Perhaps slightly, and I’ve linked to it in post #6.
Is it more difficult in the humanities to find a dissertation topic that hasn’t been done before? I would think that in a scientific field, the whole is more or less founded on a cohesive body of knowledge. There might be interesting new avenues of research, and some debate and disagreement among recent work, but everyone still accepts the first principles of mathematics and physics, so there’s a limit as to how much variation there can be on the cutting edges. Based on this I would expect that it’s easier for the student to find a topic with reasonable assurance that it hasn’t been done before.
A humanities Ph.D. student, on the other hand–how do they find topics on which to generate new work? If I wanted to do a dissertation on some aspect of Elizabethan drama, how do I make absolutely sure that it hasn’t been done already, by someone 150 years ago? By contrast, a scientist runs virtually no risk of duplicating the work of Faraday or Boyle.
I’m just speculating here, of course.
I think Götterfunken and njtt have basically nailed it, between them. There are also some pragmatic reasons to hang back on defending and filing the dissertation, especially in the current abysmal job market. It will usually take students more than one pass at the market to score a job, but the odds are best immediately after the degree is conferred. This can lead to finagling and gamesmanship with the timing.
My own PhD (English) technically took nine years (or seven, if you’re counting time from the master’s rather than than the bachelor’s degree). Practically, though, I was all but finished a year before the official filing date, and ready to defend at the drop of a hat if a job offer had been forthcoming. None of the schools where I had interviews bit that year, and I still had a year before my grad program’s funding clock ran out, so I deferred the defense until the following September – and then didn’t file until spring semester, since I would have been out on the street without funding if I had graduated in December. This gave me two years, rather than one, in which I could present myself as a defended-but-still-brand-new PhD (and believe me, I needed both of them). It also let me treat my last year of grad school as a de facto postdoc with light teaching duties – enough time to write an article that wasn’t straight from the diss and get it accepted before the end of the next hiring season.
Heh. My field is Elizabethan drama, and I’d say coming up with a topic is the easy part. There are a lot of really, really obscure plays and playwrights out there, and there are plenty of ways of thinking about those plays that wouldn’t have occurred to someone 150 years ago. (Of course, the tricky part is convincing other people that your research matters to someone other than yourself, and prepares you to teach the standard set of undergraduate courses in your field. Hence, the proliferation of dissertations that deal primarily with texts nobody has ever heard of, but have the one obligatory Shakespeare tie-in chapter.)
According to their findings, in 2003 the median registered time to degree (that is, the amount of time spent enrolled in school for graduate study) for PhDs in the humanities was 9.0 years, and in the physical sciences 6.8. That’s a non-trivial difference, but it’s not approaching a factor of 2, as the OP’s speculation suggested.
I think a lot of people get confused over what “original research” actually is. At least in history, very few people are going to have a dissertation topic that hasn’t been covered before. In the process of researching my thesis I came across a dissertation written about Carrie Nation. Certainly others have written about Carrie Nation but that didn’t stop this woman from making it her dissertation topic. What she did was examine the secondary sources, found them lacking, and proceeding to build her own narrative based on the primary sources she had access to.
I’m in the process of writing my thesis. The first chapter is going to be a historiography. In it I will point out what past historians have had to say about the temperance movement. I will then point out that some of the conclusions reached by past historians were either wrong or incomplete and I will explain how my paper will correct or fill in any scholarly gaps.
Interesting points here. If you do work on an obscure dramatist, do you run into the “one-hit-wonder” problem? In other words, you quickly learn that the writer was obscure for a good reason, and that the generally mediocre quality of the work makes it a pain for you to deal with?
To say that Thomas Benton has an axe to grind would be a bit of an understatement. This is not exactly the first piece he has written for the Chronicle. He definitely has a bit of a point of view.
The most comprehensive recent research on this was conducted by the Mellon Foundation. Its findings were wide-ranging and provocative. The biggest (and well-acknowledged defect) in the study was the control group. The Mellon Foundation offered substantial sums of money to departments and graduate programs to test some of its suggested reforms. The problem was, these reforms caught on very swiftly even by universities not asked to participate, thus tainting the control group.
The book answers quite convincingly why graduate programs take so long and what should be done organizationally to counteract this.
I hate to admit it, having spent years getting my own Ph.D., but I agree with a lot he has to say. Especially this part:
I was exactly one of those naive students who got sucked into the Ph.D. black hole for 9 years and came out with no good prospects in sight. This does not, of course, absolve me of responsibility – but it would have been extremely helpful to have a professor inject a little realism in there somewhere.
Several things stand out that would have improved my success:
[ul]
[li]A more structured plan for completing the degree. This includes a clear timeline and series of steps for completing course work, qualifying exams, and (most importantly) the dissertation. As it happens, my department started instituting clearer guidelines and checkpoints for students starting in the years following me. This has sped up graduation rates.[/li][li]A checklist of goals to create a compelling CV upon graduation. This would include plans and procedures to write and submit journal articles and give conference talks. One of the theory professors did just that, and his students have had a much better success rate following graduation. I understand that it’s not good to distract too much from doing basic research – and sometimes it really does take a good chunk of time myopically picking away at one small corner of the field with no immediate payoff to discover something meaningful. I get that. But it would help to establish a balanced approach.[/li][li]Guidance for selecting course work and research that places a candidate in a good position for job hunting. For example, I did both my Master’s thesis and Ph.D. dissertation on works by 20th century American composers (Copland and Barber). That positions me more or less as an American music specialist. What I didn’t know – but could have used my professors’ guidance to discover – was that most departments hiring an Americanist also want someone who can teach American popular music. I could have filled my electives with that stuff, maybe written a paper or two, and emerged as a viable candidate, if only I had understood the academic landscape. This is something that professors need to help students keep in mind and begin to investigate early in the program.[/li][li]Networking advice and skills. You can get ahead in the business world by hanging out with the right people and doing informational interviews. Scholarly conferences are a great place to do that too. But I didn’t get any guidance or mentoring in that area from my professors. Again, I was naive and didn’t know how the system worked. But would have only taken a brief explanation and a couple of contacts to set me on my way. Lord knows, academics love to talk about their work. I could have learned SO much if someone had told me that chatting with someone over drinks could have such a big potential payoff.[/li][li]Related to the last one… instill a sense of collegiality between upper-level graduate students and professors. I know this sounds stupid, but I remained stuck in student mode far too long. I remained in awe of experts in the field. This held me back because I wasn’t able to engage in that all-important scholarly conversation with people in my field. Turns out, people who have studied this stuff fora long time actually value my insights! Not everyone, obviously. Some professors would rather pee around their territory than let someone new in. But many more are just excited to share an interest with someone.[/li][/ul]
Anyway, that’s what I would change if I ever became a department head (in some fictional universe where I actually get an academic postion).
This is why you take a semester to do a literature review. In some fields you really have to dig around and wade through piles of resources to find a new niche.
I think Benton’s being somewhat unclear here. Yes, it’s true that for humanities PhD’s it’s extremely unlikely (maybe 20% chance nowadays?) that you’ll get a tenure-track job immediately upon finishing your degree.
But that doesn’t mean that your chances of ever getting a tenure-track job are vanishingly small. According to this 2009 summary of a Mellon Foundation study on graduate education in the humanities,
I agree that advisors in general should be alert to academic job market issues and should be honest with students about their prospects. (I remember my advisor cheerfully and bluntly telling me, when I entered grad school about 20 years ago , “There are no jobs in this field”. I said “okay” and stayed, and graduated six years later, and as it happens I’ve had jobs—if not exactly “in” my field, at least ones that included doing research in my field—ever since. Go figure.)
However, the other extreme typified by Benton’s attitude of “Never get a humanities doctorate unless you don’t need to earn a living, you have no realistic chance of getting a decent academic job” simply doesn’t seem to be backed up by the numbers.
I had a professor who went to Stanford. He said that there was a PhD student there who still hadn’t been awarded his degree after his 12th year in the program, so he finally broke and murdered the head of the program with an axe. This caused Stanford to make a rule that PhD students were finished after 10 years, whether they got their degree or not.
That prof had a funny sense of humor and you couldn’t always tell if he was joking or not, so take the facts of the story with a grain of salt, but I think the spirit of it is true.
Even when I was in a PhD program 30 years ago the journal had articles about the state of the job market. That was long pre-Google. It seems to me that any grad student incapable of researching this is going to have a hell of a time doing a dissertation. Not wanting to know is something else again.
It was actually a ball-peen hammer. Note that all the student murderers described in the linked article were graduate students in science or engineering, not the humanities.
Also note that the student who killed a professor with a hammer was a math grad student and he had spent 19 years at Stanford. He was told by his advisor that he had done good enough work that he could get his Ph.D. if he wrote it up, so he was not being denied a Ph.D. The professor who was killed had (or so claimed the Ph.D. student) publicly insulted the student. It’s not clear if the student was continuously a student over those 19 years. He may have alternated between being a student and working at other jobs:
One modest proposal: Means-test student loans at the graduate level. You can make an argument that it’s in society’s best interest to ensure that as many people as possible get undergraduate degrees. It’s much harder to show that it’s in society’s interest to fund anyone who wants to take a Ph.D in the critique of modern left-handed glassblowing or the study of renaissance dress styles.
The problem in higher education right now is a common one with bubbles and broken markets - the incentives are all screwed up. The student loan system is the equivalent of a stereo’s store’s “Nothing down, don’t pay a cent for two years!” deals, which feeds on people’s desire to defer pain and get instant gratification. The result is a glut of students who really don’t belong in college, or who doesn’t have the financial ability to spend a decade in ‘the life of the mind’ with no resources to fall back on.
We have too few engineers and too few scientists and too few doctors, but we have a glut of people with worthless degrees in the humanities. The faculties are softer and easier, and it’s easier to get through with the minimum amount of work or by just studying the narrow things you’re interested in. These people are crowding out science and engineering, and their ‘breadth’ requirements are watering down courses that everyone takes.
So… once you get your undergrad degree, no more student loans unless you meet some criteria for the probability of being able to find work at a salary high enough to realistically allow you to pay back the loan without defaulting or impoverishing yourself. That would skew loans more towards science, medicine, engineering, and other fields that are in demand and highly valued, and make it harder to waste a decade of your life studying your navel because it’s the easy way out - until the bills come due.
I also think a lot of higher learning institutions are pretty messed up in terms of the value they offer for the money they charge. Paying forty grand a year so you can get 15 hours of lectures a week, taught by TA’s and graduate students in auditoriums of hundreds of people, is just a really bad deal.
I went to a junior college to take the first two years of an engineering degree, because I couldn’t afford to go straight to a major university. Then I went to a large university after that. In the end, looking back, I got a better education at the college. We had classes of 20-30 people, the teachers were engineers who came out of industry and really knew what they were talking about, having recently ‘walked the walk’. Their offices were always open for one-on-one discussions and help. They were generally hired for their teaching ability and their overall demeanor - not their ability to attract grant money or bring prestige to the institution.
In University, I sat in huge lecture halls and listened to some prof drone on who clearly wanted to be anywhere but where he was. The profs were mostly unavailable to mere undergrads - any help we needed was provided by teaching assistants.
The college cost about 1/4 of what the university cost. There’s something very wrong with that, considering the level of service was much higher.
So maybe we need to rethink the entire higher-education system. We need new methods of accreditation, new ways to get qualifications that allow alternate paths to the same end. We need to break the stranglehold the current system has on higher education, because the current system is pretty bad.
Speaking as someone who was a double major in history and biology, I think I’m going to take offence :).
Degrees needn’t be solely vocational training ( actually I rather despise that philosophy ) and given as folks are paying for them with their own cash ( borrowed or not, they’re still on the hook for it ), I think the proper libertarian stance would be to let people do whatever the hell they want. Besides denying more humanities grad students isn’t going to suddenly generate massively more interest in engineering. You need outreach for that and more Scottys from Star Trek.
Indeed I personally feel one of the weakest aspects in the intellectual development of many emerging nations is the overemphasis on engineering. To many bridge builders and software developers, not enough zoologists or historians.
Now if you decide to socialize higher education in the U.S. to the extent where all degree studies are paid fully by the state, a little more forced selectivity might be acceptable.
:dubious: Well my goodness, if it ain’t our resident self-proclaimed libertarian Sam Stone advocating for more government social engineering because he doesn’t like the choices that individual students are freely making. Whodathunkit?
How you reconcile this criticism with the claim in your opening paragraph that “you can make an argument that it’s in society’s best interest to ensure that as many people as possible get undergraduate degrees” is not entirely clear to me. In any case, while things may be different in Canada, here in the US the glut of college students who don’t really belong in college isn’t being fueled by students’ desire to run themselves thousands of dollars in debt for a few years of carefree college life.
Rather, students expect to go on to college because a B.A. is seen as a minimum entry-level requirement for employment by many employers (especially for higher-paying positions). If businesses would stop demanding college diplomas as a hiring criterion for jobs that don’t really require a college education, we’d have fewer college students who don’t really want to be in college.
Another factor driving college enrollments here in the US is healthcare benefits: many parents’ employer-based healthcare plans will cover adult children if they’re enrolled as full-time students but not if they’re on their own. Of course, in Canada you don’t have to deal with this issue because you have UHC.
Got a cite for any of this? In the US, at least, enrollments in computing and engineering undergraduate degree programs have been rising recently, and new departments and programs in science and engineering fields have been added at many universities. Doesn’t look to me as though humanities education is “crowding out science and engineering”: where’s your evidence?
Are you just not aware that doctoral students in the US generally don’t depend on student loans for their doctoral education? Only our professional schools (law school, medical school, business school) routinely require students to go further into hock to get their advanced degree. Doctoral programs (in the humanities, sciences and engineering alike) mostly support Ph.D. students by providing them with tuition waivers and stipends, funded by the institution itself and/or by scholarships.
So your little social-engineering initiative to discourage graduate studies in the humanities by increasing governmental restrictions on student loans would be unlikely to have any significant effect around here.
Presumably students are aware that they have alternatives: for example, studying science and engineering at high-quality liberal arts colleges rather than large universities with graduate student TAs and massive lecture courses. If the student consumers choose the large universities anyway, who are you to say that they’re not getting value for money?
Sorry to hear you have such crap education in Canada, and I certainly wouldn’t say that our counterpart in the US is problem-free either. However, the level of familiarity with the details of US higher education that you’ve exhibited in this post doesn’t exactly inspire me with confidence in your assessment. You can’t usefully rethink what you don’t know much about in the first place.
Or maybe you’re only suggesting that you Canadians need to rethink the entire higher-education system that you’ve got there in Canada. In which case, be my guest; I’ll be interested to see what you come up with.
Do your student loans not work like they do in Canada? Supported and guaranteed by the state, at low to no interest, given out regardless of ability to repay, with high default rates, and with no requirement to pay a nickel back for years?
If not, and if you have to go to a bank and get a student loan based on your ability and track record of repayment like you would with any other loan, then I’ll retract my statement.
If not, then I’m afraid the hand of the state is already all over this bit of social engineering.
See my reply to Tamerlane. Unless an 18 year old kid can get a couple hundred thousand dollars in loans from a bank with no credit history, no job, and no assets, and not have to start repaying it for a decade or so, then I think the state is already heavily involved.
And didn’t I just read that Obama plans to nationalize the student loan program and run it as a pure government program?
In what way should a Libertarian support this?
Are you sure you haven’t put the egg in front of the chicken? A high school diploma used to be acceptable for many of the jobs we’re talking about. But so many kids are sent to college now that it has become the baseline.
This is the first time I’ve ever heard that mentioned as a significant factor.
Crowding can have many symptoms - the main one being skyrocketing tuition costs. This is the market in action - you have a relatively fixed number of universities, but we keep pushing the supply higher by putting more pressure on kids to go to college and giving them more financial tools to allow them to do it. Drive up the demand while keeping supply fixed, and the result is price increases.
Is it sufficient to live on? Or do students supplement it with student loans? If the overwhelming majority are getting by on nothing more than the salary they earn from the school, then I’ll retract that part of my criticism.
Great. Well, if the government isn’t subsidizing them, then I’ve got no problem with them staying as long as they want and studying what they want. It’s ceased to be any of my business.
True enough. And they do seem to be voting with their feet and their dollars - the University of Phoenix is now the largest college in the United States. A completely private, for-profit institution, it has about a quarter of a million full-time students. I expect we’ll see a lot more of this type of alternative school.