What can you do with a Ph.D. in English? Or philosophy? Or history? It's a question that every undergraduate considering humanities graduate school has to ask him- or herself before filling out applications and taking the GREs. For the majority who would like to land a job in academia, the prospects are uncertain at best. Fewer than half of doctoral graduates with humanities degrees typically receive a job offer that ends up leading to a tenure-track position. And the outlook has only worsened in recent years, with about one open tenure-track position for every four candidates in 2011.
Those who don't get lucky are often left to patch together a career of low-paying, part-time teaching jobs and hope that a full-time position eventually opens up for them. Or else they move on to another field entirely.
Recently, higher education administrators throughout the country have taken action to reduce the number of unemployed and underemployed humanities doctoral graduates by trimming down the number of students accepted into Ph.D. programs. Although this may seem like a terrible proposition on first read, we think it is a necessary step.
To be clear, this isn't a matter of a few middle-of-the-pack graduate schools cutting acceptance rates in order to inflate their prestige. Some of the best humanity graduate programs in the country are curtailing their acceptances.
The English program at The Ohio State University, for example, plans on cutting its acceptances in half for the next academic year. In the late 1990s, the program typically admitted around 60 students a year, but it's planning on taking just 20 in the future. Some universities are changing their curricula in addition to slashing new student pools. The history department at Pennsylvania State University has eliminated certain subfields and specialization areas in the program because they have found they do not lead to jobs for students.
There's no denying that the humanities have been — and always will be — an extremely important branch of academia. It's definitely sad to see fewer graduate students admitted to Ph.D. programs in areas such as English and art history. But frankly, it's certainly a more palatable solution than putting students through the ringer for years and years without the ability — or even the likelihood — to provide them with a payoff for their work.
Graduate school requires a great deal of time, money and effort, and if it doesn't lead to a satisfying career, wouldn't it have been better to just get a rejection letter before it all began? We think so, for the sake of both the students themselves and the country's still-massive unemployment rate.
Smaller Ph.D. programs should also mean that only the most qualified students are admitted to the programs of their choice. This should help ensure that the students that do get in will be more dedicated and prepared for the long road ahead. And it should weed out more of the students who aren't committed to being in graduate school but rather see it as a failsafe if they have trouble landing a job after their undergraduate work.
Because of the ample job prospects available in the sciences, there's a never-ending debate among college students over whether the humanities are worth studying. We believe any subject is worth studying as an undergraduate, and students of all majors can go on to have lucrative careers. But graduate school is a different story. Graduate work is meant to be vocational training, and there is no logic in training so many people for a field in which there are so few jobs.
