I read and commend to you both Phoebe's thoughts on the merits of going to get a PhD, and the discussion between her and MSI in the comments. Having been out for a year, I keep waiting to have some definitive thoughts on whether the PhD experience is 'worth it' in the generalized sense that "should I go to grad school?" articles pose the question. It seems, mostly, to be a big number/small number problem. Big number in the sense that a claim about the relative merits of PhD versus non-PhD paths are claims about entire generations or cohorts that require large-n data analysis which may or may not exist (being on the humanities end of the social sciences, I have no idea if it does): what does a college graduate earn at 22, 27, 32? A PhD student? etc etc.
It's a small number problem because the answer to "should I go to grad school?" is idiosyncratic. In my grad school career I think I encountered three students (out of a couple hundred, probably; two of the three were at NC State) who seemed like obvious candidates: they could read closely and produce better arguments out of the text than any of their classmates, by a substantial margin, and seemed to have the personality defect that makes success in grad school possible. But the answer's going to be like that: it has a lot to do with individual skills and the willingness to put up with grad school's version of adulthood's annoying trivia.
All of which is to say that I think any article along the lines of the one being discussed will invariably overshoot as well as undershoot.
"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."
-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis
2 comments:
To try to look at this from a medium-number (?) perspective, it helps to think of what alternatives people heading to the better PhD programs in their field would have. This is a different question from what options college seniors/22-year-olds have generally, but also broader than asking about individuals.
My sense is, alternatives are law school (a good idea only if you can go to a top one) and... ? The traditional English-major fields of publishing and journalism are some mix of kaput and behind a barrier of unpaid internships. Office jobs for which no super-special skills are required probably don't want 22-year-olds with little to no office experience. (They may not want 50-year-olds either, but that's another story.) Teaching's another obvious choice, but it's unclear to me how starting or even finishing a PhD program makes it more difficult to go that route - for some private schools it's if anything a plus, right?
I see MSI's point about how if you start building your career at 22, at 30 you'll be the envy of your friends who've gone to grad school. But I'm not sure how, in this economy, not merely in terms of unemployment levels generally but in terms of the fields humanities-types might enter, this won't leave a lot of people unemployed or working at Starbucks rather than getting an admittedly low salary for something that's at least prestigious-ish and interesting.
Well, in the first place, I think I agree with your general point: there's an oversupply of grad students relative to jobs but not, probably, relative to people who can get something useful and meaningful out of the grad school experience. I think academics and those drawn to academia tend to get some crazy ideas about what should be driving our decision-making: people are terrified of expressing out-of-the-norm political opinions, or working on obscure topics that are of interest, or engaging in hobbies that a hiring or tenure committee might think show a lack of seriousness (ahem). It's as though, having made one high-risk decision to attend grad school, one has to think carefully and avoid taking additional risks. So a PhD if it doesn't lead to a tenure-track R1 job is a waste, as though that were the only reason to do it.
On the more narrow point: my guess is that for English majors, like everyone else, there are a lot of spillover careers beyond the obvious (anecdatum alert): my Art History/Anthropology major sister went from nonprofits to a humanitarian NGO. It's not the obvious path, but it doesn't strike me as an unusual one, either.
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