

Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go - banned_man
http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2009/01/2009013001c.htm

======
GavinB
Don't start a start-up or apply for seed funding. There are lots of great
hackers out there, and only so many spots for top websites. The odds of
putting together both a solid product, good marketing, and the right timing
are incredibly slim. I talk to people all the time who are working on start-
ups with no benefits, no salary, and only a small chance of hitting it big and
becoming profitable.

Even if you do get accepted to one of the top seed start-up firms, you're
still not guaranteed to be successful. You have to realize that you're really
just an exploitable resource for venture capitalists.

On a more serious note, I'd say that anyone who's thinking of going to grad
school should read this. Then, if they're still certain they want to go, they
should go for it. Just because something's hard or might not work doesn't mean
you shouldn't try.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Startup:

WIN: fuck you money.

FAIL: On track in your career as a software engineer, but with a couple of
years of lost earnings.

Humanities academic:

WIN: tenure track position. Salary caps out at entry level software engineer,
but great lifestyle.

FAIL: adjunct professor or barista. You are 30-40 years old, and less
employable than you were at age 22. (Some humanities PhD's do well for
themselves, but getting the PhD was just a side errand. )

Note: STEM academic is vastly better than humanities, but be prepared to get
out early. If you aren't at the top at any stage of the game, quit.

~~~
alecco
In Technology and Math you are as good as dead when you go past 40. Well,
almost.

Edit: Losing 2-4 years out of 15 career years is quite meaningful.

~~~
banned_man
In academia, or overall?

I agree that this is true within academia. The maximum accepted age for a
first-year graduate student is about 27; first postdoc, 32; tenure-track, 36.
If you don't have tenure at 40, you're flushed.

This does not seem to be true outside of academia. If you're good, your career
does not take a dive in your 40s. However, the mediocre or uninterested
programmers need to move into management before this, because management is
more ageist than technology.

~~~
alecco
> This does not seem to be true outside of academia

It is just like that IMHE.

> mediocre or uninterested programmers need to move into management before
> this

There are only so many spots for managers and there's already a buch of people
competing for those. It's not a solution for most people.

------
pchivers
The author has written a follow-up article here:

 _Just Don't Go, Part 2_

<http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2009/03/2009031301c.htm>

~~~
hack_edu
Author's Suggested readings:

 _How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation_ , by
Marc Bousquet (New York University Press, 2008);

 _Generation Debt: Why Now Is a Terrible Time to Be Young,_ by Anya Kamenetz
(Riverhead Books, 2006);

 _Academic Keywords: A Devil's Dictionary for Higher Education_ , by Cary
Nelson and Stephen Watt (Routledge, 1999);

 _Ghosts in the Classroom: Stories of College Adjunct Faculty — and the Price
We All Pay_ , edited by Michael Dubson (Camel's Back, 2001);

 _The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the
Humanities_ , by Frank Donoghue (Fordham University Press, 2008).

------
nihilocrat
I can't vouch for any other generations, but it's hard to tell people my age
(born 1985) that they /can't/ accomplish anything even if they try their
hardest. Life is a lot more fatalistic and free will a lot weaker than we've
been taught.

It's very sobering and depressing to learn that scarcity is a very real thing.
There are only so many spots for the jobs that people want, and most of the
time people get there through personal relationships, luck, or other things
most people just can't realistically be expected to have.

~~~
jacoblyles
I call the mindset of my peer group the "Disney culture". It is characterized
by magical thinking, such as "if you follow your heart, everything will turn
out for the best!"

To some extent, this is valuable. It encourages people to take risks and be
creative. The wonderful explosion of technology and prosperity in the 1990s
was an expression of magical thinking.

But I think we place too little value on financial stability, independence,
and other more boring traditional values. This could be because we've never
really had to face hard times until now. I wonder if we will pick up these
traits during the recession.

~~~
Ardit20
I doubt it, necessity is the mother of invention and that magical thinking you
mentioned

otherwise we might riot like the Greek teenagers :P

------
zcrar70
Pretty depressing reading, but good on him for trying to spread the word.

I'm sorry that the chances of getting a professorship in humanities is small,
but I'm even sorrier that there doesn't seem to be many/any viable careers for
a humanities student aside professorship.

~~~
anamax
> I'm even sorrier that there doesn't seem to be many/any viable careers for a
> humanities student aside professorship.

What do you think that they can do for "the rest of us" by virtue of said
training that we should want to pay for?

~~~
etal
That's problem #1 in the current format of humanities graduate education. The
assistantships train students to teach classes and grade papers, and the
research and dissertation process teach students how to get an academic paper
published. It's optimized for generating new professors (tenure-track or
otherwise), and there's not much demand to tailor it in other directions since
the dream career of most humanities grad students is being a tenured
professor. This is less of a problem in subject areas where entering students
already have a different career in mind, e.g. engineering.

I won't speculate what those alternative careers could be, but in other
improbable fields that attempt to reassert their relevance, applied career
paths have a tendency to pop out and eventually be reincorporated into
academia as a new, related discipline. For example, psychology has already
forked and merged a few times.

~~~
gaius
_the dream career of most humanities grad students is being a tenured
professor_

Well that kinda sorta is the problem. The dream career of a science grad
student is to make some great discovery and win a Nobel prize - academia is a
means, not an end in itself. Academia for the sake of academia is fine in
principle - but who's going to pay for it?

------
tokenadult
Missed by the HN duplicate detector:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=484013>

------
jacoblyles
On the other hand, I have a hard time thinking of a better grad degree than a
CS master's program. Your job prospects are better than an MBA's or a JD's,
you will spend a lot less time in school than an MD, and you will have a much
broader employment market than your friends in other engineering and science
disciplines.

I was quite impressed by the number of firms at UCSD's job fair interested in
recruiting CS students.

~~~
sketerpot
A master's degree in computer engineering could give CS a run for its money.
There's enough overlap with CS that a Computer E grad student can learn as
much CS as they like, while still having job prospects in a bunch of nice
hardware-related jobs. And really, computer hardware is just plain _fun_.

~~~
jacoblyles
My software can break your hardware.

~~~
sketerpot
My hardware will _probably_ break your software. Beat that.

This is actually one of the drawbacks of learning both hardware and software:
when something breaks, you can never say that's not your department. You can
get away from that by simply buying stuff from other people, but you can't
always trust it; I was using some off-the-shelf hardware yesterday that
literally exploded. Like in Star Trek.

~~~
jacoblyles
I guess that is what separates software people from hardware people. You say
"my homework _literally_ blew up yesterday". I think that's a little scary, a
hardware guy thinks that's pretty cool.

------
daveambrose
Does anyone not see the irony in the author's premise when applied to an
undergraduate's search for their first big job? Just replace "universities"
with "companies" in the sentence below:

"It's hard to tell young people that universities recognize that their
idealism and energy — and lack of information — are an exploitable resource."

