Ph.D.-The New Migrant

...Of the relatively few annual vacanies, many are on the faculties of community and junior colleges...

...We had two students write to every community college listed in the directory—2,000 pieces of mail and a return of 2,000 rejections," Stich continued...

...For schools like Yale, Michigan, and Harvard, ties haven't been forged to institutions such as Peoria Junior College...

...Business careers aside, some educators are capable of rare leaps of imagination when it comes to thinking of alternatives for their hapless graduate students...

...credentials for one career are rarely applicable to another...

...In essence, they really didn't give a damn about the fate of their grad students...

...Grace Oerther, the coordinator of Michigan's Career Placement Center, says, "I don't think departments took the studies seriously...

...Yale University...

...Roland Pfaff disagrees: "It's pure snobbery, this second-rate business...

...They spoke out against the one-dimensional orientation of some departments, such as the obsessively computerized, behaviorist methodology of political science...

...If these graduate programs are closed down, it is argued, the positions currently usurped by their Ph.D.s would be filled by the allegedly better educated products of the elite institutions...

...Similarly, the untenured professor who wants his contract renewed or harbors some hope of receiving tenure must conceal any substantive differences of educational or political perspective he might hold...

...Political firings now take the more discreet form of non-renewal of short-term contracts...

...Unemployed Michigan philosophy Ph.D...

...Even if it refused to accept their accuracy, it was not ignorant of the problems its new Ph.D.s were having...

...There is a severe glut of Ph.D.s seeking college level faculty positions, and projections for the future point to further problems...

...This is not a society where broad conceptualization counts for much —as higher education has itself demonstrated by its narrow-minded creation and intensification of the glut...

...What of the recent Ph.D...

...Ironically, his years of teaching experience may hinder his chances of obtaining another faculty position: Although he might be willing to work for a beginner's salary, most institutions presume he is too expensive for them, and they know they can find someone cheaper...

...Furthermore, they were in the vanguard of political activity and opposition to the Vietnam war...

...These schools traditionally hire through their ties to a state university with a Ph.D...

...Some educators look toward the business community to snap up jobless Ph.D.s, but why should a corporation hire a historian, for example, when candidates with specialized training are graduating from the nation's business schools...

...Most graduate students and recent Ph.D.s contend they were unaware of the employment crisis in their fields until they overheard comments by fellow scholars seeking jobs or began the frustrating search for work...

...And when the glut became apparent, "the departments were looking out for their own security...

...They never came to us, because in the past we didn't have anyone interested in teaching there...

...What impact, then, will the glut have on higher education...

...During the 1960s, graduate students and untenured faculty were in the forefront of educational experimentation and revitalization...

...The department had all of the figures, the projections...

...The vast majority in such disciplines as philosophy, history, English, and foreign languages will remain unemployed or underemployed...

...Prestigious universities harbor the notion that the answer is elimination of graduate programs at "second- and third-rate institutions...

...Why continue to train more people when there are plenty of those with ability to fill vacancies for the next several decades...

...Michigan's philosophy department, for example, has reported about 250 applicants for the last three years in what is well known to be a saturated field...

...The current recession has aggravated the problem, since even fewer high school graduates are going on to college...

...may be exerting a profoundly conservative influence on the nation's campuses...

...For Ph.D.s in such disciplines as anthropology, history, and philosophy, the alternatives for other forms of professional employment are bleak in our highly specialized society...

...Most contracts are of one to six years' duration, and when the question of tenure or renewal arises, the experienced professor may be let go because he has become "too expensive...

...by not explaining the harsh realities, professors help preserve the illusion of eventual employment...

...Many undergraduates believe that if they gain entrance to a prestigious institution's doctoral program, they will have a better chance of finding work...

...How did this come about and what does it tell us about American higher education...

...As one untenured faculty member put it, "If you had a certain skill as a factory worker but no job security, and management was in the process of training three to four times the employable number in your specialty, what would your union do...

...Horror stories abound of Ph.D.s who drive miles and miles, commuting to three or more colleges for part-time work at cumulative annual wages of $4,000...

...Philosophy and history are not exceptions...

...Fewer students might orient their careers toward the glutted disciplines if a forthright adviser bluntly informed them that the prospects of stable employment are dim...

...Many of today's graduate scholars and Ph.D.s would not have dreamed, when they entered graduate school, of teaching at such places for such salaries, but now they seek this kind of work to meet their necessities while they remain in academia and hope that something better will turn up next year...

...The young assistant professor or grad student had better not vote with the wrong wing of the department when it comes to hiring...

...What is higher education doing about the surplus of academicians...

...Some departments are finally advising their new graduate students of the realities of the job market, but counseling hardly extends beyond this initial action...

...Their failure to call attention to the glut is ruining lives, yet they just couldn't be bothered...

...Thus, limiting graduate programs to the top-ranked universities might produce rigid discipline conformity...

...Many of the untenured professors facing a return to the ranks of the unemployed are in their thirties, and have families to feed...

...Why do students continue to register, and thus intensify the competition for the dwindling number of vacancies...

...The non-elite schools are often deemed second-rate because they are not doing what is 'in.' While not the 'going thing,' some of these institutions do what they do very well...

...Until you are really clobbered, you assume it won't happen to you...

...Perhaps it will result in the calcification of educational ideologies in many disciplines...

...birth rate...

...for a song...

...By 1985, there will be 40,000 scholars competing for that relative handful of positions, and a recent report from the National Board on Graduate Education predicts that in the next decade possibly only one of every ten Ph.D.s will find work as a college professor...

...in history from the University of Michigan three years ago...

...While the CIA apparently did some recruiting at the last convention of the American Historical Association (and I have talked to a recent Ph.D...

...Ph.D.—the new migrant...

...A grad student may teach two or three courses for preposterously low wages...

...In fact, however, a Ph.D...

...If he complains, he may jeopardize his chances of finding or holding a job in his chosen vocation...

...Yet he does not come from a disadvantaged socio-cultural background, and his education could hardly be called substandard...

...Some graduate students and recent Ph.D.s call for an end to new graduate enrollment in the already glutted fields...

...History professor Willbach suggests there is also need for better counseling at the high school and undergraduate levels regarding the discouraging employment prospects in academia...

...He is, in fact, one of the most highly educated professionals in America, the Ph.D...

...An uncertain future faces even those few who manage to secure a full-time faculty appointment...

...As early as the mid-1960s, economist and educator Alan Cartter, among others, predicted that the demand for faculty members would drop substantially because of a marked decline in the U.S...

...There is no hesitation to fire political or educational dissidents, since there is a reserve of qualified replacements who would be happy to harmonize in order to hold their jobs...

...The continuing influx is all the more perplexing since fellowship money is scarce and many scholars must now foot their own bills through their years of graduate work...

...A professor fired for political reasons may well find himself permanently out of the discipline...

...When I began my graduate studies," says an English scholar completing his doctoral thesis at Bran-deis, "I was told nothing about the difficulties of getting a job...

...But if training in some academic fields is curtailed, it could prove extremely difficult to get the wheels turning again when there is a need...

...program, often on a slave-labor basis...

...And placement coordinator Oerther notes that a scholar often decides to enter a graduate program on the assumption that somewhere a position will open up once he has completed his doctorate...

...If I had realized what the possibilities were for getting a job, I'd never have entered the field and surely wouldn't have spent all the years, money, and hard work that I've plowed into my graduate education...

...Unfortunately, we have no union to call on for an end to this unwarranted competitive threat to our survival...

...Were they blinded to the realities by the insularity of their "ivory tower" or did they refuse, deliberately, to alter the planned course of growth to continue tapping the then-abundant financial resources and acquiring the accompanying prestige...

...To find out, I interviewed tenured and untenured faculty members, department chairmen, placement officers, unemployed recent Ph.D.s, and graduate students in Boston and Ann Arbor...

...from one of the elite universities may be a liability...

...And enroll they still do, in surprising numbers...

...Now such jobs are quite attractive to our students, but we aren't informed of vacancies...

...The angry possessor of a1 recent Harvard history Ph.D...

...there has been no dramatic reduction in the number of applications to graduate schools...

...Last year, 500 of some 8,000 positions in philosophy were eliminated...

...for reasons of money and prestige, the "lower ranked" schools would be as unlikely to close down their graduate programs as would "name" universities...

...They just seemed to believe that there would be an endless supply of students and positions...

...Will I be granted tenure...

...Such unfounded optimism provides the rationale which keeps graduate enrollments high...

...In 1973, not even one historian of every six managed to find an academic post, and the employment picture for historians has deteriorated further since then...

...No union exists to better the new migrant's lot...

...This isn't bad for a grad student when the alternative is not eating or going on welfare...

...Will the years of hard work that prepared these scholars for their profession enable them to earn a living in another field...

...These forecasts were published at a time of great academic expansion, when the products of the World War II baby boom thronged the halls of higher education...

...Some members of the faculty spew a lot of rot about their function as professors and not employment counselors...

...perhaps it signals the end of the campus as a vanguard of dissonance and progressive political activity...

...In some departments, not all, there is a marked lack of concern...

...Some Ph.D.s have branded the 1970s a subtle reincarnation of the Joseph McCarthy era...

...Furthermore, in hard times undergraduates tend to choose career-oriented courses and shun such fields as English, philosophy, and history...

...comments, "Perhaps, for a while, departments could deny the validity of the projections, but when the handwriting was on the wall, they refused to acknowledge it—any cutbacks would have hurt them financially and eroded their notion of academic prestige...

...The scarcity of jobs and the insecure existence of the untenured faculty member ("Will my contract be renewed...

...who finds no work in his chosen field...

...There are seven applicants for every faculty vacancy in philosophy, according to a conservative estimate by the head of the American Philosophical Association placement committee, Professor Ruth B. Marcus of Daniel C. Spitzer received his Ph.D...

...If the new migrant succeeds in tracking down a part-time job, the pay may fall below the poverty line and entail dreadful working conditions...

...it is expected to decline to fewer than 5,000 in the 1980s...

...Certainly I'm bitter that not a word of this was passed on to me...

...who has applied for a CIA job), it seems unlikely that throngs of young scholars will plunge headlong into espionage...

...Why didn't educators involved in departmental planning take such demographic studies as Cartter's seriously before rushing into unwarranted expansion...

...According to placement counselors and others interviewed, this pattern is being repeated around the country...

...Many graduate programs continue to crank out Ph.D.s under the rationalization that many viable career options exist...

...The policy of most graduate programs appears to be that if the student, after some initial warning of the employment situation, is still willing to enroll, he is entitled to exercise freedom of choice...

...Professor Stich candidly notes another inhibitive trend on the "personal level": "There is the inevitable inclination to be a good boy and not step on people's toes, offend people, and so on...

...Some cutbacks have been initiated in graduate programs at both the prestigious and non-elite institutions, but not on a sufficient scale to begin to dent the supersaturation in some fields...

...But even under the healthiest of economic circumstances, the sheer impact of lower birth rates would create a crisis in the faculty job market...

...The job crisis has changed all this...

...To attempt, at this point, to retrain for another profession is more costly and difficult than it would be for the younger, often single, more recent Ph.D...

...I personally won't want to cross somebody on whom I may be dependent for getting a job, when it's desperately difficult to get work under the best of circumstances...

...Only when the declining birth rate became visible in shrinking enrollments did universities begin to recognize that they were training Ph.D.s far in excess of the demand...

...Michigan philosophy placement director Stich points out, "We've had a lot of trouble landing jobs for our people in community and junior colleges...

...Throwing the experienced professor back on the glutted market may well earmark him for unemployment and professional oblivion...

...The majority of job seekers in some disciplines are already unable to find full-time employment...

...Instead, most will continue to scan the academic landscape, hoping to scrounge one or more part-time or short-term jobs, often at poverty-line pay...

...Professor Stephen Stich, placement director for the philosophy department at the University of Michigan, opts for the notion of "benign neglect": "I think this was a combination of ignorance and stupidity— ignorance of the facts and being too stupid to realize this was going to happen...

...Furthermore, the concept of "elite schools only" is unrealistic...

...The glutted market supplants the function of the blacklist...

...You surmise that something must be wrong with the figures...

...We just had a letter from a local community college offering $650 for a three credit course—so, nine hours of teaching for less than $2,000...

...Graduate students realize that their slim chance of obtaining a faculty appointment might be endangered by bucking a department's educational philosophy or by advocating an unpopular political stand...

...The alternatives are unskilled labor (for which Ph.D.s may be judged "overqualified"), professional retraining, or the unemployment line...

...It is a matter of simple, coldly calculated mathematics: Institutions feeling the economic repercussions of diminishing enrollment, inflationary costs, and reduced external funding know they can pick up a talented mint-new Ph.D...

...The new migrant's work—if he or she can find any—is seasonal, like that of the fruit-picking nomads, with tenuous employment guarantees at best...

...Hundreds of Ph.D.s throughout the country are combing institutions of higher learning in search of employment...

...Feeling the economic pinch and enrollment contractions, small private, community, and junior colleges have taken advantage of the glut...

...The average number of new faculty hired every year is now about 15,000...

...Myopic academic planners nurtured the illusion of perpetual growth, and launched new doctoral programs, while those already in operation were expanded...

...Philosophy placement director Stich suggests, for example, "Although this is a touchy subject, there is obviously a potential demand in the intelligence community for people with training in logic and inductive programs...

...There continues to be little job counseling on the graduate level...

...As placement coordinator Oerther notes, "There simply isn't much counseling...

...perhaps it means an end to educational experimentation and innovation...

...A few professors express the fear that the society's "power brokers" could ultimately declare such disciplines as philosophy unnecessary and see to it that graduate programs were not revived...

...History professor Daniel Willbach suggests that undergraduates who do well in a field are drawn to continue in it, and often are encouraged by their professors...

...Even teaching in high school is usually out of the question without the proper certificate...

...the job market in academia is little better—perhaps even worse—in most of the arts, humanities, and sciences...