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Everyone knows that English departments are in trouble, but you can't appreciate just how much trouble until you read the new report from the Modern Language Association. The report is about Ph. D. programs, which have been in decline since 2008. These programs have gotten both more difficult and less rewarding: today, it can take almost a decade to get a doctorate, and, at the end of your program, you're unlikely to find a tenure-track job.
The core of the problem is, of course, the job market The M.L.A.report estimates that only sixty percent of newly-minted Ph.Ds will find tenure-track jobs after graduation. If anything, that's wildly optimistic: the M.L.A. got to that figure by comparing the number of tenure-track jobs on its job list (around six hundred) with the number of new graduates(about a thousand). But that leaves out the thousands of unemployed graduates from past years who are still job-hunting--not to mention the older professors who didn't receive tenure and who now find themselves competing with their former students. In all likelihood, the number of jobs per candidate is much smaller than the report suggests. That's why the mood is so dire-why even professors are starting to ask, in the committee's words, Why maintain doctoral study in the modern languages and literatures or the rest of the humanities -at all?
Those trends, in turn, are part of an even larger story having to do with the expansion and transformation of American education after the Second World War. Essentially, colleges grew less elite and more vocational. Before the war, relatively few people went to college. Then, in the nineteen-fifties, the G.I. Bill and, later the Baby Boom pushed colleges to grow rapidly. When the boom ended, colleges found themselves overextended and competing for students. By the mid-seventies, schools were creating new programs designed to attract a broader range of students for instance, women and minorities.
Those reforms worked: as Nate Silver reported in the Times last summer, about twice as many people attend college per capita now as did forty years ago. But all that expansion changed colleges. In the past, they had catered to elite students who were happy to major in the traditional liberal arts. Now, to attract middle--class students, colleges had to offer more career--focus Pause Insert majors, in fields like business, communications, and health care. As a result, humanities departments have found themselves drifting away from the center of the university. Today, they are often regarded as a kind of institution luxury, paid for by dynamic cheap, and growing programs in, say, adult-education. These large demographic facts are contributing to today's job- market crisis: they ‘re why, while education as a whole is growing, the humanities aren’ t.
Given all this, what can an English department do? The M L. A. report contains a number of suggestions. Pride of place is given to the idea that grad school should be shorter: Departments should design programs that can be completed in five years. "That will probably require changing the dissertation from a draft of an academic book into something shorter and simpler. At the same time, graduate students are encouraged to broaden themselves: to" engage more deeply with technology", to pursue unusual and imaginative dissertation projects; to work in more than one discipline; to acquire teaching skills aimed at online and community-college students; and to take workshops on subjects, such as project management and grant writing, which might be of value outside of academia. Graduate programs, the committee suggests, should accept the fact that many of their students will have non-tenured, or even non-academic, careers. They should keep track of what happens to their graduates, so that students who decide to leave academia have a non-academic alumni network to draw upon.
