Academic job market suffers
Although hiring conditions vary by discipline, job prospects in academia are suffering as universities across the country freeze hiring — proving that Yale’s graduate and postdoctoral students are not immune to the economic downturn.
Students at Yale’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences are bracing themselves for a harsh economic reality. And Graduate School Dean Jon Butler has agreed to stay on through 2010 to provide continuity of leadership through the downturn, while career services administrators are advising students to diversify job prospects. But the news is not all poor:...
After 8 long years living at the poverty line, I'm getting my humanities PhD this year, and didn't even get within shouting distance of a tenure track job. And here's a newsflash: next year will be worse. It's on to plan B for me.
I hope that Yale can help graduating students by giving them temporary assignments so they can try again in a year or two. It would be a terrible loss to academia if the students moved on to other jobs. Its also important to freeze the number of students they admit into graduate programs so the pipeline is not so clogged.
Vanquished PhD, please don't give up - the job market will improve. I have been on many academic search committees and I can tell you its very difficult to get back into academia once you leave, even for a short time.
Students realize that competition is fierce and they need to do everything to stand out from the crowd. Whether it's internships, online networking or getting an online professional identity. One free service focused on helping students create an online resume portfolio is http://www.nuresume.com. So thousands of students are already getting serious about their online identity!
who in the hell spends 8 yrs getting a degree? seriously, an MD is 4 years. 8 years for a PhD in humanities? Your professors are robbing you of the best years of your life.
To Anonymous -- while I appreciate where you are coming from, your advice (which is the same as I get from faculty at my top-5 institution) needs to catch up to the present situation. Out of 30 or so phd's seeking employment from my department this year, at *most* 10% will get placement in tenure-track jobs. And while hope springs eternal in job placement meetings, next year will assuredly be worse: the economy is getting worse, not better; and the bottleneck of qualified candidates will have swollen to the breaking point.
And while I could pursue jobs in community colleges, or on the adjunct circuit (assuming I could even get such jobs -- even those, inexplicably, seem to have become fiercely competitive), I and my growing family simply can't risk our livelihood on the chance that one day I'll make it to a job that will actually support us all with a modicum of stability and long-term security.
Sorry, but I do not plan to return to academia. I've had quite enough, thank you.
It strikes me that #4 does not appreciate how irrelevant "internships" and an "online identity" are to traditional humanities fields such as history, classical studies, and literature. "Networking" is only of slight importance.
Gotta agree w/#5.
BTW: if humanities are, as some claim, every bit as difficult as, say, physics, you should have no trouble picking up, say, an MBA or a JD on the quick and dirty, no? Have you tried cross-training at SOM or LAW?
Or, heck, getting into scientific research or something else useful...
Actually it's off to Dental school for me. Am now thanking myself for taking all those pre-med courses back in college.
@vanquished
good move. a few ?s. pre-med courses/pre-dents are only good for 5 years. did you do a post-bacc any advice for the rest of us w/ sci undergrad degrees but humanities phds? i'm in the same boat as you.
I'm getting directly in touch with the admissions dean at the school I want to go to. Yes, it's true that med/dental schools often only honor college classes for 5 or 10 years. They are telling me that exceptions can be made in cases where students have been enrolled in graduate education in the meantime. So it's likely to be a case-by-case basis, and you should get solid answers from an admissions dean about this now. I'm also taking biochemistry this semester (required and I never took it), so hopefully that will also work in my favor.
wow, that's good to know. i had no idea. you never thought about law school? i might be able to put that chem degree to some use--my humanities phd isn't going to do me any good.
George Patsourakos
It will be very difficult to obtain a faculty or staff position in academia during the next year or two, since many colleges have recently implemented a hiring freeze and have laid off personnel. America's current economic slump -- its worst since the Great Depression -- has had a negative impact on college endowments, with the average endowment loss being 25 percent. Moreover, most colleges have been receiving fewer donations from alumni, friends, philanthropists, and foundations because of the sliding economy. Although many economists predict that our economy will get worse before it gets better, job-seekers need to maintain a positive attitude during these dismal economic times. Perhaps we can be more optimistic of an "economic renaissance" occurring soon by thinking about a Biblical phrase:..."and this shall come to pass!"