Don't most of us think, "Duh?" to an article proclaiming that getting/being a PhD in Literature is hard and mostly pointless?
Upper level education costs a lot of money and involves years of time, don't these people think about what they want to do with their lives? Don't they do at least cursory research into what that degree will mean to their careers?
Every high school has some sort of career counselor. Colleges have many of them. These days, research on the Internet (these are pre-PhD Lit students, don't they know how to Google?) makes it simple to look up salaries, opportunities to be hired, personal stories from those in the career, etc.
Maybe this trend toward people realizing that many degrees are near useless is just a result of the economy and tougher times finally making the practicality of education paramount. It seems a shame that you need bad circumstances for people to evidence some common sense, though.
About a decade ago, I left a humanities Ph.D. program at Stanford after finishing the coursework, but before starting the dissertation. In my experience, my classmates thought very hard about what they wanted to do with their lives, and were very aware of the career risk involved - if not when they entered the Ph.D. program, certainly by a couple years in. (Hanging out in the graduate lounge with the eighth-year Ph.D. students will do that to you.)
However, most of my classmates were so intensely interested in researching their specialities that they decided the risk was worth taking. After all, it's not like they're particularly suffering during grad school. Grad school in the humanities gives you blissful amounts of time to really geek out in the speciality of your choice, and at top-flight universities, the first few years are free (except for the opportunity cost.) If you get in, your basic expenses and tuition are covered.
Note how we lionize entrepreneurs who intensely pursue a low-probability dream, whether they succeed or fail, while grad students pursuing their own low-probability dream get nothing but scorn. Odd, no? What needs to be changed isn't necessarily grad school, but academic culture - particularly its attitudes towards and adaption to failure. If their community was as understanding of their own failures as ours is of our own, perhaps there wouldn't be such drama about their low rate of success.
Note how we lionize entrepreneurs who intensely pursue a low-probability dream, whether they succeed or fail, while grad students pursuing their own low-probability dream get nothing but scorn.
I disagree with your characterization that grad students are getting scorn. At least in my post, I don't intend to scorn. Maybe a "marked lack of sympathy for a self-made mess" would be what I'm trying to convey. I also disagree that there is a significant commonality between entrepreneurs and grad students because of their probability of success.
I'm just wondering why PhD students are surprised that higher degrees in the humanities aren't the easy gravy train they imagined. It seemed pretty obvious to me 20 years ago. Seems easily researchable 20 years ago. As time has gone by, it has just seemed more and more obvious.
What needs to be changed isn't necessarily grad school, but academic culture - particularly its attitudes towards and adaption to failure
I disagree again. Making it nicer to fail won't help those people. Opening their eyes to the real risk vs reward scenario earlier on would.
Conflating the entrepreneurial and academic communities as far as the understanding of failure doesn't help. Entrepreneurs who fail learn important lessons about what doesn't work and are encouraged to dust themselves off and apply what they've learned. They're still entrepreneurs when they try again.
Academics who fail while working on obscure/useless PhDs should most properly learn to stop being academics.
No. Up until very recently (the most recent recession, perhaps), simply having a college degree was thought of as being a road to a comfortable middle class life. To this day career counselling focuses almost completely on interests and lifestyle and ignores salary. Unless a student has a mentor to guide them, it is very easy to go through college blistfully unaware of the realities that exist once you are in the job market.
I don't agree with your assessment that this is a completely recent phenomenon.
"Is a college degree enough?" was a pervasive question when I got out of undergrad in 1991 since we were in a recession. My placement center and many magazines had "What is this degree worth?" compilations. This same information has been available online for at least the last 10+ years.
Ironically, I always thought of myself as being pretty blissfully unaware and unthoughtful of my own career and where I was headed... but I knew what my salary and job prospects were for my career before I settled on my major when I was a Sophomore in college.
Sounds like you were a much better planner than most college students. I don't think that salary research is of much help for 18 year olds. It's hard to gauge what a good salary is at that age. This is where mentorship and parenting can be of great help. But we're still at a point where a minority of adults have college degrees so many parents believe sending college is the silver bullet to a good life.
It is not pointless. It is just not lucrative. There is certainly plenty to be fixed in the world of higher education, but if we solely follow the money we run the risk of turning our great universities into nothing more than 21st century trade schools.
> Every high school has some sort of career counselor. Colleges have many of them.
They typically won't tell a student "sure, you can go for a PhD, but it's a waste of time." Schools and colleges tend to be biased towards thinking more education is always better.
There was a time in high school where I came to the realization that I learned material better doing independent study than in actual lectures/classes. Reading/studying on my own allowed me to learn in a more focused atmosphere. Lectures seemed like a waste, time spent scribing what was being 'taught' (for review later) versus actually absorbing material. Also, I felt that a lot of my time was wasted on topics that I really didn't care for and was quite painful (American & European History come to mind).
I brought this up to my guidance counselor and asked why I was wasting my time in high school when I could just as easily buy a book. Half-considered dropping out of high school and focusing my studies on topics that were interesting (physics, chemistry, cs, math, and possibly finance).
Our dialogue went something like:
GC: Uhh...don't drop out. You should stay in school it's good for you
Me: But I learn better straight from the book, it's what I'm doing for my courses now anyway...
GC: You need to have teachers
Me: Why?
GC: It's hard to get into [a reputable?] college without graduating from high school.
Me: ...
Kind of wish I did drop out back then. I would have probably spent a lot of my time honing a particular craft, although CS and Finance/Accounting seem to be the easiest choices (lower cost of entry compared to chemistry/physics/biology - requiring labs).
tl/dr: I wanted to drop out of high school and study independently. Guidance counselor encouraged me to stay in school. Wish I left so that I could focus on interesting subject areas.
Once you get to PhD level, you need to be an independent student. The best students are. In order to get there, it's useful to be independent all along the way, typically by riffing on the constraints of the various assignments you complete.
If you're not into the structured part at all, then it will chafe from friction. However, the structure is definitely there for a reason because, if you're really pushing the limits, you'll be thankful for the times when you stumble and there is a structure to fall back on.
So you're left with two choices that maximize independent learning: 1) drop out or 2) make it past undergrad and become a master student.
I'm in a PhD program right now, but some of the best stuff I'm learning is happening through Coursera. ...and that's great, but the fact that I have a community of other full-time students and researchers to work with makes all the difference. If I were just sitting in a room learning for learning's sake, it would be totally different. I feel really lucky that I can put my ideas into practice, and I totally love the academic environment for facilitating that. To me, it's worth it.
They may also get funding based on graduations. PhD students are also fuel for the research in universities, and possible future researchers themselves.
> Well, someone also has to not die from small-cell lung cancer to give the disease its 6 percent survival rate, but would you smoke four packs a day with the specific intention of being in that 6 percent? No, because that’s stupid.
Yet lots of people smoke even though they're fully aware of the risks. It appears that the author knew of the job outlook for a Lit PhD all along but chose to ignore it. I think we all exist in that optimistic dream-world state of mind at some point.
Don't most of us think, "Duh?" to an article proclaiming that getting/being a PhD in Literature is hard and mostly pointless?
We should, but too many people don't and keep going into academia anyway (I was one; everyone thinks they're different, but I can at least say I had some ulterior motives).
For at least a decade, lawyers and law students have been arguing that law school is a bad deal, and it really took until 2012 for that to sink in. I think we're seeing a similar process unfolding around grad school more generally.
Academic grad school isn't in most cases as pernicious as law school, because if the school is paying you, even some trivial amount, quitting after two years is easy, but many of the basic supply and demand problems remain.
This article isn't about engineering or computer science degrees that are applicable in industry. It is about humanities degrees that seem to have only one career destination: a tenured professorship.
To be fair, this post is about a literature Ph.D., not one in a field like Mathematics or Computer Science. Not that the job outlook is a lot rosier on that side, but it's an important distinction to be made.
I think we should clarify that the research-job outlook is not rosy in CS. There are plenty of corporations that want to hire CS PhDs for non-research work. And there is always the entrepreneurial route (the smart VCs aren't going to hold the PhD against you).
That's true, though if you want a job in industry doing non-research CS work, the case for going beyond a B.S. or an M.S. in the first place is considerably weaker. You could do a PhD if you want to spend a few years in grad school out of personal/intellectual interest, presumably the same reason one would do the same in literature, but it's not going to really open career doors unless you're interested in research.
Agreed with one caveat. If one is interested in something obtuse, doing a PhD gives you the opportunity to work with the greatest minds/personal heroes in the subject. I got the opportunity to interact with a few Turing award level people in my career so far. It is hard to put a dollar value on that.
One other point is that resources like YC did not exist when I started my PhD. I was about to finish as YC came out and I felt finishing up my PhD was the better option. I had some friends who had just started their PhD programs and they quit to pursue startup opportunities (undoubtedly a good move for almost everyone). Timing and luck I guess.
In Germany there are plenty research-jobs, but most of them in civil service, so no CS-PhD want it. The industry just pays much better.
Last year there was something in the news about the payment of professors, which was about $5000 a month. This is an entry level pay of a software developer (without Master or PhD) in Germany.
"...which was about $5000 a month. This is an entry level pay of a software developer (without Master or PhD) in Germany."
Where? I'm near what, as I understand it, is considered a good area for high-tech workers (Ruhr area), but I don't see many jobs paying this much (maybe I'm looking in the wrong places?)
I'm from Stuttgart, made my B.Sc. in 2011 and make about $5500 (~4220€) am month as a GUI-Dev. When I read the "IT-Payment" polls in the news I get the impression this isn't nearly as much as it could be. :D
Academic work year and no crazy hours? Sorry, but you clearly don't work with research.
Working all days of the week is incredibly common.
And, unfortunately, crunch time specially near major conference deadlines is almost becoming the norm. Of course, the focus on publication is another problem related to that.
Having worked in academic research and co-founded a startup I would admit that the working hours weren't that different. However, in a startup you have a much wider set of pressures - making payroll at the end of the month, keeping customers happy, investing your own money to keep the business going, hiring/firing/managing people etc. (it's a very long list).
People can work as much or as little as they want, once they make tenure. It's not that different from the startup model: hard work for a few years up front, then cash in your chips, with 2-3 decades of guaranteed income until government retirement age.
This would only be the case if every research job was in a university and in tenure track, which is definitely not the case.
Many research positions are in industry, or are postdocs or non-tenure track. Besides the fact that many countries don't have anything similar to tenure.
Well, that's the point - if you get a computer science or physics or biology PhD, then it's likely to be useful also in a bunch of non-research industry jobs.
If you get a literature or anthropology PhD - then outside of teaching it's useful mainly as a hobby.
There is still field work to be done in anthropology, but I have it on pretty good authority that grants are very thin unless you have a last name like Leakey. My friend was on the faculty at Harvard; now she's a lawyer because she doesn't want to retire in poverty.
It's actually a lot rosier on the CS side in my experience. I got my PhD from a middle-of-the-pack school (i.e. not CMU, MIT, etc) and received a tenure-track job offer (at a 4-year liberal-arts college) before I had defended. After working as a professor for a few years, I have decided to go back to industry, and have been besieged with job offers. My understanding is that hiring my replacement is turning out to be difficult because there aren't enough people with PhDs who want to be teaching-oriented professors.
Basically, right now, a CS PhD can find a tenure-track job if they are willing to broaden their search to include non-research-only professor jobs. Of course, this should not necessarily inform whether a person should get a PhD in CS, as it takes 4-6 (or more) years and who knows if this will still be true then.
Almost every R-1 institution has them. But the difference I was articulating here is the difference between being required to teach 1 or 2 classes per year versus teaching 7 per year.
For an informative retitle, how about "Literature Ph.D. means no jobs and you become worse person," which is well within the HN character limit for titles? That seems adequately to summarize the article.
(I had to try this, because rewriting a title is a mere exercise for a humanities major like me who used to work as an editor.)
I'm not sure if I'd trust you to do that, because I heard you were a humanities major.
Aside, I'm sure there are a lot of STEM graduates here congratulating themselves on both their employablity and their superior moral character. Upvote!
Your title rewrite is missing a word by the way. :)
Edit; I got downvoted for saying what now appears in the top comment. Tut.
Going full academic can indeed ruin a person, but there's a way to prevent that: a social circle that includes at least some people who are not academics. They can provide emotional support while you're earning your degree, drag you out of the ivory tower every once in a while (kicking and screaming, if they must) both before and after the degree, and generally keep you grounded enough to remember that you are not, in fact, on a higher plane of existence. That's valuable.
What a bad article. First, a humanities PhD has little relation (from a career and financial perspective) to a STEM PhD. So I don't understand why this link is on Hacker News. Second, while I complain about the relatively-not-high compensation and limited opportunities available to CS PhDs, it isn't that bad if you graduated from a top 10-20 program. Lets stop it with the PhD bashing already.
The 3 people I know with lit PhDs had full-time jobs/careers and did the PhD for love of the subject rather than anything else. None of them expected to get a tenure-track faculty job - an adjunct teaching appointment at the local college from time to time was more in line with what these people wanted.
Don't most community colleges accept a Master's for adjunct positions?
Not that love of subject is a bad reason to get a PhD, but if the end goal is teaching a local course every now and then, you could presumably do that after you have the MS and (potentially) while pursuing the PhD, right?
True for community college. Universities typically prefer PhDs when they are hiring adjuncts. Also, to reiterate, for the lit PhD people I knew, the end goal was personal satisfaction - not a lucrative adjunct job :-p Some people just love their subject and share it with others. Teaching is a wonderful opportunity to do that.
I know several electrical engineering professors (PhD's from Carnegie Mellon, etc). They have no issue getting jobs at universities or in private sector. They are paid very well too.
I'm glad to hear job prospects for EE's have improved. I remember a time about 12 years ago when a graduate degree in EE and a buck would get you a newspaper and a shitty cup of coffee. Nothing like getting introduced to the new-hire at our shitty 2nd shift call center only to find out they've got a doctorate and 10 years of job experience and ended up having to take a gig in tech support just to feed their family.
This may only be the case for CMU EE PhD's. In today's winner-take-all economy, graduates of top programs have all the options; anyone who isn't a superstar generally has to eat shit.
The point of life is not maximal profitability. Well, it is ok if your life is, but other people may have other viewpoints. Thankfully, the world is set up in such a way that I can easily derive a living from coding which I love to do. Are my contributions to humanity; optimized database queries, gui fixes, systems that my employer sell, etc more valuable than what a literature PhD does? Is it only the work that generates the most profits that is valuable?
If one adheres to the utilitarian philosophy, I think it is easy to see that there is a problem. If the goal is to maximize happiness, then it would clearly be better if people who love to read and discuss books can do that as much as possible instead of doing something that makes them unhappy. How would you solve the problem?
She goes on about her hopeless job search, but she never mentioned where she got her degree (Department of German at the University of California-Irvine).
I wonder if her perspective were different had she graduated from an Ivy.
"After four years of trying, I’ve finally gotten it through my thick head that I will not get a job—and if you go to graduate school, neither will you."
Clearly, her personal experience can be extrapolated to everyone everywhere looking for a tenure track literature professorship. If she can't do it, nobody else should bother trying.
True, the article is heavy on personal experience, but the numbers really don't look good if you want to be a tenured professor in the humanities. Just look at the number of open positions each year compared to the number of graduates. And don't forget to include the graduates from all the previous years who also want the one tenure-track job in early modern literature (or whatever your field is).
Yeah, the success rate for startups is low, but at least there are different routes to success (side project, bootstrapping, angel, VC, etc). If you want to be a professor the only option is to get a job at a university.
Reading this the same morning as that high school girl ranting about how no white kids will get into college because of affirmative action has really kind of soured my feelings on humans for the morning.
Well, statistically speaking, most people don't graduate from Ivy, so if you're making a general point to the whole American audience you can assume that they're aiming for a non-Ivy school.
Take a look at the faculty roster of UCI, and look at where they got there PhDs I don't know about German, but in math and science, most of the top-50 or top-100 university faculties got their PhDs at top-15 universities.
If you run the numbers and look at the ratio of PhDs to professors, it's obvious why.
This is the perfect article to be submitted to HN. Because it brings out the worst in HN. The saturated, self-congratulatory, better-than-thou crowd that is smug about their income, prospects and worth. Many here already believe that everything that isn't programming or engineering is virtually worthless and should be killed. This reinforces them.
But credit where credit is due: Academia, especially in the humanities, is everything but cosy. There is little money in it, there are few available positions.
However, being a slight bit along the same way as the author, I can only relay what I see around me every day. From the group of PhD students around me, how many hold any illusions as to what academia means? None that I have met. Out of a group of ~10 people, some almost finished, some at the beginning (this is not in the US, so everyone has done a masters or equivalent before), nobody wants to become a professor. One wants to become (and judging by how she's doing, she will be) a curator, I see people interested in broadcasting, teaching (as in: school), publishing and politics. It might be different in the US, I do not know. But here, it is painfully obvious to everyone I meet as to what the chances are to land a faculty position.
Do I care? To a degree (no pun intended). Would I like to go into academia? Yes. Do I know what that means? Yes. I write quickly, I enjoy a wide range of topics, I don't mind giving talks etc. I am flexible. Would I have to move if I wanted to go down that route? Yes. Does that bother me? No, it really doesn't. I will give it its fair shot, I will finish the PhD, and I will have a look around for post-doc positions. If it doesn't work? Fair enough, publishing or IT or something else it is.
I am not terribly bothered about money, not because I am somehow well off, but because I do not particularly care. I don't need that much to be happy. As long as I will be able to buy books and music here and there, go out every now and then and have a somewhat nice flat somewhere, I will be fine. I would like to be able to have dog, though.
I don't understand the vitriol on HN, I really don't. Everytime the humanities come up, there are the same type of comments, comparing software development entry salaries to professors, talking about student debt etc. Many here seem to be incapable (or unwilling) to even acknowledge that their own set of values is not universal, that not everybody wants to make it or even cares about making it.
In many ways, I qualify for things here, I dabble in programming, I use LaTeX/Emacs/org-mode for all my work, I use Linux permanently, write my own shell-scripts, report bugs etc. That does not mean I would necessarily like to be a programmer. HN is obsessed with making money and in doing so forgets that not everyone shares the same worldview.
I'm sure I will be fine. I do not have any student debt, I will start doing whatever it is I will be doing with a clean slate, I owe no money and I see my experiences as everything but lost time. I love what I am doing, and It would be a pity to give it up. If I have to, I will, but until then, I'll see where it'll take me.
P.S.: I'm doing German now (though I have done other European languages before). Just like the original author. Her choice of topic probably didn't help her overall feelings about her position, either. Kafka is one of those authors about whom so much has been done that it is hard to approach him without a huge amount of preconceptions.
After receiving my BS in computer science I went on to get my MA in film studies. I considered going for the PhD, but decided I didn't really care for the taste of academia I had gotten. (To me, it basically seemed like politics, but without the money.)
When interviewing for engineering positions afterward, my interviewers would often try to put some spin on my MA, like:
"Well, I'll bet an intensive two-year study of film made you a better developer."
To which I'd reply, "No. No it didn't. It was fun though, and I learned a lot. I'd do it again in a heartbeat."
Not everything is about software, and not everything has to be. I didn't spend those years studying film as some oblique exercise in... well, in anything. And the value I gained from the experience can't be measured in dollars. (As cheesy as that sounds...)
I think that you and your peers have very realistic expectations of the post-PhD landscape. And I think that these expectations are exactly what this article (and the similar article by Benton that was linked therein) is trying to cultivate.
Because I don't think that this expectation really exists in the US. I have close friends who are pursuing PhDs in mathematics and literature and have consequently met a great many PhD candidates in both of those fields. Almost all of them, with few exceptions, expect that they will get a good post-doc position and, following that, will get a good tenure track position. They have no backup plans, they have no skills that could provide them a job in anything but academia, and it's not hiring.
But I think this criticism is the same that HN readers have, just better expressed. When I read these criticisms here, I don't take away a pervasive thought that people believe a literature PhD (for example) to be worthless on its own. Instead, I see a lot of criticism of the expectation that one would get a PhD and everything would simply work out.
I'm sure that there are some HN criticism that a literature PhD is inherently worthless. But I think (and hope) that this is the distinct minority. But I do see a lot of messages critical of the fact that one spent x years working on a PhD and has developed no skills beyond the ability to critically analyze Beowulf and has no backup plan if the job market for fine arts PhDs was poor (and it is). And while the tone may be exceptionally callous, this expectation and this behavior should be criticized.
Very well said. At the risk of taking away from your original point, going into academia (especially a non-engineering field) can give you a very different perspective and release you from the tech mindset. As an example, the CEO of Palantir, Alex Karp, has a PhD in German social philosophy. How the hell did he end up leading a billion-dollar tech company? Basically he was really smart, and his PhD gave him the framework to think about privacy and civil liberties concerns, something the company desperately needed. The humanities often give us the scaffolding we need to answer really hard social problems which are neglected by the tech community, but are extremely important.
"the CEO of Palantir, Alex Karp, has a PhD in German social philosophy"
To be fair we should note that Palantir is a CIA operation whose job is to help the US military destroy indigenous peoples world wide in prep for western corporations to come in and exploit local resources.
Pretty much everybody at Palantir (such as Mr. Miller) reads HN regularly though since they post here all the time to promote and justify their company's fine work in suppressing people. The German social philosophy angle fits right in there.
Love the work you guys do attacking journalists and threatening their families. Real classy.
Prior to Palantir, Alex established the Caedmon Group in 2002. Based in New York and London, the Caedmon Group offers clients access to high-quality investment opportunities in the areas of hedge funds, venture capital, private equity, and intellectual property in the United States and Europe.
Alex earned his law degree at Stanford University and received his Ph.D. in neoclassical social theory at the University of Frankfurt, Germany. A U.S. citizen, Alex is bilingual in English and German and fluent in French.
Before getting a PhD, you should consider that this might make you less qualified than someone holding a bachelors or masters degree. As the author states, academia breaks you down and remakes you in its image, which will make it harder for potential employers to break you down and remake you in theirs, and they generally know that. Unless I was running a research lab, I would prefer to hire someone with a master level of education before a PhD unless the research topic involved building something.
I am already in the midst of it. Regardless, the PhD is not meant to build vocational skills. However, you usually find humanities PhDs in all walks of life, simply because they do teach you some things: In doing it, you are mostly on your own. No research lab, no research group, just you, a supervisor and maybe some discussion groups debating general topics and questions. What does a PhD entail? Self-sufficient, independent work. The hardest part of a humanities PhD are continuous motivation, time management, structure, reading and writing.
Humanities PhDs are fundamentally different from science PhDs, they set people up differently, teach different skills and have different requirements.
"This is the perfect article to be submitted to HN. Because it brings out the worst in HN. The saturated, self-congratulatory, better-than-thou crowd that is smug about their income, prospects and worth. Many here already believe that everything that isn't programming or engineering is virtually worthless and should be killed. This reinforces them."
Wow. Not judging, are we?
I was a liberal arts major the first time through the mill. I agree that the charlatanism tends to fail quicker in the scientific and technical fields--you need a Stalin behind you to get as far as Lysenko did, but fad upon fad in the humanities has a long run in the academy. That said, I don't know of anything more worth doing well than the humanities.
A problem that I see is that US academia had a long run as a successful pyramid scheme. All those undergraduates showing up during the GI Bill years and then the baby boom kept the colleges expanding. Somewhere after 1980 the rate of expansion slowed down, and the graduate students were scrambling for positions. But everyone's expectations had been set by the boom. The days of genteel academic poverty in the 1940s and before were forgotten. But if you look back at books about that time--Jacques Barzun's essays in Teacher in America, Ulam's memoirs, parts of Wallace Stegner's novel Crossing to Safety--you'll see that it wasn't an especially secure life, and not always a contented one.
I work as a programmer. I am not obsessed with money--a very easy thing to say if you've been comfortably solvent most of your life. But I do need to make a living. Academia was never really an option. I've enjoyed schools as a student, but found them to induce a bit of claustrophobia even when I knew that I was just passing through.
I agree with your sentiment about the lamentable, though typical HN response. However, it is totally in accordance with the mean audience of the site. Almost 50% of HN readers are under the age of 25 [1]. HN is a product of Y Combinator, an accelerator that predominantly focuses on software-based startups frequently run by kids in their 20s. The average perspective is highly skewed and very different from someone several years into a non-CS technical PhD let alone a humanities one.
GMAFB, the HN title omits the word "Literature" from the "Getting a Literature PhD" This looks a lot like the folks at slate are blogspamming.
I wish HN admins would require approval on any sites with submitted content like slate, extremetech etc. Those guys are a whole lot of noise without much signal.
That's one possibility. The other is that the submitter chose to retain clauses which would increase hits at the expense of wasting a lot of people's time.
How many people would bother with an article telling us that academic jobs for Literature PhDs are hard to find?
While that's possible, I thought HN was being a lot more strict about submission titles lately. I know I've had a few of mine changed immediately (and I'm talking about those I edited for clarity, not linkbaiting).
Uhh, I may get hated on for this one and it doesn’t help that I just got out of a meeting with a bunch of academics, so I’m kind of annoyed right now, BUT, take note that I'm a PhD working in an academic environment.
[angry bold]Stop whining and start working. [/]
This article is one of the many articles, blogs, etc I’ve read from academics complaining that there are no jobs and how it's so hard, and OMG the hours are long, and why is this happening to me, and waaaaaaaaaa, I'm a victim. I literally have 2 of them talking about this right now across from me as I’m typing this.
You know what they aren’t doing? Working (says the guy who is typing on hacker news:) ).
Stop complaining and start being the best. Every academic that I have a lot of respect for was able to get a job. They are also the ones that work their asses off, networked, give talks, and play the game correctly. Being “smart” doesn’t get you a job, regurgitating papers isn’t what makes a good faculty member and thinking that you deserve a job because you have PhD does NOT quality for a job. Simple as that.
Yes, there are very few jobs and way to many PhDs. But, I’d bet that statistic would look much different if you looked at people who actually work smart ,play the game and have some business sense. When you have no business experience at all, and only have been through school with your parents paying your way , well..yeah, it’s an eye opening experience that working is hard. Deal with it, stop complaining and go work harder/better than anyone in your field or work at starbucks.
Yikes. Applying FOL to Kafka, how... well let's just say recursive.
I think a labor shortage in some academic fields is a good thing. CS has been good to me, and I may eventually get over what I had to do to get my PhD, but if there wasn't a good job waiting for me, I don't see why I'd blow the opportunity cost on it.
Sensational and over generalizing title. This should be downvoted for being misleading. Of course a PhD in literature is going to have almost zero prospective jobs. There's no demand. I'm a EE and in the engineering world this is certainly not the case.
Read the title and subheading on the original article, not the HN parent. It was too long and exceeded the HN character limit, and had to be edited. This is about Ph.Ds in the humanities, not the Ph.D in general.
> the disciplines that comprised a college education in its
> entirety for thousands of years, but whateve
I would love to study the humanities. One of my favourite classes in college was British Lit. But universities are just too damn expensive. If I'm going to spend ten of thousands on an education it's going to be one that can pay off loans.
I can only assume the prospects get worse with the movement towards online classes and learning. How many 101 classes can't be taught nearly exclusively online? That will reduce the demand for PhDs and supply of positions further.
One point not covered -- suppose you do get an academic job. Where will it be located? Now suppose you have a spouse with a career of his/her own. Where does s/he want to live and work?
Upper level education costs a lot of money and involves years of time, don't these people think about what they want to do with their lives? Don't they do at least cursory research into what that degree will mean to their careers?
Every high school has some sort of career counselor. Colleges have many of them. These days, research on the Internet (these are pre-PhD Lit students, don't they know how to Google?) makes it simple to look up salaries, opportunities to be hired, personal stories from those in the career, etc.
Maybe this trend toward people realizing that many degrees are near useless is just a result of the economy and tougher times finally making the practicality of education paramount. It seems a shame that you need bad circumstances for people to evidence some common sense, though.