Crisis on Campus_ A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities - Mark C. Taylor [14]
Number of PhD Degrees Given in Selected Disciplines
Reprinted by permission of the publisher from How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment by Michèle Lamont, p. 60. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, copyright © 2009 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
With jobs scarce, students themselves began delaying the completion of their graduate work. Over my career, the time required for students to finish their graduate work has increased from five or six years to eight or nine years. Many of these students have spent two years getting a master’s degree before they begin their doctoral program. Increasingly, the majority of these bright and dedicated young men and women have been unable to find positions in colleges and universities. Nationally, from 1975 to 1987,5 the median time taken to finish a PhD in the humanities went from 9.6 to 12 years. While doctoral students, unlike master’s students, receive some financial support, it usually lasts only four or five years, and they are often forced to take part-time jobs or borrow yet more money to support themselves and, in many cases, their families. In addition, postdoctoral fellowships supposedly designed to alleviate the worsening job situation actually exacerbate the problem for graduate students. The practice of spending one to three years conducting additional research after receiving a PhD had been common in the natural sciences for years, but in the 1990s, people in the humanities also began pursuing postdocs. Though claiming that these programs serve the needs of students, universities also benefit by securing the services of the best and the brightest young people for assistance with research in the labs of their mentors and teaching courses that tenured faculty try to avoid. All of this costs relatively little and requires no long-term commitment by employers. To see how bad the situation has become, consider one of the most prestigious postdoctoral fellowships in the humanities: the Society of Fellows at Columbia. In the past four years, applications have increased from three hundred to one thousand for three to four places. This is a direct result of the deteriorating job market. Having been on the selection committee, I can say that many of these young scholars are extremely intelligent and very well qualified for faculty appointments; most of them, however, will never find an academic job. That is a tragic situation.
The world of graduate education obviously has changed considerably from that spring day in 1968 when I sat in my professor’s office considering my future. Though my parents didn’t have much money, they started saving what little they could for my college education the day I was born. I worked in the summers and during my years at Wesleyan to help with finances. A five-year fellowship at Harvard enabled me to graduate without debt and begin teaching at Williams College at the age of twenty-seven. My salary in 1973 was $10,000, and I was given a $500 summer research stipend, which, the department chair explained, was not part of my salary, so the college would not have to pay benefits on it.
Today my course would be quite different. I would take a year off before beginning a master’s program, which would require two years. Then I would start a doctoral program, which would take seven or eight years to complete. After that, if I were one of the fortunate few, I would spend three years in a postdoctoral program. During this time, my debt probably would be increasing; it surely would not be decreasing. At the end of this long process, I would begin looking for a job. If no tenure-track position materialized, I would spend three years in a series of one-year replacement jobs or would be forced to accept an adjunct position