Learning to cope

Part 2

by James Surowiecki

To begin with, both universities have taken steps, however tentative, to make their graduate students better professional candidates. BU has stepped up its efforts to prepare students for their interviews, working both on the way students discuss their dissertations -- making sure, in the words of associate dean Susan Jackson, that they don't "become so immersed in the exquisite details of the finer points that they find it difficult to set forth the central thesis" -- and on more practical concerns like personal presentation. More substantively, the university has implemented a class called Teaching College English, which all teaching assistants take and which is designed to provide the kind of formal instruction in pedagogy that graduate students might not otherwise receive.

Harvard provides similar help to graduate students interested in improving their interviewing skills, and also emphasizes the virtues of a mentored teaching experience: most Harvard grad students will serve as section leaders and, in many cases, run one-on-one tutorials with undergraduates. In broader terms, the university is working to assemble reliable statistics about the placement of its students, while the administration has tried to use its bully pulpit to encourage faculty and departments to take a more active role in the job market.

"An important part of what we do is to get the faculty and the departments better equipped to help students sell themselves," says Margaret Newhouse, assistant director of the Office of Career Services. "We want them to start professional development earlier, have them be more proactive." Newhouse is the author of a book called Outside the Ivory Tower, dealing with alternative careers for PhDs. But she's also convinced that there are steps universities can take to smooth the road for students who wish to stay inside the tower.

"I think the faculty, especially the younger ones, are aware that there's a problem," she says, "and a lot of them are going the extra mile, making that extra phone call. One of the tools is data gathering -- getting the departments to do it systematically, having them do a three-year follow-up on their students. It's a way of making departments aware. I think several departments are taking this seriously and trying to galvanize their own faculty, but I wouldn't say that's an across-the-board phenomenon."

One of the most striking things about the job market for academics is the paucity of the data documenting it. Within departments, placement information is often sketchy ("we've lost track of a lot of people," says Bonnie Costello, the chair of BU's English department), and universities often have no reliable schoolwide information at all.

Tracking graduates more systematically, as Harvard is trying to do, may help schools figure out where the real problems are, as well as which departments are enjoying success. The matter of PhD placement is complicated, though, by a number of factors: academics receive their degrees at different times of the year, are hired at different times, and, increasingly, are on the market for years before receiving a single offer. (The received wisdom among administration officials and faculty is that candidates should now view a job search as a three-year project. What graduate students are supposed to do while they're waiting to be hired remains less clear.)

In any case, the best numbers we do have are Harvard's; they come from a survey Newhouse conducted of graduate students who received their PhD in the 1995-'96 academic year. The results are striking. There were 106 Harvard PhDs in the humanities in 1995-'96, and 89 of those filled out the survey. Of those, 56.2 percent got full-time teaching appointments, 3.4 percent took postdoctoral fellowships, 5.6 percent took nonacademic jobs, 5.6 percent were doing part-time teaching, and 22.5 percent were unemployed.

Graduate school remains, in certain ways, relatively free from the pressures of market logic, and in the comforting silence of Widener Library it's hard not to feel as if somehow things will work themselves out. But talking to the graduate students who spend their days there, one gets the sense that the reality of potential unemployment is, in fact, a constant specter. "It totally pervades people's thinking from relatively early on," says DeSales Harrison, a fourth-year PhD candidate in the English department at Harvard. "It makes for a more anxious student culture. There's an immense sense of who has interviews and so on. And in a way, this idea of independent intellectual interest is contaminated from the get-go by speculation about what will be marketable."

"I think it's very demoralizing to graduate students," adds Naomi Schor, a professor in the French Department at Harvard. "Fortunately, though, people think, `I'll be the lucky one,' and that allows them to keep working. And we have placed students."

Part 3

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