Suggestions welcome

Any advice I was gonna give was given by Dr. Danger. I tell all my MA students that the MA makes some economic sense — it boosts a public school salary, qualifies you to teach in CCs or adjunct at 4-years, you don’t waste too much time on it, and you can go to other careers more easily. The Ph.D. overqualifies you for some jobs and wastes a lot of productive years.

However, I’ll testify that the worst career decision I’ve made, looking only at financial considerations, was taking a state university job over a high school job that paid, initially, a little more (because of a bonus they added to the normal salary for the Ph.D.). It was the cusp of the millenium, and I found a chart that showed university teaching salaries rising much faster than public school salaries. I hoped past returns would be a guarantee of future performance. Ha ha. (Whether I could have been any good as a teacher at that level is a different question.)

So, does Mr. Gatorade’s state have a reciprocity program where an MA or PhD can get you into a high school teaching job? The state I had my offer in would have allowed me to teach right away and get my certificate by taking the PRAXIS test, without having to endure College of Ed classes.

I had made many mistakes in what I laughingly refer to as my ‘career’ but the biggest (so far!) was getting a PhD at the start of my ‘career’. It wasted valuable time, was very expensive, and meant I got into the job market when I was considerably older than most of my competitors for the few remaining jobs.

I have absolutely no idea about the American system but here’s what might help is to get some form of ‘minor’ qualification (say a CELTA TEFL) and see about getting a job either in the ‘third sector’ or teaching at a college: this isn’t as unusual nowadays as it used to be with the rise in asylum seekers and ‘refugees’ etc. for whom English is not their first language (don’t know about the American situation). Once you are ‘in’ you might be able to use whatever qualifications you have and then do a PhD ‘on the job’.

Another option is that Mr G. speaks another language he might be able to do something similar. A cousin of mind speaks fluent Spanish (and has the CELTA): she is now teaching language and literature at night classes at a College, is now in a position to apply for a position at at University, and might, therefore, be able to get a full time post at a Uni in a few years. Third sector work generally (which can be ‘gotten into’ via volunteering, hopefully leading to a post later on) can be a lot more ‘vocational’ and teaching orientated than people think.

To repeat, these ideas may not have any applicability in the American system in which case, sorry!

Wrong box.

I used to know a history Ph.D. who worked in marketing, but I don’t know what her path was in between. It does involve research and writing, but if it’s the committee work you hate, the corporate world isn’t going to be any better.

There’s also technical writing, which involves less research and IMO less interesting writing (Habermas wouldn’t help you much here, I’d guess), but more of it. Whether it’s an especially stable job or not, I’m not really sure.

For both of these, you’d need some ability and desire to work with technical stuff, and also with technical people.

As for “jobless recessions,” in software, at least around here, people didn’t start hiring until a while after the recession officially ended, and a couple of years after that, there were still people who’d been unemployed three years out there looking (and getting hired). So I’m not sure how much the numbers should be relied on.

Technical writing is a very varied field. It can be the woman’s ghetto and is thus relatively low-paid.

I can’t see much reason to get a humanities Ph.D. at this time. Go get a job in something besides newspapers or grad school. Try technical writing, media content creation, or something else.

It can take arbitrary amounts of time to finish a humanities degree, and one frequently doesn’t have salary support.

Y81’s point about law school is important- the job and salary potential is very different at different schools, and most of what’s said at the various blogs complaining (usually with at least some justice) about job prospects is most applicable to graduates from lower-tier schools. But, for some people, going to a lower-tier law school (or better, the lower part of the first tier) can still be a good idea _if one gets significant financial aid_. I see Tim’s point as related. The “don’t go to grad school” mantra should at least be clarified to mean that one shouldn’t go to a grad school program with a bad placement record, or without funding, and so on. And, as I know, having a family makes it a lot harder, because it is not only more difficult, but also feels a lot worse, to move around a lot for a few years taking less than wonderfully paying jobs while waiting for things to work out or not if it’s not just you, but also one’s spouse (and perhaps kids) that must move.

It’s a summer Friday, and all the clients seem to have left early, so I was faced with a choice between reading the mezzanine loan amendment that I got yesterday, or doing something else. So I went back and read the CT comment thread that Prof. Berube linked to (@3). I have to say, that is really a model of how good a comment thread can be: the participants are civil and knowledgeable, with a wide variety of experiences and views. It’s the sort of “discussion” that couldn’t have existed before the blogosphere. I only hope that lots of undergraduates-at-loose-ends have read it. (BTW, at first, I was regretting that I hadn’t participated in that thread–I only read this blog intermittently–but then I saw that “unimaginative” said about what I would have said.)

Back to the mezz loan amendment.

yeah, we’re reading this thread pretty intently.

Antonio Conselheiro:

No more Librarians! If you think it sounds bleak for English PhDs, it’s twice as bad for librarians. Everyone who goes in to get their MLS is being fed the same bare-assed lie: that all the old guard librarians are retiring and now’s the time to get that librarian job, especially if you’re a tech-savvy young-un, because you’ll have your pick. It’s ALA propaganda. The market is flooded with overqualified librarians all fighting for the same handful of jobs.

I’d have to dig up the statistics but a survey done last year found that there were more than 3000 new MLS grads trying for 1700 positions nationwide, and that doesn’t include all the grads from the previous year or the year before that and the number of available jobs is shrinking. For every 2 librarians that retire, they only replace 1, instead shifting responsibilities off to other librarians. I currently do the job of 3 librarians.

I just interviewed a candidate for our university library this week who has 15 years experience and knows her shit backwards and forwards. The position she applied for is 32 hours/week with no benefits and entry level salary. My wife, who has 10 years experience and multiple degrees on top of her MLS can’t find work at all. Multiply that by about 2000 and that’s who a new MLS grad is going up against, all for the same positions.

The standard advice in my milieu to people like this is to go into tech writing, but that seems to me (not having ever done it) like it would be a soul-crushing job.

How about the advocacy sector? There’s a vast, or at least large, set of nonprofit groups that work on more or less political issues that need mid-level people with reading and writing and speaking skills as “analysts” or whatever. I’d guess that they generally make mid-30s, although I last checked more than a decade ago, which is not much money but still better than what an adjunct makes. And you need no training other than college. It helps if you live in DC or in a state capitol.

“Communication” I have no direct knowledge of, other than that everyone I encounter who’s in it is a corporate flack of some sort.

I was faced with this same kind of decision a couple of decades back, although I had more technical and less writing skills. I eventually started my own business, which brings in a middle-class income and lets me work from home. I was able to do this by being one of about three people in the country who work freelance in my particular specialty. It’s not like there’s a lot of work, but there aren’t many people who do it either. If you can find some kind of specialization like that that will hold up over time, it clearly can work, but I’m not sure exactly how to set out and find one.

There’s a much broader question here than that I think is being addressed.

The university plays the following role within the social contract democracy:

The social contract theorists were well aware that most intellectuals from 400AD -1650AD had been priests (Aquinas, Scotus, Augustine, Ockham, etc) . Further, the learned professions of the law (Marsilius, Baldus de Ubaldis, etc. )and medicine (Maimonides, Avicenna, etc) were also very closely linked to philosophy as well (through Aristotle in the case of medicine and Cicero in the case of law). The social contract theorists knew they were going to diminish the power of the Church, remove the influence of Aristotle from the natural sciences and re-establish law entirely upon a new basis (a new basis which did not lead legal practitioners back into philosophy and high culture as the older order did).

The modern university (or it’s predecessor, the Royal Academies) is intended by the social contract theorists to be the pre-eminent location of intellectual work in their new regimes. That is, the social contract theorists moved the location of intellectual work from being widely distributed (in at least 4 major locations: the Church, the law, medicine and in government service) to being primarily concentrated in two locations (the university and bohemia).

The problem we are facing today is that the modern university is proving to be significantly more fragile than the multi-location situation that existed before the Enlightenment. There’s a single major funding source (government), for example. Also, because the university is now the only place where intellectual work can be done in a reasonable way (bohemia being the place where it’s done under impoverished and horrid conditions), that means that all or most intellectual work now conforms to the norms of academia.

The problem is much deeper than that of the modern university. The problem is that the social contract theorists seem to have made several grave errors in how they approached the problem of transmitting knowledge itself. They were likely far too optimistic that the support of universities by actual governments would be constant (indeed, constantly growing). They also perhaps made an error asserting that the university could take the place of the Church. Also, removing the learned professions from close relationships with philosophy damaged civil society greatly.

I worked as a tech writer for a while. It’s okay — not particularly more soul-crushing than any other job.

that should be “doubts”…

I don’t know about the value of a PhD in the US, but I would recommend becoming fluent in a second language and spend at least a year abroad in a non-english speaking country instead. I say this because at a certain educational level it is very common for non-native speakers to be fluent in English, while it is pretty rare that native English speakers are fluent in another language, so there must be a market for such skills.

“If you can take pride in clearly explaining something even when it only needs to be explained to ISP employees, not having control of the content (which you’re not the one responsible for) or the format and style, and having 2/3 of the writing be pretty repetitive (maybe dozens of pages that are minimal variations of one another)—and being dependent for information on arrogant people whose own language skills range upwards from nil—it’s probably a decent way to use your writing and organizational skills.”

Mutatis mutandis–and, to be fair, there are a few mutandis–that describes a lot of legal writing too.

To repeat some of what’s been said:

1) Where are you hoping to get your Ph.D. in English? I came out of Penn’s department, which has a 66% tenure-track job placement record. That’s not bad, considering some of the remaining 34% go on for post-docs or research fellowships that are not counted as job placements.

2) Can you get the Ph.D. without accruing debt? That was my big mistake. I took on a lot of student load debt because I was stupid. However, there’s no reason you must, if you can live frugally. If you can, why not get the Ph.D. for the love of it?

3) If you love teaching, would you be happy teaching at a private high school? That is the job path I pursued, because I loved teaching and ultimately hated research (and came to hate the sort of literature I had become “an expert” in — contemporary American fiction). Right now, I teach amazing teenagers classics of world and British lit. They are doing far more interesting work than my Penn undergrads that I taught as an adjunct. And they are more fun to work with. Private schools *want* Ph.D.s in English. Often, they will pay for you to get a teaching certificate once they hire you. Public schools often require an MAT or certification from the start, but I received several job offers from public high schools, which would have paid me substantially more for the Ph.D. and the teaching experience I had accrued as a Ph.D. student.

Large suburban high schools. Advertise yourself as an AP English teacher interested in teaching only AP or higher electives and unafraid of reading lots of papers. Talk about rigor and writing coaching. Be patient, but about 25% of schools have real problems getting teachers who are intellectually capable of teaching AP and can write. There’s a boomlet of teachers now who have a masters degree and who think of teaching as a form of masonry (the kind with bricks); they also run high to bureaucrats-in-training and lazy slobs. Benefits are good and pay will be good too. Plus we need you.

ice9

further to floopmeister’s suggestion, there seems to be a lot of work available in Japanese universities for people with PhDs in English and/or CELTA/TESOL qualifications to teach English and do “research” in English, that are maybe more accessible than in the west. Every Japanese uni has to teach english as a second language, and the better ones employ academics who might actually have an interest in publishing english literature papers as well. There are a very large number of Japanese universities! The downside is a lot of them are starting to close/consolidate, and the career structure ain’t great. But that’s academia everywhere.

Novakant’s prescription “become fluent in a second language” sounds nice, but yeah, just, you know, get fluent, baby. Just like that. Also, my experience of people who’re fluent in second languages is that in the job market it isn’t rewarded at all. I know a woman in London who is fluent in French and nearly fluent in Japanese, and it took her 6 months to get a job after her return from Japan, and it’s paid no more than if she didn’t have two extra languages.

“while it is pretty rare that native English speakers are fluent in another language, so there must be a market for such skills.”

Eh? The absence of those with a skill set proves demand for that skill set?

As to the larger subject here: given that a high level education in the humanities seems not to lead to a job using such high level education in the humanities, might we not conclude that too many people are getting high level educations in the humanities?

That the education sector itself should shrink?

there seems to be a lot of work available in Japanese universities for people with PhDs in English and/or CELTA/TESOL qualifications to teach English and do “research” in English

Unfortunately, that might have been true about 15-20 years ago, the current demographics here means that unless Japanese universities can find a lot of students in the next decade, at least a third and maybe half of the universities will have to close. To give an idea, the college going population was 2 million 10 years ago and is now about 1.2 or 1.3 million. This article discusses some of the problems.

Universities here have begun outsourcing the undergraduate English courses, and if they do hire foreigners, they are hired on term limited contracts (usually 1-3 years). One may think that stringing together a few of these contracts and building up ones publications for a return to the US might be an option, but it is really difficult to do the requisite networking overseas. China and other Asian locales have more opportunities, but the current salaries are rather low, and it is not certain if you will have job security. Which is unfortunate, because these other asian locales are very interesting and everyone wants to learn English. I just got back from a seminar for high school teachers at Hue University, and it was a gas. With that, I wonder if floopmeister could contact me at libjpn at gmail, I’d be interested in exchanging notes about Hue.

I too thought the advice was spot-on, the best one could give in the circumstance.

I returned to school many years ago after getting married and our first child. It was perhaps not the smartest move for our family (if my father had not been cremated, he’d still be turning over in his grave) but I suppose I was still suffering the effects of adolescence (as it were) and my wife did not verbalize any strong objections or concerns. To make matters worse, I did not think that my chosen area of study would have anything whatsoever to do with what job I would find at the end of formal schooling, for I had picked “Religious Studies” and never imagined pursuing graduate work or getting a job in the field. I eventually did go to graduate school and, belatedly (it’s a longer story), received an MA despite having left school early and thus did not go on for a PhD, one reason being that we were deeply in debt and another owing to the frustration I felt at not receiving more economic support (of the non-loan sort, like TA assignments).

When I left school I held several minimum wage jobs before getting into housing construction (at the urging of a brother who was already making ‘good money’ working as a carpenter) and eventually becoming a finish carpenter for a local contractor. One of the homes we (re-)built was destroyed by the infamous Painted Cave fire here in town back in the early summer of 1990. Both of the owners had been professors of mine and one of them, Nandini Iyer (mother of the writer, Pico Iyer, and widow of Raghavn Iyer, author of a non-pareil study of Gandhi’s moral and political thought), who taught Religious Studies and from whom I learned a little Sanskrit, would have conversations with me at the “job site” (to the annoyance of my co-workers) on such topics as whether or not the Buddha had an understanding of the Advaita Vedanin conception of “nirguna Brahman” or what was the precise nature of the Buddha’s putative metaphysical reticence (questions, incidentally, I’m still addressing). One day Nandini asked me to “substitute teach” (my locution) her class and, later, asked if I could fill in during her sabbatical and I agreed both times, not quite sure what I was getting into. I was eventually offered to teach my own courses at our community college (she’s since retired, and although I’m Pico’s age, she happens to be my best friend).

I’ve been teaching part-time now for about ten years and have even published a few things. I have no ambition to teach full-time at our community college (at any rate, these days I’d have to compete for the position with out-of-work PhDs) as that would not leave me enough time for avid pursuit of avocational educational interests nor leave time enough for research and writing. I have another part-time job but it’s safe to say that my wife’s employment keeps us afloat (and our comparatively low-income means we live, by choice of course, rather frugally: I have no cell phone, credit cards, etc., we’ve never owned a new car, don’t travel…).

All this by way of illustrating that one never knows quite how things will turn out. I realize my story is rather unusual and was shaped by (perhaps uncommon) idiosyncracies. But one should keep in mind that even if it’s not “realistic” or financially prudent to pursue an academic career, it’s not impossible to cultivate an amateur’s passion and considerable skills for ploughing any number of intellectual fields… and perhaps that passion and those skills will bear fruit in unexpected yet no less satisfying ways.

erratum: “Advaita Vedantin”

Another: “while it is pretty rare that native English speakers are fluent in another language, so there must be a market for such skills.”

Tim Worstall: “Eh? The absence of those with a skill set proves demand for that skill set?”

Seconding Tim here – never confuse supply with demand. In addition, it could easily be that any such demand is quite nicely filled by non-native English speakers who are fluent in English (hundreds of millions of such people exist, IMHO).

In thirty years there won’t be an undergraduate degree in the humanities conferred, or even offered, in a land-grant university. STEM rules the waves, and the conversion of all but elite post-secondary education to a two-track public-college vocational system — one expensive, based on community colleges, and one very expensive, based on what used to be state universities — will be complete.

“People are free to make such choices”
Yes indeed they are, and why are they? If I want to borrow $100,000 to open a restaurant or to expand my trucking business, my banker will want to see a business plan that shows how the investment will generate the income stream to repay that loan. But if I want to borrow $100,000 to pay it to a bunch of people who will spend a couple of hours a week talking to me and a couple of more reading what I write, the banker will hand me the check. Why? Because the loan is federally guaranteed, so that there’s no one to care whether the credential I receive will ever allow me to generate the income needed to pay it back. The buniversity certainly doesn’t care. It is overjoyed to take that money and it expects me to feel grateful that it is willing to relieve me of it.

“and some, it turns out, may discover they’ve made the wrong choice in deciding on graduate school.”
Ah, yes, they’ve made the wrong choice. It was their choice and they made it, and they were grown-ups when they allowed themselves to be fleeced so it’s really their own fault. It has nothing to do with graduate programs recruiting far more students than there are jobs. And since they cannot relieve themselves of student debt via bankruptcy they will be reflecting on the implications of that wrong choice for many, many years.

“what was once the “certainty of conviction” that motivated the original decision may, with the passage of time, crumble into crippling doubt.”

How true. Most people who want to become professors, like most people who want to become athletes or actors or fashion designers, are destined to fail. The point is, the professoriate is an over-crowded, over-competitive field. If you can imagine doing something else, you should be doing it.

Don’t pay back your loan and you’ll discover rather quickly that universities in fact care quite a bit…. If your credential doesn’t allow you to pay it back then you’re under an obligation to find employment that will. (There’s no guarantee a ‘business plan’ will be successful or that one will, in fact, generate the income stream necessary to repay any loan.)

I’ve not heard of graduate schools guaranteeing anyone jobs and in fact there’s nothing close to certainty in most economic sectors that provide anything by way of guaranteeing employment prospects. On the other hand, achieving some clarity about recruitment and publicity practices, such as they are, is perfectly fine.

The point of the last paragraph is that no one knows if their dreams, goals, ends, what have you, will succeed. It’s simply a fact that it often takes the pursuit of same to discover if they will or will not (perhaps we’re acting under self-deception or wishful thinking, or perhaps our wishful thinking provides the requisite motivation that assures our eventual accomplishments): alas, precious few of us can predict with absolute certainty what will happen, which hardly means one should avoid a more or less objective appraisal of one’s prospects, but there’s no algorithm for this kind of decision-making that one should invariably defer to. The fact that any field is over-crowded or over-competitive may be a reason for deciding not to enter it, but it need not trump or crowd out other reasons. Again, most of us do not know in advance if we will end up succeeding in such fields.

Michael, if you’re still around, you might want to point G toward the enlightening series written by Eszter Hargittai of this very blog, available at http://www.eszter.com/academia.html
and her Ph.Do series at http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/ph_do/hargittai1

Luckily, in Australia PhD tuition is completely free for nationals, and it’s often possible to snag a reasonable $20k a year scholarship to ensure you don’t starve. It only takes three years, to boot.

I’m surprised more people don’t consider the option.

Lest you think the situation in STEM is much better for young PhDs:
http://www.miller-mccune.com/science/the-real-science-gap-16191/?

Michael @ Panoptiblog, I’m sorry to have written so sloppily as to convey disrespect for the importance of strict pedagogical training. The reason most people in English/Rhet-Comp don’t want to have to take classes in the College of Ed is that pedagogy is about all we talk about for years of training and is about the entire subject of our research. Far from avoiding serious attention to pedagogy, we soak in it. We read Ed journals, publish in them, and teach the articles in our classes. We use APA and MLA styles with equal ease. So a lot of what happens in Ed classes is repetition for us. And, too, also, you know we are always pushing for our English Ed majors to get more content-area courses; but let’s skip over that off-topic debate.

In exchange for my sin of being snide about Ed courses, I will forgive you for your snide reference to “a few semesters as a TA.”

Let’s be friends. I think you’d be smart to keep on in high school as an Ed.D. or Ph.D., and I think I would have been smart to pick up a teaching certificate in undergrad to go along with my English degree. I coulda been a contender for some tenure-track jobs that wanted both; another reason I should have taught at the high school, because if I hadn’t like it, I would have been able to go for some college jobs that required a teaching certificate and K-12 experience.

In contrast to by beloved Lost State that allowed an alternate pathway to certification, there is my Current Backwards State that places so many barriers in the way of prospective teachers that many, many gifted people who might like to teach find that there are just too many hoops to jump through. For instance, a retired lawyer or engineer should certainly have to take classes in pedagogy and psychology and prove they have, as they say, the “teaching disposition,” but it’s sad to see people like that asked to re-take freshman and sophomore general education.

The military is looking for humanist academics to help understand the pesky Afghans. This may be your opportunity!

From both this discussion, and the law-school discussion linked earlier, it’s clear that a lot of the generic templates for careers (journalist, english prof, lawyer, librarian) are problematic. Not only are there many fewer good jobs than seekers in many cases, but also the time preparing for them (like a long PhD program) can be unacceptable, particularly if you’re dealing with near-term family obligations. And its not uncommon for people aiming for some prized but generic career to be unsatisfied with where they end up.

So my advice, for it’s worth, is: Think beyond generic. Consider the sorts of work you want to do, and try to think of lots of different ways in which you could do that work in a way that someone would find worth paying for. Consider especially ways where you can start *doing* that work, and not just preparing for it, sooner rather than later.

My wife and I both work in library-type jobs, for instance, and neither of us did it by getting library degrees. (I agree with the person upthread that generic MLS graduates face steep odds getting an ordinary library job at present.) We both did digital library work well before we started our present jobs; in my case, as a graduate student in computer science; and in her case, as something she did on the side while doing other things (including, for a number of years, taking care of small children) as her “main gig”. We ended up developing skills that turned out to be ones that our eventual employers found quite valuable. (And only one of those employers is a library– the other is an internet company that has a use for librarianship.)

I can’t say that this will always work smoothly; the folks I know who have built their own career paths not uncommonly do a few different things before finding a really good fit. But why not start trying to do the things you love sooner rather than later, and try to find ways to make it work? You probably won’t get everything you want all at once– maybe you might do K-12 English teaching, and research and writing on the side; or maybe you’ll write research reports for some organization that needs them, and find some other way to scratch your teaching itch. (Maybe *you’ll* be the one primarily raising– and along the way, teaching– your children.) Or maybe you’ll find some other path entirely. Think about what you value most, and what your family needs, and be creative and watchful for opportunities.

I’m a recent humanities PhD who was lucky to get a tenure track job right before the academic market collapse of the last two seasons. I don’t want to sugar coat things — the academic job market right now is horrible.

The option of teaching at private schools is really good advice. I know of some colleagues who took those jobs after getting MAs or PhD. I also have several colleagues who are either out of work or are working as adjuncts.

Some general things to think about when considering graduate school in the humanities:

1) Consider the opportunity cost of spending those years in school rather then building savings, retirement funds, and experience level at a workplace.

2) Also consider the strain that the poverty of graduate school can place on a romantic relationship.

3) The possible, and in this academic job market, increasingly likely frustration of not achieving a living-wage job at the end of graduate school.

4) I know relationships that did not survive the move after graduate school. How flexible are you in terms of where you live? In academia there are so few jobs that you have to be able to relocate. Is your partner ok with moving for your academic career? Are you ok with moving anywhere that you can get a job? Does your partner have transferable job skills and is she going to be happy if she moves with you? If you have children in grad school, are you ok with relocating them for a job in a different geographical area?

good luck with the decision!

ah, Bloix, I think the loan systems are different then. In Australia the repayments are through tax, so based on your income, with a lower threshold on when you start paying. It’s essentially a graduate tax, I think. I certainly don’t feel like I’ve been crippled (or like I really even notice) my loans, and I am happy to have been able to get jobs i enjoy because of them.

Even under that system though, I’d be mighty leery of paying to do a PhD. I got my loans for masters degrees in professional fields, which have a reasonable chance of a payoff (and I was working in the field when I studied them, so had some confidence of future work improvements due to them). I’m inclined to agree with you that going into hock for a PhD – even gentle hock – is a difficult risk to justify.

rm, yes, let’s do be friends. And forgive me if I sounded dismissive of college teaching experience; on the contrary, that much experience in front of actual students is an improvement on what most preservice teachers get, which is one of the problems with many teacher ed programs. Further, I didn’t mean to give the impression that “strict pedagogical training” is what everyone needs before entering the classroom. Some discussion, however, of what might actually get kids in their mid-teens engaged in reading that most of them see as pointless and dull, and how to deal with a context that is completely different from university, is better than none. My impression of college teaching in the humanities, and maybe in English departments especially, is that as far as pedagogy goes, the individual teacher is on his or her own.

One thing that would really help is mutual disarmament of contempt between English departments and English Education departments that is unfortunately so often the case. I was recently talking to someone who was just finishing up her doctorate in English at an elite east-coast institution that has top programs in both fields. Even for those interested both in English literature and high school education, she said, opportunities for crossover work between the two departments is almost nonexistent. Each sees what they do as completely irrelevant to what the other does.

At any rate, I absolutely agree with your last paragraph. I would love to see more alternative pathways to certification, especially in teacher-needy states, and there are certainly too many hoops to jump through for those returning from other fields. But I fear for what too much streamlining of that process will do to the profession (read: teacher factories). Unfortunately, some teacher ed programs seem to be moving away from what I consider to be their strength (the opportunity to discuss theory as applied to teaching and learning).

JohnM, I’m actually doing that right now. Your loan goes up at the rate of the CPI, but as far as I know there’s no penalty for not paying, because it’s paid back through taxes and the payments resume when you return. But as far as I know there are no reciprocal arrangements, so my tax doesn’t go higher while I’m in Japan.

I hope not, anyway!

Davis S. Machina @ 51

In thirty years there won’t be an undergraduate degree in the humanities conferred, or even offered, in a land-grant university. STEM rules the waves …

I would second the link VV provided @ 60 for anyone thinking that STEM has “triumphed” over the humanities, at least in the US. At the very least, I would cross out the first and last letters. I’m also seeing much more of the effort in T going into defending intellectual property than producing it. And engineers are primarily useful if a society is investing in building interesting and useful stuff. In thirty years we will be back to elite universities exclusively as official entry portals to the financier class, with community colleges dedicated to training people how to operate the Windows 2037 cash registers at McDonald’s, and advanced coursework in wiping the bums of the retired financier class in their nursing homes.

Coming in late to underscore what everyone else has said: don’t get a Ph.D. in English unless you have such a burning desire to do it that nothing else looks palatable, your spouse has a “portable” job, and you get full funding. Even then, think twice. Speaking as someone who doesn’t regret having an EngLit Ph.D., but also wishes she had her 20s to do over, I can’t in good conscience recommend it.

Private school teaching is great – I have friends who like it a lot. I also have grad school friends who are fundraisers, political lobbyists, marketers, and lawyers. The love of language and the written word will take you a long way in a lot of fields.

If you are technophiliac at all, though, I don’t recommend technical writing, a dying field in itself. I recommend the gig most of my former tech-writer friends now have: interaction designer. There is a strong librarianship tradition in interaction design, a large dose of cultural anthropology, and a strong belief in the value of the correctly-chosen word. There are many great graduate programs in the field now (which didn’t even exist when I started grad school, including SVA in New York, and Carnegie-Mellon. If you’ve ever nerded out over where the Search field is on a website or why your phone is so confusing to use, it’s work you might enjoy.

The article @61 argues that our K-12 system actually produces plenty of good science and math graduates. The question is then why does everyone say the reverse? Is it because we’re fooling ourselves and all those people, even those who get to the Ph.D. level and get postdoc positions and then can’t get teaching jobs, are really terrible: ALL of them are worse than practically every foreign student? Or is it because we think raising the anxiety level is always good because it makes people work harder to find ways to improve things and make changes?

I left a PhD program in English for law school ten years ago when my wife became pregnant because we didn’t think we could support a child on my paltry TA pay and her even more paltry pay in an art-related field. In retrospect, that decision was correct financially, but it was terrible for me personally.

I’m now a partner in a large law firm, and I make more money than I ever could have made in academia, with much greater job security as well. But I hate my job, and I’m miserable most of the time. I’m past the point where I can do anything else other than practice law–too much debt to afford a pay cut, no other skills or training, can’t afford to go back to school, etc.–and I think a lot about spending the next 35 or 40 years doing what I do now, which is a pretty terrible thought.

Scarcely a day passes that I don’t regret leaving grad school. I think about the work I could have done, the classes I could have taught, the way my life would have felt more significant even if I made less money. Passing on what you truly love in favor of financial comfort makes sense from a lot of viewpoints, but it extracts a cost, too. G. ought to do what makes him happiest and sort out the other details later.

Not to push this too hard, but even though the things you say are what one most often hears, they’re two different kinds of questions. One says that no American graduate is any good and that’s why (1) we have to hire from overseas and (2) we have to overhaul every single educational institution from scratch. What about (2)? It is obvious that some schools are better than others. We can assume that Bronx Science, Georgetown and Princeton Prep, and Groton produce better physics undergrads than G. Washington or Archbishop Ryan in Northeast Philadelphia. But beyond the extremes, where is the data–available to the hiring manager and the school board official–that provides more nuanced information about the relative quality of US and overseas graduates? Or are they just supposed to intuit where their respective school are in the hierarchy and deduce their quality of science education from their general ranking?

And it’s curious that nobody worries that even Groton just might lose a bit of reputation w/r/t the quality of its science education when people talk about “Americans” in the aggregate like that.

If you can, why not get the Ph.D. for the love of it?

Oh good lord. If you “love” getting a Ph.D., you’re a masochist. It can be nice, sometimes, but mostly it’s full of boredom, anxiety, depression, frustration, and anger. There’s not much to love about writing a dissertation.

There are no jobs for us. And as we earn our bread doing other things, then we will find out who, really, loves reading and writing.

Take a position with an NGO and go abroad and really learn something.

Just like that! As the great man said. NGOs are under the same economic pressure as everyone else. NGOs are getting hundreds of applications for entry-level jobs, so “taking a position” may not be a walk in the park.

I think he meant take a position with an NGO. You know, by force.

I am amazed to find that after four days my letter scrawled off in furious frustration is still receiving comments. I just wanted to thank everyone here for their advice and constructive comments. It’s more than I could’ve hoped for, and it’s more than one meal for thought. I suspect I’ll be chewing on this for a few weeks at least. Thanks again.
–“G”