Humanities PhDs take forever - should something be changed?

Great Debates
1

PhDs in the sciences do not generally take all that long. Some graduate students get bogged down, but it is pretty common for a PhD student in the sciences to complete his/her degree in four or five years. Again, I’m not saying it never takes longer, but it rarely takes really long. And sometimes, it can even take less than four years, if you’re really, really smart and can get some hurdles out of your way.

I’ve been gathering, over the past few years, the fact that PhDs in the Humanities tend to take much, much longer. If you earn your PhD in English in five years, you’re a prodigy. Some people take a decade to earn their degrees. Eight years for a PhD is not at all that uncommon.

So I’d like to raise some questions:

  • is this inevitable?
  • is this good?
  • can something be done about this, reasonably speaking?
  • do you have any personal experiences that can illuminate this issue?
2

In the sciences, Ph. D. programs are competing against other organizations that want talented young people. Consequently they can’t make the process too much of a pain in the butt. If you told a chem or math major that he or she had to suffer ten years getting bossed around by professors, teaching ornery freshman, splitting an office with three other people, and earning only ten thousand a year, he or she would say “screw it” and take a job in industry.

On the other hand, people who want a career in anthropology or Polish history or 19th century Hsipanic women’s poetry have few choices outside of academia. Consequently, they have to put up with whatever deal any university gives them. And the universities like Ph. D. students for the same reason that Walmart likes Chinese peasants: cheap labor.

3

Think I read somewhere that science PhDs don’t require a dissertation. That has to speed up the process considerably. I wouldn’t support removing the requirement for Liberal Arts programs though…seems like it would cheapen all previous degrees awarded.

4

That’s false, for sure. People in the sciences do have to write a dissertation.

5

Well, my humanities Ph.D. took 8 years, but I’m a lazy bugger. I was feeling some pretty heavy pressure to get finished over the last couple of years.

But anyway, the next academic stage for a Ph.D. scientist is a postdoc fellowship, which itself can last several years, and many scientists will go through several postdoc positions before they either give up academic science or finally get to be an assistant professor (or, in the UK, lecturer), with a shot at getting tenure. It is really postdocs who do most of the hands-on work of academic science. By the time you are a prof you are more of an administrator, team leader and mentor than a lab guy.

In the humanities it is very different. There are very few positions equivalent to the postdoc level, and most research is individual rather than collaborative. Once your Ph.D. is done you are essentially already in competition with other new Ph.D.s for an assistant professorship, so you really need to be more of an expert in your field when you come out of a humanities Ph.D. then you do coming out of a science one, because in the sciences you will get many more years of postdoc “training”.

In practice, most new minted humanities Ph.D.s who stay in academia probably end up as adjuncts - lecturers employed on a casual, part time basis, at minimal pay levels and with no job security or benefits. American Universities rely heavily on the exploitation of adjuncts now. I am not sure of the exact figures, but I believe that well over 50% of humanities teaching in American higher education is now done by adjuncts. (I have been one myself for many years, until I was recently laid off due to the California budget crisis.) However, unlike postdoc positions in the sciences, adjunct positions are not considered part of the proper career ladder in the humanities, and if you remain one for too long you have probably lost your chance of ever getting a full-time, salaried tenure track position, even if you have a good few well respected publications. To succeed, you really need to get that assistant professor job right out of your Ph.D.

6

In general, the humanities are single author fields and the sciences are multiple author fields. Learning how to do research in a single author field necessarily takes longer than learning how to do research in a multiple author field, because you have to do everything yourself. That’s a major factor in the length of humanities programs, and there’s no real escaping that fact.

That said, science education isn’t quite so quick as you think it is. I don’t know how reputable this source is, but their figures are more in line with what I’ve seen elsewhere (and I’d look for a better cite, but I’m up too late already). Furthermore, just having a PhD is not enough for you to land a professorship in most fields. You’ll need do a postdoc or two, which adds an extra 2-6 years after the PhD. This whole process can easily take ten years, which puts the scientists in line with the humanists.

This isn’t true in the way you think it is. In a lot of science programs, you can publish along the way and then incorporate that work into your dissertation, but it’s unusual for a dissertation to be entirely composed of previously published material. Regardless, you are writing a dissertation as a science PhD student.

7

Isn’t it true, however, that postdoctoral fellows don’t have to live in the same squalor that dragged-out Humanities PhD students do?

8

I have two friends with humanities PhDs: one in philosophy and one in literature and film studies. The impression that both left me with is that PhD students in the humanities hang on to their student status as long as possible. While it doesn’t make them rich, the odds of getting a teaching position are low, so it’s a relative level of job security.

9

Ahhh. Ignorance fought. Thanks.

10

In a lot of PhD programs they’re also earning their masters which probably adds to the time. A lot of confusion probably comes about because a lot of humanities PhD involves the student earning a masters. It takes about two years to finish with the classes for a masters and it shouldn’t take more than a year after that for a thesis to be complete and defended. So 2-3 years for the masters. Then another 2-3 years to earn the PhD. That doesn’t seem so bad to me.
Odesio (1st year graduate student who isn’t procrastinating when it comes to working on his thesis.)

11

Something should be changed if humanities PhDs take 8 years - is that commonplace, for students enrolled full time? I know PhD programs in the US are not time-limited, you graduate when you and your advisor (working in harmony :)) agree that the research project is finished. At my university in the UK all PhDs are capped at 3 or 4 years, end of. You might take longer than that to write up, but you’re only enrolled as a PhD student for that time.

The problem with such long PhDs is that they are not justified in terms of the training element that must be part of a PhD. All PhDs should balance training and research - the apprenticeship-type structure of some science PhDs have very significant training dimensions, others maybe not so much. Regardless, there is no research problem that merits 8 years of a young person’s time, given the learning outcomes that should define a PhD. How is it possible to keep on a learning curve throughout that period, working on the same overall problem, in the same environment, with the same advisor, same tools etc etc? You’d just stagnate.

(Maybe some subjects that require large amounts of data collection and unusual field work would start to rack up the years, but I don’t think of typical humanities subjects like English as falling in this category).

PhD should be benchmarked at 4 years IMO. Then out the door to a postdoc or an industrial position for some fresh challenges.

12

I think the problem for a lot of people is that funding from their graduate program only runs for 4 years or so, so they are barely started on their dissertation before they have to start teaching full-time. If people could have a bit of extra funding, it would make a big difference. But then graduate programs would have to admit fewer students in order to fund the students they have for more years (and offer fewer grad courses, since they would be funding more dissertation-writers and fewer course-takers), so it screws up the current system.

13

The Bith Shuffle, why do you feel the need to exaggerate in your OP? That bothers me a lot on the SDMB. People think that they have to exaggerate in their OP, since if they were accurate other posters would just say, “Oh, that’s nothing big. I kind of expected that.” Read the webpage that’s linked to in ultrafilter’s post. The median amount of time to complete a Ph.D. in the humanities is eight and a half years. The median amount of time to complete a Ph.D. in math and science is almost seven years. And, as ultrafilter points out, most math and science Ph.D.'s do a post-doc afterwards. Maybe you could complain that everybody is forced to spend too long in grad school, but it’s not true that a humanities Ph.D. takes much longer than a science one. Maybe one could argue that grad schools (for all fields) should be more select, so that fewer people will be competing for the jobs that are open to Ph.D.'s, since far too many Ph.D.'s end up working at unrelated jobs. But it’s clear that humanities people don’t spend hugely more time in grad school than science people.

14

I don’t know where you get this notion, but it is generally required to publish a dissertation and undergo a thesis defense in most if not all of the sciences.

The length of a doctoral program in the sciences depends on the area of study, success of research and publication, level of funding, and how desperately your advisor and/or PI needs slave labor to do his research. In the biosciences it is not unusual for a PhD to take six or seven years, largely because the adviser simply doesn’t want to allow trained labor to go, and because the research often takes that long to come to some kind of publishable conclusion. A few years ago when I was researching doctoral programs in computational molecular biology, I found that a lot of PhD candidates were dropping out with a MS just because of the hours required (often sixty or seventy hours a week or research, not including time spent on thesis, classes, quals, et cetera) and because the post-doc job prospects seemed so poor. Physics is similar; a lot of competition for relatively few jobs. Most of the physics PhDs I knew went on to apply their mathematics and programming skills to some other field (actuarial and fiscal modeling, commercial programming, computational fluid and EM simulation) rather than work in their area of study. Because there is not really a specific end game or high demand for PhDs in the general sciences and humanities the way there is for professional programs (medicine, law) or more applied disciplines (engineering, economics) there is little impetus to speed up the programs or have a set completion date. And while law and medical degrees have specific requisites and qualification criteria to practice in, the humanities and natural sciences are pretty open-ended; you’re done when your adviser (who may or may not have your best interests at heart) says you’re ready, and the dissertation board passes your thesis, and then you get to look to years more of low-paying post-doc work (at least in the sciences).

Honestly, the only reason to get a PhD in an area is because you are really, really, really enthralled with the subject matter and are happy to devote a decade or more of your life, living at the poverty line, to the study of that area, and then look forward to the internecine politics of academic life or the uncertainty of finding adequately challenging work in industry or government. If you just want to bump up your salary, stick with an MS, and study the field on your own casually as it interests you.

Stranger

15

PostDocs are almost unknown in engineering and computer science, because demand from industry is too great to make it worth anyone taking one and giving up earnings potential.

How many Humanities PhD students have full time outside jobs? My impression is that quite a few do because of the paucity of funding. Relatively few science and engineering students do. A full time job both decreases the time available for research and the urgency. I’d suspect the difficulty in getting a job has an impact also. I got an offer in May, and I finished in early September, using the offer as leverage over my adviser.

I’d suspect that many science and engineering topics are more close ended than Humanities topics. When I got my compiler working, I was done. You can always convince yourself that your dissertation needs one more pass, though.

16

It is true that postdocs are less common in those fields, but they’re certainly not almost unknown. I know plenty of postdocs in computer science and statistics, all of whom could easily be making a lot more in industry. If you want that academic career and you can’t get it right out of the gate, you do what you have to do to keep after it.

17

No kidding I have a friend who is still actively working on her Ph.D. in Literature, and has been for the past 32 years.
No typo there – she’s been in the Ph.D. program for thirty two years. it’s been relatively dormant part of that time, but she’s never left, and hasn’t had to re-start it.
She has hopes of finishing up this year, and I sincerely hope she does.

18

In my field (PhD in art history), I’ve observed a number of students who get to the dissertation stage and just get stalled.

There are a number of reasons why this occurs, some of which have been mentioned here already.

Typically, by the time an art history student starts their dissertation, they’ve spent the last four or five years doing coursework. 2-3 years at the MA level, then an additional 2 years of coursework as a doctoral student (usually completing the MA degree separate from a PhD program, but there are some schools which streamline the MA stage into the PhD program). After finishing coursework, you take your qualifying exams, the preparation for which might require a semester or so unto itself, during which time you get as deeply acquainted as possible with the scholarship in your major and (at least in my case) minor fields of specialization.

After the exams, you’re a doctoral candidate. Huzzah! Time to write the dissertation.

This is the point where many students fizzle out. For one thing, you’re no longer bound up with the structure of attending classes and preparing seminar papers that are due at the end of a term. Without the atmosphere of discipline and pressure that come with regular courses, many students just find it difficult to focus their attention on writing a book-length manuscript of original research–the final date is too far removed in the future to pile on the kind of immediate pressure of a deadline that you’re accustomed to as a grad student, and–let’s face it–grad students can procrastinate just as badly as undergrads (actually, this could be said about a large number of academics in general. But I digress).

On top of that, there’s the funding issue, already mentioned by some posters above. The best teaching gig you can hope for (and in art history, academia is pretty much the only arena your PhD is geared towards) is adjunct professor. It used to be possible to land a tenure-track assistant professor position as an ABD, with the expectation that you’d finish up the dissertation in your first couple of years as professor, but the reality today is that there are already so many art historians on the market with their PhD already in hand, most schools won’t bother with hiring ABDs.

The pay for adjunct positions is miserable, around $1000-$2000 per course taught per semester. 16 weeks on $2000 (and that’s really above average where I live) just isn’t possible to live on. So, you’d have to teach several courses just to make enough to get by on. The alternative is to find a regular 9-5 job, which would pay more than adjuncting, and since you’re not taking classes any longer, there’s no schedule conflict. But in either of these scenarios, you find most of your time is consumed by course preparation/grading or 8 hours of mindless drudgery, and by the end of the day, you’re pooped and in no frame of mind to write a dissertation chapter. Plus, there’s rarely a sense of urgency in finishing it quickly and getting it published right away, since the material is most likely so incredibly specialized that it’s unlikely that you have too much competition from other scholars.

Add into that mix a family or a relationship, and it’s easy to see how a PhD candidate can get completely sidetracked by non-academic concerns (the “real world” as it’s commonly known), or just generally unmotivated, and ultimately disengaged from the dissertation.

I feel lucky, because although I went through some of these challenges myself (including a stressful and ultimately doomed relationship), I occasionally got some extra funding through scholarships that helped me travel abroad to consult some of the archives and paintings that I was researching. Without those opportunities, I doubt I could have afforded those trips, and without those trips, the writing of the dissertation would have been further delayed. From the beginning of my candidacy until the defense of the finished dissertation, the process took about five years.

And then, I got even luckier and got hired for a tenure-track job less than one year after finishing the doctorate. But the job market for art historians is awful–far more candidates with the qualifications than there are available positions–and this surely is an additional factor that can discourage and de-motivate a PhD candidate while writing the dissertation.

One might try to spin that into a positive and say that all of this is a good thing, because the competitive nature of the field will ensure that only those with the right drive and commitment can survive, and the fewer PhDs on an already glutted job market, the better for everyone. On the other hand, there are a number of brilliant ABDs and PhDs who just get frustrated with the process and find work in another field, and the discipline certainly loses something in their absence.

19

Am I weird in saying that I think the assumption should be proven before it’s debated? Is there any data that shows that it takes longer to get a graduate degree in Humanities than in Sciences? If not, then the question is moot.

20

A relevant article: The Big Lie about the ‘life of the mind’.