“The Ph.D. Glut Revisited” should be cause for sober reflection for all of you pursuing a PhD or planning to enroll in an advanced education program. To summarize:
The Ph.D. glut has existed since the fall of 1969. The number of entry-level full-time professorial positions has remained stagnant. Few new universities have been constructed. Legislatures have resisted additional funding.This has led to a reduction of the number of tenure-level positions. Universities and community colleges have been able to staff their entry-level positions with inexpensive instructors.
Those few Ph.D.s who receive a full-time position at a university find they are paid much less than tenured members of the department. They are assigned the lower-division classes, which are large ““ sometimes 200 to 1,000 students. These mega-classes require lecturing skills that most professors do not possess. Those untenured faculty members who perform well in mega-classes are kept on until the day of reckoning: the decision to grant them tenure, usually eight years after they go on the payroll. They are usually not re-hired unless they have published narrowly focused articles in professional journals.
The assistant professor is now 35 years old or older. He has not made the cut. He is now relegated to the academic underworld: the community colleges, where a professor is lucky to get $15 an hour teaching worn-out adults trying to earn an A.A. degree.
This has been going on ever since the fall of 1969. It is great for community college administrators, who have a never-ending supply of optimistic Ph.D.-holding graduates of all but the top two-dozen universities, plus a never-ending supply of burned-out, terrified assistant professors from top universities who did not receive tenure.
Bright graduate students possess a pair of non-marketable skills: the ability to write term papers and the ability to take academic exams. They are also economic illiterates and incurably naïve. So, they become the trusting victims of the professorial class.
I told you law school wasn’t as bad as you thought!
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COMMENTS / 11 COMMENTS
lirelou added these pithy words on 26 Jan 06 at 4:23 amFrom an institutional perspective, all things being equal, a glut is good. An institution can, again in theory, choose from among the very best and brightest. BUT, tenure is a check! Tenured professors may even be inferior in performance to some newly minted Ph D’s, but they have that magical power of being permanent. Perhaps the answer is to do away with tenured positions altogether. Fat chance that will ever have being voted in in Boondocksville State. I remember reading similar papers on law schools some time back. We were minting far more lawyers than were employable, was the judgment. Therefore law schools should cut back. Yet in my own law school, which was in a civil law jurisdiction, about a full third of the class had no intentions of ever becoming attorneys at all. Rather, they were acquiring a legal education for the purposes of better managing family businesses or estates. Indeed, some of our professors were prominent business, industrial, poltical, and government figures whose J.D.s were often listed below one to two Ph.Ds.! Probably just as well, given that the local bar exam only admitted 28% of the candidates in its most successful year. (Three full days of essay, written in Spanish, with no multiple choice or “Interstate” questions.)
Good article! I guess I can abandon any dreams of teaching any history or political science classes at my local Podunk community college once retired. My brother, with a masters in accounting and a CPA certification had far better luck.
Joe added these pithy words on 26 Jan 06 at 5:36 amI suppose it depends on whether your education “transfers.” The benefit of a legal education is that it teaches you skills that transfer over into a variety of other job areas: finance, administration, politics, law enforcement, etc. Other fields are transferable too. With a higher-level math background, for example, a person can pick up quite a few financing and managerial skills that would be very difficult for people who can’t crunch numbers without a calculator. With a graduate background in foreign literature, a person can make a pretty good living as a professional translator. Or, with an upper-level degree in political science and appropriate research background, they could be an excellent candidate for lobbying, campaign strategy, the foreign service or other positions.
If they’re really nuts, a person with a Ph.D. in science could go to law school, take a state bar and the patent bar, and make $150k/year right off the bat…
The thing, of course, is that many of these careers are also available to people with no graduate degree at all, so all that extra schooling becomes largely wasted for practical purposes. But at least it isn’t totally useless.
At any rate, I think you have to actually love your field before you go to graduate school to study it. Otherwise, you’ll be miserable no matter what. And if you love what you study, supply and demand become less relevant.
Dan added these pithy words on 26 Jan 06 at 6:27 pmAgreed.
Also, for Curzon, overheard:
Person 1: “He said that he should be called ‘Doctor’?”
Person 2: “Yeah, because he has a Juris Doctor.”
Person 1: “Haha! ‘Esquire’ wasn’t good enough?”
lirelou added these pithy words on 27 Jan 06 at 1:02 amJoe. your last point is spot on. Dan, Esquire was obviously not good enough for Fidel, who does not even have the equivalent of a J.D. His course was four years of university which, if it follows the Spanish system, grants a “licenciado” with the candidate having a year to prepare and submit his thesis for a doctorate. The point here is that within the Spanish system, much like in the U.S. prior to WWII, law is merely another field of university study, and not comparable to the present U.S. system which requires an undergraduate degree prior to be admitted to law school. Thus the J.D. in lieu of the LL.B. (which was also a graduate degree after WWII) My take on the Cuban system is that it is modeled on the Spanish system, whereas in Puerto Rico, despite the fact the the base legal system comes from Spanish Civil Law (modified by those clauses of the U.S. constitution which cover interstate commerce, admiralty, and individual constitutional rights), the legal education system is modelled on the U.S.. The U.S. Academic community ranks the J.D. below the Ph.D. Within my own university, we were listed below the graduates of MS and MA degrees on the graduation program, but many of those so anxious to let us know we weren’t academically up to their level would have been the first to address Fidel by his putative “Doctor” Castro title. One element of the Spanish legal education system that is worthy of study is the bifurcation of civil from criminal law. Those who seek to be either prosecutors or defense attorneys attend different law schools, and take different bar exams, than those who will enter civil practice.
RichL added these pithy words on 27 Jan 06 at 2:24 amThe article rings true. A tenured Art history professor in NYC that I know makes less than a NYC schoolteacher. She would have done far better economically if she had been a secretary. Adjuncts are treated worse, with very poor pay and zero job security.
As far as science goes, my son had two friends among all of his classmates in school that had househusbands trailing after them, rather than mothers. Both had doctorates in science. The wives skills were better paid, so they were the breadwinners.
Curzon added these pithy words on 27 Jan 06 at 3:10 amCertainly science PhDs are far more valuable than anything in the humanities. The poor bastards getting doctorates in Philosophy, Sociology, and Political Science are the worst off. Economics is better. Business and Law are another plus. Physical sciences, engineering, and IT are great.
Dan added these pithy words on 27 Jan 06 at 4:20 amCurzon,
I agree with the humanities comment. MBA is equally worthless. IT is valuable on the “harder” end (CompSci good, MIS bad).
Admiral added these pithy words on 28 Jan 06 at 7:49 amIn terms of average value, what y’all say is true, but the world is what you make of it should you have a degree of intrepidity and enter that old, most nefarious of trades: commerce. Heck… I’m thinking my JD will be most helpful with business, honestly.
monocrat added these pithy words on 28 Jan 06 at 8:29 pmDan, in terms of earning power, an MBA is not worthless. The material might be, although I’m inclined to think there’s some use to what’s taught, but the networking is the real value of an MBA. The University of Florida probably teaches 90% of what Harvard and the like do, but the real value comes from the other bodies in class with you and alumni connections. Hardly worthless. I imagine in many instances a JD and most degrees outside of the sciences are similar.
Dan tdaxp added these pithy words on 28 Jan 06 at 9:36 pmPerhaps a better phrasing would be that an MBA is roughly as valuable as two years of relevant work experience. That would explain why MBAs are paid in line with their peers, and not below.
Jason added these pithy words on 15 Feb 06 at 4:58 amSome science and engineering degrees with strong internships have utility for all classes of Americans, as do vo-tech programs, but the liberal arts should be avoided by everyone but the wealthy and professorial caste. So if you’re the son of an oil magnate who is studying philosophy for fun and to impress daddy, or your parents are university professors who will find someone to write outstanding rec. letters to prestigious graduate schools, there will be little utility to earning a liberal arts degree. It won’t transfer back to your community in any meaningful way, especially if you are the first to go to school. In the liberal arts, it’s who you know not what you know (aside: no one really agrees on how to measure knowledge in these fields anyway)
I chose my personal road of pain with an MA in History. Now I am “overqualified” for nearly everything back in my working-class home in rural, northcentral Pennsylvania. To add salt to my wounds, I get to enjoy the entire historical narrative that brought us to this point (English and philosophy students are spared these wonderful morsels). Haven’t had a career prospect or a way out in over three years, but I was lucky that school paid for itself and owe no one anything (except an apology to myself). Did my professors and advisors take into consideration my demographic profile? Nope. He’s a bright lad, he’ll find work in some city…yeah, sure.
What angers me the most, is how so many young kids (like myself) are robbed of their time, their energy, and their talent in pursuing useless skills because they were told how well they did them. I was good at a lot of things, but now I am good at writing papers no one will read. If I could hack, I would insert an open letter to freshmen on every college website warning them about this sham. But would anyone even listen?
