Forty Years In The Desert And No Way Out

In 1964, the late Allan Murray Cartter, then the Chancellor of New York University, predicted that the market would be glutted with PhDs by 1969.  His prediction was uncanny:  students who had just completed their PhDs were having difficulty finding full-time faculty positions in higher education that year.

However, he initially predicted that the PhD glut would happen in the sciences.  Later--before 1969--he revised his prediction to include the humanities and social sciences. 

Cartter wasn't a gloom-and-doom prophet; he was a trained economist.  He could see the trends and warn of their consequences; however, it would take another researcher to explain exactly how those trends worked. 

In 1970, the University of California-Berkeley accepted a dissertation with this title:  The Ph.D. Production Process:  A Study of Departmental Behavior.   Its author, David Breneman, later became the Dean of the Curry School of Education in the University of Virginia.  In his dissertation, Brennan shows how academic departments act in accordance with Parkinson's Law, which posits growth as an institutional imperative.  In accordance with this principle, administrators advance their careers by increasing the number of their subordinates.

The academic world has its own unique version of this process, which Breneman described.  Most universities allocate resources--including full-time faculty positions-- among departments by something called Full-Time Enrollment.  However, for the purposes of calculating FTE, not all students are created equal.  Depending on the institution, a graduate student counts twice as much as an undergraduate.  So, the system rewards administrators for achieving the highest possible FTE with the lowest numbers of actual students.

Now you know why schools and departments try so hard to persuade undergraduates to pursue Master's degrees and Master's students to earn their PhDs.  This situation also means much smaller classes in graduate programs than in undergraduate programs.  And each of those graduate students in those smaller classes is easier to teach than a typical undergraduate, let alone a freshman in an introductory or remedial class who has no business being in college.

Another side-effect of this system that professors of graduate programs like is that they can get their better students to do unpaid or grant-paid research for them, which they then incorporate into their own work or publish outright under their own names.  All of this, of course, further advances the careers of those professors and the administrators of their institutions.

Add to this unholy mess the naive optimism of those young students who believe that their hard work will make them the ones to beat the odds and become full professors in some prestigious college, and you have a recipe for exploitation. 

Everything I've mentioned, by the way, contributes to another phenomenon of academia:  Professors hold on to their positions long past retirement age, even if they can easily afford to retire.  Hey, if I had a deal like theirs, I don't think I'd give it up, either!  Unfortunately, William G. Bowen and Julie Ann Sosa didn't think of that when they prepared their 1989 report which predicted "severe" faculty shortages as professors hired during the 1960's began to retire.

Meantime, a market that has been depressed for more than four decades will not improve any time in the foreseeable future.  In fact, even if graduate programs close and fewer students enroll in those that remain, the situation will continue to deteriorate because when professors retire, their positions are often eliminated and their courses (if they're continued) are taught by adjuncts or non-tenure-track full-timers who make much less, and have fewer benefits, than the older professors. 

The next time someone you know expresses interest in doing a PhD in Philosophy, English, History or some related field, tell him or her about Cartter and Breneman.  Or, at least, show that person this post before he or she sits down with some "advisor" who will him or her some version of "the good ones always get jobs."