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.
