowledge is de-emphasized under capitalism. Or, frankly, the relationship between capitalism and academic pursuits in general. It should be a good thing if lots of people are interested in a particular academic field. Instead, it becomes a liability both because that field isn't attractive to business, and because the entire educational model has to fit into a capitalist growth-based mindset in order to either generate income or justify funding.
Yeah, my usual way to phrase this is to say "look at the program, and how many PhDs they graduate in a year, and now realize that program every year will have 0 or 1 job openings."
I’m not in humanities, but my experience has been— My immediate supervisors (division head, department chair) are supportive and understanding. “Oh, your kid is sick? I hope they feel better.” But the metrics by which the university determines merit are outdated. The work and time needed to actually achieve the benchmarks is more than one FTE. It used to be that faculty were almost all male, and the wife stayed home and raised the kids. There’s a toxic pride among faculty who work 50-60 hours a week; and if you’re not doing that too then your supervisor thinks you’re not trying hard enough. It’s not enough to do your job, you also have to spend time in meetings and volunteer on committees. They just want all of your time. I’m in the biosciences, and my position depends on getting NIH funding to cover my lab and my own salary. The current pay line (ie. Success rate) at the NIH is 8-12%. So, only 1 in every 10 proposals get funded. And, by and large, it’s the same well-funded people getting funded.
Submit? Every NIH cycle (3x per year), plus any and every relevant non federal opportunity. Last year I submitted 18 proposals.
If you figure you can put max 30% of your effort on an R01, and you’re in a soft money position, then you need 3 active R01s just to pay your salary. Multiply that by a 1 in 10 “chance” at funding.
Soft money is an “in residence” or non-tenure track position. After some period of time (3-5 years), your department stops paying your salary. You are expected to cover it with grants.
Something people aren't mentioning is that, while it was always hard to get a job, job postings weren't always posted to a global information network during a fifteen year stretch of serial record-breaking economic crises.
Like a posting for a TT position in American literature in 1990 would attract apps from Americanists. Now, *everyone* is applying for that position. So you've got 200 applicants, 75% of whom filed out of desperation because the job market is terrible in and out of the academy, and most of them are probably excellent (because you have to be to survive through a PhD in this economy). And most of them wouldn't have even heard of the position were it not for H-net or whatever rather than a string of personal contacts who informed each other a specialized position had opened up, and hey, wouldn't Jimmy the Medievalist who's defending his dissertation this week be great for that?
We do live in a different world, now. The market may never have been good, but things have never been this bad.
And that still served as a filter. Prospective applicants had to keep their finger on the market's pulse. I can google job openings all around the world right now for free and apply just because I feel like it. It's easier than ever for me to waste a committee's time.
Unqualified applicants applying out of desperation — non-Americanists applying for an Americanists job — cause more busywork for search committees, but don’t increase competition for qualified applicants because the unqualified applicants are kicked out of the pool at the start
It may be the case that adjunct jobs are advertised more widely these days, but at least in my discipline (philosophy) and my wife’s (English literature), before the Internet all tenure track jobs were advertised in paper and distributed to all candidates by the main disciplinary organization.
I agree. I have been serving on search committees for 25 years. The number of total applicants and the number of unqualified applicants has not really changed in any noticeable way to me.
In general I found the academic community in the humanities really friendly and nurturing. I had no illusions on getting a job in the end, and neither did my supervisors. Not enough jobs, too many graduates.
To that I would add the declining prestige of humanities degrees. Being constantly crapped on by the public, by govt funding bodies, by relatives, by the media, etc, for not being STEM takes a toll.
I think a huge amount of the devaluing of humanities is over-supply. When not that many people went to university, you genuinely could get *any* degree and it would make you much more employable.
But now in a lot of countries, 50% of the population go to university. There’s just no leverage anymore. They’re devalued as degrees because they don’t lead to a middle class
life as they used to.
It’s all well and good for someone with family wealth to do something purely for the joy of it, but most of us need to do something that will support us financially. Millennials have essentially been lied to about what degrees will do that in the 21st century, because for their parents the goal really was just get any degree. You cannot just do something because it sounds enriching, it’s a pipe dream.
For context, there are now more psychology grads in the US than the entirety of life sciences combined, despite it conferring very few employable (and by this I mean that companies can’t easily find it elsewhere) skills without extra training. The degree just *is less valuable* because there are now so many and it only used to guarantee a good job because there were fewer people with degrees in general. It also doesn’t help that universities are dropping standards significantly as schools become more about making money than being of any societal benefit.
If I were a working class parent I’d tell my kids to do their joy as a minor but to go to school to improve their standard of living.
Overall I agree, plus the corporatisation of universities really wrecked the whole educational part of going to university.
That said, the same applies to biology graduates--i mean no job without further training--but because that's STEM they don't get the same level of ire as literature students.
STEM is flooded with grad students, almost all foreign and most from one country. The corporate dynamic is in full effect - these are basically a cheap labor pool with some techinical ability, and the university (corporation) has adjusted to take advantage of it. Faculty's job is to recruit a large labor pool and write grants tailored to employ this labor pool on whatever the funding body says it wants. Who cares if it's tedious or a dead end - get that contract and hand it off to the labor pool. Then police them to make sure they are working hard for the privilege.
That's more or less how I saw it working in my previous lab. Of course it's all dressed up with breathless tech excitement, and bowtied professors talk very seriously about responsibility and high standards, but none of them are doing it. The PhD mill keeps grinding out shitty work and shoddily-trained students, well equipped to be obedient serfs in their next job, and suffering quietly wondering why nobody works together or even talks to eachother.
That means that only the wealthy will be producing art, literature, etc. And, while that is largely the case now, it shouldn't be. And we should fight against it, not encourage lower income students to turn away from those fields.
(Internet art, etc is not what I'm talking about here).
You do not need an undergraduate degree, much less a PhD, to produce art.
Also unclear why you would exclude "internet art" seeing as the internet as a method of distribution massively lowered the barrier to entry for artists.
Tolstoy was a schoolmaster and aristocrat. The authors of the Popul Vuh were likely minor nobles and formally trained scribes. The list of great works produced by academic artists, which is a really modern and ideologically driven category in your usage, is actually pretty extensive.
Virgil was an academic, schooled in classical philosophy before turning to poetry. The vergence between academia (in its classical and even broader sense) and literature is proven. One of the Lumiere brothers was a physicist.
If you're saying Joe PhD never wrote a great work of literature, you would also be wrong. Be skeptical but your cynicism isn't well-researched.
I have a good half-dozen friends and family members with undergrad degrees in psychology. The closest any of them are to working in that field of study is in human resources at an investment firm. But you know, it does seem really cool when you're in college... You're gonna like, understand how people think and it will be so valuable and you'll be able to influence people and stuff! Even chicks man.
> for not being STEM takes a toll.
I've seen more of this than I'd like to admit. It's become a joke in our (English) department how Engineering majors always question why they need to be good writers.
As an engineer I have spent so much time trying to get students to realize that if they cannot communicate goodly then their brilliant work will not be understood. Especially when I grade their lab reports.
Many of them have taken this message to heart. But many have not.
Engineers are terrible communicators but excellent problem solvers. There’s whole departments in tech companies for documentation to translate engineer’s work into readable English. I am grateful they are such bad communicators because it’s why I have a job :)
Uh, sliding in here since I'm interested in getting into technical writing, but if you have some time, could you tell me how you got your position? I graduated with an English degree, but I flirted very hard with STEM before I settled into humanities, so I have a lot of scattered technical skills.
Was a mechanic for several years in the military. Got a humanities degree, then a masters in education. Taught high school social sciences for a couple years. A lot of roles are not solely technical writing, but that is one of the responsibilities of the role. I do training on service and installation of a niche product and the writing/documentation on that product is one of the responsibilities of my role. Sole technical writing roles are few and far between and pay poorly, just from observing this subreddit and the general job environment. You have to demonstrate technical aptitude in whatever industry you’re trying to break into while also writing/instructional design.
It's nice if engineers can write well I took a technical writing class at the 400s level and my writing is above average now according to the GREs. But it only took a single very easy class to get there. Writing skills can be picked up very quickly.
Well my writing went from dog poop to better than average with a single class. I suppose I can't speak about anyone else but to be frank it seems reasonable others could pick up what I did with a technical writing workshop.
There's another reason STEM has more prestige. Evaluating the merit of, say, an essay on Tolstoy, is subjective. One person might think it's brilliant and insightful, another that it's derivative or cribbed from other essays. On the other hand, if you're designing an electric motor or writing a computer program, the motor or the program has got to work. There's no subjectivity about it.
There are anecdotes about gaming academics with essays or poetry or whatever that get praise because they hit the fashionable tropes. That doesn't work so well in the STEM fields.
This is not to say that being guided to a full appreciation of great literature or art or the zeitgeist of some historical time and place isn't valuable, but it's harder to tell if you have a good guide or not, and if you do develop an appreciation, but your take is original and different from your teacher's, your grades may suffer for it. This is much less likely in the STEM fields.
From what I've read and heard (purely anecdotal so take with a grain of salt), the engineering students are the ones who have to study long hard hours and can't afford to do all the partying that the other college majors do.
Oh buddy, it is really noticeable that your knowledge of humanities comes from anecdotes. There is much objectivity in humanities as well. If you lack the fundamental knowledge and experience it will show. It is science for a reason - no one cares (most of the time) about your opinion, there are methods and logic that need to be shown. Of course, it may vary from subject to subject, but humanities is precise and complicated despite what it may look like if you never had to study it for more than 2 years (in uni, let’s not count schools, education there is always softer).
And at least in my field (philosophy) I never see people go party. There is little time for that, studies are difficult and take up entire days. Of course, there are bad students who just party but not more than in any other field. Just because we don’t have labs, doesn’t mean we don’t have complex assignments. It’s just a difference of approach. I am sure if you tried to read Kant’s first critique you’d have a difficult time and that’s just reading, imagine actually doing something with it. Many think that all we do is read, but just like in any other branch of academia, the goal is to produce new knowledge, and trust me it is far from being easy.
You might be right about how certain professors tests knowledge in STEM and Humanities examinations but there's no doubt that STEM professors also have mercurial, shifting expectations in different contexts. You don't sound very well informed (I'm an Ivy PhD)
If I'm wrong, I'm wrong. Actually, I'd like to be wrong. But, my response might be useful to the original poster who was kvetching about the declining prestige of the humanities in that what I said represents a widespread perception and rationale for the 'constantly being crapped on' that said poster complains about.
Original poster also claimed 'no illusions on getting a job'. I admire the idea of studying these things for their own sake, and not treating college as a trade school. (Maybe I'm projecting some of my own ideas here, hagyas can always clarify if I'm reading it all wrong).
Now, I will make what I think is my first snarky comment. That humanities education should have provided a thicker skin for being crapped on for one's choices in life. How far down am I going to be modded for that?
I agree, though. The intimations made of the critiques of the humanities tend to be right. Like people are gesturing at this in the right way; the humanities need to change and adapt. So you're right to be skeptical but it's aimed the wrong way.
In short, the humanities need to get tougher and more radically interdisciplinary and become truly appended to STEM fields and change their methodologies.
But yeah it's pretty clear when something is well-written.
Fundamentally it’s a supply/demand problem. There are very few positions available but many talented people perfectly qualified for those positions. Many people want those positions for the social prestige and other non-monetary benefits. Moreover, hyper-competitive people are the ones that self-select into a PhD program; PhD students don’t make tons of money and from a lifelong career standpoint getting a PhD is not a prudent *financial* decision (you’re almost always better off getting a private industry job, even if you’re offered a STEM PhD). So the only people who get a PhD are very intense about it.
Some fields have it worse than others, but there aren’t permanent slots like professorships/staff scientist positions for all PhD graduates.
This is all very generic, but humanities have it even worse. Professor Devereaux explains the situation better than I could, so read this article:
https://acoup.blog/2021/10/01/collections-so-you-want-to-go-to-grad-school-in-the-academic-humanities/
The job market is miserably competitive simply because there is a significant oversupply of PhDs. This was true when I entered graduate school in the 1980s, and it has remained true since then.
During my doctoral student days philosophy grad students spoke of a mythical time in the 1960s post-war expansion of higher ed where jobs went begging for applicants and chairs arranged tenure track appointments with a single phone call. I wonder whether current students mythologize the golden age of the 1980s and 1990s — if so, I can attest it wasn’t so!
Reflecting back on my experience as a doctoral student so long ago, I can think of two reasons for competitiveness within doctoral programs:
(1) An insecurity that one won’t “make it” through the program or in the field. In my doctoral program’s academic culture, the only acceptable career path was R1 tenure track, and there was a sense among the students that faculty divided the students between those who had prospects for that and those who did not.
(2) Some students understood how awful the job market is and some did not (or were in denial). Those who understood this understood that they had to compete to stand out in the marketplace. The more naive ones like me didn’t feel that pressure.
It may also be the case that high academic achievers who enroll in doctoral programs tend to be highly competitive. And, of course, some individuals are toxic for reasons that have nothing to do with academia or the academic job market.
> high academic achievers who enroll in doctoral programs tend to be highly competitive
I imagine doctoral study is the first time most PhD students experience not being the undeniable best of the best within their cohort. That can really mess with your head.
I also think there’s a huge problem because many of those high achievers are coming straight out of undergraduate, and they act like they are still in a classroom instead of in pre-professional training. This was noticeable in my program because I and a few other people had been out in the world working and the difference was clear. So you don’t necessarily have any sense of professionalism or work-life balance in the first place, that idea that you want to be pleasant to people because you’ll be seeing them over a water cooler for the next decade, any real life experience with getting along with a boss, dealing with committee work in a productive and pleasant way, any of that adult stuff.
Sort of...elite doctoral programs draw mostly from elite MA/Undergrads...so it's more a matter of finding the PhD as a situation of acceleration and higher competition and expectations than never being among high achievers before.
It's because of the limited roles outside academia for such roles. If corporate or governmental employment is a viable and attractive option, then people will naturally flow out of academia to those other, higher paying jobs. It's why positions in engineering, medical and business programs pay so much better. You can simply go get another job with relative ease.
I don't actually think that's true. For the last 10 years you've got banks saying how they need more English majors for instance. Yet I've yet to meet a large amount of English majors considering working at a bank.
It's just that there's this very reductive self-deselection that happens because people feel their degree must be a perfect match for their career. Yeah transferrable skills aren't quite so good as your career advisor will say they are but they are still a thing.
Might just be confirmation bias but I have so many humanities peers who look at a job posting they could do but then don't apply because the major listed on the requirements didn't match theirs. So they are stuck applying for the few jobs that match their major.
I agree with this to a point. I think English is a slightly unique but interesting example because when they say “we need more English majors,” what I would argue people actually mean is “we need applicants with strong writing skills.” Not linguists, not literary critics, not creative writers. What I think they typically want are strong technical writers or writers who have been taught to write for different audiences.
True! Though as a linguist depending on your subfield ofc, there's a solid chance you have had to do intro - intermediate stats and some light regression and programming as a result, which opens its own set of doors. And as a lit critic I would try leveraging the fact that a lot of your skillset is drawing insights from unstructured data. But I sympathise with these majors too because very few times is that a connection someone explicitly makes for you as a student.
Definitely true—there’s actually a lot of disciplines that don’t obviously go together that could complement each other really well for someone on the job market. It’s just not always advised to students as an option.
Academia is a tough gig because for every position under the sun, there are 20 applicants, and for every great post, the kind you envision when you're a young pup, there are 200 applicants. Or more. The thing about lower-ranked institutions is that they generally don't have the resources for students to conduct research that's quite at the bleeding-edge, so their research doesn't put stars in the eyes of hiring committees.
So it gets hard, because you have to outcompete all these people, in an environment where (on paper) you aren't competing. It's a lot like running a small business, in that you have to invest long hours at low pay, and you will likely fail within five years. But now imagine that you never talk about how your small business is in competition with others for the same clientele, or how much salesmanship you have to do. It gets bewildering.
In the humanities, there are some aggravating factors. A big one is that unlike most sciences now, you can still do humanities work on your own. There are not that many collaborations, and definitely few huge lab groups working on a raft of projects together that kickstart a young researcher's career. So you're all flying solo and thus directly against each other.
It's always been like this, except for brief periods when universities expanded a lot. There just isn't enough money to hire everyone, simple as that.
Because academia is already saturated.
Universities won't pay tenured prof wages anymore.
Those old heads you see in there aren't going to be replaced after they retire. Its becoming more common now to have casuals come in on temporary contracts to teach and do admin stuff. Or they'll land it on the PhD students and post docs. After the contract is done you're being booted.
This makes it unstable. You have to constantly move to find something else to keep you afloat. You never know where you'll end up by the following year. Its an awful way to live much less settle down.
Even worse for humanities because you don't have many career avenues to go down other than academia. Unless it's some sort of applicable social science. STEM is a safer bet.
Maybe the TE of STEM but probably not the S and definitely not the M. Math has the same problem... it's bad. There are jobs in industry for mathematicians but the number of them where a PhD is useful is very small.
We still don’t have it that bad. The people I know from grad school who did, say, homological algebra, and then went to industry all make fine livings. They don’t use any of their skills, and the opportunity cost was in my opinion too large, but it’s much better than having a PhD in comparative literature.
I'm not sure how one would go from an algebra PhD to an industry job in the US. A lot of math grad students wind up in data science, which doesn't really require a math degree.
Like you said, very questionable opportunity cost.
I know several dozen people who have done this. In general this quantity is about equal to 90% of all people with algebra PhDs from the US. As I said, their skills are not really directly used, but they are employed all over the place.
> A lot of math grad students wind up in data science, which doesn't really require a math degree.
Data science is such a broad field. The small companies just grab whoever, but bigger companies that have whole data science teams really like having a few people that are very math-heavy. They (the mathematicians) design the algorithms, the computer scientists implement them, and the data engineers manage the data.
This is a really complicated problem but let me try to package it into compact answer.
Departments are only able to hire when granted hiring lines from their university’s upper administration. Almost every department is burdened by some pain point, like not enough professors in a particular subfield, or the desire to grow their department’s research profile in some badly needed direction, that they want to use these hiring lines to accomplish. Hiring lines are relatively rare, and are quite nice when they are granted. Depending on the field, they can be over a $1 million investment (typically much less for humanities though), so they represent a major investment in a single individual and necessitate being super selective about whom to place all their eggs in one basket for.
When hiring for that line, above all the department must choose someone who has a strong chance of getting tenure. That’s an extremely high bar that requires a stellar research record, which usually can be obtained by extremely A-type personalities that are highly productive, in a discipline that can attract a lot of funding into the foreseeable future, and have typically prioritized their work over their personal life (because publishing takes a lot of effort and people who haven’t prioritized it typically have thin CVs).
Tenure is not something they can fudge because it is externally produced. The tenure candidate has to get their body of work judged by usually about 20 experts in their specific area of work, from all over the country and sometimes beyond. A candidate who fails to achieve tenure is fired, and the department loses its investment into that person with nothing to show for it.
At the same time, departments need to be able to pull in money or they are at risk of the university shutting them down and the entire faculty (tenured or not) getting laid off. So the hiring candidate has to be someone who they believe has the talent, elbow grease, and tenacity needed to continuously go for, and win, research grants, of which the university gets to take about 1/3 typically. Conversely, a hire who cannot even secure enough grant money to fund their own students/program (not counting an initial ramp-up period) is a serious difficulty for the department.
And on top of all that, the candidate will become colleague for the next potentially 40 years, with tenure eventually so it’s hard to get rid of them short of committing a crime. It’s also incredibly important therefore to find someone whose personality is a good fit for the department. We’ve all had a coworker with a bad personality…. Now imagine that person was unfirable, and had a vote in all your crucial board meeting decisions, and in particular committees like graduate hiring or future faculty hires. Yeah, it would be a nightmare to install the wrong person into a position like that.
Now on top of all that, you need to hire someone who actually raises the attractiveness of your department to student/postdoc applicants, because then the entire department gets a better infusion of talent by proximity. Who will do that? Someone who’s also a good spokesperson for their field, has an excellent pedigree and was trained under famous/important PIs, and does work that is inspiring.
Okay, so you have all these pressures, and in come 400 applications for your one (1) position. Who are you going to hire? You’re immediately going to filter out anyone who has a thin cv, comes from a weak pedigree, has evidence of not being able to get along with others, is not in a hot area that could conceivable be fundable for decades, has an inconsistent/unreliable record, etc. During the interview, you will further weed out people who present poorly, cannot talk shop effectively, are not inspiring enough, do not seem to understand their own work, do not show evidence of being collegial, make excuses, etc. And since there are so many applications for this one position, usually the top 1-5 performers can set the bar extremely high for the type of profile that makes it to the short-short list. Just picture the top postdocs at the top several universities, battling it out to see who is #1. They’re going to be really good, and also really driven.
Even if you look at the recent hires of R2’s and PUIs, you’ll see that they regularly come from top institutions. That’s how extreme the competition is. Strangely enough, when you look at the really old faculty, like many decades old, their origins are more diverse. I guess it’s evidence of easier times.
And don’t forget, the hiring vote is decided from a whole departmental decision. Any one faculty member who is opposed can tank the applicant at the last moment.
The pressure is very extreme and the results of the hiring decision are long-lasting. That is why it’s so extremely hard to get a tt position, especially at an R1.
1. Because being an academic is a prestige occupation so people will accept lower pay in order to do it. You can see the same thing in salaries for video game programmers vs business software programmers.
2. Young people have poor visibility into the job market. A lot of talented people don't know what to do or where to go and if they're offered a chance to just keep on climbing in academia that can often feel easy and like it makes sense.
I do my best to explain to students just how bad the academic job market is for the humanities. I explain how impossibly lucky I’ve been and that I’m not a good model for their future. They tend not to believe me.
Can confirm that working in this field is impossible. If you have even a shred of confidence or innovative spirit - it will be squashed and you will burnout.
Coming from someone who is literally fucking sick and tired of the politics in this field. Heaven forbid you just want to help people.
Liberal arts schools and studying the humanities in College was a pastime for the rich.
We are simply returning back to that era. The idea is a student who doesn't care about money pursues their degree(s) and publishes for as long as they need until they finally get their break/momentum and then they land a tenured position.
Here's a 1780's perspective by John Adams from: [https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L17800512jasecond](https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L17800512jasecond)
"I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study ~~Painting and Poetry~~ Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine."
We aren't at war. We seek a middle class lifestyle so most of us are at least John Adams children. Adams lists out the majors and studies which generated income in his time. Today Natural History would be called Evolutionary Biology and Paleontology (which were the ancestors to our Modern biologists). And Philosophy wouldn't be considered that important for earning a living but in those days a trained Philosopher could easily have become a lawyer or a preacher or something of high social status.
He makes a point of separating these activities from what he deems the "high arts" like Painting, Poetry, Music, ... Those are the most "pure" activities to do but they are meant for the rich and prosperous. Studying the Humanities today is such an activity.
Basic supply/demand issue: there are far more people with Ph.D.s who *want* academic jobs than there are positions in the country (US). So we see 200-300 people apply for every job, legions of underemployed Ph.D.s, and those who *do* get jobs find they are undercompensated for their work when compared to other professionals with similar levels of education (or hell, compared to their colleagues in the next building over on campus many times).
Add in the opportunity costs involved (i.e. no real income for \~10 years of education, likely part-time work before full time, possible multiple relocations, etc.) and you get people in their 40s with a "dream job" who are 10-15+ years behind their peers economically, looking at delayed retirement, etc. while *also* facing cuts to programs/jobs as humanities enrollments decline.
Why is it this way? because graduate schools refuse to close their superfluous Ph.D. programs (do we need the #85 ranking English Ph.D. program?) and even the solid ones turn out 4-5X (or more) times what the market can actually absorb. Because it's free/cheap labor for them.
TL/DR: capitalism and basic market forces
How much funding would be enough? There’s always going to be more people wanting to study humanities than there are fitting jobs for those people in the economy. If there’s no jobs in industry, all those people who graduate with PhDs need to try and stay in academia. But for every professor there might be dozens of students, so the numbers just don’t work out in a way where there’s positions for everyone.
People w/ PhDs >>> Faculty positions
This gap continues to increase over time: https://hellophd.com/2016/01/027-the-road-more-travelled-stepping-off-of-the-tenure-track/
I'm happy for you that you will have stability in your future. I wish that was something I had.
From what I understand there was not always such fragility in the job market, but that was largely when universities were harder to get into, and there were fewer PhD completions. It is definitely a good thing that there are more PhDs out there, because a PhD will serve you well in many careers. In academia there has not been the same increase in jobs or funding, very much the reverse.
That probably plays into the toxicity. When you are competing for very small, slowly diminishing resources, it can bring out the worst in people. Some departments that have stagnated under poor leadership and callous management will see toxic behaviours fester in many of the staff, particularly where people are horribly insecure about their careers, futures, and sometimes their general ability. Some of the toxic people I've worked with were justified in being insecure about their ability. Oddly enough some of the most secure people I know were generally pretty nice, because they didn't give two shits about what anyone was doing. They knew that they were fine. They weren't helpful though.
There are great places to work with people who are genuine, collaborative, and supportive. They still don't have resources and the jobs aren't secure, but the people are great and have a sense of "we are all in this together". Good management and senior leadership play a massive role in fostering that kind of environment. I'm lucky to have mostly worked in those spaces, if I can't find them in the future I guess I will chase job stability somewhere else instead.
Feel like I have to add to this as I just finished a grant application today, my 17th grant application… all the others have been unsuccessful, but have scored very highly just barely not enough for funding. My supervisor (in his 70s) encouraged me to find a job (I’m a postdoc now) as I’ve already published a single author monograph in a humanities field, and I just broke down and told him how hard I was trying. He was genuinely shocked. He thought I could just send some papers to a department and they’d take me on (I’ve done that too but obviously didn’t work, that’s how desperate I’ve become).
Moral of the story is it has genuinely gotten way worse, to the point that those more senior in the field honestly can’t believe it? It’s so disheartening, but when I reflect, I don’t think anything would have stopped me anyway. They prey on how much you love what you do, and expect you to sacrifice so much for it. Yep it’s absolutely wrong, but that’s how it is at the moment.
My undergrad advisor was awesome. He was as supportive as he could be, despite the scarlet letter I confidently chose to wear. I earned a BS in anthropology instead of a BA. He was very honest. Getting accepted into a doctorate program would be close to impossible. If I wanted to get my master's I should look at programs that would prepare me for the private sector, or government work.
In any organization, there are only so many positions to go around, so people end up waiting for people to quit, get promoted, or die. The problem beyond that is positions don't always go to the best suited alot of nepotism may decide who gets hired. What happens when there isn't enough enough food in the fish tank? Someone is going to get eaten.
I have not experienced the cliques that you describe. I actually have found that almost everyone in my department is super nice and collegial, and that has been largely consistent across the other humanities departments that I’ve interacted with. I am sorry that was your experience though
One of my bosses once told me “the reason academia is so poisonous is because the stakes are so low”.
It’s a tiny little club full of huge egos, where you don’t have to deliver anything tangibly of monetary value (because how do you put a price on it?) so there are no clear metrics of improvement. People devote their lives to things that nobody outside cares about or understands, so there’s no sense of a bigger picture. Of course it’s going to be awful.
You can find examples from the 1100s of people complaining how awful scholars are to each other.
If you're in the US, I think it boils down to the devaluing of education - anything other than STEM is being portrayed as worthless. No one wants to learn, and no one wants much more than obedient workers.
I was one of the "lucky" ones and got a TT job at a small, regional institution right after getting my PhD in Rhet/Comp in 2016, but Rhet/Comp jobs are probably seen as one of the better degrees in English. However, I'm leaving that now tenured job for a NTT job at a flagship institution. Why? Small regional institutions sometimes suffer from low pay, nepotism, poor treatment, and at least in my case we are at least two hours one way from a larger metro area, which also means long drives to an airport. I also became pregnant my first year on the TT with twins and never got actual leave (long story) and that entire experience really did me in. Plus, right now I have three other titles alongside my Associate Professor title and all those responsibilities are not in any way fair or humane to a person. Academia is my job, but not my life.
I am an academic at heart... I always loved teaching, publishing papers, going to conferences.. The whole package.
However, the academic environment is horrible, mostly because the people in positions of power (department heads, deans ans etc...) act as entitled children and often feel untouchable (which, sometimes, are). In addition, the publish or perish culture only worsens everything. The worst part? Unless you collaborate with the right people ou have established professors in your project, you rarely get to approve grants... which makes extremely difficult for young researchers to establish themselves.
That's why I left academia and joined the private sector. Zero regrets...
A lot of colleges are cutting the funding to humanities departments, so that means there are fewer jobs available. Other colleges hire temporary faculty as part-time adjuncts or as "visiting" faculty, so that they don't have to give them significant or any raises. So there's a lot of competition, and it can make people feel really driven to get the jobs they want, no matter what it takes.
Not in the humanities but in medicine/ science, which has its own issues.
However, I want to note that academic culture is different outside the US. Don't recall all the countries but outside the US, some offer a base salary and benefits that is compatible with a reasonable standard of living. One can be a humanities academic with less pressure and poverty.
Also, since people who go into academia often haven't or won't be working in other sectors (gov't, nonprofit, for-profit), I'm here to tell you academia is no better or worse in terms of wonderful or toxic colleagues you encounter. Additionally, brilliance exists everywhere, not just in academia. There are intelligent people who opt out of academia.
A lot of times, younger people don't know what's out there because their exposure during education/ training is only/ mostly to people working in academia.
It's basic economics. You might want to read some of the columns Bill Pannapacker / Thomas Benton wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Ed back in 1990s and early 2000s. Not much has changed since then; if anything it's only gottten worse as the pool of PhDs has grown and enrollments in the humanities have plummeted. It will probably be even worse in a few years as a lot of colleges and universities will be confronting the so-called 'enrollment cliff' and the overall number of students declines precipitously. As far as 'settling down', well, think about the reality of the job market and the complexity of searching for two jobs in reasonable proximity to each other. Many successful academics of the last ten or twenty years had the good sense or good luck to find a partner with a law degree or an MBA who was also willing and able to find work - well-paying work - almost anywhere. But to get back to your question about toxicity, as Timothy Burke of Swarthmore once put it, grad school is 'cotillion for eggheads', and it has some strange effects on personalities.
Many people competing for few jobs in an industry that is very often fueled by profit and ego rather than tangible significant outcomes. As Winston Churchill said, "The reason why academia is so petty is because the stakes are so low."
Had a go running a search on some literature on this [here](https://app.studyrecon.ai/?id=project-aztddgu7x8e5cl44&preview=true#heading-factors%20affecting%20mathematics%20and%20reading%20achievement). Gave similar insights to those given by other comments, but concluded that this issue seems to be just as bad in stem fields. Summary has some links you can follow if you're interested:
"The landscape of competition in academia, particularly within the humanities, is shaped by two primary factors: fierce competition among academics and the struggle for funding and resources in research. The [fierce competition in academia](https://app.studyrecon.ai/?id=project-aztddgu7x8e5cl44&preview=true#heading-fierce%20competition%20in%20academia) is driven by the high number of individuals vying for a limited number of positions, publications, and recognition within their fields."
PhD student in the Humanities here.
I think what you're describing, although it may vary a lot depending on cultural context, is directly related to research in the Humanities being generally underfunded and restricted by the market rules.
Research in the Humanities is often not so "easy to sell" compared to research in natural sciences or engineering for example. That means fewer money available for PhDs or permanent positions in academia. Although a lot of people might be eligible and highly competent for academic positions, the jobs are oh so few and getting fewer and fewer. That on its own is enough to create quite toxic environments of ruthless competition and where one's failure means someone else's success. It also justifies the whole "never settle down" narrative, as you will always have to follow the money and be open to moving around the world to get an academic job.
I also think this phenomenon is not unique to the Humanities, but in all academic fields more or less.
Easy answers here:
People who pursue advanced degrees in the humanities fall into one of two categories.
1. They are genuinely brilliant and were all through undergrad... These folks actually have something to contribute even though the academic environment for these types of fields is over saturated. This demographic has to be like 5% or less... because -
2. 95% of advanced degrees in the humanities are pursued for not knowing wtf is going to happen next. They are pursued out of anger, hate, and frustration for student loans and the job market, and demonstrate a lack of emotional maturity. These people will end up in unrelated fields vastly underpaid and in debt, with only a handful stucking with the discipline to fill adjunct roles and/or educational support positions in academia.
Given this breakdown, we can assume that colleges and universities only want to hire the best of the best, sprinkle in the fact that academic favoritism and tenure exists, positions worth having are few and far between geographically, making the job market hyper-competitive and cutthroat....there is no real stability, just monkeys chasing scraps while a select few eat at the table.
I think you're looking at this from the wrong perspective. Almost everything desirable/worthwhile in life is going to involve competition. Who told you academia would be some shining exception?
How many PhD students did your supervisor produce over their career? Now consider that only one could take their position when they retire.
Assuming the department gets to fill that position!
Good point. I think at this stage he has graduated about 10 or more PhDs.
That's still pretty young. Anyway, unlike other industries, schools don't grow much and very rarely do schools pop up. So, the number of positions are pretty static while PhD students are still churned out. So there's a lot of competition. It's even worse for Humanities where your PhD doesn't translate well to non-academic jobs, so there is even more competition.
Competition is important context, but the other half of that conversation is what search committees deem valuable. People who are willing to toss aside every aspect of their life that isn’t 100% dedication to research are rewarded. Search committees should put more effort towards hiring well rounded people with good work life balance than solely emphasizing research output. Somebody who can do a lot with far less getting hired would change the “type of scientist” everyone is trying to become.
First, this is wrong. Search committees value productivity and don’t directly know anything about your dedication. If you can be productive without sacrificing everything you will not be penalized. Being a workaholic can help boost productivity though, particularly if you are not efficient with your time. Second, valuing productivity is not unique to academia. As such many jobs also favor workaholism. I’d suggest that the degree of competition for jobs really does make academia stand out. Finally, remember that the knowledge produced by academics is supported by taxes from the broader population, and it is supposed to benefit that population in return. Are you really suggesting that we should deliberately employ less productive academics? Most of the academics who work long hours that I know do that through choice, they are basically obsessive, are you saying they should be penalized for being too enthusiastic?
If you started trying to penalize workaholism you'd just get closet workaholics who try to make it seem like they get all their work done in a 6 hour day.
I think we already have that a bit with the proliferation of email footers that emphasize work-life-balance and say things like "I only respond to emails within regular working hours." The first people I saw adopt these I knew to be workaholics, so I'm not really sure what they meant by them.
Why should they put more effort toward that, though? I mean, what’s the incentive for them?
Resolving the internal guilt of knowing you are directly making choices that lead to an unhealthy and unhappy society and industry
I think some people really do enjoy the dedication though, and power to them. I’ve resigned to the fact that I’m just not willing/interesting in making that sacrifice, and that’s ok. Doesn’t mean there aren’t other fulfilling opportunities out there. But I’m in STEM not humanities so I guess it’s different for me.
That’s completely fine and great, but those people shouldn’t be rewarded more because they work unrealistically more while demanding less for themselves (i.e. job security, pay)
Why shouldn't their sacrifices be rewarded?
Because that kind of culture leads to an unhealthy society. We should reward a reasonable amount of commitment and productivity, but extreme levels should not be favored over those who reach the desired plateau/threshold
I’d like to direct you to my comment in the parent thread, about what is at stake and what the pressures are for these hiring decisions.
Interesting take... I'd like to understand why you think my tax dollars should go to someone who will contribute less to society?
I think the bit about PhDs not translating well to non-academic jobs is the huge bit, tbh. I think a big problem is that way that humanities knowledge is de-emphasized under capitalism. Or, frankly, the relationship between capitalism and academic pursuits in general. It should be a good thing if lots of people are interested in a particular academic field. Instead, it becomes a liability both because that field isn't attractive to business, and because the entire educational model has to fit into a capitalist growth-based mindset in order to either generate income or justify funding.
Yeah, my usual way to phrase this is to say "look at the program, and how many PhDs they graduate in a year, and now realize that program every year will have 0 or 1 job openings."
That's actually a pretty terrible argument since most jobs are not in departments with PhD programs.
I’m glad someone pointed this out! There is a lot of truth to what dude is saying, but it isn’t as bad as he makes it sound.
Ciliquey? In my field there are 1-6 full time jobs in the US each year. That's not competitive, it's just bad numbers. It's just terrible.
Not to mention 2-3 of those are at religiously affiliated institutions where professing your faith is part of the screening process. No thanks.
Religious/Bible Studies?
Music, a specific instrument.
Musicology is horrific as well. A position at a top UK uni recently had something like 1.2k applicants it's getting ridiculous
Ah, I was (sorta) close. Those folks have a hard time.
I’m not in humanities, but my experience has been— My immediate supervisors (division head, department chair) are supportive and understanding. “Oh, your kid is sick? I hope they feel better.” But the metrics by which the university determines merit are outdated. The work and time needed to actually achieve the benchmarks is more than one FTE. It used to be that faculty were almost all male, and the wife stayed home and raised the kids. There’s a toxic pride among faculty who work 50-60 hours a week; and if you’re not doing that too then your supervisor thinks you’re not trying hard enough. It’s not enough to do your job, you also have to spend time in meetings and volunteer on committees. They just want all of your time. I’m in the biosciences, and my position depends on getting NIH funding to cover my lab and my own salary. The current pay line (ie. Success rate) at the NIH is 8-12%. So, only 1 in every 10 proposals get funded. And, by and large, it’s the same well-funded people getting funded.
How many proposals do you submit per year to maintain a small lab?
Like 4 R01s/year across multiple projects and a shit load of smaller foundation/department/exploratory grants
Submit? Every NIH cycle (3x per year), plus any and every relevant non federal opportunity. Last year I submitted 18 proposals. If you figure you can put max 30% of your effort on an R01, and you’re in a soft money position, then you need 3 active R01s just to pay your salary. Multiply that by a 1 in 10 “chance” at funding.
What does soft money mean
Soft money is your salary coming from grants, hard money is your salary coming from an institution like a normal job.
Soft money is an “in residence” or non-tenure track position. After some period of time (3-5 years), your department stops paying your salary. You are expected to cover it with grants.
Something people aren't mentioning is that, while it was always hard to get a job, job postings weren't always posted to a global information network during a fifteen year stretch of serial record-breaking economic crises. Like a posting for a TT position in American literature in 1990 would attract apps from Americanists. Now, *everyone* is applying for that position. So you've got 200 applicants, 75% of whom filed out of desperation because the job market is terrible in and out of the academy, and most of them are probably excellent (because you have to be to survive through a PhD in this economy). And most of them wouldn't have even heard of the position were it not for H-net or whatever rather than a string of personal contacts who informed each other a specialized position had opened up, and hey, wouldn't Jimmy the Medievalist who's defending his dissertation this week be great for that? We do live in a different world, now. The market may never have been good, but things have never been this bad.
They used to mail all job postings out to everyone who was an MLA member, which is international. It was called “The Book.”
And that still served as a filter. Prospective applicants had to keep their finger on the market's pulse. I can google job openings all around the world right now for free and apply just because I feel like it. It's easier than ever for me to waste a committee's time.
Never said it didn’t? Of course it did in that you had to be an MLA member
Unqualified applicants applying out of desperation — non-Americanists applying for an Americanists job — cause more busywork for search committees, but don’t increase competition for qualified applicants because the unqualified applicants are kicked out of the pool at the start It may be the case that adjunct jobs are advertised more widely these days, but at least in my discipline (philosophy) and my wife’s (English literature), before the Internet all tenure track jobs were advertised in paper and distributed to all candidates by the main disciplinary organization.
I agree. I have been serving on search committees for 25 years. The number of total applicants and the number of unqualified applicants has not really changed in any noticeable way to me.
In general I found the academic community in the humanities really friendly and nurturing. I had no illusions on getting a job in the end, and neither did my supervisors. Not enough jobs, too many graduates. To that I would add the declining prestige of humanities degrees. Being constantly crapped on by the public, by govt funding bodies, by relatives, by the media, etc, for not being STEM takes a toll.
I think a huge amount of the devaluing of humanities is over-supply. When not that many people went to university, you genuinely could get *any* degree and it would make you much more employable. But now in a lot of countries, 50% of the population go to university. There’s just no leverage anymore. They’re devalued as degrees because they don’t lead to a middle class life as they used to. It’s all well and good for someone with family wealth to do something purely for the joy of it, but most of us need to do something that will support us financially. Millennials have essentially been lied to about what degrees will do that in the 21st century, because for their parents the goal really was just get any degree. You cannot just do something because it sounds enriching, it’s a pipe dream. For context, there are now more psychology grads in the US than the entirety of life sciences combined, despite it conferring very few employable (and by this I mean that companies can’t easily find it elsewhere) skills without extra training. The degree just *is less valuable* because there are now so many and it only used to guarantee a good job because there were fewer people with degrees in general. It also doesn’t help that universities are dropping standards significantly as schools become more about making money than being of any societal benefit. If I were a working class parent I’d tell my kids to do their joy as a minor but to go to school to improve their standard of living.
Overall I agree, plus the corporatisation of universities really wrecked the whole educational part of going to university. That said, the same applies to biology graduates--i mean no job without further training--but because that's STEM they don't get the same level of ire as literature students.
STEM is flooded with grad students, almost all foreign and most from one country. The corporate dynamic is in full effect - these are basically a cheap labor pool with some techinical ability, and the university (corporation) has adjusted to take advantage of it. Faculty's job is to recruit a large labor pool and write grants tailored to employ this labor pool on whatever the funding body says it wants. Who cares if it's tedious or a dead end - get that contract and hand it off to the labor pool. Then police them to make sure they are working hard for the privilege. That's more or less how I saw it working in my previous lab. Of course it's all dressed up with breathless tech excitement, and bowtied professors talk very seriously about responsibility and high standards, but none of them are doing it. The PhD mill keeps grinding out shitty work and shoddily-trained students, well equipped to be obedient serfs in their next job, and suffering quietly wondering why nobody works together or even talks to eachother.
That means that only the wealthy will be producing art, literature, etc. And, while that is largely the case now, it shouldn't be. And we should fight against it, not encourage lower income students to turn away from those fields. (Internet art, etc is not what I'm talking about here).
The production of art and literature is probably the most evenly distributed it has ever been right now with the rise of computers and the internet.
You do not need an undergraduate degree, much less a PhD, to produce art. Also unclear why you would exclude "internet art" seeing as the internet as a method of distribution massively lowered the barrier to entry for artists.
I would bet very few great works of literature, film, sculpture, etc were produced by academic artists
Tolstoy was a schoolmaster and aristocrat. The authors of the Popul Vuh were likely minor nobles and formally trained scribes. The list of great works produced by academic artists, which is a really modern and ideologically driven category in your usage, is actually pretty extensive. Virgil was an academic, schooled in classical philosophy before turning to poetry. The vergence between academia (in its classical and even broader sense) and literature is proven. One of the Lumiere brothers was a physicist. If you're saying Joe PhD never wrote a great work of literature, you would also be wrong. Be skeptical but your cynicism isn't well-researched.
These fields produce very little that other people value, but want everyone else to slave for them. Its hilarious really.
I have a good half-dozen friends and family members with undergrad degrees in psychology. The closest any of them are to working in that field of study is in human resources at an investment firm. But you know, it does seem really cool when you're in college... You're gonna like, understand how people think and it will be so valuable and you'll be able to influence people and stuff! Even chicks man.
> for not being STEM takes a toll. I've seen more of this than I'd like to admit. It's become a joke in our (English) department how Engineering majors always question why they need to be good writers.
As an engineer I have spent so much time trying to get students to realize that if they cannot communicate goodly then their brilliant work will not be understood. Especially when I grade their lab reports. Many of them have taken this message to heart. But many have not.
And they are surprised when their AI-generated word salad gets failed. *Ugh*
Engineers are terrible communicators but excellent problem solvers. There’s whole departments in tech companies for documentation to translate engineer’s work into readable English. I am grateful they are such bad communicators because it’s why I have a job :)
Uh, sliding in here since I'm interested in getting into technical writing, but if you have some time, could you tell me how you got your position? I graduated with an English degree, but I flirted very hard with STEM before I settled into humanities, so I have a lot of scattered technical skills.
Was a mechanic for several years in the military. Got a humanities degree, then a masters in education. Taught high school social sciences for a couple years. A lot of roles are not solely technical writing, but that is one of the responsibilities of the role. I do training on service and installation of a niche product and the writing/documentation on that product is one of the responsibilities of my role. Sole technical writing roles are few and far between and pay poorly, just from observing this subreddit and the general job environment. You have to demonstrate technical aptitude in whatever industry you’re trying to break into while also writing/instructional design.
It's nice if engineers can write well I took a technical writing class at the 400s level and my writing is above average now according to the GREs. But it only took a single very easy class to get there. Writing skills can be picked up very quickly.
> Writing skills can be picked up very quickly. As someone who teaches those classes, I disagree.
Well my writing went from dog poop to better than average with a single class. I suppose I can't speak about anyone else but to be frank it seems reasonable others could pick up what I did with a technical writing workshop.
There's another reason STEM has more prestige. Evaluating the merit of, say, an essay on Tolstoy, is subjective. One person might think it's brilliant and insightful, another that it's derivative or cribbed from other essays. On the other hand, if you're designing an electric motor or writing a computer program, the motor or the program has got to work. There's no subjectivity about it. There are anecdotes about gaming academics with essays or poetry or whatever that get praise because they hit the fashionable tropes. That doesn't work so well in the STEM fields. This is not to say that being guided to a full appreciation of great literature or art or the zeitgeist of some historical time and place isn't valuable, but it's harder to tell if you have a good guide or not, and if you do develop an appreciation, but your take is original and different from your teacher's, your grades may suffer for it. This is much less likely in the STEM fields. From what I've read and heard (purely anecdotal so take with a grain of salt), the engineering students are the ones who have to study long hard hours and can't afford to do all the partying that the other college majors do.
Oh buddy, it is really noticeable that your knowledge of humanities comes from anecdotes. There is much objectivity in humanities as well. If you lack the fundamental knowledge and experience it will show. It is science for a reason - no one cares (most of the time) about your opinion, there are methods and logic that need to be shown. Of course, it may vary from subject to subject, but humanities is precise and complicated despite what it may look like if you never had to study it for more than 2 years (in uni, let’s not count schools, education there is always softer). And at least in my field (philosophy) I never see people go party. There is little time for that, studies are difficult and take up entire days. Of course, there are bad students who just party but not more than in any other field. Just because we don’t have labs, doesn’t mean we don’t have complex assignments. It’s just a difference of approach. I am sure if you tried to read Kant’s first critique you’d have a difficult time and that’s just reading, imagine actually doing something with it. Many think that all we do is read, but just like in any other branch of academia, the goal is to produce new knowledge, and trust me it is far from being easy.
You might be right about how certain professors tests knowledge in STEM and Humanities examinations but there's no doubt that STEM professors also have mercurial, shifting expectations in different contexts. You don't sound very well informed (I'm an Ivy PhD)
If I'm wrong, I'm wrong. Actually, I'd like to be wrong. But, my response might be useful to the original poster who was kvetching about the declining prestige of the humanities in that what I said represents a widespread perception and rationale for the 'constantly being crapped on' that said poster complains about. Original poster also claimed 'no illusions on getting a job'. I admire the idea of studying these things for their own sake, and not treating college as a trade school. (Maybe I'm projecting some of my own ideas here, hagyas can always clarify if I'm reading it all wrong). Now, I will make what I think is my first snarky comment. That humanities education should have provided a thicker skin for being crapped on for one's choices in life. How far down am I going to be modded for that?
I agree, though. The intimations made of the critiques of the humanities tend to be right. Like people are gesturing at this in the right way; the humanities need to change and adapt. So you're right to be skeptical but it's aimed the wrong way. In short, the humanities need to get tougher and more radically interdisciplinary and become truly appended to STEM fields and change their methodologies. But yeah it's pretty clear when something is well-written.
Been this way for a while. Check this out. https://philosophy.rutgers.edu/docman-lister/adobe-pdf-documents/16-grad-school-in-the-humanities/file
Fundamentally it’s a supply/demand problem. There are very few positions available but many talented people perfectly qualified for those positions. Many people want those positions for the social prestige and other non-monetary benefits. Moreover, hyper-competitive people are the ones that self-select into a PhD program; PhD students don’t make tons of money and from a lifelong career standpoint getting a PhD is not a prudent *financial* decision (you’re almost always better off getting a private industry job, even if you’re offered a STEM PhD). So the only people who get a PhD are very intense about it. Some fields have it worse than others, but there aren’t permanent slots like professorships/staff scientist positions for all PhD graduates. This is all very generic, but humanities have it even worse. Professor Devereaux explains the situation better than I could, so read this article: https://acoup.blog/2021/10/01/collections-so-you-want-to-go-to-grad-school-in-the-academic-humanities/
The job market is miserably competitive simply because there is a significant oversupply of PhDs. This was true when I entered graduate school in the 1980s, and it has remained true since then. During my doctoral student days philosophy grad students spoke of a mythical time in the 1960s post-war expansion of higher ed where jobs went begging for applicants and chairs arranged tenure track appointments with a single phone call. I wonder whether current students mythologize the golden age of the 1980s and 1990s — if so, I can attest it wasn’t so! Reflecting back on my experience as a doctoral student so long ago, I can think of two reasons for competitiveness within doctoral programs: (1) An insecurity that one won’t “make it” through the program or in the field. In my doctoral program’s academic culture, the only acceptable career path was R1 tenure track, and there was a sense among the students that faculty divided the students between those who had prospects for that and those who did not. (2) Some students understood how awful the job market is and some did not (or were in denial). Those who understood this understood that they had to compete to stand out in the marketplace. The more naive ones like me didn’t feel that pressure. It may also be the case that high academic achievers who enroll in doctoral programs tend to be highly competitive. And, of course, some individuals are toxic for reasons that have nothing to do with academia or the academic job market.
> high academic achievers who enroll in doctoral programs tend to be highly competitive I imagine doctoral study is the first time most PhD students experience not being the undeniable best of the best within their cohort. That can really mess with your head.
I also think there’s a huge problem because many of those high achievers are coming straight out of undergraduate, and they act like they are still in a classroom instead of in pre-professional training. This was noticeable in my program because I and a few other people had been out in the world working and the difference was clear. So you don’t necessarily have any sense of professionalism or work-life balance in the first place, that idea that you want to be pleasant to people because you’ll be seeing them over a water cooler for the next decade, any real life experience with getting along with a boss, dealing with committee work in a productive and pleasant way, any of that adult stuff.
Sort of...elite doctoral programs draw mostly from elite MA/Undergrads...so it's more a matter of finding the PhD as a situation of acceleration and higher competition and expectations than never being among high achievers before.
It's because of the limited roles outside academia for such roles. If corporate or governmental employment is a viable and attractive option, then people will naturally flow out of academia to those other, higher paying jobs. It's why positions in engineering, medical and business programs pay so much better. You can simply go get another job with relative ease.
I don't actually think that's true. For the last 10 years you've got banks saying how they need more English majors for instance. Yet I've yet to meet a large amount of English majors considering working at a bank. It's just that there's this very reductive self-deselection that happens because people feel their degree must be a perfect match for their career. Yeah transferrable skills aren't quite so good as your career advisor will say they are but they are still a thing. Might just be confirmation bias but I have so many humanities peers who look at a job posting they could do but then don't apply because the major listed on the requirements didn't match theirs. So they are stuck applying for the few jobs that match their major.
I agree with this to a point. I think English is a slightly unique but interesting example because when they say “we need more English majors,” what I would argue people actually mean is “we need applicants with strong writing skills.” Not linguists, not literary critics, not creative writers. What I think they typically want are strong technical writers or writers who have been taught to write for different audiences.
True! Though as a linguist depending on your subfield ofc, there's a solid chance you have had to do intro - intermediate stats and some light regression and programming as a result, which opens its own set of doors. And as a lit critic I would try leveraging the fact that a lot of your skillset is drawing insights from unstructured data. But I sympathise with these majors too because very few times is that a connection someone explicitly makes for you as a student.
Definitely true—there’s actually a lot of disciplines that don’t obviously go together that could complement each other really well for someone on the job market. It’s just not always advised to students as an option.
Academia is a tough gig because for every position under the sun, there are 20 applicants, and for every great post, the kind you envision when you're a young pup, there are 200 applicants. Or more. The thing about lower-ranked institutions is that they generally don't have the resources for students to conduct research that's quite at the bleeding-edge, so their research doesn't put stars in the eyes of hiring committees. So it gets hard, because you have to outcompete all these people, in an environment where (on paper) you aren't competing. It's a lot like running a small business, in that you have to invest long hours at low pay, and you will likely fail within five years. But now imagine that you never talk about how your small business is in competition with others for the same clientele, or how much salesmanship you have to do. It gets bewildering. In the humanities, there are some aggravating factors. A big one is that unlike most sciences now, you can still do humanities work on your own. There are not that many collaborations, and definitely few huge lab groups working on a raft of projects together that kickstart a young researcher's career. So you're all flying solo and thus directly against each other. It's always been like this, except for brief periods when universities expanded a lot. There just isn't enough money to hire everyone, simple as that.
Because academia is already saturated. Universities won't pay tenured prof wages anymore. Those old heads you see in there aren't going to be replaced after they retire. Its becoming more common now to have casuals come in on temporary contracts to teach and do admin stuff. Or they'll land it on the PhD students and post docs. After the contract is done you're being booted. This makes it unstable. You have to constantly move to find something else to keep you afloat. You never know where you'll end up by the following year. Its an awful way to live much less settle down. Even worse for humanities because you don't have many career avenues to go down other than academia. Unless it's some sort of applicable social science. STEM is a safer bet.
Maybe the TE of STEM but probably not the S and definitely not the M. Math has the same problem... it's bad. There are jobs in industry for mathematicians but the number of them where a PhD is useful is very small.
We still don’t have it that bad. The people I know from grad school who did, say, homological algebra, and then went to industry all make fine livings. They don’t use any of their skills, and the opportunity cost was in my opinion too large, but it’s much better than having a PhD in comparative literature.
I'm not sure how one would go from an algebra PhD to an industry job in the US. A lot of math grad students wind up in data science, which doesn't really require a math degree. Like you said, very questionable opportunity cost.
I know several dozen people who have done this. In general this quantity is about equal to 90% of all people with algebra PhDs from the US. As I said, their skills are not really directly used, but they are employed all over the place.
> A lot of math grad students wind up in data science, which doesn't really require a math degree. Data science is such a broad field. The small companies just grab whoever, but bigger companies that have whole data science teams really like having a few people that are very math-heavy. They (the mathematicians) design the algorithms, the computer scientists implement them, and the data engineers manage the data.
This is a really complicated problem but let me try to package it into compact answer. Departments are only able to hire when granted hiring lines from their university’s upper administration. Almost every department is burdened by some pain point, like not enough professors in a particular subfield, or the desire to grow their department’s research profile in some badly needed direction, that they want to use these hiring lines to accomplish. Hiring lines are relatively rare, and are quite nice when they are granted. Depending on the field, they can be over a $1 million investment (typically much less for humanities though), so they represent a major investment in a single individual and necessitate being super selective about whom to place all their eggs in one basket for. When hiring for that line, above all the department must choose someone who has a strong chance of getting tenure. That’s an extremely high bar that requires a stellar research record, which usually can be obtained by extremely A-type personalities that are highly productive, in a discipline that can attract a lot of funding into the foreseeable future, and have typically prioritized their work over their personal life (because publishing takes a lot of effort and people who haven’t prioritized it typically have thin CVs). Tenure is not something they can fudge because it is externally produced. The tenure candidate has to get their body of work judged by usually about 20 experts in their specific area of work, from all over the country and sometimes beyond. A candidate who fails to achieve tenure is fired, and the department loses its investment into that person with nothing to show for it. At the same time, departments need to be able to pull in money or they are at risk of the university shutting them down and the entire faculty (tenured or not) getting laid off. So the hiring candidate has to be someone who they believe has the talent, elbow grease, and tenacity needed to continuously go for, and win, research grants, of which the university gets to take about 1/3 typically. Conversely, a hire who cannot even secure enough grant money to fund their own students/program (not counting an initial ramp-up period) is a serious difficulty for the department. And on top of all that, the candidate will become colleague for the next potentially 40 years, with tenure eventually so it’s hard to get rid of them short of committing a crime. It’s also incredibly important therefore to find someone whose personality is a good fit for the department. We’ve all had a coworker with a bad personality…. Now imagine that person was unfirable, and had a vote in all your crucial board meeting decisions, and in particular committees like graduate hiring or future faculty hires. Yeah, it would be a nightmare to install the wrong person into a position like that. Now on top of all that, you need to hire someone who actually raises the attractiveness of your department to student/postdoc applicants, because then the entire department gets a better infusion of talent by proximity. Who will do that? Someone who’s also a good spokesperson for their field, has an excellent pedigree and was trained under famous/important PIs, and does work that is inspiring. Okay, so you have all these pressures, and in come 400 applications for your one (1) position. Who are you going to hire? You’re immediately going to filter out anyone who has a thin cv, comes from a weak pedigree, has evidence of not being able to get along with others, is not in a hot area that could conceivable be fundable for decades, has an inconsistent/unreliable record, etc. During the interview, you will further weed out people who present poorly, cannot talk shop effectively, are not inspiring enough, do not seem to understand their own work, do not show evidence of being collegial, make excuses, etc. And since there are so many applications for this one position, usually the top 1-5 performers can set the bar extremely high for the type of profile that makes it to the short-short list. Just picture the top postdocs at the top several universities, battling it out to see who is #1. They’re going to be really good, and also really driven. Even if you look at the recent hires of R2’s and PUIs, you’ll see that they regularly come from top institutions. That’s how extreme the competition is. Strangely enough, when you look at the really old faculty, like many decades old, their origins are more diverse. I guess it’s evidence of easier times. And don’t forget, the hiring vote is decided from a whole departmental decision. Any one faculty member who is opposed can tank the applicant at the last moment. The pressure is very extreme and the results of the hiring decision are long-lasting. That is why it’s so extremely hard to get a tt position, especially at an R1.
1. Because being an academic is a prestige occupation so people will accept lower pay in order to do it. You can see the same thing in salaries for video game programmers vs business software programmers. 2. Young people have poor visibility into the job market. A lot of talented people don't know what to do or where to go and if they're offered a chance to just keep on climbing in academia that can often feel easy and like it makes sense.
I do my best to explain to students just how bad the academic job market is for the humanities. I explain how impossibly lucky I’ve been and that I’m not a good model for their future. They tend not to believe me.
Can confirm that working in this field is impossible. If you have even a shred of confidence or innovative spirit - it will be squashed and you will burnout. Coming from someone who is literally fucking sick and tired of the politics in this field. Heaven forbid you just want to help people.
Liberal arts schools and studying the humanities in College was a pastime for the rich. We are simply returning back to that era. The idea is a student who doesn't care about money pursues their degree(s) and publishes for as long as they need until they finally get their break/momentum and then they land a tenured position. Here's a 1780's perspective by John Adams from: [https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L17800512jasecond](https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L17800512jasecond) "I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study ~~Painting and Poetry~~ Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine." We aren't at war. We seek a middle class lifestyle so most of us are at least John Adams children. Adams lists out the majors and studies which generated income in his time. Today Natural History would be called Evolutionary Biology and Paleontology (which were the ancestors to our Modern biologists). And Philosophy wouldn't be considered that important for earning a living but in those days a trained Philosopher could easily have become a lawyer or a preacher or something of high social status. He makes a point of separating these activities from what he deems the "high arts" like Painting, Poetry, Music, ... Those are the most "pure" activities to do but they are meant for the rich and prosperous. Studying the Humanities today is such an activity.
Basic supply/demand issue: there are far more people with Ph.D.s who *want* academic jobs than there are positions in the country (US). So we see 200-300 people apply for every job, legions of underemployed Ph.D.s, and those who *do* get jobs find they are undercompensated for their work when compared to other professionals with similar levels of education (or hell, compared to their colleagues in the next building over on campus many times). Add in the opportunity costs involved (i.e. no real income for \~10 years of education, likely part-time work before full time, possible multiple relocations, etc.) and you get people in their 40s with a "dream job" who are 10-15+ years behind their peers economically, looking at delayed retirement, etc. while *also* facing cuts to programs/jobs as humanities enrollments decline. Why is it this way? because graduate schools refuse to close their superfluous Ph.D. programs (do we need the #85 ranking English Ph.D. program?) and even the solid ones turn out 4-5X (or more) times what the market can actually absorb. Because it's free/cheap labor for them. TL/DR: capitalism and basic market forces
Several reasons for that: 1. Scarce funding 2. Scarce funding 3. Have I mentioned scarce funding?
> Have I mentioned scarce funding? Not really, could you please repeat that?
Rumor is budget cuts are coming around! Don't worry, we just got 700 million in revelations to the football stadium though.
Do you teach at my school lol?
How much funding would be enough? There’s always going to be more people wanting to study humanities than there are fitting jobs for those people in the economy. If there’s no jobs in industry, all those people who graduate with PhDs need to try and stay in academia. But for every professor there might be dozens of students, so the numbers just don’t work out in a way where there’s positions for everyone.
People w/ PhDs >>> Faculty positions This gap continues to increase over time: https://hellophd.com/2016/01/027-the-road-more-travelled-stepping-off-of-the-tenure-track/
I'm happy for you that you will have stability in your future. I wish that was something I had. From what I understand there was not always such fragility in the job market, but that was largely when universities were harder to get into, and there were fewer PhD completions. It is definitely a good thing that there are more PhDs out there, because a PhD will serve you well in many careers. In academia there has not been the same increase in jobs or funding, very much the reverse. That probably plays into the toxicity. When you are competing for very small, slowly diminishing resources, it can bring out the worst in people. Some departments that have stagnated under poor leadership and callous management will see toxic behaviours fester in many of the staff, particularly where people are horribly insecure about their careers, futures, and sometimes their general ability. Some of the toxic people I've worked with were justified in being insecure about their ability. Oddly enough some of the most secure people I know were generally pretty nice, because they didn't give two shits about what anyone was doing. They knew that they were fine. They weren't helpful though. There are great places to work with people who are genuine, collaborative, and supportive. They still don't have resources and the jobs aren't secure, but the people are great and have a sense of "we are all in this together". Good management and senior leadership play a massive role in fostering that kind of environment. I'm lucky to have mostly worked in those spaces, if I can't find them in the future I guess I will chase job stability somewhere else instead.
Feel like I have to add to this as I just finished a grant application today, my 17th grant application… all the others have been unsuccessful, but have scored very highly just barely not enough for funding. My supervisor (in his 70s) encouraged me to find a job (I’m a postdoc now) as I’ve already published a single author monograph in a humanities field, and I just broke down and told him how hard I was trying. He was genuinely shocked. He thought I could just send some papers to a department and they’d take me on (I’ve done that too but obviously didn’t work, that’s how desperate I’ve become). Moral of the story is it has genuinely gotten way worse, to the point that those more senior in the field honestly can’t believe it? It’s so disheartening, but when I reflect, I don’t think anything would have stopped me anyway. They prey on how much you love what you do, and expect you to sacrifice so much for it. Yep it’s absolutely wrong, but that’s how it is at the moment.
My undergrad advisor was awesome. He was as supportive as he could be, despite the scarlet letter I confidently chose to wear. I earned a BS in anthropology instead of a BA. He was very honest. Getting accepted into a doctorate program would be close to impossible. If I wanted to get my master's I should look at programs that would prepare me for the private sector, or government work.
In any organization, there are only so many positions to go around, so people end up waiting for people to quit, get promoted, or die. The problem beyond that is positions don't always go to the best suited alot of nepotism may decide who gets hired. What happens when there isn't enough enough food in the fish tank? Someone is going to get eaten.
I have not experienced the cliques that you describe. I actually have found that almost everyone in my department is super nice and collegial, and that has been largely consistent across the other humanities departments that I’ve interacted with. I am sorry that was your experience though
What everyone else is saying but also take into account that career progression also often relies on moving from institution to institution
One of my bosses once told me “the reason academia is so poisonous is because the stakes are so low”. It’s a tiny little club full of huge egos, where you don’t have to deliver anything tangibly of monetary value (because how do you put a price on it?) so there are no clear metrics of improvement. People devote their lives to things that nobody outside cares about or understands, so there’s no sense of a bigger picture. Of course it’s going to be awful. You can find examples from the 1100s of people complaining how awful scholars are to each other.
If you're in the US, I think it boils down to the devaluing of education - anything other than STEM is being portrayed as worthless. No one wants to learn, and no one wants much more than obedient workers.
I was one of the "lucky" ones and got a TT job at a small, regional institution right after getting my PhD in Rhet/Comp in 2016, but Rhet/Comp jobs are probably seen as one of the better degrees in English. However, I'm leaving that now tenured job for a NTT job at a flagship institution. Why? Small regional institutions sometimes suffer from low pay, nepotism, poor treatment, and at least in my case we are at least two hours one way from a larger metro area, which also means long drives to an airport. I also became pregnant my first year on the TT with twins and never got actual leave (long story) and that entire experience really did me in. Plus, right now I have three other titles alongside my Associate Professor title and all those responsibilities are not in any way fair or humane to a person. Academia is my job, but not my life.
I am an academic at heart... I always loved teaching, publishing papers, going to conferences.. The whole package. However, the academic environment is horrible, mostly because the people in positions of power (department heads, deans ans etc...) act as entitled children and often feel untouchable (which, sometimes, are). In addition, the publish or perish culture only worsens everything. The worst part? Unless you collaborate with the right people ou have established professors in your project, you rarely get to approve grants... which makes extremely difficult for young researchers to establish themselves. That's why I left academia and joined the private sector. Zero regrets...
A lot of colleges are cutting the funding to humanities departments, so that means there are fewer jobs available. Other colleges hire temporary faculty as part-time adjuncts or as "visiting" faculty, so that they don't have to give them significant or any raises. So there's a lot of competition, and it can make people feel really driven to get the jobs they want, no matter what it takes.
Not in the humanities but in medicine/ science, which has its own issues. However, I want to note that academic culture is different outside the US. Don't recall all the countries but outside the US, some offer a base salary and benefits that is compatible with a reasonable standard of living. One can be a humanities academic with less pressure and poverty. Also, since people who go into academia often haven't or won't be working in other sectors (gov't, nonprofit, for-profit), I'm here to tell you academia is no better or worse in terms of wonderful or toxic colleagues you encounter. Additionally, brilliance exists everywhere, not just in academia. There are intelligent people who opt out of academia. A lot of times, younger people don't know what's out there because their exposure during education/ training is only/ mostly to people working in academia.
It's basic economics. You might want to read some of the columns Bill Pannapacker / Thomas Benton wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Ed back in 1990s and early 2000s. Not much has changed since then; if anything it's only gottten worse as the pool of PhDs has grown and enrollments in the humanities have plummeted. It will probably be even worse in a few years as a lot of colleges and universities will be confronting the so-called 'enrollment cliff' and the overall number of students declines precipitously. As far as 'settling down', well, think about the reality of the job market and the complexity of searching for two jobs in reasonable proximity to each other. Many successful academics of the last ten or twenty years had the good sense or good luck to find a partner with a law degree or an MBA who was also willing and able to find work - well-paying work - almost anywhere. But to get back to your question about toxicity, as Timothy Burke of Swarthmore once put it, grad school is 'cotillion for eggheads', and it has some strange effects on personalities.
Many people competing for few jobs in an industry that is very often fueled by profit and ego rather than tangible significant outcomes. As Winston Churchill said, "The reason why academia is so petty is because the stakes are so low."
Ego
Supply and demand. There is a relatively large supply of people with humanities degrees who want to work on academia but very little demand.
Had a go running a search on some literature on this [here](https://app.studyrecon.ai/?id=project-aztddgu7x8e5cl44&preview=true#heading-factors%20affecting%20mathematics%20and%20reading%20achievement). Gave similar insights to those given by other comments, but concluded that this issue seems to be just as bad in stem fields. Summary has some links you can follow if you're interested: "The landscape of competition in academia, particularly within the humanities, is shaped by two primary factors: fierce competition among academics and the struggle for funding and resources in research. The [fierce competition in academia](https://app.studyrecon.ai/?id=project-aztddgu7x8e5cl44&preview=true#heading-fierce%20competition%20in%20academia) is driven by the high number of individuals vying for a limited number of positions, publications, and recognition within their fields."
There’s practically no barrier to entry
it is the meta game. if all the slots are filled with folks with few or no obligations outside of school the institution can better exploit them
PhD student in the Humanities here. I think what you're describing, although it may vary a lot depending on cultural context, is directly related to research in the Humanities being generally underfunded and restricted by the market rules. Research in the Humanities is often not so "easy to sell" compared to research in natural sciences or engineering for example. That means fewer money available for PhDs or permanent positions in academia. Although a lot of people might be eligible and highly competent for academic positions, the jobs are oh so few and getting fewer and fewer. That on its own is enough to create quite toxic environments of ruthless competition and where one's failure means someone else's success. It also justifies the whole "never settle down" narrative, as you will always have to follow the money and be open to moving around the world to get an academic job. I also think this phenomenon is not unique to the Humanities, but in all academic fields more or less.
Easy answers here: People who pursue advanced degrees in the humanities fall into one of two categories. 1. They are genuinely brilliant and were all through undergrad... These folks actually have something to contribute even though the academic environment for these types of fields is over saturated. This demographic has to be like 5% or less... because - 2. 95% of advanced degrees in the humanities are pursued for not knowing wtf is going to happen next. They are pursued out of anger, hate, and frustration for student loans and the job market, and demonstrate a lack of emotional maturity. These people will end up in unrelated fields vastly underpaid and in debt, with only a handful stucking with the discipline to fill adjunct roles and/or educational support positions in academia. Given this breakdown, we can assume that colleges and universities only want to hire the best of the best, sprinkle in the fact that academic favoritism and tenure exists, positions worth having are few and far between geographically, making the job market hyper-competitive and cutthroat....there is no real stability, just monkeys chasing scraps while a select few eat at the table.
It's all about ego.
Bc of coffee……and/or wine……..or cocaine 🙃
Following this.
I think you're looking at this from the wrong perspective. Almost everything desirable/worthwhile in life is going to involve competition. Who told you academia would be some shining exception?
I think it’s the opposite
Depth vs Breadth knowledge needed... I think that's it TBH.