Why You Should Not Get a History PhD
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My conclusion is that I would actually have less time for research in a PhD program than in my current life where I find time for it around a job outside academia.
If I had a student like that I would go ahead and graduate him or her. (It takes a very long time to publish anything in Econ so that kind of productivity would be hard to reach though.)
Wittgenstein famously got his PhD from Trinity College in Cambridge by basically showing up and handing in the finished Tractatus Logico-philosophicus. Wittgenstein was of course a rare case, but that work was groundbreaking and leading philosophers at the time agreed, he defended and was given a PhD. Moore, one of the people overseeing his defense, stated “I consider that this is a work of genius but, even if it is not, it is well above the standard required for a PhD degree.”
Today getting that PhD is a combination of a bizarre hazing ritual and making sure you don't offend any of the other department faculty that will ultimately be deciding if you're worthy. I've seen a few cases from my time in academia where jealous or bitter faculty will do anything to ruin the carer of someone they view as threatening.
If Wittgenstein where alive today he probably would have ended up a software engineer writing an engaging blog in his spare time that most academics viewed as hopelessly obscure and amateur.
One thing I have absolutely hated, especially since entering the tech industry, is how many of my friends who came from poorer backgrounds were misled by academia into pursuing things like "education for its own sake" or "studying what you love", and subsequently missed out on opportunities to study something that could have changed the socio-economic trajectory of their lives.
It can be hard, at these universities, to see who has invisible safety nets. You might decide to major in education because, well, it changed your life! You look around and, wow, so many other cool people are also majoring in education, it must be okay. What you don't realize, though, is that half of those kids plan to go into consulting or finance or whatnot via their parents connections.
I do value learning for its own sake and I don't think the liberal arts should solely be the privilege of the rich! But for a lot of kids from poorer backgrounds who make it into good schools, pursuing a more vocational major is the best chance of making enough money to go on to change their circumstances in life. This is sadly a fact of reality, and those who deny it (such as the professors encouraging these kids to jump into history PhDs) are taking away people's chances at upwards mobility.
In the teams I've worked, every member had a PhD, our manager had a PhD, their director/VP had a PhD... everyone up until the C-suits.
It was necessary and expected.
So I think it really depends on your field.
Something like "89% of history PhDs are employed in these salary bands (list them with percentages), and 3% are employed in the profession associated with their PhD".
I bet most history departments would tell you that they are not interested in the commercial success of their PhDs. That's not the purpose of their institution or in alignment with the academic tradition.
The University of Michigan has a really nice online tool:
https://tableau.dsc.umich.edu/t/UM-Public/views/RackhamDocto...
According to that 22% of history grad students from 2015-2020 got tenure track positions. That's quite a crapshoot for investing 5+ years in a career path. And of course you could fall off the tenure track. And Michigan has a top history program.
I got an undergraduate degree that has 0% unemployment rate with good salaires because there are so few graduates, but for a PhD (that I was thinking of getting) there is no guarantee that even the places where I would work are good enough in terms of research or teaching.
Those can be worth pursuing, but otherwise you may want to consider just resting on the incidental Masters you get as part of the PhD program ...
This really depends on the field. For any field, you need to think about the outside options (I.e., non academic). If they are good and you would be happy, a phd may be a good move.
In economics, the outside options include government, policy (foundations and think tanks) and the private sector. Many are lucrative and / or rewarding in other ways. Furthermore, unlike in CS there are some roles in economics and policy which you cannot fill without a PhD.
It may be a good move!
And if I recall correctly, Economics was basically the only field where it made financial sense to get a PhD, taking into account opportunity cost etc.
There are definitely some parts of economics you want to avoid though. If you're interested in anything that fits in the "Freakanomics" classification, the job market is going to be challenging, and I'd personally not recommend getting a PhD if that is your area of interest. I chaired a search for a labor economics faculty position a couple years ago and found their job market to be absolutely brutal. Many, many top candidates with good publications were applying as postdocs. Some of them, in spite of their outstanding publications, could not find academic jobs even after completing the postdoc. I don't think any of them will be living in poverty. A tough job market nonetheless.
Sure, I could teach myself everything I learned in grad school on my own time (I guess) but to me, those stipended years wherein I had no responsibilities other than to learn were the best years of my life, and they have served as the springboard for more learning in this, much more busy, period of my life.
Would it be better if I had made full professor somewhere? Sure, but in the end the education was its own reward. I consider the trade offs a bargain.
We don't give enough credit these days to education being its own reward.
On the other hand, I feel like I've defined myself in a narrow specialization, so I might miss opportunities because they don't fit that.
But definitely don't get a PhD if your plan is to become a professor. Unless nepotism will go in your favor.
Depends on the field, doesn't it? Some fields, like History, don't open any opportunities other than academia. Other fields, like engineering or medicine, basically lets the student practice their field in industry and commerce.
If studying a certain field means that the only thing you can do is teach that field, then that's a pretty sure way to go into poverty.
So my question is: why do people subject themselves to this? I mean if this is something that's fulfilling to you or you're not that concerned with the poor chances of finding a tenure track position, that's one thing. But we're well beyond the point where people can reasonably be shocked by this.
Is this hubris? As in, "sure the odds are bad but I'll be the exception to the rule".
I honestly don't understand.
You are also getting paid (hopefully - if you aren't, then you're really screwed). It's not a lot, but enough to live on as a single person.
Then, the academic humanities lifestyle is quite cushy for anyone who really loves reading, thinking, and writing. And as a Ph.D. student, you get to live it for 5 years or more. There's very little of the grant race (you just need a few thousand dollars a year to travel to conferences/archives), there's no grueling lab work. There's not much pressure to perform from your advisor, who is likely working on unrelated projects within the same sub-field. It's just reading, thinking, writing, and talking about other people's writing.
Depends on where you're located. At Stanford, for example, I'm not sure I would consider the PhD stipend "enough to live on as a single person." (It varies by department but humanities are invariably lower.) So much so that "getting a significant other in tech" is a common joke.
In 1996, I was talking to a history professor about going to grad school. I was probably going to go to grad school in economics, but I wanted to make sure I checked out all my options, so I was also looking at some humanities fields. His answer was simply to not give any consideration to grad school in the humanities. It was very difficult to get a job, and if you did you probably wouldn't want to live there, and if you got lucky on the first two, you'd be broke your whole life.
I've seen humanities PhD's claim the job market died with the Great Recession. No, the job market for humanities has been terrible for decades. Maybe it's gone from terrible to something even worse, but it's been a bad idea to go to grad school in the humanities for decades.
It's pretty much been varying degrees of bad since then, but as the first chart in [1] shows, it got a lot worse after 2008.
[0]: https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/pers...
[1]: https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/pers...
What happened was a big drop in the number of new PhDs. That is why the 1980s and early 1990s might have had okay job markets. By about 1991/1992 the job market was once again saturated.
Second, as you’re in college 100% of the PhDs you know have won the jobs lottery. You don’t know any that haven’t. Easy to get a biased impression.
And if you really respect professors and you’ve grown up as a high achiever academically, it sounds like a giant complement when a professor says you’re phd material.
When I was in school I took a triple major so I could study two unemployable things I liked and computer science so I could get a job. I had the benefit of wealthy parents paying my way so it didn't matter that I took extra time to complete my triple major. Still, in my unemployable studies I'd often meet people saying things like "I'm studying English, so going to be unemployed, ha ha" like it was a joke. I always wanted to grab them by the shoulders and shake them and scream "This is real life. You really will be unemployed!"
As to why it wouldn't dissuade them... some people are more passionate than other I suppose.
I think it's not passion but just a general social pressure towards getting a college degree. On top of that, history, or the humanities, is a pretty easy degree to get. Students who like history more than their options will go there, not from passion, but a desire to get a degree at least cost.
A big part of the cost of doing a degree is the opportunity cost of not working anyway. If your university fees are 10k per year (not unrealistic in Canada), but you could be working a 40k/year job instead, the real cost is 50k/year so you would only really be saving 20%... 20% for the privilege of an incomplete experience, no testing to verify you grasp the concepts, no possibility of doing a masters and no diploma to show for it.
Roaming classes is like buying a Mitsubishi mirage. Sure, it's a car... but you can have a car that's twice as good for 20% more.
People are familiar with school in general, and with the university experience and lifestyle specifically. The "Real World™" is where you start paying off loans, pay rent, report to a desk job, and the like. If you're taking a step into this strange new world, where you abandon your status and the lifestyle you know, there's a real psychological barrier there, and it's only stronger for many of the people who excel in academics and know it. Far easier to stay in the realm of the familiar.
As a CS student, I took multiple internships, had some idea of what "real work" would be like, made a reasonable amount of money during the summers, and had a job offer in hand before I graduated. A few students of the humanities might be this lucky; most won't be.
Just like military recruiters are able seduce 16 years without much of a future to join an exciting career in the military academics are able to sell academically inclined ungrads on some fantasy that being a PhD in history in 2021 is anything like it would have been in 1921.
By the time your realize you've been scammed you're at least 4+ years into a PhD, and so committed to the sunk cost fallacy, combined with very strong academic conditioning that nothing will ruin your life more than leaving academia, that you can't fathom the idea of stopping at this point.
Once you have the PhD and done your time in post-doc purgatory, and start on your tenure track hazing, you start babbling about how it's impossible for anyone to do real research without a PhD, even though the general state of "independent research" in academia is increasingly a bad joke.
People often fail to mention that the fantasy of a PhD as someone who spends their time working on hard problems and collaborating with other brilliant-like minded thinkers, is derived from an era when a precondition to getting a PhD was largely based on having a well-off family and a good upbringing. It was a time when PhDs where respected, not because it was a better world, but because only an elite group could reasonably be expected to follow that path.
If you talk to any undergrads starting a PhD today the level of naivete is almost endearing. They unquestionably believe that they are pursuing knowledge for its own sake and starting a path to enlightenment. Academia benefits tremendously from this illusion and has absolutely zero interest in breaking it. It doesn't hurt that they mark anyone who has left academia as a failure. I've seen so many people in the PhD life cycle absolutely devastated when they decide to not take the abuse anymore.
People, as a rule, do not make all of their choices from first principles. When you wake up in the morning hungry, you don't wander out to the back yard and begin conducting methodical experiments to determine which plants growing there are safely edible.
We rely on culture to give us default answers to most of life's questions. If not answers, culture will at least winnow down our choices to a few and nudge towards the safest options. We lean on this so heavily that we can't even perceive ourselves doing it. It's as if the options not handed to us by our culture don't even exist.
We pick up culture from our parents and peer group. It changes all the time, but relatively slowly. If you're roughly the age of a Gen-xer, then you're the offspring of Boomers. That generation grew up in a world of post-WWII economic prosperity surrounded by colleges flush with cash from the GI Bill.
Boomers were raised in an era of optimism to believe in following their dreams. They experienced a reality where they could easily afford to go to college for whatever struck their fancy. When they got out, well-paid jobs were ripe for the picking regardless of education.
They passed all of that onto their children as a cultural assumption that college is always good, you should follow your passions, and that it will work out economically. Then corporations destroyed the labor movement, economic inequality skyrocketed, and government funding of education withered and died. Unfortunately, our prevailing culture was slow to get that memo.
TL;DR: We tacitly assume it's safe to do what worked for our parents even when we don't live in the same world they did.
It depends on what you mean by "boomers". If you mean "baby boomers" then no, that's not true at all. Baby boomers entered the workforce in the 60s and 70s with an expectation they'd probably work for the same company for their entire working lives. Sure there was the countercultural hippie movement but most of the hippies reverted to the mean.
If you mean GenXers then again I don't think that's true either.
I think the first generation to really buy into this "follow your dreams" mentality and end up with $175k in student loan debt for a theater arts degree but ending up as a barista is the nillenials.
I mean Boomers. Yes, they entered the workforce at a time of rising wages and quality of life and in an environment where they expected their employer to take care of them for life even through retirement thanks to pensions.
I think you're interpreting my "following their dreams" in an anti-corporate "not into corporate America" way but that is itself a modern framing. I meant more the belief that they could go to college for what they were interested in with the assurance that plenty of jobs would be available afterwards regardless of their major.
That said, from a pragmatic perspective, this does explain why there wouldn't be a lot of jobs. How many people do you need to research the same stuff over and over, and how qualified do you have to be to teach somebody how to think in the historian mindset?
The unfortunate reality is there should be fewer Phds being churned out in a lot of fields if those degrees can't translate into non-academic positions.
If you want to be liberal arts Phd, you better be preparing to be the best of the bunch if you want to remain in academia.
Making it about supporting yourself, kind of actually hurts humanities education and, I think, inevitably distorts it.
Rather, it should be about becoming a well-rounded person independent of making money.
I am a software engineer and have a comfortable salary. However, I would love to be able to do deeper study into History, Art, and Philosophy, not because it will enable me to make more money, but simply because it would make me a better person and expose me to a deeper understanding of the ups and downs of being human.
Maybe humanities needs to change its target primarily from 18 year olds who are figuring out what to do with their lives, to 40 year olds, who already make money, but want to learn more about what it means to be human.
I think a lot of higher education would be best life-long learning. The amount of stuff you learn before any real-world XP, only to forget (or cling unhealthily to) feels v. wasteful. A professors time might be best spent on adults in the field.
That said, for the humanities, there still needs to be a marketable skill-set that underpins the field.
Accounting is the one PhD that seems to have favorable supply / demand economics. I used to work at a Big 4 accounting firm and they would pay you a generous salary, on top of your stipend, to get an accounting PhD. They were actively looking to fill the shortage of accounting professors that train their workforce.
Anyone know of any other PhD programs that have good supply / demand fundamentals. I used to work with a bunch of econ PhDs and the tenure professor track is really hard for them too (but they have much better private sector opportunities than humanities PhDs).
It could be just my school, but the quality of professors in each program were light years apart. To a person, the history professors were personable, smart and good lecturers. They cared about their students and helped them succeed. Accounting professors, on the other hand, largely stood up in front of the class, read directly from their slideshows, and answered any questions with "read your textbook".
My thought is that this is related to the supply and demand between the two fields. In history, universities can afford to hire the best of the field. They can picky and wait for the right person to come along. In accounting, the best of the field go make big bucks somewhere else. Professors pay well, but not nearly as well as working at a firm. I can't imagine working at a Big 4 firm and teaching as well, just with the hour commitment of their full time job!
As an aside, when I was completing my history degree and considering next steps, I consulted with one of my professors who basically told me I should give up my dream of becoming a PhD just because of how horrible the job market is. I ended up applying for my masters anyways and was rejected, which I take now as a blessing. I made more in my entry level job in accounting that I probably would be making now if I had ended up with my PhD.
So if you want to do actual R&D work in this area you absolutely should be doing a PhD. Considering that you are quite well paid during the studies as well is also a plus.
It makes me wonder - are there opportunities for a digital hybrid of techie and historian? The data hoarder subreddits come to mind but they tend to be focused on tech itself or unfocused in what data they collect.
Though even if you could maintain and do analysis on a digitized archive of a specific subject I wonder what kind of market there is for that since that’s kind of what libraries have become?
The History job market now is not better than it was 2-3 years ago. If anything it's worse, and schools continue to pump out PhDs like it just doesn't matter that they're tricking kids into burning the better part of a decade for less than nothing (average time to complete in the US is 7-8 years!)
The new policy seems to be to throw the (digital) archives down the memory hole to avoid lawsuits.
Most people have incredibly strong attachments to (specific bits) of history. It's often be inseparable from culture, national identity, and religion. However, it's difficult to justify that funding politically over things like building another warship (to keep us safe!), building a supercomputer (to keep us innovative!), or subsidizing corporate entities (to save jobs!). There's also no commercial market for building national identity. Accordingly, most funding comes out of relatively small culture/arts budgets that don't have to answer directly to constituents, except for a very few things that meet the incredibly high bar of direct political support like the national parks and pyramids.
But if you're interested in how humans have adapted to climate change in the past, or how to design a resilient society, or how pandemics spread, you're going to need historical studies at some point.
People see themselves continuously as playing a role in a story than spans millenia. That's what "identity" is really about, and it underlies war, crime, achievement, religion, raising of families, etc.
Historians could be the leaders here, but for whatever reason they are not. Historians haven't put themselves in a position where they could guide human stories for society overall.
So do they have potential value? Yes. But either they aren't able to provide it, or we aren't able to accept it.
Instead we have media narratives, which are a sad substitute.
This area is called digital archival: https://ndsa.org/conference/ https://www.imaging.org/site/IST/Conferences/Archiving/IST/C...
I used to hate history, but it's much more interesting to read when compared against "common knowledge" of what people believe.
In many cases what is already digitized, much like what is shown at museums, is just the tip of the iceberg of information kept in non-digital forms.
Guy I knew was doing some really cool history work around German settlers in early America based on data collected by early life insurance companies.
Honestly? Don't shit on STEM courses. Encourage programs that produce well-rounded students in the liberal arts tradition.
Most humanities departments are dependent on class enrollment - they are so-called "service" departments (vs. research or clinical departments). Enrollment is largely what determines what those departments can support.
I feel a lot of the answer of "How" will be in the "Why".
If area/endevour is not seen as producing value or being rewarding, it'll naturally atrophy.
If we have a compelling reason for Why that area is rewarding or producing value, it may need as little as an informational/awareness campaign to promote that value/reward.
(note that I am NOT defining "producing value" in dollar terms necessarily, but more generically as "something that somebody or society values". Otherwise, it becomes "something you do for fun for yourself", which is an awesome hobby and everybody should have some, but may not necessarily need to be externally sponsored. I.e. I pay to play music and paint and photograph as a hobby, other people are paid to play music/paint/photograph/etc, and I'm not sure either model is the only right model).
I notice the Historian PhD's only track is defined in that article as somebody who will teach history, not as somebody who will research/write/promote history. This makes it a a very small subset of what I would've considered a Historian / History PhD, and as such, again, I return to "Why" they may need external support if their interaction is strictly inward/cyclical.
There was a famous post, "Don't Become a Scientist!"[1] about Physics in particular.
It includes the memorable line: "I have known more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a Ph.D. in physics than by drugs."
Which I suspect tells us more about Katz's social circle than anything else but nonetheless shows that it certainly isn't a rosy wonderland in STEM.
Most students are there to improve their career prospects. If you go WITHOUT this as your primary goal, at best you spend a very large percentage of your time fighting against bureaucracy designed to reinforce the system as a job training system and end up bitter, and at worst your ability to learn is directly affected when, for e.g., you struggle to find an advisor since most advisors are looking for students who will help improve their own career prospects (i.e. wanting to get as many papers out as possible)
> Often, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity that you could regret later of not having taken.
FWIW I totally agree with this and I think you CAN enjoy it if only interested in the knowledge itself, but one should really, really know what they're getting in to.
We are graduating far more people in various fields than are actually required.
We need to scale back education at all levels to match actual demand, and hold students to higher standards. We need to accept once again that only about 20% of the population really need tertiary education.
In the anglosphere we seem to struggle with the concept that people are of differing levels of intellectual capability (particularly when trends are seen along racial lines) - and we have figured erroneously that just throwing degrees at people will end inequality.
When it has been the fact that only the most qualified and intelligent people were previously granted those degrees that has given them any value.