No PhDs Please: This is Canada Dismal Employment and Earning Prospects of PhDs in an

How will I respond to the pace of change ahead? How will I make my case for this field of study I love—to peers and mentors, to hiring committees and decision makers, to alumni and the public at large? How will my career in the academy unfold? Everything about the life of an academic humanist, it seems, is shifting around them. As one year passes into another, this doctoral study turns out to be not only an intellectual journey, but also a trial, a cacophony of unpredictable pleasures, a social network, a long slog, a disenchantment, a psychic landscape, a familial sacrifice, a demanding job, an initiation, a shifting terrain of tradition and change, and a cauldron of anxiety, about adequacy, performance, and future prospects.

For me, the numbers intersect with the stories of this lived experience of graduate training. The inflationary rise in the cost of higher education has led to the rise in debt level of students upon graduation. These financial costs to students will undoubtedly continue to rise as budget pressures prompt ongoing or periodic cuts in fellowship funding, travel funding, and summer stipends.

Many students stay on track, even some of those who develop a deep skepticism about the project of doctoral education and the prospects ahead. Many find a workable balance between their personal and professional commitments. Many immerse themselves in the diverse opportunities for leadership and professional development available to them.

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Many bring brilliant dissertations to their defense. Many find tenure-track positions the first or second year on the market, or the third or fourth years. Others lose momentum after completing exams, finding themselves suddenly adrift without the incessant and somehow soothing pressure of imminent deadlines. They watch debt accumulate, lose steam, dissociate from peers, avoid mentors and advisors, suffer disenchantment with their topic, stall out. They find themselves about out of funding, and with little progress made on the dissertation.

One term passes with little progress, then a year. After fellowships and teaching positions dry up, some slip away entirely. Some come to the defense after several years away with a less-than-promising dissertation. Unpredictable for any individual graduate, it is distressingly predictable in terms of the academic job prospects. Students learn that openings for tenure-track positions track the economy, that the economic meltdown of brought a precipitous decline in full-time tenure-track academic positions.

They find themselves in an academy with a growing imbalance in the percentage of tenure and tenure-track faculty and part- and full-time non-tenure-track faculty. They hear about doctoral students who enter contingent positions that may or may not lead to satisfying careers in the academy. They learn of the new job search in which advanced doctoral students and recently minted PhDs confront a protracted search process.

They hear about graduates spending two, three, four, even five years in search mode, seeking postdoctoral positions or non-tenure-track positions, full- or part-time, along the way. They are pushed to become early and ready professionals, giving papers, writing essays, assembling lists of achievements so their dossiers grab the attention of search committees. As these realities sink in, doctoral students become even more anxious, and cynical.

Many struggle to remain resiliently hopeful. An increasing number of them begin to think about, and plan for, alternative careers. The numbers thus speak of isolation, of a sense of drift, of the pressure to maintain persistent self-motivation. They speak of anxiety, inertia, a sense of confusion, embarrassment, shame, a sense of failure. They speak of relationships under stress and parenting postponed, a major issue for women in the academy.

They intimate high levels of stress, and mental distress. The data also tell stories of graduate programs. They tell of the inability of some programs to adequately support students on teaching assistantships, but more importantly on fellowships.

They tell of the increasing gap between resources and support available to those at the elite privates and public flagships and those at less well-funded universities. They tell of difficulties in recruiting diverse cohorts of doctoral students and the consequent lack of demographic diversity around the seminar table, and of the underproduction of doctorates of color. They tell of curricular straitjackets. They tell of sporadic mentoring. They tell of laissez-faire values of scholarly inquiry.

They tell of a one-model-fits-all trajectory. They tell of the intensification of professional norms and the difficulties of breaking through normative expectations of an academic humanist. Given these realities—of a higher than desirable average time-to-degree and dismal job prospects into the future—the call for the transformation of doctoral education has now become a broad one.

Across North America, deans of graduate schools, foundation officers, faculty, and doctoral students are contributing to a national conversation about the humanities in higher education and about doctoral education for the next generations. That sense of urgency follows a succession of efforts to address the stark realities of doctoral education in the humanities. Let me briefly, and only selectively, survey these efforts.

In the late s and early s, foundations and professional organizations sought to stimulate improvements in the curricular shape and experience of graduate education in ways that would decrease time-to-degree and improve graduation rates. A bolder initiative tackling time-to-degree gained attention in late when the national education press reported on the Stanford initiative on doctoral education in the humanities.

At Stanford, a group of faculty leaders in humanities disciplines, among them Russell Berman, president of the Modern Language Association, wrote the dean of Arts and Sciences requesting month funding for students to decrease time-to-degree to an optimal five years. In order to secure commitment to enhanced funding, the humanities departments agreed to revise coursework, timing of exams, and mentoring.

In response to constrained job prospects, activism has shifted to preparing doctoral students for new career paths. In , The Path Forward: Humanities departments and graduate schools across the country now organize panels and workshops on alternative careers for humanities PhDs, inviting to campus graduates working in nonacademic sectors or in alternative academic jobs in higher education. And major intellectual leaders who hold professional jobs inside the academy in libraries, digital humanities labs, and museums and institutes blog, talk, and make the case for the new realities of this expanding sector of humanities professionals.

In addition to tackling time-to-degree and addressing preparation for alternative careers, there are two other strands of transformation on the radar. In the last decade, funding agencies and national organizations have shifted foci in recognition of the changing environment of humanities scholarship addressed in Part II. The Mellon-funded Scholarly Communication Institute, located at the University of Virginia from to , for instance, held meetings and issued invaluable reports on new media and modes of scholarly communication, and the impact of this new intellectual ecology on doctoral training and its importance to new career paths for professionally trained humanists.

Another strand of program activism has focused on public scholarship. Under the founding leadership of Julie Ellison and now Timothy K. Knowledge Creation and Tenure Policy in the Engaged University ; held annual conferences; and now launched the journal Public. The Center offers a graduate certificate in public scholarship and the Public Scholarship award program. Two major reports issued within six months of one another captured the range of intersecting issues relevant to transforming doctoral education for the 21st century.

They both acknowledge the troubling realities of the academic humanities and the changing conditions of the scholarly and teaching life of faculty; they both make recommendations for change.

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Traces of those conversations and references to the recommendations will emerge in my arguments for change in the next sections of this book. And finally, two books engage, directly and in depth, the troubles with graduate education in the United States: Merit, Diversity, and Faculty Gatekeeping. As the abstract for her book suggests: They do not call for the elimination of doctoral programs in the humanities. They do not call for some rationing system for doctoral education that would determine which programs survive, which grow, and which close down.

They do not caution against developing and launching new kinds of doctoral programs in the humanities. They do not claim that graduate programs are educating too many humanists at the doctoral level. Others do make these arguments, as is evidenced in the media and in responses to the reports. They call for decreasing the number of programs and the size of cohorts. But not here, in the activities, statements, and aspirations of all those foundations, institutions, administrators, faculty, and students who are taking a stand, making a case, calling for change.

Thus, even when students are provided some degree of choice or training concerning different career paths, many, will choose or attempt to obtain a faculty position—this will, of course, be encouraged by faculty. In fact, encouraging students down an academic path is beneficial to faculty as it raises the overall profile of the department if their students are successful in obtaining positions. Again, we recognize this does not characterize all individuals, programs, and departments, and that there are exceptions.

Despite this, however, the numbers point to the fact that there is an inordinate number of candidates—sometimes in the hundreds—for any one academic position advertised, suggesting that there are systemic issues at play. Academic employment challenges are not limited to anthropology.

Multiple studies have detailed the issues surrounding employment for the social sciences, humanities, computer sciences, and business [ 10 — 13 ].

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In the biological sciences, the outlook is not any better. Simply put, the American academic system generates doctorates at a rate greater than the job market can support [ 15 — 18 ]. The issue is more complex than there simply not being enough departments to hire new tenure-track faculty. The problem is that programs are producing doctorates at levels that are not sustainable. As secondary education institutions have increasingly embraced business management models over the past 30 years, universities, in order to maintain a competitive advantage, have expanded graduate programs.

Concurrent with the increase in NTTF, the numbers of full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty have decreased from approximately Another important factor that is oftentimes overlooked with respect to the academic job market is the retirement age of tenured faculty. When the amendments to the Age Discrimination in Employment Act ADEA ended mandatory retirement in most occupations, postsecondary schools were allowed to continue imposing a mandatory retirement age of 70 on tenured faculty.

By , the number of tenured professors older than age 65 more than doubled [ 21 ].

Currently the median age of college and university faculty surpasses all other occupational groups in the US [ 21 ]. The net result is that longer faculty careers directly translate to a reduction in the rate of new hires. In principal, for each senior-level faculty retirement, a university should be able to hire at least 1. However, this is not necessarily the case, as many universities opt to replace tenured faculty lines with less costly NTTF hires, further suppressing the availability of new tenure-track faculty hires.

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The reality is that recent graduates seeking academic positions often find themselves in lengthy and insecure postdoctoral research positions [ 23 ] or a seemingly endless series of NTTF positions—if they are among the fortunate. There is little institutional incentive to replace low-paying, temporary NTTF with higher-paying tenure-track positions [ 23 — 24 ] and it is unlikely that this business model will change. For most recent PhD graduates, the job market—especially the academic job market—is bleak [ 9 ].

With more than programs producing anthropology doctorates in the US, it is clear that not all programs are equal. Prospective graduate students must consider many factors in selecting a graduate program, including department rankings and institutional prestige, fit with departmental research interests, and, perhaps most importantly, access to financial support. Here, we examine data from US anthropology departments to: As our primary source of data, we utilized the — American Anthropological Association AnthroGuide [ 25 ] to document the current state of the tenure-track anthropology job market in the US.

Data from the AnthroGuide are self-reported by anthropology departments, and include general information about departments, such as degrees offered and program descriptions, as well as more specific information about their faculty. This includes academic rank, specialization, and year and origin of doctorate. We then rank programs in terms of total market-share. In business, market share is determined by calculating the total sales over a given period e.

Market share is not a measure of the real or perceived quality of goods and services, nor is it a measure of how many individual units a company placed on the market, but is instead a measure of how company sales compare to other companies within the same industry. Likewise, our academic market share rankings are not a measure of the real or perceived quality of a graduate program, nor are they a reflection of how many PhD graduates from a given program entered the tenure-track job market—market share is simply a measure of tenure-track job placement for individuals from a specific university relative to other universities.

The idea of ranking programs based on placement is not a new concept. As part of their study, Schmidt and Chingos [ 26 ] compared academic job placement for recent political science doctorates to National Research Council NRC Q ranking scores.

This study determined that a small number of graduate programs in the US and Canada account for a majority of the total market-share. This work also concluded that for prospective doctoral students, obtaining a degree from the right program could be among the most critical first steps for those who aspire for a tenure-track academic career. In the current paper, we examine market share for anthropology as a discipline. Unlike the Speakman et al. At this point, we feel the need to emphasize several key concepts that are stated in detail in our previous study [ 1 ].

Our rankings do not reflect the real or perceived quality of a graduate program although arguably these variables are highly correlated. We do not attempt to, nor can we account for, PhDs working outside of academia in the US e. These include categories such as lecturer, staff, post-doc, research staff, adjunct, affiliated, emeritus, museum professional, or anthropologists in other departments.

We do not assume that all graduate students entering a PhD program begin with the goal of obtaining a tenure-track position, but arguably many incoming PhD graduate students entertain the idea of completing their degree and entering the tenure-track job market. As a first step in examining the data, we compiled a Table S1 Table in which we tabulated total market share for each of the approximately US universities as well as dozens of foreign institutions that have or previously had anthropology PhD programs. We only include in this Table programs that placed at least one individual who graduated between and into an anthropology faculty position within the US.

Because some programs tend to emphasize preferentially archaeology, bioanthropology, or sociocultural anthropology, we also produced comparable Tables for each of these subdisciplines S2 — S4 Tables.

Market share and recent hiring trends in anthropology faculty positions

In an ideal study, we would we able to compare total numbers of graduates per institution directly to numbers of graduates who obtained faculty positions to provide indices of per-capita tenure-track placement for graduates of a given institution—however, these data simply do not exist. We calculated percentiles to rank each university based on their cumulative year market share. We used cutoffs of 95 th , 90 th , 75 th , 50 th , 25 th , and 10 th percentiles to rank the programs. These rankings are summarized in Table 1. Comparable Tables for the subdisciplines of archaeology, bioanthropology, and sociocultural anthropology are presented in S5 Table.

Programs that had no anthropology faculty job placements in the past 20 years ca. It is important to note that many, but not all, of the lower-ranked programs are relatively new e. Summary statistics for ranking and placement averages for Anthropology programs listed in S1 Table. For the discipline of anthropology, there are 5 programs in the 95 th percentile. Departments in the 95 th percentile average 4. There are 19 universities in the 75 th percentile, with an average placement of 1. When we consider departments ranked at the 75 th percentile or higher, 30 PhD programs ca.

The 27 programs in the 50 th percentile, 25 in the 25 th percentile, and 28 in the 10 th percentile are placing doctorates on average at a rate of one individual every 1. We note that a few universities in the 10 th percentile do not actually have doctoral programs in anthropology.

We likewise point out that departments have different strengths in archaeology, bioanthropology, and sociocultural anthropology and that just because a program is ranked highly for all subdisciplines of anthropology Table 1 , S1 Table that one must consider the job placement rates for program within their specific subdiscipline S2 — S5 Tables.

In Table 2A—2D , we list all programs in the 90 th percentile or higher for each subdiscipline of anthropology. The University of Michigan, Harvard University, and foreign earned doctorates are ranked highly in all three subdisciplines. We note, however, that data for Harvard subsume two separate doctoral programs: All subfields of anthropology A , archaeology B , bioanthropology C , and sociocultural anthropology D. We examined two groups of PhD recipients: Using the percentile categories defined above—which again describe market share, not the real or perceived quality of a graduate program—we plotted where anthropologists originated, and where they ultimately obtained faculty positions Fig 2.

It is evident from the two periods examined that where an individual obtains their PhD greatly influences where they ultimately become employed. Interestingly, for the period —, graduates of programs ranked at the 90 th percentile and higher are being hired at higher rates than previously into departments with doctoral programs that are ranked in the 50 th percentile and higher.

Comparison of PhD origin versus the destination department where the individual is ultimately employed for — A and — B. The x-axis depicts the type of program that PhD graduates are hired into relative to the rank of the program from where individual graduated. Academic market share change over the past 20 years has increasingly favored the hiring of PhD graduates from anthropology programs in the 90 th percentile and higher into higher ranked anthropology PhD programs.

Finally, we examined differences in gender in hiring practices for anthropology as a whole and the subdisciplines of archaeology, biological anthropology, and sociocultural anthropology. Using NSF data [ 6 — 8 ], we modeled the percentages of male and female anthropology doctoral recipients from to S6 Table ; Fig 3A , dashed lines. We note that a well-balanced department does not necessarily mean that there are equal numbers of male and female faculty.

Instead, we argue that current hiring rates should reflect the graduation rates for males and females. Based on graduation rates for males and females over the past three decades, we suggest that a well-balanced department should be hiring more females than males. To examine disparity in hiring practices, we projected the percentages of males and females hired into tenure-track anthropology positions S6 Table ; Fig 3A , solid lines by their year of graduation using a 3-year moving average. The model shows that although gender equity has greatly improved in recent decades, especially since , males continue to be disproportionately hired into tenure-track positions.

We applied the same proportional distribution model to the subfields of archaeology, biological anthropology, and sociocultural anthropology Fig 3B—3D and projected the percentages of males and females hired within each subdiscipline. Implicit in this model is the idea that the relative percentages of males and females in anthropology are more or less constant across the subfields.

Based on our knowledge of the discipline, we believe this to be accurate. Several trends are observed. First, from approximately —, the subfields of sociocultural and biological anthropology have been most successful in terms of hiring males and females at rates that reflect the actual percentages of males and females who earned doctorates. In contrast, during the same period, hiring practices in archaeology are strongly biased toward males. Second, since approximately , disparity in hiring has increased. In biological anthropology, similar trends are observed.

Third, since , the number of male archaeologists hired into academic positions has decreased dramatically. Although disparity still exists, more female archaeologists are being hired than previously. For the discipline as a whole A , males have been more successful over the past 30 years in obtaining tenure-track jobs relative to the actual percentage of male PhD graduates.

From approximately —, the subfields of sociocultural D and biological anthropology C were successful in hiring males and females at rates that reflect the actual percentages of male and female PhD graduates whereas males in archaeology B have been systematically hired at disproportionate rates relative to percentages of female graduates. Of note is that disparity in hiring has increased in sociocultural D and biological anthropology C following the end of the recession in , whereas hiring disparity has decreased in archaeology B since Whereas it is informative to understand overall hiring trends of male and female anthropologists, it also of interest to examine the types of anthropology departments into which males and females are being hired.

We therefore examined the percentages of males and females hired into three types of anthropology departments: We modeled actual hiring rates based on year of graduation against NSF graduation rates [ 6 — 8 ] and looked at each type of department in 5-year increments for the period — Fig 4. The idea here is that assuming all things are equal, males and females should be hired at percentages that reflect graduation rates.

In contrast, males are consistently being hired into PhD-granting departments at rates higher than what our proportional distribution model suggests is equitable, while females are being under-hired. For PhD-granting departments Fig 4A , equity in hiring was almost achieved during the period —, but during the period —, it appears that males are again being over-hired by PhD granting departments. Creative graduates are no longer tied to just one segment of the employment landscape.

Graduates from creative art and design courses tend to be among the worst paid. On average, female graduates earn less than their male counterparts, according to Hesa. Its figures show that while There is no breakdown available to show how degree classification impacts on a graduate's salary. However, lower degree grades do correlate with higher unemployment rates. You'll find that they look not only at degree classifications but also at Ucas points," says Isherwood. They want graduates with good communication skills, numeracy and commercial awareness.

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