| Article from the Chronicle of Higher Education | 
| | Photo by Lyle Stafford for The Chronicle |
November 28, 2010 Master's in English: Will Mow Lawns By Robin Wilson Most programs don't say where graduates get jobs, and future Ph.D.'s don't demand the data James Mulvey, who has a master's degree in English, abandoned his lifelong dream of getting a Ph.D. and becoming an English professor after taking a hard look at the job market. He now works as a landscaper and a technical writer in British Columbia. When a group of prospective graduate students visited the physics department at the University of Washington during a recruiting weekend last spring, they asked lots of questions about their lives as doctoral students. But none of them seemed very interested, the department's chairman says, in how recent Ph.D.'s fared after graduate school—on the job market. "I don't think I ever encountered a question about that," says Blayne Heckel, the chairman. "These students want to know things like, Will they have an office in the building? They are more interested in things that will affect their day-to-day lives than in what kinds of jobs our graduates get." Even if students did want to know, job-placement information would be hard to get. Most academic departments in the arts and sciences at universities nationwide don't share those data with students, because they don't keep close track of their Ph.D. graduates. Since prospective students don't demand it, departments don't collect it. And in this vacuum, some departments say they are reluctant to be the first to put their records out there, because they don't know how they would compare. The National Research Council wanted to use job-placement data in its latest rankings of doctoral programs but abandoned the idea when it realized universities didn't have the numbers. Now some institutions, including Ohio State University and the University of Maryland at College Park, are starting to push academic departments to track their Ph.D. graduates and publish the information online. "The placement of students is the best outcome indicator I know of program quality," says Patrick S. Osmer, vice provost and dean of the graduate school at Ohio State. But the question is: Will prospective students pay any attention? Even though the market for tenure-track professors may be the bleakest in decades, students are more likely to evaluate the quality of a doctoral program based on the reputation of its faculty members and on how much financial support a department can offer. Even factors like whether prospective students feel comfortable in a department and where a university is located can trump data about future careers, say faculty members and students. "Ph.D. students are extremely bright people who have been successful their whole lives," says David D. Perlmutter. He is director of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa and author of a new book called Promotion and Tenure Confidential (Harvard University Press). "They are like the hundreds of thousands of inner-city kids who believe they are going to be playing in the NBA," says Mr. Perlmutter, who also writes a column for The Chronicle's Careers section. Despite gloomy job news and the hundreds of applicants for any opening, "they still think they'll be the exception." Boasting of Success The Web sites of the country's top business and law schools devote entire sections to the job market. Professional schools have to be upfront about the experiences of their graduates because students demand it. Unlike most Ph.D. students at top research universities, law- and business-school students pay full freight, and they want proof that jobs are waiting when they're done. In Ph.D. programs, though, forces can work against making job-placement information available. "Program by program, the placement data provided over the last couple of years have been pretty pathetic," says Peter Conn, an English professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a former interim provost there. "It is not in the graduate faculty's interest to advertise the very, very mediocre results we have been having in Ph.D. programs, particularly as opposed to professional schools. Faculty like teaching graduate students more than they like teaching undergraduates, and graduate students provide them with participants for their seminar classes." Organizations that might help change the status quo haven't said much. "We don't have any data on this," Belle Woods, a spokeswoman for the Council of Graduate Schools, told The Chronicle. "While we're aware that job-placement information is an issue, we don't have any comment on it at this time." A session on the topic, however, will be part of the council's annual meeting this week. Some Ph.D. programs have decided on their own that it's a good idea to offer more information. The English department at the University of Michigan posts more data online than most programs do. It tells where its Ph.D. graduates found academic jobs, and whether those jobs are tenure-track or limited-term appointments. It also offers firsthand accounts of the job search from some of its most successful graduates. With the academic job market in English so abysmal—the Modern Language Association reported a nearly 50-percent drop between the 2007-8 and 2009-10 academic years in the number of tenure-track jobs advertised in its listings—Michigan's department wanted to be upfront. Of the 10 students on the job market for the first time in 2008-9, five took tenure-track jobs, two secured postdoctoral fellowships, and three became lecturers. The following year, two of those lecturers found tenure-track jobs. It would be tempting to say those numbers look pretty good, but there aren't lots of others to compare them with. Sara Blair, director of graduate studies in English, says her colleagues at other universities have asked why Michigan provides so much information when most departments don't. "Our program aims for transparency," says Ms. Blair. The chemistry department at the University of Washington, in contrast, does not publish data on where its Ph.D.'s get jobs. And Paul B. Hopkins, the chairman, wasn't eager to supply such data to The Chronicle. "If the NRC was going to get the data and publish them for the nation, I'd say, Good," he declares. "But I won't do it as an individual department, because I don't want only my data out there." It was that kind of sentiment that led Brian Leiter, a professor of law at the University of Chicago with a Ph.D. in philosophy, to push philosophy programs to begin publicizing job-placement statistics for their doctoral graduates. Mr. Leiter puts out The Philosophical Gourmet Report, which ranks the quality of graduate programs in philosophy and is widely used by prospective students deciding where to enroll. "I did put a lot of pressure on departments to start making this data available online," he says. "They thought they had a moral right to keep these things secret, but they all caved in the end." Michael C. Abramson used Mr. Leiter's report when deciding where to enroll in a Ph.D. program a few years ago. But he didn't always find data on the job-market very useful. "Some departments aren't very good at updating these, and they underreport who doesn't get jobs, and the few standout job successes are still lingering on their list long after the faculty advisers of those students have left," he says. Mr. Abramson chose to attend the Johns Hopkins University's doctoral program because, over all, the university was the highest-ranking one that accepted him, and it had respected faculty members in his field. "I visited and got a great feel," says Mr. Abramson, who noted that Johns Hopkins also offered him five years of support. Even academic departments that are ahead of the curve in providing information do not always disclose everything that prospective students might want to know. Because it doesn't want to embarrass anyone, Michigan's English department does not publish information about graduates who don't get jobs. And, like most academic departments, it doesn't say how many students drop out before earning their Ph.D.'s. 'Study for Its Own Sake' Nicholas A. Richie, a first-year Ph.D. student in English at Michigan, says he knows full well how bad the job market is. Like other first-year students, he is enrolled in Ms. Blair's seminar this semester, called "Introduction to Graduate Studies." Ms. Blair thinks it's important to educate students about the job market. But like his peers, Mr. Richie isn't very interested in talking about how difficult it will be to find a tenure-track job. "If one is rational, a look at the job statistics would never provoke anyone to try and become a professor—it's an irrational pursuit," he says. "I took that into account. But I undertook the study for its own sake. It had to be self-justifying." New graduate students in other disciplines say the same thing. They decided to attend graduate school not because they necessarily believe they'll eventually become tenure-track professors (although some do), but because they really want to delve into a discipline. For others, the lack of job prospects after earning an undergraduate degree is what sent them to graduate school. Brian Fitz, a first-year doctoral student in chemistry at Washington, says that was his concern after earning his bachelor's degree in chemistry. He probably could have gotten a job as a laboratory technician, he says, but he would have been doing the same tasks over and over again. And there was always the chance that, like friends of his who have only bachelor's degrees, he could end up working outside his field altogether. "I didn't want to be a janitor or a waiter," he says. Still, Mr. Fitz isn't particularly concerned about what kind of job he will get after earning his Ph.D. "You're not learning to do one specific thing in graduate school that you'll go out and do for the rest of your life anyway," he says. "It's more of a skill set. You learn how to think, and you can apply that to a broad set of circumstances." Cora Ann Johnston, a first-year doctoral student in biology at the University of Maryland, acknowledges that job-placement information "wasn't at the top of my list" in deciding where to attend graduate school. One small department she applied to tried to attract students by capitalizing on how well its graduates did on the market. "They were saying, 'We have had students in the past get great positions—look how well they are doing,'" relates Ms. Johnston. But the message didn't sway her. Instead, she chose Maryland because the biology department was large and "vibrant," and she fit well with other grad students there. "Yes, I'm interested in my job afterward," she says. "But because a Ph.D. is such a long undertaking, I was more interested at that point in how many seminars they have, how cohesive the students are, and how much knowledge is swishing around in the department." Maryland's biology department does not yet provide information to prospective students about where its Ph.D. graduates find jobs. But starting two years ago, administrators at the university directed all departments to collect employment information as part of an effort to "right size" enrollment in graduate programs, says Cynthia Hale, assistant dean of Maryland's graduate school. The university is moving to make the data available online. Mr. Conn, who devised a system at Penn for tracking the employment of graduates, says it isn't that difficult to do—particularly with the help of online searches. "It's still by no means possible to track everyone," he says. "If they bail out before they earn their degree, they have no interest in being tracked. But in terms of students who get any kind of academic job or a job related to their degree, most of those people are visible on Web sites and easy to find." Some departments start by sending surveys to their graduates, and then follow up with online searches of those who don't respond. Either way, the key is deciding that gathering the data is a priority, and keeping up with it year by year. Pushing for More Job Data Joseph F. McQueen is one graduate student at Ohio State who did pay a lot of attention to the job market. But he did most of the research himself, using the Internet, in part because some English programs he considered attending didn't provide the data. He identified faculty members at his top-choice universities who could be his doctoral advisers, looked at who their Ph.D. graduates were, then searched online—a lot of Googling—to see where those graduates worked now. "I tried to do my own 'Where are they now?,'" he says. What he found was that about 80 percent of the graduates were working, half in tenure-track jobs and a fair number in adjunct positions. Those statistics aren't exactly comforting, acknowledges Mr. McQueen, but he chose to attend Ohio State's Ph.D. program in part because he felt its professors didn't sugarcoat the reality of the job market. "I just wanted to know there was a recognition of how desperate the situation was," he says. But not all prospective students decide grad school is worth attending for love, not money. It was the same sense of desperation Mr. McQueen speaks of that led another student—James Mulvey—to abandon his plan to enroll in a Ph.D. program in English this fall. Becoming a literature professor had been Mr. Mulvey's lifelong dream, and he had already completed a master's degree in English at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia, and accepted a generous doctoral stipend at McGill University, in Montreal. But he didn't feel he could ignore the job market. "For me, it was a calculated risk, and the risk was too great" that he wouldn't find a good academic job, says Mr. Mulvey, who is working now as a landscaper and a technical writer. In September, Mr. Mulvey started a blog on dropping out of graduate school called selloutyoursoul.com. He wants it to be a place where graduate students can go for an injection of skepticism about whether earning a Ph.D. is worth it, and for support if they're considering giving it up. For Mr. Mulvey, the hardest thing about passing up graduate school was that he had to shed not just a potential career but an identity. In graduate school, he says, students are "taught this detachment from the world—you see the problems of the world, and you're outside it." The irony, he says, is that many Ph.D.'s are eventually forced to turn away from academe, to the real world, for jobs. "Instead of reading nice books about culture all day, you might have to learn some business concepts," he says. "I want to make that seem all right." | 
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