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What’s Wrong With the Humanities?
The supply of people with PhDs in the humanities vastly exceeds the demand for them. Why?
The explanations for trouble in the humanities I see the most are:
1. People care too much about making money, not enough about the search for truth and beauty.
2. The Humanities disciplines caused their own problems by wandering off into fashionable theories of the liberal, relativistic, or goofily postmodern persuasion.
The first explanation sometimes involves criticisms of capitalism, and sometimes of Republican governors. The second explanation often appears in places like National Review’s Phi Beta Cons blog. A third explanation of this particular problem is pretty simple, and may not make it as easy for the left or right to toss blame at each other:
3. Too many universities have produced way too many humanities PhDs because universities look more prestigious when they have more PhD programs.
My own working theory is that all of these explanations are correct. Please note: I don’t think much of the first theory as a criticism of capitalism, though it might be a nice criticism of the reduction of the good life to capitalism alone (also criticized here, for example).
I might add that, even if the third theory carries the most weight as an explanation, I am a fan of the second theory, and I think it’s an important commentary on the humanities these days.
I might also ask, given the truth of the second theory, how much you can blame people if they pursue financial stability and a strong economy instead of studying these theories?
What say the Ricochetti?
Theory 1?
Theory 2?
Theory 3?
Theory 4? (Please provide in comments.)
Published in General
“The humanities” were created solely for those unable to comprehend “The Calculus”.
I laughed. Not true, but it is funny. (Recovering math major here.)
Lucy: “When they realize that there are no jobs for people with only a bachelor’s degree in Comp. Lit., they look around to find people who started with bachelor’s degrees in Comp. Lit. and are working, and the people they see are their professors, who got Ph.D.s in Comp. Lit. So they think that’s the viable career path.”
Good point.
So it’s not precisely about the humanities, but I thought this was relevant to our discussion:
We have our own programs. The most successful is called “start working in a restaurant when you’re 16 (or younger)”
Ball Diamond Ball
Ricochetheads. Ricochetards.
Eventually every discussion on Ricochet gets to the essential question of who we are. I am a Ricoteer because I still pine for Annete Funicello and I like wearing a cap with ears.
1) Of course, the over-supply of humanities PhDs is the main driver of them being paid so low. But that’s because humanities people, usually, don’t understand supply and demand.
2) Union contracts for professors? These are exceedingly rare, and only in a handful of schools (almost all city-level schools, like CUNY etc). So they are unlikely to be a problem.
There’s virtually no real-world uses or applications for virtually any humanities field. The only thing you can do with them…is teach more humanities. But that all depends on the demand for people to learn humanities, and as they have no real world uses, the demand just isn’t there.
The “xyz studies” type of majors are a tiny proportion of total humanities PhDs. So they’re pretty inconsequential.
Money is status in America. And PhDs and doctoral graduates in general, get paid way more than “average Joe”. So who cares what “average Joe” thinks? Money speaks louder.
So this isn’t an issue for all PhDs. It’s an issue for humanities PhDs.
Overall I think the problem is pretty self evident. I don’t mean it as an “insult” to humanities people, but the reality is:
1) There is no value produced in humanities studies. You may all like and be passionate about some particular field, but there’s no value that it creates for others. Re-studying Shakespeare or Aristotle for the 600th million time, is just not going to squeeze out anything that anyone can then utilize for any valuable purpose.
Money is a measure of value. You may say that it has value outside of money. Yes of course. But then you’re not going to get paid in money for it. You’ll get rewarded through some other mean.
I.e., humanities PhDs are going to be rewarded by being able to do what they find passion in doing. But they’re not going to be rewarded in money, because there’s no money to be made from this pursuit.
2) The same argument can be made for other fields: economics and economics related fields. They’re not really “discovering” anything new, most of the time, either. They’re just rehashing the same problems everyone has known for for centuries. Yes, but there’s value in that…because these are problems which are directly related to value (i.e. money) creation.
3) The over-supply problem is a problem for many PhD fields, not just humanities. It’s just that humanities gets hit hardest because it also has the problem of not actually being focused on any issue which can be linked with value (i.e. money) creation.
Natural science PhDs aren’t doing too well either (relatively speaking, always). But then again when a single school produces 30-40 PhDs a year in each of those fields, there’s probably too many of them.
You’ll notice that the fields which actually understand labor markets better, econ and business fields…tend to limit the amount of PhDs they produce. In fact, they limit it to the extreme.
My PhD program has a max capacity of…10 people…over the 5 years of the program (i.e. 2 per year is all they will take, up to the max of 10). This is pretty much the norm. Some econ PhD programs will take more, but they will flunk out at least half of them by the first or second year.
They do this on purpose: limit the number of new PhDs you create, so that they will have higher wages.
1.) As just noted, studies PhDs are fairly recent. They are younger than my own field, and in public administration, we’re only in the first generation of PA doctorates, rather than econ or poli-sci doctorates working in the field. (I’m a second generation PA, but two thirds of my teachers are econ/poli-sci, and the remaining third included a sociologist.) Though having said that, studies programs aren’t necessarily pure humanities. Social science and even hard sciences can get in on it. Geology of East Asia, for example.
Thus, we really are focusing on the traditional humanities -history, language, philosophy, and art.
2.) Our culture has always been very practical -arts degrees were always fairly rare. In fact, they still are fairly rare. I seem to recall that the total number of arts degrees (and here I mean as in “art” not as in BA) in basically unchanged in 50 years, despite the growing size of universities. For that reason, programs in language, philosophy, and art (and music) are fairly hard to get into.
3.) At the same time universities are growing, humanities degrees are stagnant -but the growth of the university means that, for example, class sizes are increasing. Thus, we need fewer humanities professors than in the past.
4.) At the same time, the mandatory retirement age (used to be 50) has been dropped, so retirements don’t open up as many spaces.
5.) Many humanities students would be teachers for K-12. In the same time period, more has been moved over to the Ed schools, cutting into the humanities’ territory. But even if some of the classes hadn’t been taken by the Ed schools, public pressure on K-12 has reduced the number of history, philosophy, literature, language, and arts classes offered K-12.
6.) And we’re coming off a mild baby-boom, so there will be even less demand in the future.
4) This of course may not be doable for certain PhD programs. In the humanities or the sciences, professors want…bodies. They want RAs and TAs to do the work. So they’ll happily take more students (since they pay them little in terms of stipends anyway), so that they will do the research for the professor.
And this way, you also don’t have to do the hard work of selection of the best students in the first place. If you’re only getting 1-2 new PhD students a year, you better make sure they’re the best you can find. If you’re getting 40…meh. They’ll sort themselves out, and even the “bad” ones, will still do work for you.
So, that might work for them
5) As for the theory that universities produce too many humanities PhDs because it gives them “prestige” or “status”, I’m not so sure. Humanities don’t have very high “prestige” outside of humanities anyway. And schools earn prestige by producing high-quality PhDs, not masses of PhDs.
And schools earn money and donations for their “science” disciplines. Not much money to get for humanities programs.
It may be just that, they’re really really cheap to get in as students (compared to some other fields), and professors need lots of…bodies…to do the work.
I wouldn’t think Public Administration is a “humanities” program at all. It’s a poli sci/econ field.
“The supply of people with PhDs in the humanities vastly exceeds the demand for them. Why?”
Because math and science is too hard, and business? You mean I’d have to SELL stuff? Ewwww! My Anthropology prof likes me… maybe he can help me get a job. I’ll buy a Volvo! It’ll look so cool at the Free Palestine gatherings!
1) I don’t think that “humanities” have a monopoly on training people to “think”. I’d say, its lagging far behind actually, because most of what they teach has already been assimilated by the modern world to such a degree that it is “common knowledge”.
2) The original intent, several centuries back, isn’t particularly relevant. We no longer live in a world where having read 1 book provided you with an insurmountable comparative advantage over others.
We live in a world where everything requires deep specialization.
3) The “new” model is what has created the modern world. Hence, I’ll take it over the “old original” model any day.
Hehe. Yeah, has anyone else noticed that the favorite car for humanities professors is always a…Volvo?
PS: Business academics don’t “sell” stuff. They train others to “sell” stuff. But yes, people self-select into those fields.
I wasn’t meaning to imply otherwise -I was only meaning it as a comparison. PA started as a separate discipline less than a century ago, and even now most of the people in it aren’t PA doctorates. Studies are less than 50 years old. Ergo, we aren’t primarily talking about people with Studies PhDs. We may be talking about traditional humanities PhDs who focus on particular areas, but that’s been true for centuries.
Oh yes, I agree.
As a Public Administration PhD (or PhD student, whichever you are), do you think there’s a lot of competition from econ, poli sci (and to some degree, sociology) PhDs for the same jobs?
That’s an oxymoron.
I care very much about truth and beauty, was raised and educated to strive for both and that’s precisely why I make money. Consumers have a higher appreciation for these qualities than you realize but also place an emphasis on value.
This is America; the land of the savvy entrepreneurs who should and can provide all three.
PhD. It depends on the job. I came from a poli-sci background, so I didn’t have as much interest in econ-dominated positions, but I did see them. The job descriptions tend to say “political science, public administration, or a related field…” or “economics, public administration, or a related field…” I don’t recall seeing any that were all three. In the “related field” category, I haven’t seen much call for sociologists -but we do work with them if we need some experts on polling or interviewing. A lot of us came up in the econ-dominated massive datasets system, so we’re good at econometrics of census data -but less good at survey methods (for which I was sent over to sociology).
Independent PA programs tend to be the place you’d see it -and I haven’t been in many of those. My impression is that whoever gets the most seats at the founding will gradually take over the program. Economists will tend to look for economists, and political scientists tend to look for political scientists when hiring. Over time, the school will throw in one way or the other unless a conscious effort is made to stay multi-disciplinary. Over time, that effort may result in more deliberate hiring of PA people, but I think that will take decades.
I love the humanities. But I find humanities degrees, let alone PhDs to be worth less than the paper they’re printed on.
Most of the books I gobbled up in my own time in college were related to the classical period. I was a history major, but after four years, felt I had learned more through self-study and leisure reading than all the painfully boring classes I took.
Is the assumption here is that truth and beauty are not found in the science?
Too easy. When you subsidize something, you get more of it. So you tell all kids they must go to college. You convince their parents it is near abuse to deny it to their kids.
You take all risk out of loan repayment.
So you are amazed when kids go to college and take the easiest programs available to not interfere with the five year party?
(Sorry, but stem majors actually require effort)
You expected the Humanities to self police this Democrat supplied gravy train?
Agree, but my point is if parents can afford to pay the due bill, it’s not a bad idea to send your kid to university and keep an eye on their course selections.
Examples:
1. No to Women’s Studies but Modern British Lit is fine reading even if Joyce is often incomprehensible.
2. No to Sociology but Econ 101 is an excellent choice.
3. No to Indigenous Languages in Third World Countries but French Literature with an emphasis upon Flaubert, Dumas, Rimbaud and Hugo is highly preferable and far more intellectually challenging.
You’re forgetting one tiny little detail:
They wages are low…relative…to other PhDs.
They’re still much higher than those who didn’t go to college.
Given that a PhD is free anyway, that’s still a good return relative to someone who only has a HS degree. It just isn’t relative to someone who went on to get a doctoral degree in, say, medicine.
Thanks for comments, everyone! I lack time to respond as well as the comments deserve. I woke up this morning to 18 new ones, and I have to go teach in the Humanities in a couple of hours (Intro to Logic this morning, followed by Metaphysics, where we’re going to begin a short study of Thomas Aquinas).
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I worked for my degree. It wasn’t easy at all. (But I can’t say there aren’t some Humanities Ph.D. programs that are too easy.)
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If Logic and Aquinas aren’t useful, I don’t know what is. On Logic, for example, true story: “the president of a liberal arts university once asked the president of the national branch of an international auto manufacturer what sort of graduates of the university he would most want to hire. The reply was: graduates who can think.”
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On Aquinas, for example, a broader understanding of his metaphysics would make some common objections against pro-lifers and defenders of traditional marriage ineffective. Ricochetti ought to know how useful that could be!
To explain: I refer to objections like You’re all bigots! and Keep your religion out of the public square! and Keep your irrational religious views to yourself!
Largely Thomistic (i.e., Aquinas’) metaphysics is used by the authors of this and this, for example. So this ain’t bigotry, and it ain’t just religion (when it is religion at all); it’s metaphysics too, and it’s the metaphysics of Aristotle and Aquinas, who are paradigmatically rational people.
(And it’s a metaphysics that is still rational in our day. It wasn’t just an old-fashioned theory that looked good until science came along. Perhaps I can elaborate later if there is a need. But I fear this comment has already gone on long enough.)
Something’s wrong with the formatting in the opening post. I’ll try to fix.
Their wages are low compared to welders, electricians, plumbers, roofers, network techs. and countless other skilled positions. Most large private sector companies are shedding white collar admin at an accelerating rate. Their only refuge is government work, and that gravy train is running out due to the pension crisis.
Skills are always worth more in the long haul than degrees. Many “successful” college grads realized their value in the working world was zero and got the skills later. College just wasted their time and parents money.
I’m a public employee so this information is public record:
I make $50k and work 9 months a year. My normal week I officially clock something like 37 hours. (Unofficially it’s more -I’m not paid by the hour so I don’t keep track, but I probably spend easily another 10 hours grading -but I’m grading while checking Ricochet or watching a movie.)
And my job involves sitting in an air-conditioned office, or standing in an air-conditioned room where I talk about topics that I enjoy, read about topics that I enjoy, or work on administrative projects that -ultimately -I get to pick, because most of them are volunteer only.
And I am paid less, relative to my colleagues in grad school, because I took at PoliSci job at a teaching school. I teach 75% political science undergrads and general education. Not exactly hard courses to teach. My friends who went to R1s? They’re getting 60-75k, teach less, and research more (and, accordingly, spend a lot of time wrangling grants). They’re welcome to it -I like being in the classroom.
I have a sweet gig, and I thank the people of Kentucky for giving it to me.
Also, the PhD only cost me something like a couple of thousand dollars because everything was paid for by scholarships, assistanceships, or grants.
Mine is a very sweet gig.
AIG is correct when he says that PhDs are well compensated, even in comparison to welders.
I always liked the reason given by Steven Pinker for the excess supply of PHDs in the Humanities: the failure to practice academic birth control.
Maybe so, for a great many, and perhaps even on average.
Yet: There are hordes of professional philosophers out there who are making 30k to 45k a year, with a job guaranteed for one to three years at a time and guaranteed to end after that–under extreme pressure to publish if they want a shot at tenure someday, and beset by an urgent need to apply for dozens or, in some cases, hundreds of jobs for the next academic year.
(And most of them, I daresay, are teaching the fundamentals. No Theory #2 above. Teach Logic, tell the young’uns what Aristotle said, help them learn how to read Plato’s Republic.)