The latest article making the rounds of my small world concerns the future of doctoral students: “Finding Life After Academia — and Not Feeling Bad About It.” The article features Ph.D.s or Ph.D. candidates in the humanities who have left the academic world (in which they were generally still searching for a job, or in one case dissatisfied with the job they had found) in order to make their way in the business world, or in nonprofit or government employment, and it describes halting attempts by graduate programs to help their graduates find work outside academia, or outside the professoriate anyway. The term “alternative academic,” or “alt-ac” “has gained widespread currency (and its own Twitter hashtag) and can refer to jobs within universities but outside the professoriate, like administrator or librarian, as well as nonacademic roles like government-employed historian and museum curator,” according to the article. Apparently (though it’s not entirely clear), the term is also beginning to refer to any job that an individual with a Ph.D., or nearly so, takes upon leaving academia.
Here’s what the article misses:
1) In the business world, people who spent time getting a doctorate and then want to find an alternate career path are at a disadvantage in getting hired, relative to someone straight out of school. The mere fact that the business world is their second-choice career is a negative, as well as the feeling that if they’re really interested in literature, or philosophy, or whatever, they won’t be able to “get their hands dirty” (even if only figuratively).
2) There is a cost to graduate school. Of course, for the typical student, a teaching assistantship covers tuition and provides a basic stipend (and anyone attending graduate school, in a field which isn’t explicitly career-oriented, should only do so with a stipend, or, exceptionally, with some other means of support, but should never be taking out loans), so it may seem like it’s a cost-free way to pursue one’s deep interest, but no one really seems to talk about the opportunity cost.
I know this: I spent five years in grad school. (This was back in the days when we were all told that there was an upcoming cohort of retiring faculty so the job market would be great when we finished, and, besides, I was a stellar undergraduate student, with respect to my classroom assignments, so I didn’t have any clue that graduate work, or, specifically dissertation work, would require a whole new level of initiative I didn’t have.) When I left, and started an entry-level job in my current field (below entry-level, in a way — I had to prove myself to enter the actuarial “entry-level” program, starting as what was called an “analyst” doing more routine work), I was five years behind everyone else. By the time I was ready to have kids (and we didn’t try any of this mid-30s nonsense), I had only just really started trying to build a career, because I had missed those first five years. And this also meant five fewer years of retirement savings, of home down-payment savings, etc.
And many of these grad school, or post-grad-school career-changers have spent something more like a decade than a half-decade pursuing this. And I would imagine that the largest number of them have deferred student loans which have continued to accrue interest during this time. (I left college loan-free.)
3) At the same time, in a lousy job market, the opportunity cost is much less than in a healthy job market. If I have a choice between working minimum wage and attending grad school with a roughly-equivalent stipend, I’d choose the grad school route. Wouldn’t you?
4) Ultimately, this is about career-counseling in college, not in grad school, given that many future humanities grad students end up there because they end up with the major (maybe because they looove the subject, maybe because of friends, maybe — as was the case in my social group — because being a business major was something crass that we were too smart for) and don’t know what else they’d do. And I’ve read hints that universities are trying to improve in this respect, moving away from that idolization of “do what you love” that is so common.
Here is what an old friend of mine, who now teaches medieval English literature at a state university, told me:
I do try to communicate both to undergraduates thinking about grad school and to graduate students that there is an opportunity cost–especially to the undergraduates. But I’m not going to imitate William Pannapacker and tell them simply that they shouldn’t go, because most are already hearing that, and because I don’t want grad students to be only those who are “independently wealthy” or “well-connected” or supported by a spouse or already in a job.
The article she refers to, and links, is this: “Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don’t Go,” which dates to 2009 but presumably is just as relevant today, and many of the reasons it gives why students choose graduate school really fit me, 22 years ago, pretty accurately. Is it too pessimistic? Is my friend right that it would be a Bad Thing for the graduate student body to consist only of those who have the funds and are at a place in life where going to grad school wouldn’t put them at risk, so each student should simply make their own decision, knowing the risks?
Maybe a part of the project of reinventing undergraduate education should consist of creating an environment in which bright students are not counseled, explicitly or indirectly, into the belief that only graduate school is worthy of their talents, but allow them to believe that they can love Medieval history, or philosophy, and still work at a (maybe not-so-soul-sucking) corporation.
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