Getting a literature Ph.D. will turn you into an emotional trainwreck, not a prof...

Discussion in 'General Distance Learning Discussions' started by BlueMason, Apr 5, 2013.

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  1. Rich Douglas

    Rich Douglas Well-Known Member

    There is no reason for that assessment. I acknowledged that you can gain insights into the process without doing one, but you need to do one to fully understand.

    Otherwise, you're merely creating a strawman argument out of things I didn't say. I'll pass.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Apr 8, 2013
  2. BillDayson

    BillDayson New Member

    Some of the medieval universities were descendents of the monasteries and cathedral schools. Even architecturally, the university quadrangle is an adaptation of the monastic abbey's cloister. You can still see it in Oxford and Cambridge.

    That assumes precisely what I was questioning in my earlier post: that an individual's primary motivation in undertaking to live the monastic life (and analogously, in pursuing advanced education and research training) is to advance to senior monastic rank (or analogously, to a tenured university teaching position). I suspect that monastic novices often had more religious (and arguably deeper) motivations than merely ascending an earthly career ladder. Just as physics doctoral students today are typically going to be motivated by physics.

    I think that it's very important that students at all levels have a realistic understanding of the job prospects in their major. I have no objection at all to that.

    What I take exception to is the idea that if somebody isn't likely to land a tenured teaching job, then he/she is probably best advised not to pursue advanced education at all. That's a very different proposition.

    The implication there is that the studies in question have no intrinsic value of their own, apart from whatever their instrumental value is in attaining something else entirely (money, power, prestige or whatever).

    Returning to the monastic analogy, there's the example of the friars, individuals in monastic orders who didn't physically reside inside the monasteries. The analogy there might be individuals with doctorates or other sorts of advanced education, who don't go on to join the professoriate.

    At one time, that's what I hoped distance learning might evolve into, something like an intellectual friary. I wanted to see it become a way for those called to be scholars to not always be so dependent on landing a university teaching career, a way for people to participate in intellectual life part-time, wherever they are physically located, while continuing to live a more conventional life out there in the wider world.
     
  3. Rich Douglas

    Rich Douglas Well-Known Member

    I'm currently writing a piece on my field, human resource development, describing it as an academic discipline, as a professional practice, and the very real gap between the two of them. My solution: creating "scholar-practitioners" who bridge the gap and live in both worlds. That's only the beginning, of course. But where do we start? By taking practitioners and teaching them the academic discipline behind their areas of practice. Where is this done? In doctoral programs open to working professionals, designed to accommodate their practical and academic pursuits.

    Pushing the envelope of academic research has practical implications, as long as there is the means to move this knowledge to the practice. But....

    There are aspects of human learning that are primarily for the pursuit of knowing, even if there are no practical or business applications for that knowledge. Humans sometimes just strive to know. And what, exactly, is wrong with that? Nothing. Nothing at all. And a Ph.D. program is a good place--but by no means the only place--for that to occur.

    I did a Ph.D. whose content has had absolutely no impact on my career. But, I've done real research in nontraditional higher education, and I know this stuff pretty well. Considering how much I loved reading about it for years, I'm really glad I did it. The degree--not the subject--has had a very positive impact on my career. Being a Ph.D. has been good to me, even though I don't do any work related to my studies. Maybe I need to get in on the ground floor somewhere.
     
  4. Balios

    Balios New Member

  5. CalDog

    CalDog New Member

    That's not my implication; I readily accept that doctoral studies in the humanities have intrinsic value. Even the author of the “jeremiad” referenced by the OP acknowledges this: “There is unquantifiable intellectual reward from the exploration of scholarly problems and the expansion of every discipline”. So yes, the benefits are real.

    Unfortunately, so are the costs – and they are much higher than they were even 20 years ago, due to tuition increases that have outpaced inflation and greater times for degree completion. If a humanities PhD does not land a decent academic position, then they land on the job market having lost 5-10 years of income, and with little to nothing in the way of professional work experience or skills. There was a time, within living memory, when that would not have mattered – a college degree of any kind was still a ticket to a decent middle-class job. Unfortunately, that time is not 2013.

    The “jeremiad” cites Prof. William Pannapacker (pen name: T.H. Benton), a tenured professor who has published the following conclusions:

    Unfortunately, Pannapacker is right. And unfortunately, most of the people who do pursue PhDs in the Humanities do not meet his criteria.

    Perfect analogy. Yes, friars were expected to leave the monastery -- but they were also expected to take lifetime vows of poverty.
     
  6. CalDog

    CalDog New Member

    Who got an English PhD from Princeton in 1996, and who is not an English professor -- because she is a Journalism professor.

    Great outcome. Happy ending. But perhaps not a typical result for the average humanities PhD in 2013.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Apr 9, 2013
  7. CalDog

    CalDog New Member

    I fully agree that this would be great. Unfortunately, I also agree that it hasn't happened, and that it probably will never happen.

    The US has most of the world's best research universities. In theory, the top schools could create amazing DL outreach programs in all kinds of humanities and social science disciplines, like maybe French Literature, Medieval History, Buddhist Studies, or American Art.

    But for the most part, the top schools have no interest in doing anything of the sort. A century ago, professors at the University of Chicago were actually expected to offer correspondence courses to the general public as part of the job. That would be inconceivable today.

    And let's face it: even if the top schools did try to offer DL outreach, they couldn't do it inexpensively. They need tens of thousands of dollars per student per year to stay in business. They've forgotten how to do it any other way.
     
  8. BillDayson

    BillDayson New Member

    Yet the conclusion always seems to simply be that students should not study the traditional academic subjects (history, philosophy, literature, many of the sciences and so on) at the graduate level at all. Whatever intellectual importance the authors concede the subjects might have, it doesn't really justify anyone actually studying them, because the subjects aren't perceived as paying off in the very different ways that the authors believe are much more important.

    The implication seems to be that graduate school = doctoral education. Obviously that needn't be true. But even if it was, the anti-intellectual conclusion doesn't follow.

    That assumes that the graduate student must be studying full-time and that graduate study will preclude holding down a day-job. Degreeinfo readers' experience seems to falsify that assumption. Many of our participants have already earned, or are currently enrolled in graduate programs part-time, programs that they are paying for themselves, while they continue to hold down a job.

    I personally did a BA in Philosophy and Religion (part-time, on campus, often at night) and an MA in Humanities (part-time, by DL) that I paid for myself while I was working, and in both cases I graduated with no debt at all. It wasn't even all that difficult, certainly no more difficult than earning an MBA the same way would have been, and countless people are doing that right now with no problems.

    If we concede that it's entirely possible for students to study subjects like business administration part-time, at night or by distance learning, in hopes of getting a better-paid position in the future, then why can't we concede that it's possible for different people with different interests and different motivations to study traditional academic subjects part-time, at night or by distance learning, because they are actually interested in the subject?

    That assumes that a student's only motivation for undertaking advanced study in the traditional academic subjects is to land a cushy career in the professoriate. That indeed might have been Mr. Pannapacker's own motivation (if it was, then that's sad), but it needn't be everyone's.

    This one is another variant of the 'independently wealthy' objection that I already responded to up above.

    Now the 'independently wealthy' idea is conjoined with the career-advancement-motivation assumption

    Mr. Pannapacker's complaints seem to boil down to two issues: 1) Graduate study can be expensive, and 2) There aren't enough nice tenured university teaching jobs out there to absorb all the graduates. Once we acknowledge that these two issues are both real and important, we need to think about their implications and about how best to respond to them.

    Part of the problem here is that Pannapacker, like many tenured academics, seems to equate "graduate school" with the prestige universities that they personally attended, and with their own career path into academia. But that doesn't exhaust the possibilities.

    One obvious way for students to address these issues is for them to enroll in less costly graduate programs that permit part-time study. It would also help a lot if students didn't have to physically move to within commuting distance of the school they enroll in and if its classes were flexibly (and perhaps non-synchronously) scheduled so that they can fitted around work schedules. And isn't that precisely what Degreeinfo exists to talk about?

    And obviously, students who take the low-cost, part-time and perhaps-DL route will need to face the fact that a comfortable career in university teaching is unlikely. (Though they might be able to participate as an adjunct occasionally.) It's already hard enough for graduates of the full-time prestige programs to find tenure-track positions.

    But that doesn't imply the rather anti-intellectual and over-the-top conclusion that traditional academic subjects shouldn't be studied at all. It just means that prospective students who are deeply interested in these subjects need to be realistic and choose their programs intelligently.

    It seems to me that when university professors espouse views like Mr. Pannapacker's, those views can be very destructive and self-defeating. After all, why do universities employ professors like him in the first place? To teach students. If professors succeed in convincing prospective students that they shouldn't study what the professors teach, there will be fewer students. Fewer students means that professors are going to be laid-off. That will make bad academic job prospects even worse, so there will be even fewer students. So more professors will be laid off. That could easily become a destructive self-reinforcing cycle. (Maybe it already has.) And if university study of the traditional academic subjects withers and blows away like dust, then it's not only professors like Pannapacker that are going to suffer, the intellectual life of all of humanity will suffer along with them.

    I still think that professors would be a lot smarter if they tried to increase the number of students enrolling in their subjects, instead of trying to make their subjects shrink away to nothing. Professors should be promoting ways for students with real interest in what they teach to study those subjects flexibly and inexpensively, without totally disrupting the students' lives. If there aren't enough tenure-track teaching jobs for every graduate, then professors should be promoting new and innovative ways for graduates to put their learning to work outside the walls of traditional academe. Growing their fields instead of shrinking them might actually improve job prospects for the professors themselves.

    It depends on what kind of poverty you are talking about.

    If a prospective student only cares about making more money, getting more power and about career advancement, then he or she probably should be thinking about enrolling some high-demand vocational subject. (And hoping that it will still be in demand ten years from now.) There's nothing wrong with that.

    But that isn't, and it shouldn't be, all that education is. There are still some students out there (probably a minority) who study their subjects because they are actually interested in them, because they think that the subject is truly important. Scientists obviously think that way about science. Historians think that way about history. Religious people think that way about theology. In many cases, these people think that their subjects are more important both to themselves and to the world than merely making a bigger salary could ever be. There's nothing wrong with that either.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Apr 9, 2013
  9. CalDog

    CalDog New Member

    Because the costs of higher education have risen to the point that most people cannot afford to undertake it, unless there is some chance of financial payback. That's why student loan delinquency rates are at record levels. This is unfortunate -- but it is the reality.

    Dr. Pannapacker is providing prospective students with a realistic understanding of the job prospects for traditional humanities PhDs. And you stated, earlier in this thread, that you "have no objection at all to that".

    Furthermore, there is no need to worry that his views will be "destructive". If you read the "jeremiad" that is the subject of this thread, the author acknowledges that she was fully aware of Pannapacker's warnings, but -- because of her passion for literature -- she ignored them. So in her case, educational passion won out over more mundane concerns. The problem is that it's not a happy ending -- the student now regrets her decision.

    I totally agree. Unfortunately, this is not the trend. And the higher up you go on the academic hierarchy, the less interest they have in inexpensive non-traditional education.

    There is nothing wrong with it -- unless the cost is too high. Maybe there is something wrong, for example, with taking out tens of thousands of dollars of non-dischargeable student loan debt to get an MFA in Creative Writing.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Apr 11, 2013
  10. ryoder

    ryoder New Member

    We recently had some high level appointments in my company and the big bosses sent out an email talking about the appointments and their qualifications. I was glad to see that two of them this year were recognized for being PhD holders. I have also met quite a few PhD holders in high level engineering positions in my company. Not in my local office but in other offices. These PhDs have gained the respect of their peers and others in the company and I think that the company is proud to have them.
     
  11. CalDog

    CalDog New Member

    My experience is also that the PhD is quite respected in firms involved with engineering and physical sciences. A freshly-minted PhD in those fields is employable, and will likely command a higher starting salary than a freshly-minted MS.

    However, that's not the whole picture from a financial standpoint, because the PhD spends much longer in school than the MS. Someone who leaves school with the MS gets a "head start" on a professional career relative to someone who stays for the PhD; the MS collects several additional years of professional paychecks.

    Furthermore, the MS gets work experience and promotions while the PhD is still in school. So we shouldn't compare a freshly-minted PhD to a freshly-minted MS; the more realistic comparison is a freshly-minted PhD to an MS with several years of professional experience. And in that comparison, the MS+experience gets a higher salary than a PhD+no experience.

    So the conventional wisdom in engineering/phys.sci. is that the MS hits the "sweet spot" financially; the PhD will not usually catch up to the MS in terms of lifetime earnings. That does not mean that the PhD is a waste of time; it just means that prospective PhDs should expect the rewards to be predominantly non-financial.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Apr 12, 2013
  12. BillDayson

    BillDayson New Member

    Perhaps I'm a minority of one here on Degreeinfo, but I'm convinced that higher education has intellectual rewards as well, that in some cases might be even more important than the financial rewards.

    A lot of that debt is being accumulated by full-time on-campus students who are living off loans.

    I expect that many of our Degreeinfo participants are enrolled in graduate programs right now, without experiencing terrible hardships or debt burdens. (I've done it myself, so I know it's possible.) Helping students do that is what I've always thought that this board was about.

    Recommending to prospective students that they not get too deeply into debt earning their degrees is very good advice. But advising them not to study at all is a totally different proposition.

    I think that I've already done a pretty good job of deconstructing Pannapacker's remarks: He falsely assumes that students will all attend graduate school full-time like he probably did, and ignores the possibility that they might attend part-time while continuing to support themselves. He seems blissfully unaware of distance learning. And he again assumes that the only goal of graduate study is to follow the career path that he followed to become a tenured university professor.

    University professors are employed to teach students. When those professors attempt to convince prospective students that their subjects aren't worth studying, the professors are subverting their own academic fields and their own reason for being.
     
  13. CalDog

    CalDog New Member

    As pointed out repeatedly, nobody is disputing that point. The issue is the intellectual rewards vs. the financial costs. You are only a minority of one because you won't acknowledge the obvious fact that the latter can (and frequently does) outweigh the former.

    OK, let's return to the subject of this thread: the "jeremiad" against PhD programs. The author pursued a Germanic Studies PhD, on Kafka, at a top US research university. We can assume that this program was intellectually demanding, highly selective, and required both German language fluency and an extensive knowledge of the German literary tradition.

    There are exactly zero flexible, part-time, inexpensive DL programs like that. And this is not the exception -- DL options generally are limited, unselective, and unspecialized. DL can meet some people's intellectual passions -- and that's great -- but even you have admitted that DL hasn't lived up to its promise in this regard.

    So for the subject of this thread, it was B&M or nothing. She now feels that "nothing" might have been the better choice. And unfortunately, she's probably right.

    No, and this is where we completely disagree. If (for example) a German literature PhD requires an extensive investment of time and money, then time and money are part of the proposition. If the costs, in time and money, are too high, and if they outweigh the potential career and personal benefits, then advising students not to study at all is perfectly logical. In fact, it would be unethical not to disclose the costs and to emphasize their magnitude.

    Once again we return to the subject of this thread. She is a PhD and a (visiting) professor. She is now advising prospective PhD students that, based on her experience, the costs outweigh the benefits. In your opinion, should she shut up for the sake of her academic field? Or can she tell the truth, as she sees it ?
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Apr 12, 2013
  14. CalDog

    CalDog New Member

    University professors are employed to teach, but also to do research. What if they do their research, and come to the honest conclusion that their subjects aren't worth studying, at least for some students?

    It happens, and the best example is law school. For example, one recent study, "Reflections on the Decreasing Affordability of Legal Education", found that most 2011 law grads are not making enough money to pay off their debts and to pay off a mortgage on a $100,000 house (I'll concede that non-financial, intellectual rewards were not considered). Recent books by law profs include titles like "Failing Law Schools", "Don't Go to Law School (Unless)", and "The Lawyer Bubble".

    Are these professors subverting their own field? Yes, they are helping to drive the biggest decrease in law school applications in decades. There is a very real possibility that some law schools will close in the next few years. There simply aren't enough applicants to fill up all of the available slots, even at a 100% acceptance rate.

    But is that really a bad thing, given that law schools have been supplying JDs at a rate which is approximately twice the demand?
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Apr 12, 2013
  15. Rich Douglas

    Rich Douglas Well-Known Member

    I would find it difficult to believe that a university professor would conclude--at that point in his/her career--that his/her academic discipline isn't worth researching.

    Law schools are in a unique position, having seen the market for attorneys just disappear all of a sudden. Academics, on the other hand, have been facing this dilemma for decades. It's really nothing new.
     
  16. CalDog

    CalDog New Member

    Then I invite you to read "Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go, by Dr. William Pannapacker, a tenured professor of English. It may be the single most famous article published in the Chronicle of Higher Education during the past 5 years.

    The academic job market for PhDs has been bad for decades, but what is new is that (1) tuition, in real terms, is now higher than ever; (2) student loan debt, in real terms, is now higher than ever; (3) times to PhD completion are now higher than ever; and (4) the non-academic job market for PhDs is now worse than ever. Because of 1, 2, 3, and 4, PhDs in traditional academic disciplines who can't land a good academic job (i.e. most of them) are in significantly worse positions than they were 30, 20, or even 10 years ago.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Apr 12, 2013
  17. Helpful2013

    Helpful2013 Active Member

    Category Error

    The (very bitter) author seems to define the problem as ‘Getting a Ph.D. gets one nowhere in academia.” I think a more realistic estimation might be “Getting a U.C. Irvine Ph.D. gets very little traction in seeking a tenured post in academia." This is not snobbery or an anti-UCI agenda, but a realistic appraisal of the extreme competitiveness of the arena for those seeking full-time academic positions. I suspect that many students unrealistically flatten the playing field in their own minds, and that recently minted Ph.D.’s from elite schools likely aren’t facing the same level of struggle as the author of the article. One can either choose to chalk that up to “branding” or to a genuine difference in the graduates, but I suspect that grads from the Ivy League, Chicago, Duke, and U.C. Berkeley travel a substantially different road, both in and out of academia. Granted, that also has a lot to do with publications, but the grads of top programs usually seem to start publishing during their Ph.D. Conflating all the doctoral programs out there into a single category marked “Ph.D.” is a mistake in English Literature, and I would argue, in any field.

    Regarding the transactional (as opposed to transformational) perspective and the reduction of everything to cost-analysis, I agree with BillDayson and Rich Douglas.
     
  18. danders

    danders New Member

    Well, yeah. :)
     
  19. danders

    danders New Member

    It can also be a way to avoid the working world. ;)
     
  20. danders

    danders New Member

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