[1994] No Openings at This Time: Job Market Collapse and Graduate Education

Abstract

Graduate study is more than simply job training; its excitement and challenges are intellectual rewards in themselves. Yet it was my understanding when I entered an English graduate program that, for all its benefits, graduate school was not an end in itself but, rather, an apprenticeship with the promise of eventual full-time academic employment. The PhD was to lay the ground for intellectual explorations that would continue and develop in a community of scholars and teachers who would be my peers. In my experience, the promise of a job at the end of graduate school is on the order of a contractual agreement for most graduate students. Thus, with the current budget crises in universities in general, but especially in humanities fields, this contract seems to have been broken, and many current graduate students may wish that they had followed the example of the unnamed but distinguished American writer. Whether or not such a course would yield a superior education, in this depressed job market it is becoming less and less clear that graduate school is a more likely prelude to academic employment than a subscription to TLS would be. The charts, graphs, and statistics that tell of the historic decline in the job market are well known by now, as is their grim tale of falling demand for PhDs combined with rising production of PhDs by graduate programs. Three graphs recently published in the ADE Bulletin sum up the situation best. First, a graph that gives the number of positions advertised in the MLAs fob Lnfor mation List each year since 1975-76 tells a story of dra matic boom followed by even more dramatic bust ("Facts and Figures" 63). It shows a large increase in the number of jobs advertised beginning in 1983-84, with a peak of over 2,000 positions in both the English and the foreign language lists in 1989-90, and then a rapid decrease, with the number of positions falling to under 1,250 in each list for 1992-93. This decline, the worst charted on the graph, would be bad enough even if the number of PhDs granted in the period had roughly paralleled the decline in jobs or had at least remained relatively stable. As a second graph shows, however, the number of PhDs granted in humanities was on an upswing during the period when the number of jobs available began to decline ("Facts and Figures" 62). After a decline in the period from 1976 to 1985, the number of PhDs granted rose from a low of about 3,400 in 1985 to about 4,100 in 1991. A third graph breaks down these humanities figures for English alone: there, the number of PhDs granted rose from a recent low of about 650 in 1987 to about 850 in 1991, an average annual increase of about 50 PhDs granted ("Facts and Figures" 62). Statistics are not yet available for years after 1991, but if this average annual increase continued, there would have been 950 PhDs granted in 1993, the same year that there were about 1,150 English positions advertised in the Job Informa tion List. While the ratio of jobs advertised to PhDs granted is still better than one-to-one, new PhDs do not account for all job seekers in a particular year. When job seekers whose PhDs were granted in previous years are added in, the ratio of jobs to applicants becomes considerably worse. When we take everything into account, then, the sta tistics show a rising supply of new PhDs and a declining demand for their services. Needless to say, the combina tion of too many PhDs and too few jobs does not seem likely to foster careful and innovative scholarship or effective and vigorous undergraduate teaching. Yet I do not think it is an overstatement to say that, against all odds, graduate students have successfully risen to meet