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Comment by Gimpei | Hacker News Reader

Is a glut of English and Comparative Literature PhDs really that big of a benefit? Those skills are not transferable to anything. I think it’s a crime the way liberal arts departments admit way more students than could ever hope to find a job in Academia. I say this as someone who loves literature and is sad to see these departments shrink. But it isn’t fair to the students to put them through so much pain when you know there is nothing for them at the end of the tunnel.

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In the early 2000s those liberal arts departments went as far as Southeast Asia to recruit international students who paid a lot more than domestic students, especially at the time. One of their outreach programs in Myanmar is called the Pre-Collegiate Program, whose website claims to promote critical reasoning among young people.

Except I actually spoke to several of them who said that they were heavily groomed into joining the liberal arts departments. Not one of them went into engineering or the sciences. One student said during the program she was told she "must" choose the liberal arts. Another described how he was sweet talked by a philosophy professor into becoming a philosophy major, despite having followed a science-based curriculum in high school and little-to-no education in the arts (back then they had to specialize in either but not both in high school).

So when you said "crime" I thought "funny you should say that". It might not be criminal but there was definitely some creepy stuff going on.

Not quite sure what you're talking about. The majority of PhDs awarded in the US were science and engineering (S&E) degrees. The number of non S&E PhDs has held steady since about 1973 [1].

It's also never been a 1:1 ratio of PhD recipients ending up in academia. I will agree that many universities overinflate job prospects post-graduation, but students should also be doing their own market research before entering into such a long process.

[1] https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf25300/report/u-s-doctorate-awa...

>According to data from the Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED), around 1,600 English and Literature PhDs are awarded annually in the United States. Total PhDs awarded annually in all categories : 57,862

It is a very small field that is being used as a straw-man for all PhDs. I don't know what benefit those 1,600 may produce, but I'd rather them have that expertise and use it for our country than have them leave the US for better opportunities elsewhere. Because they will leave.

The benefit is intangible and honestly if they didn't have the opportunity to pursue a PhD they wouldn't leave the country. They would do what the 99% of people like them who are unable to pursue a PhD in their chosen topic do, work another job and publish a smaller body of work in a less prestigious setting. The fact of the matter is that those are not the 1,600 people who have the ability to earn a PhD in English or Literature, it's the ones who's interests and personal profile afforded them the opportunity.

Now to be clear, I'm not saying that this work is unimportant. Intangible benefits are (despite the name) very real and do benefit the nation. It's just a much more complicated than engineering PhDs making stronger forms of concrete or whatever.

>if they didn't have the opportunity to pursue a PhD they wouldn't leave the country

How do you think the US got so many international students?

Incentive structures, mostly.

The glut is primarily a function of the fact that universities have decided that it's fine to have most of their courses taught by poorly-paid adjuncts. That is, actually, a bad thing. If we returned to having tenure-track faculty do a substantial majority of teaching, most people who get humanities degrees would get jobs in the end.

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