People who share my academic focus (broadly, liberal arts and social sciences) know that a general rule floated about by academic advisors and career services employees to hand-wringing freshmen and despairing seniors is, “Well, Major X doesn’t specifically qualify you to do anything, but it does not disqualify you from doing most things. It is a very versatile degree.”
Ah, versatility. There’s nothing wrong with versatility. I like knowing that my “versatile” degrees (which have provided me with the following skills: writing.. and that’s all) certainly don’t preclude me from most industries. Most freshmen probably tout their future versatility to their skeptical parents, who rightly wonder how one might market a degree in Far Eastern Folklore to a potential employer.
If I and my fellow pie-in-the-sky liberal arts scholars are so marvelously versatile and primed for employment in any number of well-oiled industry machines, the number of us who feel compelled, usually in sophomore or junior year, to choose between a life in academia or a life in the law is curious. I challenge you to find an English major who is not planning to continue to graduate school or a professional program.
Obviously, my choice was to parlay my degrees into one useful, socially meaningful professional certification. I am anxious about the state of the legal market and its implications for my employability in four years, but I have a strong conviction that I want to be a lawyer. In other words, I am not going to law school because I’m not sure what the hell else to do with my degrees.
That seems to be the cardinal rule for making the decision whether or not to live in casebooks for three years: Don’t go just because you don’t know what else to do. Assuming that our Far Eastern Folklore and English majors do decide to heed this rule, and that they then decide to head into the rarified air of doctoral training programs, let’s consider their career prospects. (Remember that we are specifically addressing the concerns of PhD students in the liberal arts and social sciences.)
I once saw a funny ecard that said, “If you go to law school, you will probably have to become a lawyer.” (Har, har, har). This is very, painfully (if you don’t want to actually be a lawyer) true. The same could be said about PhD programs: “If you get a PhD in English, you will probably have to become a professor.” Because once you get that PhD, you’re an expert. An expert in a mind-numbingly narrow field. An expert who is expected to conduct research in that narrow field, publish works, and impart your expertise to sprightly eighteen-year-old minds. An expert who is vastly overqualified to do a lot of other jobs, like teaching The Great Gatsby in a public high school.
For all the crying we future attorneys do over the state of the legal market, we have nothing on our peers who are attempting to break into the academic job market, those students we brushed shoulders with in Literary Critical Practices until our paths diverged, some of us pursuing the path toward social and monetary capital and the rest of us surging forth to the stacks and the beginnings of a six hundred page dissertation. The sacred cow of the academic world is the tenured teaching position. For reasons I won’t go into but that you can check out here, tenure in academia is critical. It also creates a world in which academics stick around because they’re so damn hard to get rid of and turnover is so small as to be negligible. It’s like the Supreme Court: They ain’t goin’ anywhere until they kick it, and your chances of filling one of those seats when it does become vacant is basically nil, statistically speaking.
So if tenured positions aren’t opening, and new ones aren’t being created due to budget cuts like this one happening at schools across the country, a pretty picture is not being painted for future academics. The possibility of funding for doctoral candidates makes such a program slightly less scary than the six figures of debt many law school students saddle themselves with, but, again, that kind of funding is disappearing for PhD programs. I think I can confidently say that I would prefer spending three years and $150,000 pursuing a career path that may not be as plush as it was before September 2008 to spending eight years conducting research that no one will ever read only to find myself overqualified for everything but positions in academia that no longer exist.
In other words, “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and instead of taking the one less traveled by and spending the rest of my life in my parents’ basement alternately mourning and cursing the demise of the academic job market, I took the road well traveled by, which included a calculated risk, six figures of debt, and the hope of being employed before I am thirty.”
