I think the title is wrong. Should read: Don't go if you're planning to get a job as a professor and would mind wasting ten years of your life waiting.<p>On the other hand, if you actually enjoy what you're studying and have any reasonable amount of skill in something else (as many humanities majors who read HN probably do), then graduate school can be fantastic. You want to use computers to solve problems, but unless you're a low-level systems programmer or a CS researcher, you'll need some <i>specific</i> thing to make websites or computer programs about. School is great for that.<p>Last year I finished my MA in classical Chinese literature. The problems of OCR'ing, transcribing, and translating Chinese are enormously interesting. Even simply trying to present digitized versions of ancient Chinese texts is difficult (no one told Confucius that only so many characters would be in the Unicode standard). I got a lot of attention (and should have productized it) by making free information available in a more convenient way with a simple Rails app. There's a huge gap in the field for a young grad student who wanted to digitize information, present it attractively, and sell it back to libraries or individual researchers. And these gaps exist in most traditional humanities fields.<p>Aside: I went to UW, which has the most rigorous Chinese lit. program outside of China. Obviously don't go to graduate school in the Humanities at a school that is only theory--you're probably smart and coherent enough to make your way through it without really learning anything--go somewhere that has a difficult program where you learn linguistics, philology, or serious history. I also got all of tuition, a nice stipend, and optional health insurance by doing some PHP programming for a lab at the school--don't go into serious debt for a masters in the humanities.
A friend of mine in academia recently commented that jobs for liberal-arts Ph.D.s are so scarce that their grad school programs are basically Ponzi schemes.
i'm a bit late to this thread, so not many people will end up reading this, but i'm very much against overloading of the term "graduate school". in particular a Master's degree and a Ph.D. are <i>not</i> (not, not, not) merely different shades of the same beast. it's not like you do 4 more years of master's level coursework and suddenly get a Ph.D. A master's degree is technical training in an applied field (e.g., a master's in software engineering), whereas a Ph.D. is training to become an <i>academic researcher</i>. I'm not trying to say that one is better than the other, but they are <i>different</i>. Thus, this article should really be named "Ph.D. in the humanities: Just don't go". Master's in humanities is a completely different beast altogether. just my 2 cents!
<i>As somebody who hangs out with a lot of English PhD Candidates, I can attest that their job is way better than yours. Here’s what they do:</i> <a href="http://squashed.tumblr.com/post/316844790/dont-go-to-graduate-school-in-the-humanities" rel="nofollow">http://squashed.tumblr.com/post/316844790/dont-go-to-graduat...</a>
What about graduate school in computer science? Surely a Ph.D. in CS would have fallback options at places like Google or Microsoft where their graduate work won't have been wasted?
There's a huge oversupply of candidates because humanities is 'exciting' and thus will attract a certain number of people regardless of how bad the conditions are.<p>Ultimately the less glamorous a job/career and the higher the barrier to entry the better the conditions.<p>(This is one of the reasons why businesses are often the best way to make money; it's an unpleasant and uncertain slog which few are willing to take on and navigate).
<i>"The reality is that less than half of all doctorate holders — after nearly a decade of preparation, on average — will ever find tenure-track positions"</i><p>That doesn't sound too bad at all.<p>Presumably some percentage of doctorate holders do not want "tenure-track positions." Some might be good at things other then academia to which their academic expertise is useful. Some are probably already wealthy or old & do not want to work full time. Some are just not very good at being academics. You have that in every field regardless of training.<p>Being a history researcher is probably a less wonderful career path then Laws or engineering but I assume the students know this going in & prefer history anyway.<p>Besides, I know several PHDs working as academics with comfy 6 figure jobs that I would never hire for anything.<p>This article seems to be assuming that all PHD candidates are all of the highest "quality" and that even the bottom 10% would be flying high anywhere else and are wasting their talents in Academia. That's just not true. I'm sure that many are. These get their cushy professor jobs or do something else that they like.
A lot of highly trained, unemployed talent pool of people available for teaching pretty much any humanities subject. Over priced tuition to be taught by a grad student or adjunct anyway.<p>The situation is looking very ripe for a disruptive business model offering the same quality of education online for a much lower price.
Sorry to say, this article is very realistic about a lot of things. Since tuition got so high and heavy debt became common, starting college without a <i>realistic idea why you're there</i> is a bad idea.<p>There's nothing new about PhD's leaving school to find nothing, except that there are more of them chasing fewer opportunities. <i>Don't</i> expect colleges to clue you into these realities: it would be bad for business.
If you go to a top ten school in your field and have a prestigious advisor with some weight behind their recommendations then you'll be fine. The problem is that every school wants to hand out graduate degrees. If you're getting your phd in history from Northeastern Wichita State you're fucked.
A lot of the same things are true for law school. I think a lot of people go into PhD programs/Law school because it sounds prestigious and assume with prestige comes money.
(Disclaimer: Read this when it came out, haven't re-RTFA.)<p>Sad, but accurate. On one hand, some humanities academics are directly responsible for this; the attitude of many academicians that research was the "real work" and teaching was just commoditized grunt work ended up hosing the humanities. Physicists can afford to cop that attitude, because if they're great researchers the university will put up with poor/no teaching, but those in the humanities can't, because the transfer of culture to rising generations (e.g. education) is the <i>raison d'etre</i> of humanities departments.<p>On the other hand, the corporatization of the university and research world in general has been an unmitigated disaster, and it'd be better for all of us if the trend reversed.
Are any Humanities Ph.Ds under the impression that they can actually <i>do</i> anything with their degree (besides teach)?<p>A Ph.D in CS is not, as I understand it, a prerequisite for success in a technological field, but PG was able to make use of it to start Viaweb. Could a Humanities Ph.D do anything like that?