There was another change that led to a drop in academic hiring: Starting in 1994, the ADEA no longer allowed universities to have mandatory retirement ages of 70. Professors hired at 30 with the expectation that they would be forced to retire at 65 or 70 can now stick around for as long as they are able, often staying through their 70s and sometimes into their 80s. Less turnover means fewer vacancies to fill.
It looks like price signaling between demand, down; and supply up, has huge viscous lag.
People that really need to work, do what they need to do, adapt. I got an SB in Physics in 75 and saw I'd be at best a lowly miserable one, the 258th author on some 258 authored paper.
I went into business. One of good friends, a VC, has a degree in English literature. He's a master at tech business. 80 companies.
I think it's possible that the excess production of PhDs comes from 2 things:
Shoutout to one of my advisors, who is 86 and does not intend to retire. In his office discussing the offer he also said "I won't solo advise anymore because I can read the actuarial tables". It's too fun a job to ever stop
You might be interested to see what Peter Turchin, who wrote the book on Elite Overproduction, has to say about the current state of law school grads...
" "It’s strange to think of most law school graduates in America as members of the precariat, by that’s where they are.” [page 92 of his book, based on his interpretation of NALP data, which of course presents law school outcomes in the best possible light]
One wonders if You Know Who wrote him a meandering, several thousand word long note about how all law grads are in fact secret millionaires.
However, during their career, existing professors seem to always have a certain ratio of masters and phd students that they are sponsoring or mentoring, regardless of the length of their career. They pretty much always do this at greater than replacement rate. This is especially true in the sciences such as biomedical research where industry relies on inexpensive labor, and grants are placed at the universities because undergraduate and grad student labor is available
As someone in academia, I see exactly what you are seeing. Massive overproduction of Ph.Ds leading to applicant pools in the hundreds for every humanities position and most social science positions we advertise. I do you think you left out one important factor--a significant reason for the overproduction is that many (if not most) Ph.D-granting institutions rely on their doctoral programs both for prestige AND for low-wage instruction in these areas. This significant pool of doctoral students provides a constant supply of cheap labor, allowing the tenure-track faculty to teach many fewer courses per year compared to non-doctoral schools. This perverse incentive structure encourages even the most mediocre doctoral programs to continue to admit students that have very little chance of ever succeeding in the market.
As things currently stand, there are no real incentives for most of these doctoral programs to stop recruiting potential Ph.Ds, and there are clear incentives for them to continue to recruit new grad students to keep them teaching all those intro classes the tenured faculty want to avoid. Until academia finds a way to fix this skewed incentive structure, this problem will not go away.
If people stop buying the lie that there is a stable career at the end of studies, then the problem resolves. The problem is there are many downwardly mobile children who want to spend a decade pursuing a PhD in “wasted human potential.”
Maybe I was lucky. Lots of professors gave me advice on the serious tradeoffs and costs of pursuing a PhD. It generally has a negative ROI and there are many disciplines where it is not worth the sacrificed time and income.
This is pretty surprising to me! In my senior year finishing a physics degree at MIT, I was in the midst of a pivot to philosophy. I talked to 4 different professors about applying to philosophy graduate school, and all four of them told me, more or less, "You are exceptionally talented, and it doesn't matter. The job market sucks. Go use your very employable physics degree for something else." I didn't take their advice, something I'm moderately regretting going into year 5 of my PhD, but it's at least my own fault and I knew what I was getting into.
Saying this not to invalidate any of your own stories but to provide another data point on a different approach! I wouldn't be surprised if there's a lot of heterogeneity in what talented undergrads are told about attending grad school.
Bethany C. and Dan Quail both report getting tough and realistic advice about entering humanities or social science PhD programs:
BC: "I talked to 4 different professors ... and all four of them told me, more or less, "You are exceptionally talented, and it doesn't matter. The job market sucks. ..."
DQ: "Lots of professors gave me advice on the serious tradeoffs and costs of pursuing a PhD. It generally has a negative ROI ..."
My guess is that their experience is typical. As a professor, the last thing you want is to be advising a strong PhD student who is unable to find a decent job in his/her field.
My experience is in Linguistics, somewhat out of date (retired 2008).
Linguistics departments have generally been very conscientious about explaining the risks of the job market.
Maybe we should show our students graphs comparing someone who enters the workforce after graduation or a 2-3 year professional program vs the opportunity costs and slower rates of growth in retirement accounts for a person who spends 5-13 years (PhD plus postdoc) not maximizing retirement contributions and working in positions where the employer does not match. Maybe that would provide a more compelling argument against a PhD in the humanities than all of our words. We need to be more honest about how expensive it all is.
I agree in principle but good luck with that...a cleaner method would be to stop subsidizing the lie and make the applicants pay something closer to the full cost upfront.
Everybody told me how poor the odds were. But I, being a smart 21 year old who had never failed at anything he tried, assumed that I would be the lucky one.
It worked out okay for me, because there's plenty of well-paid backup careers for hard science PhDs. I'm not sure what the heck a failed history PhD is supposed to do.
A previous department I worked at used to have a highly ranked masters program that sent people on to many top phd programs. A few years before I arrived, the university made the department create a PhD program. While I was there, both programs continued to exist, but then the university cut all funding for masters programs, and we didn’t want to charge students for grad school, so we cut it. So now the department has a mediocre PhD program and no masters, because the university thinks that is more prestigious, even though within the field it’s now almost as if the department had disappeared. I wonder how many times this has happened for other departments at other universities.
This is exactly what I thought too. In places like Massachusetts, Suffolk County NY, or Nassau County NY, that actually pay teachers a liveable wage, he could be making over $100,000 a yr, have summers off, be off whenever his kids are off if he has children, if he was willing to teach middle school or high school history. Arguably, he's overqualified, but becoming a principal or superintendent down the road is also an option. If you don't believe me, look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics on average wages for middle school teachers, or high school teachers.
when you retire you can move to a lower cost location. If you are a teacher making $100k that 60 to 80k pension goes a lot further in many places, especially if you bought a house and can cash that out.
There is a reason Idaho has become a retirement haven for the west coast.
I live in NY, but Florida fulfills the same role on the East Coast, especially since Florida has no state income tax. Lots of teachers and cops who retire down there. Walsh could actually teach as an adjunct at a community college, while being a a middle school or high school teacher. One of my math teachers in high school used to teach classes at the local community college, since they only required a master's degree. Or, alternatively tutor students on the side for some extra money.
I don’t even plan to leave my state, just retire someone cheaper within it.
Also, I referee on the side. The hourly rate ranges about $40 - $80 an hour & I can pick my schedule.
The drawback is that this is at a sacrifice of producing original scholarship. I’ve produced some, but not at the rate I could if I had university backing.
Yeah, I know some people don't like the political climate, weather, potential hurricanes, or culture of the Southern states, and wouldn't leave NY, but even upstate NY is cheaper. Referring's a good gig, as long as parents behave themselves.
He could not become a public school teacher without certification. Which would only take a year or two, I guess, but it would be putting his life on hold a bit longer. And the skillsets are not precisely the same.
I was lucky enough to get scholarships to a prep school in New England, if not one of the truly fabled ones like Andover or Exeter or Deerfield.
I would say 95% or more of my alma mater's teaching hires since 2000 have had PhDs or another terminal degree in the discipline(s) for which they were hired to teach. And if it's like that at my also-ran prep school, I imagine at the Important Prep Schools it's a requirement.
Plumbing is hard on your body, and probably an activity that he doesn't enjoy doing. Teaching, in contrast, is probably something he does enjoy because he's chosen to do a variety of it right now.
It's true he has "wasted" the last decade pursuing his passion (academia) when he could have gone straight into a secure career. But that's equally true whether the secure career was plumbing, teaching, or something else.
Like what? HR drone? Executive assistant? Customer support operative?
Companies will (rightfully) balk at hiring PhDs for low-level jobs since they often have massive egos and trouble simply doing the job they're told. But he's massively unqualified for high-level jobs.
The unemployment rate for PhDs is around 1%, so companies bulking does not appear to be a big problem. Lots of PhDs get jobs doing various forms of data analysis. I'm not that familiar with the humanities, but there's lots of jobs that require research and writing. Entry level jobs don't usually have great pay, but it's better than postdocs. You don't have to move up far to make more than an average professor salary. I agree that ego will be a problem for this particular guy.
Optionality is under-rated. Developing skills that can be modified or rolled into another profession is under-rated in terms of value. While it probably does not maximize your gains if everything works out...it is a great fallback when things don't work out (which is a lot of the time).
Also, we live in time and place were even a fallback job can be great. People tend to forget just how good things are relative to even 1980/early 90s.
Frankly, this lets universities off the hook far too lightly.
The argument that academia is like the Mafia is well made: with a tiny core of made men (and they’re still disproportionately men) with jobs for life, money, prestige, and in all too many cases historically, a stream of young people of the appropriate gender who treat you like rock stars.
Then you have a much larger group of mostly young people working outrageous hours with little money or job security, on the promise a lucky few can join the ranks of the made men. A bad word from a made man is enough to prevent one of the workers from moving up.
PhD students and non-tenured academics deserve the kind of protections that factory workers joined unions for over a century ago - decent pay, reasonable work hours, better conditions, and the chance of a decent life that doesn’t depend on winning the tenure lottery.
If this means that academics have fewer slaves to second-author papers for them, so be it.
You are correct, but these facts have been well known and publicized since at least the late 1990s, well before Walsh graduated college and started making serious career choices. He knew (or should have known) the kind of odds he was going into.
The problem with Walsh is that he chose to "get educated" for a field with no jobs. The problem with the universities is that if it wasn't Walsh, it would necessarily be someone else, because it's not education being sold to the "student" but labor being bought from them.
He is still a product of the US system. A system rigged to exploit suckers. With the full backing of the US government.
What would it take to create--or re-create--a system whereby the universities design degrees around what employers (including the military) want, rather than on what the universities want to teach?
I think these facts were for a long time deliberately concealed from undergrads or papered over by established academics. I certainly remember being pushed to go to grad school in philosophy by my entire senior thesis committee in undergrad, to the point that my strident declarations that i was planning to go work as a teacher were called a 'betrayal of my gifts'. It's true that you could have learned this information very easily, but that's a different thing from actually believing it applies to you when trusted people are telling you you're *different* and *special*.
That's changing now from what I understand. More and more professors I've spoken to now do the exact opposite, where they attempt to dissuade students from pursuing Ph.Ds. And good for them, because at this juncture I think it is deeply unethical and irresponsible to tell *any* humanities undergrad to pursue academia. The trickle of jobs is so small that basically only people who are so dedicated and fervent about their research that they will do it despite everyone telling them not to can find a place.
"betrayal of my gifts" -- oh, that would really tick me off. That's what my profs (and friends!) told me when I was going to get a Masters of Library and Information Studies. Not all librarians are brain dead. There are many interesting paths!
The 2 main UG degrees feeding the MA in LIS are English for W. and history for M. Digital humanities would be a good career direction for historians. One thing I have noticed when I spoeak to people teaching English or History is that they see LIS as a lesser choice than PhD in their fields. Really, and I'm biased--I think it helps the world more.
When I was doing my PhD, the university touted the fact that most scientific papers there were written by graduate students as a *good* thing (this was in a country where most theses are based on at least 4 published papers). Just from that, it was obvious how dismal the average career prospects were. The common rationalization was and is that higher education still has value even if you end up outside of academia - sure, but most people seem happy to apply this reasoning to other people, but not themselves.
Yes, like most industries, higher education is marketing lottery tickets: a costly entry for the minimal chance of the jackpot of a tenured professorship. Why universities do this is obvious. The harder question Noah is tackling is why supply isn't adjusting. After all, undergrads are responding to market incentives while grad students are not.
Not enough blame goes to parents. Post-docs grew up wealthier than the average American. Reaching and subsisting through a fully-funded PhD program is nearly impossible without significant external financial support. Virtually every colleague in my wife's humanities PhD program was receiving significant support from parents.
Wealthy, highly-educated parents are unconsciously colluding with their children to pursue vanity careers. While I can contort myself to excuse the kids from irrationally assessing their odds of getting an academic position, I can't excuse the parents. I struggle to sympathize with a segment of society choosing to buck the market in the pursuit of cultural capital.
Not enough attention is paid to the role of parents and socioeconomic background.
Don't forget the other huge cohort of postdocs -- foreigners. (Not so much in history, but definitely in the sciences.)
A job in the US paying $45,000 a year, with the possibility of eventually working towards a greencard, seems like heaven to a lot of smart people from poor countries. So the actual postdoc market is a combination of rich local kids (for whom a $45K salary is just a nice extra bonus on top of their trust fund disbursements) and ultra-smart poort-country foreigners (for whom a $45K salary is a fortune).
Great point. Add in foreign students paying full freight bachelor’s and master’s tuition and it’s amazing how much post-secondary funding comes for a small number of extremely wealth donors and foreigners.
Because of unionization, the model is going to shift to permanent research assistants and lecturers.
PhD students will be much fewer- they will do some TA and teaching work as part of their training, and of course will continue to do research for their CVs and dissertations, but they won’t be thought of as an “on call” slave labor force. Post docs will also be much fewer.
This actually sounds a bit like how it probably should work. Do you see this as a bad thing or good thing? It is kind of like the move to Physician Assistants and Nurse Practioners in medicine or the growing use of community service officers in policing.
It's interesting how many of our culture-producing professions are like this. Entertainment is also characterized by a handful of winners and a mass of low-paid, exploited strivers.
Increases their incomes and reduces their numbers. This solves the oversupply problem and students don’t get stuck in dead end careers. Universities don’t rely on Ph.Ds as cheap labor and instead expect professors to teach.
Here in the SF Bay Area, over the last few years there was a lot in the news about attempts to unionize in the University of California system, where the exploitation of graduate students was enormous.
I was already a member of the UAW as a UC grad student 20 years ago. A year and a half ago there was a major strike, and the grad students got a raise to $30,000 plus some housing support. The universities are all figuring out how to properly cut phd admissions to make funding work out. We will see how this turns out.
The bit that jumped out at me was that somewhere along the way he got a mediocre LSAT score and….blamed the test. Standardized test scores are pretty accurate aptitude (not intelligence) screeners. People who get sub-par grades or test scores and blame the test or the class or the teacher are going to be a pain to work with. That Guy who thinks everything bad that happens to him is everybody else’s fault is infuriating to work with, and it’s fairly easy to smoke them out in interviews with a few questions about projects or experiences that didn’t go well.
“I had 100 interviews and I can tell you why all 100 who got hired when I didn’t aren’t as good as I am…” Nah bro….it’s not the job market….it’s you. You are an ass, and nobody wants to work with you.
The Logic Games section of the LSAT is going away after this summer's test, the result of a lawsuit by a blind applicant who argued that solving the problems was often dependent on drawing diagrams, which disadvantaged blind applicants. After this August, the LSAT will be little more than a slightly more difficult SAT reading section.
Then again, the logic games had absolutely **** all to do with law school or the practice of law, so... whatever.
Isn't the ability to see a fairly good indication of law-school aptitude? Doesn't law school require a lot of reading?
Even if everything that you ever need to read happens to be in a format that allows text-to-speech, text-to-speech is much slower than the average law student can speed-read. Furthermore, the ability to skim a large document to quickly find the relevant sections would seem to be extremely important for law school as well.
So I don't see why it's unreasonable to penalise blind people in the LSAT any more than it's unreasonable to penalise obese people in fitness tests.
I'm a biologist and I took the LSAT on a whim when I briefly considered law as a possibility. I did much, much better than the GRE and could do almost perfect on the logic puzzles, but I realize that I don't think I have the temperament or ability to read so much per week to do law. I'm not great at public speaking either. Indeed, the logic puzzles are things like how many options there are for seating people at round tables at a dinner party where certain people cannot sit next to each other and others must be at the same table etc.
But also, the second question (global warming) wasn't right-wing at all. There's just no way to read it other than as implying that the evidence for global warming is very strong.
The ability to read a text and understand what it's saying is arguably the single most important skill a historian needs to have, and he totally whiffed on a trivial test of that skill. No wonder he didn't do well on the LSAT.
Different skill set. I’ve known two people who have double degrees. Law and Economics. Both went to top Econ programs and got their law degree from their employer university (no tuition). Both of them got thru grad school by working harder than their peer group. In their respective law schools, the vast majority of students worked equally as hard. Maybe he should try the MCATS
I am the same age as Walsh. I am an economic historian in 20th Century US history who did the academia game, but who changed his expectations. Lots of people move to government because having a stable income, family life , and not dealing with asinine referees is better than the shrinking pond of academia.
(I also experienced/witnessed some of the biases that come with my demographic in US interviews. Though the Harvard/elite bias is much stronger than anything DEI related.)
As someone who worked for the Federal Government my entire career (I have a MA in Econ) I’m often surprised that a lot of academically oriented economists PhD grads don’t hedge there bets by applying for Federal jobs. The Federal banking agencies (particularly the Federal ReserveSystem hires armies of economists. Many agencies, well a few, have economic historians. They pay much better than academia and often have cool, interesting issues to work on. Although I never worked at the Fed (although my late wife did) most folks loved it. They encourage academic research and give their staff time to work on it. For agricultural Econ the Ag Department used to be here he. However the Trump administration had some petty grievances and moved a majority of the ERS to Kansas City. However, USDA still employees over 800 economists (count almost certainly anyone classified as economists, which includes undergraduate research assistants).
Also, economic consulting. Wow, not for everyone, but lots of money.
My belabored point is, there are a lot of interesting jobs for PhD economists outside of academics. Confining oneself to only one path is, perhaps a mistake.
One more point. One of my staff, a whip smart person who got her PhD in finance from a top 5 finance department, got a tenure track position at Cornell and…..hated it. Not the research, but the students. Then there was the winters….
Your mention of economic historians reminded me of a friend from MIT. He was a senior when I was a freshman, finishing an electrical engineering degree. Yes that’s a high demand degree, but he realized he didn’t want to be an electrical engineer. He wanted to be an archeologist. One semester after graduating, he returned to MIT and got a BS in Humanities, concentrating in anthropology. Then he went to Harvard and got a PH.D. In either archeology or anthropology, I’m not sure which. Where did he end up with that combination of degrees? As the historian of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). If you have a passion in the humanities, pressure your passion, but don’t pigeon hole yourself to only working in a Ph.D academic if role.
I lost out on an ERS job because I applied a year too late after the Trump purge. Federal Reserve jobs are gold plated and competitive, but they usually want macro folks. I currently work for an agency that doesn't really publish academic work even though I just found a great IV and identification strategy for a policy relevant question (it will be a headache to get anything greenlit for publication.) I might eventually jump agencies.
But alas, I also hate dealing with publication culture in econ. (Heck I know folks in Census that only push out working papers and don't bother with asinine asks by referees.) And covid really killed the travel benefits.
Try the FDIC or the regional Feds, they don’t do macro, but encourage publishing. I get your point about the resistance to publishing in some of the agencies. Places like the Fed and ERS are run by economists, most other agencies are run by risk averse lawyers who don’t understand that most economics papers are barely noticed outside a small group of experts.
This Cornell history grad feels your associate’s pain. Spring, summer and fall run April-October. The rest of the year is winter. It’s beautiful. I loved Ithaca, loved Cornell, but I’m nevah gonna shovel snow again.
This is good and all, but understates the level of personal delusion. I graduated from college in 1995 and even then people were talking about how pursuing a PhD in the Humanities was a very risky career move, with no prospect of it getting any better any time soon. Walsh probably graduated around 2010, fifteen years later, with things only getting worse since then, and AFTER the Great Recession. Sure, universities are probably still gas lighting people into going for exceptionally rare academic careers but at some point a student needs to take some personal responsibility for their choices. The other option I’ve heard - curious from feedback from any actual academics- is if you still want to go headfirst into the PhD abyss, at least pack a parachute- make sure your research work, for example includes some cutting edge analytical techniques or something similar that you could apply to a non-academic career track. That happens automatically in STEM of course, but I don’t think it is impossible in the humanities if you make some deliberate choices.
Or go to only a top program like Princeton that will pay your way and has a good placement track record….and write a book, publish lots of papers and get a good post-doc.
This guy isn’t upset because he borrowed $250k to get a PhD from the Univesity of Arkansas and didn’t get hired. He’s upset because he made a decent decision, playing the odds, and lesser players (in his view- we have no evidence either way) are getting the jobs.
Sure- but that’s a bit like saying - “you should only pursue a career in the arts if you can get into Juilliard.” I’m sure Juilliard helps, but everyone still recognizes that it’s a very tough field and there aren’t any guarantees.
Credentials are important in art (MFAs from Julliard and RSD as well as many curators look down on self-taught talent), but I would say skill matters more in art and credentials matter more in academia. In art, there is a buyer making informed decisions at the end of the chain. In social sciences there are government grants and endowments funding almost everything.
I know a dispiriting number of Berklee and Julliard grads who make adjunct professor-level wages in steady gigs / bands / symphonies that play for crowds of hundreds to a few thousand.
But he didn't make a decent decision. Thinking that a humanities PhD, even from Princeton, is likely to get a tenure track job is just wrong. I don't blame others when I lose the lotto and he shouldn't either.
Straight out of PhD, very unlikely- perhaps 10 pct based upon their placement record. After writing a book and having a productive post doc at Yale- it should be “likely” (ie greater than 50 percent). Not a lock by any means and he should have considered failure as a very possible outcome. Your area of research, gender, race, recommendations/connections, politics and your personality all play a role. I don’t do Twitter or any social media so have no idea who he is, but from the description he doesn’t sound like a particularly likeable person (nor wise).
I graduated college in 1980, and even THEN got cautionary talks from faculty about the difficulties of pursuing an academic career! One wise prof told me that too often students deciding to pursue PhDs picture themselves teaching at an elite university (such as the one I attended) and were disappointed when that didn’t materialize for them. He said it would be worth getting a PhD if I could imagine a career teaching intro classes at a community college and find that satisfying. He wasn’t being arrogant or dismissive, but realistic about the range of academic career options.
It's not really automatic for STEM. A lot of the techniques taught to large numbers of students in academia even on STEM courses aren't used in industry, or are only used a tiny amount.
There was a 2010 article in the economist about this exact problem called “The Disposable Academic” that I read when I was contemplating grad school vs professional school in 2012. Walsh was in my same cohort and this information would have been available if he’d looked (and maybe he did). I agree that there is some personal accountability at work here.
Graduated Yale ‘92, went into an English lit PhD at Harvard, bailed in ‘95 for exactly the reasons under discussion. Prestige wasn’t enough even then. There was a dude a few years ahead of me who was the leading world expert on Lollardy and couldn’t get a position of any kind three years running. There were seven (7) full professorships in the country in my own area of interest, all filled, by young people. It wasn’t going to happen.
I was very lucky to get my PhD in 2008, just before the financial crash. It’s interesting seeing this chart for history showing this brief period as the only one in decades where there were more jobs than new phds.
What a remarkably self-entitled young man you portray. My doctoral students were in Applied Physics (in U Cal and U Mich), where academic aspirations are somewhat more plausible. But becoming a tenure-track professor, especially at a top school, is an aspiration with low odds of success, even in my field. I always schooled my students to try if they wanted but to plan for nothing in that direction and to develop capabilities that maximized career flexibility. It turns out that one of them is now an Associate Professor. That is about 3%, which is about replacement rate.
I suspect applied physics (if applied in engineering and design fields) is in demand in private industry.l with good paying and possibly interesting jobs. History degree holders are also in demand, at Starbucks.
Lots of history majors in policing and the military as well. Those are good paying jobs (better than office drone work) but do require following orders (or at least grinning and engaging in malicious compliance).
There are so many possibilities in government and public policy. Read David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs - corporations have all sorts of strange positions that have become essential, like team organizers, transition teams, project managers. You just have to pick your industry and know enough about it to work somewhere. My friend who went to Westpoint military academy became a equipment manager for large factory operations, which is sort of a combination of logistics and knowing how to fix things plus some details about industrial production - like setting up a Cheez-it production line, Amazon warehouses with the robots and stuff, a paper mill. At the paper mill they wanted him to develop a community college millwright vocational program, and he felt that was stressing his limits, and he would need to work on a team to achieve that. Indeed, where is the paper industry going to find someone to design an educational program for niche vocational fields. Maybe they could find a history phd who knows how to teach
Fair enough. For jobs that want a "college degree" but without regard to which one, then I agree. That's the path on my sons took, although he then went on to train as paramedic.
How? what? That killing student loans would only encourage more elite production and taxing endowments would just cause universities to further reduce their operations and/or raise tuition
When I came to the US from UK in 1979 I knew I needed to find a new profession at the age of 40, so I just looked at what was being advertised for in newspapers. Aha - programmer, programmer, programmer !! I had little idea what that was so I researched & discovered computers ! Found a one year nighttime program I could just about afford, and jumped in ! Got sneered at by young people who all thought I was far too old to be getting into such "future" things - their world as they saw it - but I ignored them. I completed my course went for interviews & found a job. I was sent to the company's training course first, and met the same young person snobbery as B4 - ignored them all, and did well. My old attitude of will-do-whatever to succeed compared well to the entitled snootiness of the young degree-bearing fellow newbies in the company. My boss loved my attitude - I did well. Long since retired I had a very happy 35 years of programming, loved every minute of that life ! 84 now - hard work & application is a very good way to go !
I think the problem is not as recent as you think. While you are right that student populations grew into the 2000’s overproduction of social science PhDs was evident even in the mid/late 1970’s.
I had a friend who’s dad was an English prof at one of the Texas compass schools. He said prior to the end of the Vietnam war they hired mostly home grown new PhD’s. After the war ended, they never recruited below the top ten departments.
My friend was in Yale’s PhD historian department in the early ‘70. After two years he saw how few graduates received offers, he terminated and got his PhD in economics (not from Yale). And this was before the large pulse of PhDs came out after the Vietnam war ended. (Many grad students stayed in their programs after they had basically completed their work in order to maintain their draft exemption.)
Back in 1989 my agency decided to hire an “agency historian.” The person we hired graduated from Harvard. Only two in his class got tenure track positions, one at a small college in South Carolina and one at a small college in Iowa. A number a classmates made a decent living writing popular history, but none made much money in academics.
As you pointed out, with so few jobs. Lots of people are disappointed when the don’t one of the vanishingly few academic jobs open each year.
My roommate and I saw this as early as 1972 or so. Ph.Ds in our area of expertise were getting job offers in Alaska, or Nebraska, maybe, while we were urban people grown in New York and Chicago.
He switched to computers and Into law, because we realized that we preferred the institutions of urban life—museums, concerts, lots of good restaurants—over the ability to earn a living teaching undergrads.
1972 was a big crash for the Vietnam related reasons you mention. I think things were better in the 80s and 90s, and especially in the last few years before the financial crisis - but much worse since. I have had the impression that post pandemic there has been some recovery from the awful markets of the 2010s, but I’m not sure.
Another huge factor is the rise of Black, Women's and Queer Studies vs. old-school humanities departments.
The (Black, Women's, Queer) Studies departments effectively supplanted English and History, both from the demand side (that's what students want to major in) but also from the administrative side.
As Noah points out, in the 1990s Humanities departments were packed with old white men taking up all the tenured positions. In order to meet rising diversity requirements, Identity Studies allowed institutions to quickly stand up new tenured positions that were immediately accessible to minorities and women.
Those Identity Studies departments then became a competing power center that vied with Old-School Humanities departments for resources. But they had a ready-made political framework and ideology for their demands -- an argument for which Old-School Humanities had no answer. "The Western Canon" or "The Great Books" were, conveniently, cast as hegemonic, Eurocentric sites of oppression -- which undergirded the demands for a greater share of a shrinking pie.
It was brilliant, really. Identity studies created the ideological framework (Critical Theory, etc) that found its way into the institutional structure of the academy itself in the form of DEI -- and that framework formed the argument for even more money, more resources. And the graduates of Identity Studies departments have a ready-made career path in HR departments and nonprofits, where they work to propagate the same ideas in politics, media and corporate America.
In this sense, "the long march through the institutions" was never about advancing "cultural Marxism" per se, but about competition for jobs and resources within academia -- and nothing else.
All of these trends were in motion even in the 1990s. David Austin Walsh simply chose to ignore them.
Agree completely with your last two sentences. I wonder how many of these young white woke people understand that they are not immune from their ideology.
‘I am an entitled man-child, who is left wing, and believes in DEI: but only if it doesn’t affect me.’ 🙈 The left don’t like it when they are eaten by their own nonsense.
Excellent post. There are many substantive comments already. I'll so just point out that Jack Goldstone, in "Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World" (1991), kicked off the elite-overproduction-leading-to-rebellion hypothesis -- and deserves a mention. Peter Turchin has formalized the hypothesis, related it to geopolitics , and most recently has used it as lens for interpreting contemporary history. Both Goldstone and Turchin emphasize inequality as a second contributing factor to unrest.
It's a good point but I think you are missing his point about being a white male. It's really, really bad in academia. I will share two examples.
First, I recently applied to a PsyD program. They segregated us by race, creating a table where only students of color could sit. One student mentioned they had not taken a course in psychology. Others had very little research or clinical experience. I had a 4.0, 2 years of research experience, 2 years of clinical experience.
There is a clinical interview for PsyD programs that forms the bulk of the selection process. My interviewer said in writing I did a great job . Another professor said they were looking forward to having me. I didn't even get waitlisted. During the interview, I met around 20 students. There was one white male.
There have been several other examples. Several professors have told me that I am facing massive discrimination. One told me to give up in Psychology. Another said he is very worried about a white male student. Of students in counselling, in 2020 95% were women--yet there are no programs to increase the number of men or "affirmative action."
What he is describing is VERY real. DEI has devolved into picking on certain races and taking away their civil rights.
There was another change that led to a drop in academic hiring: Starting in 1994, the ADEA no longer allowed universities to have mandatory retirement ages of 70. Professors hired at 30 with the expectation that they would be forced to retire at 65 or 70 can now stick around for as long as they are able, often staying through their 70s and sometimes into their 80s. Less turnover means fewer vacancies to fill.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3737001/#R1
Ahh good point!
It looks like price signaling between demand, down; and supply up, has huge viscous lag.
People that really need to work, do what they need to do, adapt. I got an SB in Physics in 75 and saw I'd be at best a lowly miserable one, the 258th author on some 258 authored paper.
I went into business. One of good friends, a VC, has a degree in English literature. He's a master at tech business. 80 companies.
I think it's possible that the excess production of PhDs comes from 2 things:
A. There really is a lot less new new
B. There are dilettantes with money
B
Also, a fall in General Education requirements.
Shoutout to one of my advisors, who is 86 and does not intend to retire. In his office discussing the offer he also said "I won't solo advise anymore because I can read the actuarial tables". It's too fun a job to ever stop
Deadwoods!!!
You might be interested to see what Peter Turchin, who wrote the book on Elite Overproduction, has to say about the current state of law school grads...
" "It’s strange to think of most law school graduates in America as members of the precariat, by that’s where they are.” [page 92 of his book, based on his interpretation of NALP data, which of course presents law school outcomes in the best possible light]
One wonders if You Know Who wrote him a meandering, several thousand word long note about how all law grads are in fact secret millionaires.
However, during their career, existing professors seem to always have a certain ratio of masters and phd students that they are sponsoring or mentoring, regardless of the length of their career. They pretty much always do this at greater than replacement rate. This is especially true in the sciences such as biomedical research where industry relies on inexpensive labor, and grants are placed at the universities because undergraduate and grad student labor is available
We have all seen a few folks who should have retired a decade ago still marching on
Not only vacancies, but many of these senior guys can make the salary of 2 or 3 assistant profs!
As someone in academia, I see exactly what you are seeing. Massive overproduction of Ph.Ds leading to applicant pools in the hundreds for every humanities position and most social science positions we advertise. I do you think you left out one important factor--a significant reason for the overproduction is that many (if not most) Ph.D-granting institutions rely on their doctoral programs both for prestige AND for low-wage instruction in these areas. This significant pool of doctoral students provides a constant supply of cheap labor, allowing the tenure-track faculty to teach many fewer courses per year compared to non-doctoral schools. This perverse incentive structure encourages even the most mediocre doctoral programs to continue to admit students that have very little chance of ever succeeding in the market.
As things currently stand, there are no real incentives for most of these doctoral programs to stop recruiting potential Ph.Ds, and there are clear incentives for them to continue to recruit new grad students to keep them teaching all those intro classes the tenured faculty want to avoid. Until academia finds a way to fix this skewed incentive structure, this problem will not go away.
If people stop buying the lie that there is a stable career at the end of studies, then the problem resolves. The problem is there are many downwardly mobile children who want to spend a decade pursuing a PhD in “wasted human potential.”
I say this as a PhD economist.
Maybe I was lucky. Lots of professors gave me advice on the serious tradeoffs and costs of pursuing a PhD. It generally has a negative ROI and there are many disciplines where it is not worth the sacrificed time and income.
This is pretty surprising to me! In my senior year finishing a physics degree at MIT, I was in the midst of a pivot to philosophy. I talked to 4 different professors about applying to philosophy graduate school, and all four of them told me, more or less, "You are exceptionally talented, and it doesn't matter. The job market sucks. Go use your very employable physics degree for something else." I didn't take their advice, something I'm moderately regretting going into year 5 of my PhD, but it's at least my own fault and I knew what I was getting into.
Saying this not to invalidate any of your own stories but to provide another data point on a different approach! I wouldn't be surprised if there's a lot of heterogeneity in what talented undergrads are told about attending grad school.
Bethany C. and Dan Quail both report getting tough and realistic advice about entering humanities or social science PhD programs:
BC: "I talked to 4 different professors ... and all four of them told me, more or less, "You are exceptionally talented, and it doesn't matter. The job market sucks. ..."
DQ: "Lots of professors gave me advice on the serious tradeoffs and costs of pursuing a PhD. It generally has a negative ROI ..."
My guess is that their experience is typical. As a professor, the last thing you want is to be advising a strong PhD student who is unable to find a decent job in his/her field.
My experience is in Linguistics, somewhat out of date (retired 2008).
Linguistics departments have generally been very conscientious about explaining the risks of the job market.
Guy Carden
Linguistics, U of British Columbia, retired
Colleges are making a strong push to hire women in STEM fields. It's part of what the postdoc in the OP is complaining about.
Key word, "physics"
I don't think this is the type of conversation that is had with PhD candidates, but with High School students.
Add: “Education is one thing that can never be taken away from you.”
Dementia brought on by the years of oxidative stress can certainly rob you of your education.
I got this advice all the way up until I was in the phd program, when all of the sudden it was "ohh the job market is impossible" . . .
Maybe we should show our students graphs comparing someone who enters the workforce after graduation or a 2-3 year professional program vs the opportunity costs and slower rates of growth in retirement accounts for a person who spends 5-13 years (PhD plus postdoc) not maximizing retirement contributions and working in positions where the employer does not match. Maybe that would provide a more compelling argument against a PhD in the humanities than all of our words. We need to be more honest about how expensive it all is.
I agree in principle but good luck with that...a cleaner method would be to stop subsidizing the lie and make the applicants pay something closer to the full cost upfront.
Everybody told me how poor the odds were. But I, being a smart 21 year old who had never failed at anything he tried, assumed that I would be the lucky one.
It worked out okay for me, because there's plenty of well-paid backup careers for hard science PhDs. I'm not sure what the heck a failed history PhD is supposed to do.
Stock the shelves at Home Depot.
A previous department I worked at used to have a highly ranked masters program that sent people on to many top phd programs. A few years before I arrived, the university made the department create a PhD program. While I was there, both programs continued to exist, but then the university cut all funding for masters programs, and we didn’t want to charge students for grad school, so we cut it. So now the department has a mediocre PhD program and no masters, because the university thinks that is more prestigious, even though within the field it’s now almost as if the department had disappeared. I wonder how many times this has happened for other departments at other universities.
My PhD program didn't accept people with MAs in my subject.
I will have a pension and health care after teaching history in a public middle school in a blue state for 25 years.
I stared at a history PhD for years, and couldn’t make it work financially for me.
I just settled on an MA, while I worked.
I told this to an unemployed former history adjunct at Princeton, and he gladly would’ve switched places
David Austin Walsh is 35 years old - not too old to become a history teacher and get that 25 year pension!
This is exactly what I thought too. In places like Massachusetts, Suffolk County NY, or Nassau County NY, that actually pay teachers a liveable wage, he could be making over $100,000 a yr, have summers off, be off whenever his kids are off if he has children, if he was willing to teach middle school or high school history. Arguably, he's overqualified, but becoming a principal or superintendent down the road is also an option. If you don't believe me, look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics on average wages for middle school teachers, or high school teachers.
https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes252022.htm#st
https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes252031.htm#st
Also,
when you retire you can move to a lower cost location. If you are a teacher making $100k that 60 to 80k pension goes a lot further in many places, especially if you bought a house and can cash that out.
There is a reason Idaho has become a retirement haven for the west coast.
I live in NY, but Florida fulfills the same role on the East Coast, especially since Florida has no state income tax. Lots of teachers and cops who retire down there. Walsh could actually teach as an adjunct at a community college, while being a a middle school or high school teacher. One of my math teachers in high school used to teach classes at the local community college, since they only required a master's degree. Or, alternatively tutor students on the side for some extra money.
I don’t even plan to leave my state, just retire someone cheaper within it.
Also, I referee on the side. The hourly rate ranges about $40 - $80 an hour & I can pick my schedule.
The drawback is that this is at a sacrifice of producing original scholarship. I’ve produced some, but not at the rate I could if I had university backing.
Yeah, I know some people don't like the political climate, weather, potential hurricanes, or culture of the Southern states, and wouldn't leave NY, but even upstate NY is cheaper. Referring's a good gig, as long as parents behave themselves.
The point of this article is that Dr. Walsh deeply believes that he is much too good for such a low-level role like “public school teacher”.
He could not become a public school teacher without certification. Which would only take a year or two, I guess, but it would be putting his life on hold a bit longer. And the skillsets are not precisely the same.
He could probably go into an elite prep school where the pay isn’t great, but he’d get free housing, utilities, food, & gym use.
No state certification needed, but he’d also prob have to coach
Depends on the state for certification, I tried that but got stuck because all my job offers were in blue states that require certs.
Of course it also become a bit of a potential vicious cycle. If Ph.D.s flood prep school jobs, then that becomes a hard job market as well.
I was lucky enough to get scholarships to a prep school in New England, if not one of the truly fabled ones like Andover or Exeter or Deerfield.
I would say 95% or more of my alma mater's teaching hires since 2000 have had PhDs or another terminal degree in the discipline(s) for which they were hired to teach. And if it's like that at my also-ran prep school, I imagine at the Important Prep Schools it's a requirement.
He seems to also have a rather unpleasant personality, which will likely make it hard for him to find ANY employment.
And if he takes care of his healthy he could probably double dip too.
Plumbing is hard on your body, and probably an activity that he doesn't enjoy doing. Teaching, in contrast, is probably something he does enjoy because he's chosen to do a variety of it right now.
It's true he has "wasted" the last decade pursuing his passion (academia) when he could have gone straight into a secure career. But that's equally true whether the secure career was plumbing, teaching, or something else.
He has a PhD from Yale, so he's probably qualified for lots of white color corporate jobs that pay better than being a history professor.
Like what? HR drone? Executive assistant? Customer support operative?
Companies will (rightfully) balk at hiring PhDs for low-level jobs since they often have massive egos and trouble simply doing the job they're told. But he's massively unqualified for high-level jobs.
The unemployment rate for PhDs is around 1%, so companies bulking does not appear to be a big problem. Lots of PhDs get jobs doing various forms of data analysis. I'm not that familiar with the humanities, but there's lots of jobs that require research and writing. Entry level jobs don't usually have great pay, but it's better than postdocs. You don't have to move up far to make more than an average professor salary. I agree that ego will be a problem for this particular guy.
Optionality is under-rated. Developing skills that can be modified or rolled into another profession is under-rated in terms of value. While it probably does not maximize your gains if everything works out...it is a great fallback when things don't work out (which is a lot of the time).
Also, we live in time and place were even a fallback job can be great. People tend to forget just how good things are relative to even 1980/early 90s.
Frankly, this lets universities off the hook far too lightly.
The argument that academia is like the Mafia is well made: with a tiny core of made men (and they’re still disproportionately men) with jobs for life, money, prestige, and in all too many cases historically, a stream of young people of the appropriate gender who treat you like rock stars.
Then you have a much larger group of mostly young people working outrageous hours with little money or job security, on the promise a lucky few can join the ranks of the made men. A bad word from a made man is enough to prevent one of the workers from moving up.
PhD students and non-tenured academics deserve the kind of protections that factory workers joined unions for over a century ago - decent pay, reasonable work hours, better conditions, and the chance of a decent life that doesn’t depend on winning the tenure lottery.
If this means that academics have fewer slaves to second-author papers for them, so be it.
You are correct, but these facts have been well known and publicized since at least the late 1990s, well before Walsh graduated college and started making serious career choices. He knew (or should have known) the kind of odds he was going into.
My heart is not overflowing with sympathy specifically for today's main character.
My point was more general - universities are exploiting the majority of their workforce.
I have sympathy for people who are complacent in their own suffering. We are all flawed people and suffering is still suffering.
It makes me want to shake him though.
The problem with Walsh is that he chose to "get educated" for a field with no jobs. The problem with the universities is that if it wasn't Walsh, it would necessarily be someone else, because it's not education being sold to the "student" but labor being bought from them.
He is still a product of the US system. A system rigged to exploit suckers. With the full backing of the US government.
What would it take to create--or re-create--a system whereby the universities design degrees around what employers (including the military) want, rather than on what the universities want to teach?
I think these facts were for a long time deliberately concealed from undergrads or papered over by established academics. I certainly remember being pushed to go to grad school in philosophy by my entire senior thesis committee in undergrad, to the point that my strident declarations that i was planning to go work as a teacher were called a 'betrayal of my gifts'. It's true that you could have learned this information very easily, but that's a different thing from actually believing it applies to you when trusted people are telling you you're *different* and *special*.
That's changing now from what I understand. More and more professors I've spoken to now do the exact opposite, where they attempt to dissuade students from pursuing Ph.Ds. And good for them, because at this juncture I think it is deeply unethical and irresponsible to tell *any* humanities undergrad to pursue academia. The trickle of jobs is so small that basically only people who are so dedicated and fervent about their research that they will do it despite everyone telling them not to can find a place.
"betrayal of my gifts" -- oh, that would really tick me off. That's what my profs (and friends!) told me when I was going to get a Masters of Library and Information Studies. Not all librarians are brain dead. There are many interesting paths!
The 2 main UG degrees feeding the MA in LIS are English for W. and history for M. Digital humanities would be a good career direction for historians. One thing I have noticed when I spoeak to people teaching English or History is that they see LIS as a lesser choice than PhD in their fields. Really, and I'm biased--I think it helps the world more.
When I was doing my PhD, the university touted the fact that most scientific papers there were written by graduate students as a *good* thing (this was in a country where most theses are based on at least 4 published papers). Just from that, it was obvious how dismal the average career prospects were. The common rationalization was and is that higher education still has value even if you end up outside of academia - sure, but most people seem happy to apply this reasoning to other people, but not themselves.
Yes, like most industries, higher education is marketing lottery tickets: a costly entry for the minimal chance of the jackpot of a tenured professorship. Why universities do this is obvious. The harder question Noah is tackling is why supply isn't adjusting. After all, undergrads are responding to market incentives while grad students are not.
Not enough blame goes to parents. Post-docs grew up wealthier than the average American. Reaching and subsisting through a fully-funded PhD program is nearly impossible without significant external financial support. Virtually every colleague in my wife's humanities PhD program was receiving significant support from parents.
Wealthy, highly-educated parents are unconsciously colluding with their children to pursue vanity careers. While I can contort myself to excuse the kids from irrationally assessing their odds of getting an academic position, I can't excuse the parents. I struggle to sympathize with a segment of society choosing to buck the market in the pursuit of cultural capital.
Not enough attention is paid to the role of parents and socioeconomic background.
Don't forget the other huge cohort of postdocs -- foreigners. (Not so much in history, but definitely in the sciences.)
A job in the US paying $45,000 a year, with the possibility of eventually working towards a greencard, seems like heaven to a lot of smart people from poor countries. So the actual postdoc market is a combination of rich local kids (for whom a $45K salary is just a nice extra bonus on top of their trust fund disbursements) and ultra-smart poort-country foreigners (for whom a $45K salary is a fortune).
Great point. Add in foreign students paying full freight bachelor’s and master’s tuition and it’s amazing how much post-secondary funding comes for a small number of extremely wealth donors and foreigners.
Grad-students are responding rationally to the short-run demand for grad-student labor, not to the longer-run demand for professorial labor.
Because of unionization, the model is going to shift to permanent research assistants and lecturers.
PhD students will be much fewer- they will do some TA and teaching work as part of their training, and of course will continue to do research for their CVs and dissertations, but they won’t be thought of as an “on call” slave labor force. Post docs will also be much fewer.
This actually sounds a bit like how it probably should work. Do you see this as a bad thing or good thing? It is kind of like the move to Physician Assistants and Nurse Practioners in medicine or the growing use of community service officers in policing.
A downward spiral of quality, to ensure strong profits.
It's interesting how many of our culture-producing professions are like this. Entertainment is also characterized by a handful of winners and a mass of low-paid, exploited strivers.
One of the best developments over the past few years has been the UAW organizing graduate students
In what way?
Increases their incomes and reduces their numbers. This solves the oversupply problem and students don’t get stuck in dead end careers. Universities don’t rely on Ph.Ds as cheap labor and instead expect professors to teach.
I presume he is making a joke, in that they will all be working on the assembly line.
No. Those who know more about union history than I do can explain why, but most grad student unionization drives have come from the UAW.
Here in the SF Bay Area, over the last few years there was a lot in the news about attempts to unionize in the University of California system, where the exploitation of graduate students was enormous.
Dunno what came of it.
I was already a member of the UAW as a UC grad student 20 years ago. A year and a half ago there was a major strike, and the grad students got a raise to $30,000 plus some housing support. The universities are all figuring out how to properly cut phd admissions to make funding work out. We will see how this turns out.
The bit that jumped out at me was that somewhere along the way he got a mediocre LSAT score and….blamed the test. Standardized test scores are pretty accurate aptitude (not intelligence) screeners. People who get sub-par grades or test scores and blame the test or the class or the teacher are going to be a pain to work with. That Guy who thinks everything bad that happens to him is everybody else’s fault is infuriating to work with, and it’s fairly easy to smoke them out in interviews with a few questions about projects or experiences that didn’t go well.
“I had 100 interviews and I can tell you why all 100 who got hired when I didn’t aren’t as good as I am…” Nah bro….it’s not the job market….it’s you. You are an ass, and nobody wants to work with you.
He must have had a good GRE to be admitted to Princeton. How different is the LSAT?
I think the LSAT has a lot of formal logic.
The Logic Games section of the LSAT is going away after this summer's test, the result of a lawsuit by a blind applicant who argued that solving the problems was often dependent on drawing diagrams, which disadvantaged blind applicants. After this August, the LSAT will be little more than a slightly more difficult SAT reading section.
Then again, the logic games had absolutely **** all to do with law school or the practice of law, so... whatever.
Isn't the ability to see a fairly good indication of law-school aptitude? Doesn't law school require a lot of reading?
Even if everything that you ever need to read happens to be in a format that allows text-to-speech, text-to-speech is much slower than the average law student can speed-read. Furthermore, the ability to skim a large document to quickly find the relevant sections would seem to be extremely important for law school as well.
So I don't see why it's unreasonable to penalise blind people in the LSAT any more than it's unreasonable to penalise obese people in fitness tests.
I'm a biologist and I took the LSAT on a whim when I briefly considered law as a possibility. I did much, much better than the GRE and could do almost perfect on the logic puzzles, but I realize that I don't think I have the temperament or ability to read so much per week to do law. I'm not great at public speaking either. Indeed, the logic puzzles are things like how many options there are for seating people at round tables at a dinner party where certain people cannot sit next to each other and others must be at the same table etc.
This was (I think) misrepresented by Noah.
"Welp, I just took the practice LSAT and it looks like law school is out.
It is pretty bonkers how right wing some of these questions are, though [Posted screenshot of a question."
This doesn't read to me like he's his poor performance was caused by the right wing questions.
But also, the second question (global warming) wasn't right-wing at all. There's just no way to read it other than as implying that the evidence for global warming is very strong.
The ability to read a text and understand what it's saying is arguably the single most important skill a historian needs to have, and he totally whiffed on a trivial test of that skill. No wonder he didn't do well on the LSAT.
Different skill set. I’ve known two people who have double degrees. Law and Economics. Both went to top Econ programs and got their law degree from their employer university (no tuition). Both of them got thru grad school by working harder than their peer group. In their respective law schools, the vast majority of students worked equally as hard. Maybe he should try the MCATS
Wrong, the LSAT is an IQ test.
You may want to Google that.
You may want to Google Scholar it.
Nope, I know it's not an IQ test. Thanks tho.
I am the same age as Walsh. I am an economic historian in 20th Century US history who did the academia game, but who changed his expectations. Lots of people move to government because having a stable income, family life , and not dealing with asinine referees is better than the shrinking pond of academia.
(I also experienced/witnessed some of the biases that come with my demographic in US interviews. Though the Harvard/elite bias is much stronger than anything DEI related.)
As someone who worked for the Federal Government my entire career (I have a MA in Econ) I’m often surprised that a lot of academically oriented economists PhD grads don’t hedge there bets by applying for Federal jobs. The Federal banking agencies (particularly the Federal ReserveSystem hires armies of economists. Many agencies, well a few, have economic historians. They pay much better than academia and often have cool, interesting issues to work on. Although I never worked at the Fed (although my late wife did) most folks loved it. They encourage academic research and give their staff time to work on it. For agricultural Econ the Ag Department used to be here he. However the Trump administration had some petty grievances and moved a majority of the ERS to Kansas City. However, USDA still employees over 800 economists (count almost certainly anyone classified as economists, which includes undergraduate research assistants).
Also, economic consulting. Wow, not for everyone, but lots of money.
My belabored point is, there are a lot of interesting jobs for PhD economists outside of academics. Confining oneself to only one path is, perhaps a mistake.
One more point. One of my staff, a whip smart person who got her PhD in finance from a top 5 finance department, got a tenure track position at Cornell and…..hated it. Not the research, but the students. Then there was the winters….
Your mention of economic historians reminded me of a friend from MIT. He was a senior when I was a freshman, finishing an electrical engineering degree. Yes that’s a high demand degree, but he realized he didn’t want to be an electrical engineer. He wanted to be an archeologist. One semester after graduating, he returned to MIT and got a BS in Humanities, concentrating in anthropology. Then he went to Harvard and got a PH.D. In either archeology or anthropology, I’m not sure which. Where did he end up with that combination of degrees? As the historian of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). If you have a passion in the humanities, pressure your passion, but don’t pigeon hole yourself to only working in a Ph.D academic if role.
I lost out on an ERS job because I applied a year too late after the Trump purge. Federal Reserve jobs are gold plated and competitive, but they usually want macro folks. I currently work for an agency that doesn't really publish academic work even though I just found a great IV and identification strategy for a policy relevant question (it will be a headache to get anything greenlit for publication.) I might eventually jump agencies.
But alas, I also hate dealing with publication culture in econ. (Heck I know folks in Census that only push out working papers and don't bother with asinine asks by referees.) And covid really killed the travel benefits.
Try the FDIC or the regional Feds, they don’t do macro, but encourage publishing. I get your point about the resistance to publishing in some of the agencies. Places like the Fed and ERS are run by economists, most other agencies are run by risk averse lawyers who don’t understand that most economics papers are barely noticed outside a small group of experts.
This Cornell history grad feels your associate’s pain. Spring, summer and fall run April-October. The rest of the year is winter. It’s beautiful. I loved Ithaca, loved Cornell, but I’m nevah gonna shovel snow again.
I see a lot of white males with successful substacks, including this one. Maybe he should try that
This is good and all, but understates the level of personal delusion. I graduated from college in 1995 and even then people were talking about how pursuing a PhD in the Humanities was a very risky career move, with no prospect of it getting any better any time soon. Walsh probably graduated around 2010, fifteen years later, with things only getting worse since then, and AFTER the Great Recession. Sure, universities are probably still gas lighting people into going for exceptionally rare academic careers but at some point a student needs to take some personal responsibility for their choices. The other option I’ve heard - curious from feedback from any actual academics- is if you still want to go headfirst into the PhD abyss, at least pack a parachute- make sure your research work, for example includes some cutting edge analytical techniques or something similar that you could apply to a non-academic career track. That happens automatically in STEM of course, but I don’t think it is impossible in the humanities if you make some deliberate choices.
Or go to only a top program like Princeton that will pay your way and has a good placement track record….and write a book, publish lots of papers and get a good post-doc.
This guy isn’t upset because he borrowed $250k to get a PhD from the Univesity of Arkansas and didn’t get hired. He’s upset because he made a decent decision, playing the odds, and lesser players (in his view- we have no evidence either way) are getting the jobs.
He has a right to be miffed. He also has agency and jump off and stop playing this Red Queens gambit.
Yup- violated the first rule of Academic fight club
Sure- but that’s a bit like saying - “you should only pursue a career in the arts if you can get into Juilliard.” I’m sure Juilliard helps, but everyone still recognizes that it’s a very tough field and there aren’t any guarantees.
Credentials are important in art (MFAs from Julliard and RSD as well as many curators look down on self-taught talent), but I would say skill matters more in art and credentials matter more in academia. In art, there is a buyer making informed decisions at the end of the chain. In social sciences there are government grants and endowments funding almost everything.
I know a dispiriting number of Berklee and Julliard grads who make adjunct professor-level wages in steady gigs / bands / symphonies that play for crowds of hundreds to a few thousand.
But he didn't make a decent decision. Thinking that a humanities PhD, even from Princeton, is likely to get a tenure track job is just wrong. I don't blame others when I lose the lotto and he shouldn't either.
Straight out of PhD, very unlikely- perhaps 10 pct based upon their placement record. After writing a book and having a productive post doc at Yale- it should be “likely” (ie greater than 50 percent). Not a lock by any means and he should have considered failure as a very possible outcome. Your area of research, gender, race, recommendations/connections, politics and your personality all play a role. I don’t do Twitter or any social media so have no idea who he is, but from the description he doesn’t sound like a particularly likeable person (nor wise).
I graduated college in 1980, and even THEN got cautionary talks from faculty about the difficulties of pursuing an academic career! One wise prof told me that too often students deciding to pursue PhDs picture themselves teaching at an elite university (such as the one I attended) and were disappointed when that didn’t materialize for them. He said it would be worth getting a PhD if I could imagine a career teaching intro classes at a community college and find that satisfying. He wasn’t being arrogant or dismissive, but realistic about the range of academic career options.
It's not really automatic for STEM. A lot of the techniques taught to large numbers of students in academia even on STEM courses aren't used in industry, or are only used a tiny amount.
There was a 2010 article in the economist about this exact problem called “The Disposable Academic” that I read when I was contemplating grad school vs professional school in 2012. Walsh was in my same cohort and this information would have been available if he’d looked (and maybe he did). I agree that there is some personal accountability at work here.
Graduated Yale ‘92, went into an English lit PhD at Harvard, bailed in ‘95 for exactly the reasons under discussion. Prestige wasn’t enough even then. There was a dude a few years ahead of me who was the leading world expert on Lollardy and couldn’t get a position of any kind three years running. There were seven (7) full professorships in the country in my own area of interest, all filled, by young people. It wasn’t going to happen.
I was very lucky to get my PhD in 2008, just before the financial crash. It’s interesting seeing this chart for history showing this brief period as the only one in decades where there were more jobs than new phds.
What a remarkably self-entitled young man you portray. My doctoral students were in Applied Physics (in U Cal and U Mich), where academic aspirations are somewhat more plausible. But becoming a tenure-track professor, especially at a top school, is an aspiration with low odds of success, even in my field. I always schooled my students to try if they wanted but to plan for nothing in that direction and to develop capabilities that maximized career flexibility. It turns out that one of them is now an Associate Professor. That is about 3%, which is about replacement rate.
I suspect applied physics (if applied in engineering and design fields) is in demand in private industry.l with good paying and possibly interesting jobs. History degree holders are also in demand, at Starbucks.
in all honesty history majors are perfectly in demand as interchangeable office drones they just don't want to do those jobs.
Lots of history majors in policing and the military as well. Those are good paying jobs (better than office drone work) but do require following orders (or at least grinning and engaging in malicious compliance).
Agree, but again, is because the degree in and of itself is what matters, not the subject matter.
There are so many possibilities in government and public policy. Read David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs - corporations have all sorts of strange positions that have become essential, like team organizers, transition teams, project managers. You just have to pick your industry and know enough about it to work somewhere. My friend who went to Westpoint military academy became a equipment manager for large factory operations, which is sort of a combination of logistics and knowing how to fix things plus some details about industrial production - like setting up a Cheez-it production line, Amazon warehouses with the robots and stuff, a paper mill. At the paper mill they wanted him to develop a community college millwright vocational program, and he felt that was stressing his limits, and he would need to work on a team to achieve that. Indeed, where is the paper industry going to find someone to design an educational program for niche vocational fields. Maybe they could find a history phd who knows how to teach
Fair enough. For jobs that want a "college degree" but without regard to which one, then I agree. That's the path on my sons took, although he then went on to train as paramedic.
Stronger economic growth by itself would probably take care of elite overproduction as if usually promotes more "room at the top".
Eliminating government student loans and taxing endowments might also help.
How? what? That killing student loans would only encourage more elite production and taxing endowments would just cause universities to further reduce their operations and/or raise tuition
When I came to the US from UK in 1979 I knew I needed to find a new profession at the age of 40, so I just looked at what was being advertised for in newspapers. Aha - programmer, programmer, programmer !! I had little idea what that was so I researched & discovered computers ! Found a one year nighttime program I could just about afford, and jumped in ! Got sneered at by young people who all thought I was far too old to be getting into such "future" things - their world as they saw it - but I ignored them. I completed my course went for interviews & found a job. I was sent to the company's training course first, and met the same young person snobbery as B4 - ignored them all, and did well. My old attitude of will-do-whatever to succeed compared well to the entitled snootiness of the young degree-bearing fellow newbies in the company. My boss loved my attitude - I did well. Long since retired I had a very happy 35 years of programming, loved every minute of that life ! 84 now - hard work & application is a very good way to go !
Getting into computers in the late 1970's early 80's turned out to be the rocket to prosperity.
My mom did something similar, taking a night computer course in Oklahoma, while teaching kids in the day.
Being the person with programming skills in the 80's and 90's meant she always had a job.
I think the problem is not as recent as you think. While you are right that student populations grew into the 2000’s overproduction of social science PhDs was evident even in the mid/late 1970’s.
I had a friend who’s dad was an English prof at one of the Texas compass schools. He said prior to the end of the Vietnam war they hired mostly home grown new PhD’s. After the war ended, they never recruited below the top ten departments.
My friend was in Yale’s PhD historian department in the early ‘70. After two years he saw how few graduates received offers, he terminated and got his PhD in economics (not from Yale). And this was before the large pulse of PhDs came out after the Vietnam war ended. (Many grad students stayed in their programs after they had basically completed their work in order to maintain their draft exemption.)
Back in 1989 my agency decided to hire an “agency historian.” The person we hired graduated from Harvard. Only two in his class got tenure track positions, one at a small college in South Carolina and one at a small college in Iowa. A number a classmates made a decent living writing popular history, but none made much money in academics.
As you pointed out, with so few jobs. Lots of people are disappointed when the don’t one of the vanishingly few academic jobs open each year.
My roommate and I saw this as early as 1972 or so. Ph.Ds in our area of expertise were getting job offers in Alaska, or Nebraska, maybe, while we were urban people grown in New York and Chicago.
He switched to computers and Into law, because we realized that we preferred the institutions of urban life—museums, concerts, lots of good restaurants—over the ability to earn a living teaching undergrads.
1972 was a big crash for the Vietnam related reasons you mention. I think things were better in the 80s and 90s, and especially in the last few years before the financial crisis - but much worse since. I have had the impression that post pandemic there has been some recovery from the awful markets of the 2010s, but I’m not sure.
Another huge factor is the rise of Black, Women's and Queer Studies vs. old-school humanities departments.
The (Black, Women's, Queer) Studies departments effectively supplanted English and History, both from the demand side (that's what students want to major in) but also from the administrative side.
As Noah points out, in the 1990s Humanities departments were packed with old white men taking up all the tenured positions. In order to meet rising diversity requirements, Identity Studies allowed institutions to quickly stand up new tenured positions that were immediately accessible to minorities and women.
Those Identity Studies departments then became a competing power center that vied with Old-School Humanities departments for resources. But they had a ready-made political framework and ideology for their demands -- an argument for which Old-School Humanities had no answer. "The Western Canon" or "The Great Books" were, conveniently, cast as hegemonic, Eurocentric sites of oppression -- which undergirded the demands for a greater share of a shrinking pie.
It was brilliant, really. Identity studies created the ideological framework (Critical Theory, etc) that found its way into the institutional structure of the academy itself in the form of DEI -- and that framework formed the argument for even more money, more resources. And the graduates of Identity Studies departments have a ready-made career path in HR departments and nonprofits, where they work to propagate the same ideas in politics, media and corporate America.
In this sense, "the long march through the institutions" was never about advancing "cultural Marxism" per se, but about competition for jobs and resources within academia -- and nothing else.
All of these trends were in motion even in the 1990s. David Austin Walsh simply chose to ignore them.
Agree completely with your last two sentences. I wonder how many of these young white woke people understand that they are not immune from their ideology.
‘I am an entitled man-child, who is left wing, and believes in DEI: but only if it doesn’t affect me.’ 🙈 The left don’t like it when they are eaten by their own nonsense.
Excellent post. There are many substantive comments already. I'll so just point out that Jack Goldstone, in "Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World" (1991), kicked off the elite-overproduction-leading-to-rebellion hypothesis -- and deserves a mention. Peter Turchin has formalized the hypothesis, related it to geopolitics , and most recently has used it as lens for interpreting contemporary history. Both Goldstone and Turchin emphasize inequality as a second contributing factor to unrest.
It's a good point but I think you are missing his point about being a white male. It's really, really bad in academia. I will share two examples.
First, I recently applied to a PsyD program. They segregated us by race, creating a table where only students of color could sit. One student mentioned they had not taken a course in psychology. Others had very little research or clinical experience. I had a 4.0, 2 years of research experience, 2 years of clinical experience.
There is a clinical interview for PsyD programs that forms the bulk of the selection process. My interviewer said in writing I did a great job . Another professor said they were looking forward to having me. I didn't even get waitlisted. During the interview, I met around 20 students. There was one white male.
There have been several other examples. Several professors have told me that I am facing massive discrimination. One told me to give up in Psychology. Another said he is very worried about a white male student. Of students in counselling, in 2020 95% were women--yet there are no programs to increase the number of men or "affirmative action."
What he is describing is VERY real. DEI has devolved into picking on certain races and taking away their civil rights.