From Facebook: on grad school

Last updated on: January 7, 2014 at 9:01 pm by Jane the Actuary

From Facebook: on grad school 2014-01-07T21:01:00-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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So everyone in the right-of-center blogosphere is talking about the oversupply of humanties Ph.D.’s, and I thought it would be useful to actually get the opinion of a real humanities professor, namely, my old friend who teaches Old English at a state university (hence, in the English department but nothing flaky like Postcolonial Studies):

I think we need to be very honest, to the point of talking them out of it a *little*. What I don’t want to do is see graduate school become the playground of the independently wealthy, which is the result of what people like William Pannapacker are proposing, because then the faculty will be even less diverse than it already is and further removed from the experience of most of the student body.

We have a responsibility to manage our graduate programs well and not let in too many, but my university tends to attract not the traditional professor types, and that’s a *good* thing. We do not place all our literature PhDs, but we certainly place some (numbers are tough to do, and unreliable guides if we include place-bound and second-career PhDs), and the Rhetoric and Composition program has placed all its people the last couple or few years. That’s [my school] –not a top-ranked school by anyone.

We are NOT just setting up our grad students for failure, and I suspect most programs are the same.

Do you think grad students (whether in your program or undergrad English majors headed that way) have a realistic understanding of their chances?

I try to make darned sure that they do. Some graduate students actually enter the program already very nervous, and that’s a bit TOO much. I still remember my first year on the job market, when I was confident that with a degree from [a top grad school in the specialty],a publication in the top journal in my field, and a second publication, I wouldn’t have much trouble. I didn’t even get an interview. The second year, I had interviews and campus visits, but no offers. It took three years. I make sure my students know that. I find most have already heard worse. Some of the undergraduates are a little starry-eyed, but most of us sit them down for a talk if they ask about grad school or for a recommendation. I fear if only the top-tier graduate programs remained open, we’d see even more elitism than we already do in academia.

Is she right? I don’t know. At any rate, she’s not blindly encouraging more students just to keep the pyramid scheme going.

And it’s not entirely easy for a grad school to admit only the “truly deserving” — heck, I looked great on paper as a grad school applicant, and did just fine until I got to that part requiring independent research, so I’d say that part of the solution is definitely to take more of a “weeding out” approach to the beginning of grad school. At a minimum, my program didn’t require a master’s thesis, and I think that was a mistake — requiring grad students to engage in the sustained research and writing required for the dissertation, at an earlier point, would be an earlier test and send some into alternate careers sooner. (The master’s thesis ought to be designed to be part of a later dissertation, wherever possible, so that time is not lost.) Oh, and grad students ought to be eligible for the same general career counseling as undergraduates are, to provide a wider set of options.

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