Something to consider when considering grad school

Someone pointed recently pointed me toward this article, written about a year ago by Thomas H. Benton, called Graduate School In The Humanities: Just Don’t Go.

Benton, himself a college professor, warns that a humanities degree is an investment that’s not worth the risk. PhD’s spend an average of ten years (and tens of thousands of dollars) preparing for the job market, but less than half of them will ever find a tenure track position. The jobs that do exist are adjunct faculty positions that pay less than minimum wage. He compares the job market for humanities PhD’s to that of actors and professional athletes.

He says that young people go to grad school for a variety of reasons. Some are intimidated by the thought of life outside of academic institutions and idealize their college life. Those who receive good grades and praise from their professors might feel more validated inside academia than outside it. Others think that grad school is a good place to hide out in tough economic times, as indeed he did when we went in the early 90’s recession. Academia, he contends, is only too happy to exploit these young people, taking their tuition money, underpaying them for their research and teaching labor, and then continuing to underpay them as tenure-track positions are scaled back, placing new PhD’s into a permanent pool of adjunct workers who make less than minimum wage.

I’m writing about this here because I suspect that 2E students are particularly vulnerable to humanities graduate programs. 2E, or “twice-exceptional”, refers to folks who are both gifted and learning disabled. We are often very, very good in certain academic subjects, and god-awful in other subjects. Our deficits can be in areas that are required for entry-level work, such as attention to detail and clerical skills. Basically, we’re absent-minded professors. And what better place for an absent-minded professor than academia?

I fell pray to this line of reasoning. My learning disabilities were undiagnosed until halfway through my junior year of college. My grades were low, too low to carry out my original plan of going to law school, and when I entered the job market I found that the only work I was qualified to do was entry-level admin stuff. All those job postings were aimed at “highly organized” candidates with “excellent clerical skills” who were experts in creating Excel spreadsheets. Hmm … dyscalculia, dysgraphia, and ADHD … nope.

I tried temping, but I failed every single computer test they gave me. I got one shift as a receptionist.

I wound up in retail, working just above minimum wage, feeling like my potential would never be realized. That is, until I started thinking about MFA programs.

An MFA is a terminal degree (ha!) in the fine arts, meaning that it’s “equivalent” to a PhD, only the knowledge is in an applied field such as painting rather than something like art history, where you write about painting. An MFA degree qualifies you to teach college courses. I was told that it was a great way to work a secure job that complemented my creative work. There would be A Lot Of Retirements coming down the pipe Real Soon Now, opening up new positions in the job market. It would be a track to a professional job that didn’t require me to trip and fall over the entry-level hoops that everyone else can just jump through on their way to better things.

And it was all wrong.

Turns out, not only are there no jobs in the humanities, but that MFA’s are taken much less seriously than PhD’s when applying for the few positions that are out there. I learned that adjunct faculty work for below minimum wage. I learned that the time and money I’d put into my degree would have been better spend just taking the art and music classes that interested me.

These days, I hire myself out as an art teacher, as a gardener, or sometimes as a personal assistant. Work is sporadic. I live because my husband had the sense to go into network engineering, and that whole internet thing turned out to be kind of a big deal. If I weren’t married, I’d be lucky to have a roof over my head.

And I’m not the only one. While they’re not 2E, I know others who fell into the humanities trap.

My husband’s brother is getting a PhD in English Lit. His funding was recently cut off, which means that he is no longer an “employee” of the school, which means that he will be uninsured at the end of the year. As he finishes his dissertation he’ll be an adjunct faculty member, paid a third less than he’s paid now (not including benefits) to teach more courses.

Then there’s a friend of mine from middle school who got his Doctorate in music. He had intended to be a music professor, but found the same things the rest of us do — there’s a shortage of jobs, and the ones he could find were in backwater rural hellholes, where only the most musically untalented students dared to tread (seriously, he had a prospective piano major who couldn’t play a scale!). He’s now struggling to set up a piano studio and wishing he’d saved his money. He sums up his situation: “If I’d gotten a decent job somewhere ten years ago, instead of going to grad school, at least by now I’d be able to afford a piano!”

There are four reasons, Benton writes, that justify the enormous time and expense of a humanities graduate degree. They are:

* You are independently wealthy, and you have no need to earn a living for yourself or provide for anyone else.
* You come from that small class of well-connected people in academe who will be able to find a place for you somewhere.
* You can rely on a partner to provide all of the income and benefits needed by your household.
* You are earning a credential for a position that you already hold — such as a high-school teacher — and your employer is paying for it.

As for my friends and I, we all would have been better off if we’d seen Thomas Benton’s article years ago, and taken it to heart.

The whole article appears here. In a follow-up piece, he discusses the economics of academia in more detail. Also worth checking out is his tongue-in-cheek essay, Is Grad School A Cult? If you’re already in grad school, this article gives some pointers about how to prepare for both the academic and non-academic job markets.