Learning to cope

Area universities offer a full range of PhDs in the humanities. But what, exactly, happens to those who earn them?

by James Surowiecki

A couple of blocks south of Harvard Yard, at 54 Dunster Street, a small brick building with white columns houses the University's Office of Career Services. Computer terminals line the walls to the right as you enter, and to the left are circular tables surrounded by serious-looking students in down parkas and Timberland boots, all of them paging through volumes of job information. The student worker at the front desk asks everyone who walks through the door for ID before granting access to what all here hope will be a conduit to future employment.

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The great PhD scam

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It feels very much like the last year of college in this office, and, indeed, many of the students are earnest-looking 21-year-olds. But more and more of them recently have been five or 10 years older: graduate students wondering what possibilities exist for them outside the academy. With years of cutbacks in the number of teaching jobs in the humanities, and with the numbers of new PhDs holding firm -- and, at many schools, increasing -- even institutions with the prestige of Harvard are finding it difficult to place their graduate students in the profession for which their education has prepared them. In this economy, with a doctorate no longer anything like the proverbial union card, "alternative careers" are looking a lot more interesting than they once did.

"I think there's a growing awareness among faculty and graduate students here that the realities of the academic marketplace are very difficult," says William Wright-Swadell, who directs the Office of Career Services. Wright-Swadell takes these realities seriously, and seems surprisingly unconcerned about the PR implications of talking about them. "The marketplace is simply not growing. And Harvard has not reduced the number of PhDs it's producing, which means that we're seeing more students today who are not going to be able to use their skills in the way they imagined they would when they got here."

Harvard has begun to help graduate students enter the non-academic work world by applying some of the same strategies it uses to help undergraduates, including internships and alumni networks. Now that a PhD no longer guarantees even a two-year position at some Midwestern college, expanding the horizons of possibility is probably a wise policy, especially since conditions don't seem to be getting any better.

"I've been here 18 months, and none of the projections we've heard about the market improving have turned out to be true," Wright-Swadell says. "We want to ask what is the marketplace for PhDs, not just what is the academic market."

Many universities have begun to consider instituting similar strategies. But, as Wright-Swadell himself suggests, very few graduate students decide to spend seven years of their lives studying Bakhtin and the 19th-century novel in order to get a job writing for Esquire. For most students, graduate school is professional training meant to result in a job inside the academy. And for most professors, the training of future academics is an essential part of academia. So what, specifically, are Harvard and Boston University -- the two area schools that offer the full range of doctorates in the humanities -- doing to help their students find places inside the ivory tower?

Part 2

James Surowiecki has written for Lingua Franca and the Village Voice, and is a regular contributor to PLS.