PhDs need real jobs too

Leonard Cassuto
People who study for doctorates in the arts and sciences are typically driven by love — for a particular historical period, author or field of inquiry. But graduate school isn't just a place to dive into 18th century novels, Medieval art or neurobiology. It's also, necessarily, a place to prepare for a career.

Most graduate programs encourage their students to set their sights on jobs teaching or conducting research at a college or university. They also endorse the notion, whether intentionally or not, that taking a position outside of the professoriate is some kind of failure.

That's insanity. It takes nine years on average for students to obtain a doctorate in the humanities, and the sciences are almost as bad. At the end of that long process, students encounter a job market for professors that is a mostly dry well. Only about half of doctoral candidates in the arts and sciences will eventually obtain jobs as college and university instructors. An increasing number of those openings are short-term gigs, many less than a year long, with no promise of future employment.

Even the lucky graduate students who secure a tenure-track position are likely to find a mismatch between their training and their future job requirements. As students, they learn how to become research specialists. But most professors spend most of their time teaching. Only a sliver of the doctorate population gets top-tier, research-first jobs.

We would hardly expect a modern journalism school to have a single-minded focus on print newspapers. Yes, there are still jobs to be had at newspapers, but only a small fraction of the number that there once were. A single-minded focus on professorships — on research-dominated professorships in particular — is just as irrational.

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http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-1130-cassuto-academic-job-market-20151130-story.html