One of the first things that any student of public administration learns is that bureaucracies don’t like to change. Once you set up an organization and procedures, it s is very, very difficult to make alterations, because the people who operate these bureaucracies have some skin in the game. Paychecks and ego and plain old resistance to learning something new are the sand in the gears of reform. This is a hard lesson for outsiders to accept. More often than not, a stubborn bureaucracy can weather any storm. They outlast reformers, who get discouraged and walk away.
Last week, I opened my big mouth about some obvious flaws in the administration of the special ed program in town. My first instincts are to give a “Make it work” statement and walk away. But that only works on Project Runway. In reality, if you want to make changes, it involves a lot of sweet talking and compromise and reduced expectations — things that don’t come naturally to me.
There’s a big discussion in the higher newspapers and twitter about making reforms to graduate school education. Clearly, we making more PhDs than there are jobs. Greg Weeks sums up the conversation very nicely.
So, here’s the latest report on jobs for history PhDs. Since Steve was briefly on the market for a history job a decade ago, these numbers caught my eye. These numbers are even worse, if you understand how the system works.
| Field | Number of Openings | Number of New Ph.D.s |
| North America | 199 | 441 |
| Europe | 129 | 187 |
| Asia | 110 | 73 |
| Latin America | 51 | 64 |
| Middle East | 41 | 60 |
| Africa | 40 | 38 |
Steve’s PhD was in European history, so that means he could only apply for a European history position. That’s 129 jobs in entire country. But those numbers are even worse, when you break them down by sub-subfield. Steve’s expertise was in Modern European history with a specialty in Germany history. Of the 129 jobs, he could only apply to about 30 of them. After you consider the jobs that are located in places that you would be actually be willing to live, then you’re maybe looking at 5 jobs. Imagine spending 10 years in school and only have 5 job openings. Then imagine that you’re competing not only with the 187 recent PhD grads, but the previous ten years of PhD grads who don’t have jobs and who have had ten years to write books and things that make your right-out-of-grad-school CV look pathetic.
The system of producing grad students does not sync up with this tragic job situation. There is a nearly, rock-solid consensus on the fact that there are too many PhDs and not enough jobs. Everybody knows changes need to happen. So, why doesn’t anything change? Because academia is a bureaucracy, just like my kids’ schools. Grad programs have no incentive to reduce their number of students. Even worse, it’s a bureaucracy without a head. There is no President of American Colleges that can institute changes across the board. So, it is nearly impossible to respond to problems like this in a clear, logical manner.
What happens when problems add up and a bureaucracy doesn’t change? Well, the system breaks entirely. People are hurt. Unwanted changes occur.
Libertarians say that the answer to the difficulties is to not create bureaucracies in the first place and to let the market step in to answer the demand for a particular service. In higher ed, that means MOOCs and the adjunctification of higher ed — not great answers to these problems. Others say that unions that represent the interests of grad students and adjuncts are the answer to these dysfunctions, but these unions have never gotten off the ground. Perhaps changes can be made by public shaming of schools engaged in bad practices and by providing greater information to all consumers of public education. Shaming and information spreading are something that bloggers and pundits can do, so I guess I’ll keep talking.
Apt. 11d 
I understand the problem of structural bureaucracies, especially in special education, where most people have no options but to participate in the system. But, the number one answer to the problem you describe of the mismatch between PhDs and job openings in academia is that people have to stop entering PhD programs.
The most common alternative change people suggest — that graduate programs stop accepting students, seems to me to be a poor alternative, especially given that at least 1 parts of your math are individual specific — i.e. “places you are willing to live.” The number one piece of advice I’ve always given to entering grad students is that if you want to stay in academia you must be willing to go where the jobs take you (exceptions only make the rule). Whether one is willing to accept that constraint is a choice to made by the student, I think, not the program.
I think in the biomedical sciences, there is an important structural change that should be made (and won’t be, for the bureaucratic reasons you describe): NIH should stop funding graduate student research assistants. The NIH funding fuels the PhD programs and overproduction, and undermines the market for scientists in academia. NIH could chose to support stability and labor over producing the most science with the same funds (again, unlikely), but there could be incentives to produce the change (worries about fraud, instability, boom/bust collapse).
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“I think in the biomedical sciences, there is an important structural change that should be made (and won’t be, for the bureaucratic reasons you describe): NIH should stop funding graduate student research assistants.”
That’s certainly a possibility. The federal government is a player in all of this.
“…especially given that at least 1 parts of your math are individual specific — i.e. “places you are willing to live.” The number one piece of advice I’ve always given to entering grad students is that if you want to stay in academia you must be willing to go where the jobs take you (exceptions only make the rule).”
That jumped out at me, too. 13 years ago when my husband was on the job market, he went to every single one of the interviews he got and then after much drama, the one job he was ultimately offered was in DC, a city we had never considered, and at a department that he had really never thought about. (DC is far too expensive for people like us.) We went, he got tenure five years later, and then he got a job offer from a college in a less expensive area. Never, never have we ever had the luxury of being picky about exact geographic area. (Google informs me that it is a 36 hour drive to either set of our kids’ grandparents from where we live now.)
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College seniors are at least as ignorant and naive as stock market investors, and university professors and administrators are at least as venal and disingenuous as investment bankers. So a mandatory disclosure regime, comparable to what the SEC requires of those selling investments, would be justified. In particular, extensive disclosure of items like completion times and rates, costs (which are mostly in time, although some grad students go into debt), and employment rates should be required of any university which receives federal funds and admits graduate students.
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When I was looking at graduate school for myself, the department I chose claimed a 100% placement rate (that was in 1997). At the time, I was impressed, but it now strikes me as being highly misleading.
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Most likely it was 100% of the much much smaller percentage of students who completed the program within the allotted time period. Take out of the denominator those who quit the program and you have a much more robust statistic.
Also, like how some law schools do, count ANY paid work post graduate school as “placement”, even if it has nothing to do with that particular field.
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Yes and yes.
I also now know that many graduate students stay officially in the program until they have a job offer. There was a guy in my old grad program (a very strong student) who famously had his entire dissertation written and in a drawer, just waiting for job offer. He was not a US citizen, so it was probably a wise move.
I just googled him and I see that he is now an associate professor at a well-known college as well as Russian Studies program director. Yay!
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Collective bargaining is illegal in private universities (thanks to GWB). There are actually some robust graduate student unions, both de facto and de jure, and legalizing the right to unionize for all graduate students would help.
I agree about the overproduction problem, but I’m not sure what centralized control would do, since graduate programs can be very variable.* In my discipline, students from certain schools get the jobs. If you’re at one of those schools, you have a reasonable chance at a TT job as long as you’re willing to move anywhere. If you’re not at one of those schools, you’re screwed unless you’re an incredible standout. Probably the best thing to do would be to require schools to make comprehensive hiring data available and post it either on the application page or send it with an acceptance offer. That way if students want to do a PhD as basically a hobby, they can, but they know what they’re getting in to.
OTOH, the destruction of academia is simply another facet of neoliberal proletarianization of white collar professions. It’s heading in the direction that anyone in a white collar position not going into i-banking or maybe marketing is going into a struggling industry. Law, journalism, publishing, government, teaching, and lots of other former white collar career paths are increasingly not a secure option. We can decide that we want to stop funneling a vast majority of our wealth to the top 1% and provide more decently paying white collar jobs and public services (also creating jobs), or we can “re-feudalize” our society. If we pick the second option though, worrying about tenure feels like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
*though obviously problems are system wide.
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I’m really puzzled by the mis-use of the term “feudal” in this context. Wasn’t the main virtue of the feudal system that everybody had a job for life?
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” In my discipline, students from certain schools get the jobs. If you’re at one of those schools, you have a reasonable chance at a TT job as long as you’re willing to move anywhere. ”
In my field, students from certain labs get the jobs (not schools). And, your post-doctoral lab matters at least as much (potentially more) than your graduate program lab.
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Please correct me if I’m wrong.
So, currently graduate students in a department also teach sections for lecture courses. They aren’t well paid for this work. A lecture course of 120 might have 6 sections, each headed by a graduate student? And how many graduate students are needed to man very large lecture courses?
I think this model might have worked when the population of college students was rising quickly enough to provide *new* openings for young professors. A system which drifts towards many large (100+) lectures will need fewer professors, yet more (poorly paid) TAs.
Departments whose graduate students have not secured tenure track positions should not be allowed to run large lectures. I don’t think it’s moral to use people as essentially free labor, when you know they won’t be employed as professors at the end of the process.
The overproduction of PhDs also feeds the supply of adjuncts.
Another change which could help would be not to admit anyone directly from university into a graduate program. They have to work for three years first. Business schools started doing this some time ago. The hope would be that at the end of three years, the applicants would be more realistic about the wages and advancement opportunities lost during graduate school. The Real World might also not be as scary to a 24 year old, as it might be for a 21 year old.
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All true, except who in the world is going to stop “Departments whose graduate students have not secured tenure track positions [from being] allowed to run large lectures.”? No one has the authority to do that, and there are no incentives to stop (except morality). That is not a system conducive to change, except for the group who does have an incentive, the students joining the graduate students. They need to stop going to those programs, and being exploited for cheap labor in the hopes of a tenure track position.
Clinical psychology programs pretty much follow that model, too, that they don’t accept people straight out of college, but require them to have experience first. But, in both clinical psychology & business, the idea is that you would learn what the practice will be like and how you will use your degree during that working period. I’m not sure the same logic applies for forcing people who want to study medieval literature that they should work in the real world first (what would they learn there that would help them decide that they want to do the degree?)
BTW, there is a trend towards biomed programs expecting students to have done research when applying, though it’s not quite the requirement that it is in some other fields. That’s a good filter for the work that will be done in grad school, but not really a filter for the requirements of becoming a PI/lab head.
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There’s also an issue that most TT positions require some proof of teaching experience. Graduate students DO need some teaching as part of job training. They obviously don’t need to be overworked and underpaid adjuncts. Graduate student teaching can also range from exploitative to helpful (often in the same institution or even the same department). This is also something grad student unions can help with. My school’s unofficial union got TA & teaching salaries doubled about 6 years ago. Current work is trying to make sure that wages keep up with inflation and that the university doesn’t try to chip away at what was achieved 6 years ago.
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There’s also some merit to early in, early out.
Also, I understand that mathematicians are often most productive when young, so it would be very wasteful to make them cool their heels for several years between undergrad and grad.
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I really like the idea of a 3-year delay before admission. I worked for about five years before grad school, and definitely felt like I could get a different job if I needed to (though of course once I was through my PhD program the market for everything had gotten so much worse with the recession). I knew other grad students who would say, “Oh, I couldn’t possibly do anything else” – thinking that both a) they would be miserable in any other job and b) they wouldn’t be capable of doing any other job. For the most part, at least b) was untrue, and a) probably was too.
These days, though, I don’t know where really smart college grads are getting jobs. It seems like so many of them are having a really hard time even getting a semi-decent office job requiring a little bit of skill. So maybe if you can’t get a job, and if you have real promise as an academic, grad school is not such a terrible idea. I’m not sure.
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I comment on a different forum where one of the posters has a difficult family situation, mental illness, little earning potential and is thinking about a doctoral program in philosophy. From her description of her situation, I think graduate school is not at all a bad choice (although she may be a headache for her future graduate director). She’ll have health insurance of some sort, student mental health services (such as it is) and a small but reliable income–I think she could definitely do worse.
But you can get in and out of a philosophy program in roughly 5 years, so it’s not the decade-long slog that Laura has described. I would definitely not encourage a young person with a real job to do a doctorate, but not everybody has a real job.
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The system only worked for graduate students during the 1960s, when the rapid expansion of higher ed created a lot of spots for new professors. When the music stopped in the early 1970s it quit working, and hasn’t really worked for forty years, despite a brief uptick in the 1990s/early 2000s. It hasn’t been “flxed” because there is one group for which it still works just fine: senior graduate faculty, who can teach fun grad courses and slough off much of the scutwork of undergrad teaching to grad students.
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