How much should I worry?

The NYT headline pretty much says it all: Doctoral Candidates Anticipate Hard Times.

Of course, the economy has already run off a cliff and is currently plummeting and times are hard for everyone, but should prospective academics like myself and, I presume, many of our readers, be particularly worried? The article has, as is the form, a number of anecdotes from individal PhD holders who have had trouble finding jobs, but while these may be representative they are of course not necessarily so. The statistics and generalized data are the important part. And they don’t look particulary good.

For example:

A survey by the American Historical Association, for example, found that the number of history departments recruiting new professors this year is down 15 percent, while the American Mathematical Association’s largest list of job postings has dropped more than 25 percent from last year.

Or perhaps:

In the past 30 years, public and private money dedicated to the humanities has also significantly declined. The budget for the National Endowment for the Humanities is roughly a third of what it was at the high point of 1979, after adjusting for inflation, according to the Humanities Indicators data, though stimulus money may raise that figure.

Only 13 percent, or about $16 million, makes its way into scholarly projects. And unlike the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes for Health, the humanities endowment does not give awards to postdoctoral students.

Although there are some small positive signs in the article. According to one “Margaret Peacock, 35, who spent eight years on her dissertation in Soviet history at the University of Texas”, “Americanists seem to be having a much tougher time now than those specializing in other historical areas.” As is the case in other fields, supply and demand is still the rule in academics, and perhaps it is true that American historians are the most plentiful, as it is naturally by far the easiest field of history to pursue while studying in America.

Now, while I can certainly sit and think about dimming future career prospects and conjure up a state of apoplectic nervosia I’m not actually particularly concerned. While I mainly study and research things of particular interest to me, I believe that I am lucky to have stumbled into areas that will continue to be of particular interest in the future. Although there is aways the possibility that, say, Taiwan will be absorbed by the People’s Republic at some point in the future-an event which, upon consideration, I am not sure would actually increase or decrease demand for a course on Taiwanese history-and Japan’s economy may very well wither over the next decade to the point where it falls into the second rank of world economy’s (a far from foregone conclusion, naturally) , I certainly expect that my general areas of interest, which I suppose could be summed up as late 19th century-20th century modernization, colonization and education in East and parts of Southeast Asia, will be at least as relevant as today.

Where I stand: I will be starting a 2 year MA at Kyoto University in April. Graduate in March 2011. I will have sent out PhD applications in November 2010 to several PhD history programs in the US and will therefore hopefully be moving into one of those in September 2011. Hopefully the school of my choice will also be providing a good living stipend and perhaps a decently subsidized apartment, but considering the financial situation at present this is perhaps the most insecure part. Over the course of the PhD studies, I would hopefully be spending at least one year doing research in Japan, one year studying Chinese in Taiwan, one year doing research in Taiwan, and perhaps a few months doing shorter stints of varying lengths in other Asian countries. Assuming relatively prompt completion of my dissertation (none of the 8 or 9 year marathons referred to in the article), I would hopefully be getting a PhD around 2017 which is rather shockingly far away.

Having done all of this, would I then be able to get a real university job, not a mere adjunct teacher but also with a research budget and so on? Perhaps, perhaps not-I really have little idea. But would I be able to get some other sort of decent job? I certainly think so. Assuming that working as a professor in a university setting is not the only option I allow myself, I actually think that even considering this sort of academic background it would probably be far easier to find a decent job in other sectors. Naturally government would be the easiest, particularly the State Department, but there is also the UN, NGOs, assorted think tanks and other non-academic research institutes, and probably even some sort of corporate options. There may even still be a news media by then, although now I tread into the realm of the fantastic.

15 thoughts on “How much should I worry?”

  1. Hey, by 2017 we could all be having knife fights over expired cans of tuna. So, you might as well do what you love until then.

  2. Roy, both you and I wandered into being educated in a certain profession with dreams of a great job doing something that we wanted to do. I had my idealist hopes smash against the hard rocks of reality the moment I stepped into the real world. That may well be your experience too.

    However, I’m doing OK so far (great, in fact), and my advice from my very hard job searches have convinced me that the only way to approach a job search such as ours is to be ambitious, proactice, and ruthless. When there are far too many qualified, smart people for the jobs available, you should engage in guerilla warfare — relentlessly send out your resume, be in touch with every contact you’ve got, and ruthlessly promote your uniqueness by emphasizing whatever unique skills you happen to have.

    For you, I would recommend that you push to publish your best stuff in a real publication. For academia, that basically means a peer-reviewed journal, but anything to get your name out is better than nothing.

    We’re rooting for you, kid!

  3. Hm, I think I’d better start practicing my knife-fighting skills.

    Honestly, I think news articles like this are overblown noise. What matters to you is not the “PhD” market overall but the market for the particular subset of that market you seek to enter. You are in a very niche part of that market, which is low-supply and low-demand. Since you are in such a specialized field, if you were interested you could probably do a fairly comprehensive review of your potential job prospects. It would probably make more sense to e-mail some of those academic Taiwan history bloggers rather than look at the impressions of a NYT reporter. And as Chris implied, a lot of the people who complain about finding employment just suck at selling themselves an make a lot of excuses. The recent news reporting on unemployed factory workers in Japan has been a field day for such pity parties.

    Of course, Chris’s advice to be proactive and ruthless is excellent and could apply to any field, really. But if I may add to that advice without putting words in Chris’s mouth, I would advise against confusing being proactive with being hyper-aggressive. When selling yourself, you should never be too shy to honestly let the employers know why you’re special – they are not mind readers after all. But if you’re a threatening dick about it, that can send negative signals at the same time. I have interviewed many people who were very aggressive in letting me know how great they were but then either didn’t back it up with real skills or just turned everyone off with their abrasive personalities.

  4. Low demand indeed. I’m about ten years ahead of Roy, and jobs are far and few between. Getting a job is a matter of luck as much as anything – you have the right specialty for a given university at the same time they are looking for someone with those skills. I’m actually making rather more than I would in academia at the moment, so don’t forget that a university post is not the *only* thing you can do.

    The decline in academic jobs is not just the NYT moaning. It has been an ongoing problem for years – it’s merely getting worse. If you don’t already, check out The Chronicle of Higher Education forums. True, they’re a worse bunch of whingers than the NYT, and someone going for a PhD in Eng. lit or American History in the US better hope they like wearing paper hats for a living, but the humanities are not great across the board (however Asian history is not too bad, relatively – is it too late to change to accounting?).

    Incidentally, 8 years is not that uncommon for a PhD in the humanities. That may however include all the stuff up to the quals, before the real work, as I understand it.

    Oh, and if you don’t already, read “Piled Higher and Deeper” comics to get the real dirt….

    Publish, yes. But first try to get into the biggest-name grad school you can in the US: a PhD from Yalevard is much more impressive than one from New Jersey Polytechnic. Yeah, it’s disgusting snobbery, but it does tend to work. Especially if your publications are weak (and rather than six to a dozen in minor journals no one has ever heard of, aim for a few but in as high a class as you can manage).

  5. Oh, and this is the scariest part of the NYT article:
    “Humanities professors are already among the lowest-paid faculty members […]
    What’s more, nearly half of all the positions are part time — with no job security and no benefits — a situation that many educators expect to worsen.”

    One reason for this, I like to think, is that these are people who actually went so far as to pay others for the chance to do research (in grad school). Why pay someone who will essentially work for room and board the same kind of money as you would pay to someone who only works for the money? After all, if you wanted to do it, you wouldn’t need to get paid….

  6. Most of what’s been said already is true: for the last few years, there have been about as many East Asia jobs as East Asianists on the market, and that’s going to be true for a while, I think. US and Europe positions are the most vulnerable ones, especially as state teaching standards increasingly include World History.

    For employability purposes, here’s my recommendation: take a China field, even if your research has nothing to do with China, because the vast majority of jobs will require teaching in that area; get some experience with World History surveys — they always need TAs and adjuncts — because you’re likely going to be doing that, too, or at least an East Asian survey of some kind.

    Then, if you get one of the three or four straight-up Japan jobs in the year you go on the market, you can write me back and say how I wasted your time. But if you get one of the two dozen or more East Asia or Asia+World jobs, you’ll be in good shape.

  7. I was one of the lucky ones who left grad school with a pile of surplus scholarship money in the bank and got a job right away. I consider myself lucky. I’m also a ruthless organizer.

    However, the doom and gloom stories are all true. In many fields of history and English – only 50% of PhD students ever finish. Of those, only 50% get tenure track jobs. Many of those jobs are in community colleges in the deep South. It’s a hard world. I’d estimate that each year there are only about 70 decent jobs for Asian historians in the English speaking world. Of those, probably about 40 would be modern and have some potential fit with your specialty.

    The default advice that profs give to prospective grad students now is “don’t do it”.

    You, however, have a number of advantages –
    – Funding attracts funding so your current Monbusho is likely to net you another scholarship for your PhD. Don’t, under any circumstances, do a PhD unless they fund you. A lawyer can afford to get out with $75,000 debt and still have a life. As a history prof, you could start at as little as $40,000 (even at a top 20 program) and that debt would be hanging over you for 10 years (2027!).
    – You know Japanese and Chinese. This gives puts you in a tiny minority among Asianists and will increase your marketability. A Taiwan only focus could actually end up being bad for you – many places that advertise for China want a mainland China historian because it is a butts in seats popular with students area.
    – You write a lot already – I think that you can get stuff in peer reviewed journals (we have already talked about this). I would aim for 6 or so by 2017 (!?).
    – You can look for jobs in Japan and the English-speaking world.

    Also –
    – Count on at least 5 years for your PhD. Some programs won’t let you graduate earlier.
    – Decide right now what type of school that you want to end up at. You need to tailor your resume to either SLAC (selective liberal arts college), R2 (large state school), R1 (think UCLA or Wisconsin Madison), or Ivy. Keep in mind that Ivy league schools will hire 4 people and tenure 1. You could count on ulcers until 2025.

    Curzon’s advice is very good, but needs to be tailored to the university job search. If you send your resume to a university that is not running a job search, it likely will not make it out of HR or past the departmental assistant (profs do all of the hiring). The key is networking at conferences (although don’t get hooked on doing lots of conference presentations, they are worthless compared to peer reviewed articles) and getting a powerful advisor to write strong letters of recommendation for you. Also, when job search season is on, you have to be ready to send out 100 applications – each tailored specifically to the institution that you are applying to. This will be a full time job for months and has to be factored into your PhD completion time.

    Adamu’s advice is very good. It will be the infamous academic job interview that gets you the job in the end. I’m not sure that any other normal (not, say, baseball or something) job in the world has a process so gruelling. Think 1 or 2, 2-3 hour presentation and question and answer sessions where experts will seek to brutalize you on the most esoteric aspects of your research, a mock lecture before apathetic students, and basically having to be on point through interviews with department heads, deans, provosts, etc. for 2 full days. In the end, they will not only be voting on your potential as a researcher, but (and this is a far bigger factor than in private industry because of tenure) whether they want to have an office next door to yours for the next FORTY years. If you are too assertive, they could brand you an @$$hole and decide to take the second or third best researcher because he/she will be more fun to have around.

    The most important thing to keep in mind (and this can be scary) – when you finally do get a job, you will have beaten out 100-200 other applicants – all smart, all ambitious, all with publications, many with Ivy degrees, many, in fact, with credentials not that different from your own. Do you see yourself winning a Battle Royale like this? Being able to imagine yourself as the last man standing is an important step.

  8. Curzon: Yeah, you did end up in a pretty good place but I saw how exhaustive you had to make your job search to get it. I imagine that it’s going to be a pretty rough time finding an academic job when the time comes, but as everyone says, the key is to do good publications and have the proper balance of relevant specialization and diversification in my studies and research.

    “you are in a very niche part of that market, which is low-supply and low-demand. Since you are in such a specialized field, if you were interested you could probably do a fairly comprehensive review of your potential job prospects.”
    Well, this blog post is rather un-transparently the initial foray into that.

    Jade: I didn’t know that you had ever tried to go into academia as a profession. Would you mind talking a bit more about that, as much as anonymity allows? Or if you want to skip anonymity, then email me directly?

    “Oh, and if you don’t already, read “Piled Higher and Deeper” comics to get the real dirt….”
    Actually never saw that comic, but I’ll bookmark it now. I read a lot of webcomics back when I worked at the campus computer lab and such in like 2000-2002 but since then have mainly stuck to comics that appear on paper at some point.

    “But first try to get into the biggest-name grad school you can in the US: a PhD from Yalevard is much more impressive than one from New Jersey Polytechnic. Yeah, it’s disgusting snobbery, but it does tend to work. Especially if your publications are weak (and rather than six to a dozen in minor journals no one has ever heard of, aim for a few but in as high a class as you can manage).”
    While waiting for the reply from the Monbusho people I applied to PhD programs at Harvard, Columbia and Chicago and MA programs at several other places. All the MAs let me in but offered no definite money at that time, Harvard just sent a form rejection, Chicago offered me a 1 year MA instead (with no money) and one prof at Columbia called me to come in and then said I made it to the final round but didn’t get in. I would hope that an MA from Kyodai and a good thesis will seal the deal pretty easily next time.

    “Why pay someone who will essentially work for room and board the same kind of money as you would pay to someone who only works for the money?”
    No way in hell would I pay to go to grad school, unless it was for an MBA or law degree. I study on the dime of the Japanese government.

    “take a China field, even if your research has nothing to do with China, because the vast majority of jobs will require teaching in that area; get some experience with World History surveys—they always need TAs and adjuncts—because you’re likely going to be doing that, too, or at least an East Asian survey of some kind.”

    Luckily, I was planning on taking a China field anyway, due to my own interest. Even though my present qualifications and study so far is VERY heavily slanted towards Japan, Taiwan is probably the single country whose history interests me both which by itself basically requires both Japanese and Chinese history fields, and I’m also becoming quite interested in Chinese history in its own right. The recommendation to try and do some teaching in world history surveys is quite a good one though. It’s nice to hear from one of the academics who currently has a teaching job!

  9. At least I’m not looking for a job NOW. Considering the economy I almost don’t see how it couldn’t be better by the time I have a PhD.

  10. Depends on your field. Business schools are booming while all the bankers are out of work. I know a few people who have segued out of their white collar jobs to become MBA profs.

  11. Roy – you know my email address I assume (it’s on the form) so feel free to email me with any questions. I will say right here that I am only two years out from a nice lucrative post-doc and it can often take years to get an academic job. So I haven’t given up entirely…. But, as everyone else has said, the process is brutal, the job itself maybe poorly paid slog-work, and there are few openings now (I saw a huge drop last year from the year before), and I am making rather more than what I would at a university. So the pressure is not as strong….

    “Considering the economy I almost don’t see how it couldn’t be better by the time I have a PhD.”

    Very likely. Or else civilisation will collapse and we’ll all trade in our PhDs for a stone spear. But what the hell – if all else fails, you still get to be called “Dr” Berman*…..
    http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=377

    *M-Bone is right about it not actually being worth paying for, though. Rule of Acquisition 109: “Dignity and an empty sack is worth the sack.”

  12. 2017 is going to come around whether you finish a PhD or not. If you are doing it because of interest (which seems apparent from your blog posts) and there are no immediate reasons to defer it, go for it. 8 years is a long time and has been previously said, no one knows what the situation will be like then. For example after the tech wreck no one wanted to get IT degrees anymore and then surprise surprise a shortage of skilled people occurred. At the very least when 2017 rolls around you should have that piece of paper where instead you might have a redundancy notice.

    Everything has risk and there are lots of people now who took safer options with their career who are now starting all over again after 20 plus years of working. I might have been financially better off if I hadn’t taken such a meandering path through education/careers/countries but I don’t think that would have offset the fun I had doing it, and I’m doing fine now.

    As far as being employable in the corporate world there’s lots of potential as long as you know how to sell the skills they will find useful. Lots of historians do serious statistical analysis, always a good skill. Other options include employment by companies that deal with Taiwan/China/Japan where they need the expertise of someone who can explain why certain western behaviours might not work and what to expect in return. Cross cultural business negotiations are fun. Writing skills, business analysis (granted this usually requires some domain knowledge, however, many places let people learn on the job). Not to mention language skills – having english, chinese and japanese all in the one person.

  13. Yeah. The only thing there that doesn’t ring true is about how many people read your diss. Anyway, the fewer people that read it, the more the various proper journal articles you can extract from it will seem like fresh work.

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