I’m surprised no one has (I think — I did read down the thread but may have missed it) mentioned Marc Bousquet’s book, _How the University Works_, which does (to my mind) such a persuasive job of showing why we should stop pointing fingers at one another and start looking at the fact that while undergrad enrollments have grown and admin has mushroomed the share of the university that consists of t-t faculty doing teaching and research has been dwindling toward nothingness. That’s a broad social problem with broad social consequences and the more PhDs with jobs and PhDs without spend their time forming circular firing squads the less we are dealing with it.

In my view, the university is getting staked in the heart and it’s not by clueless profs nor clueless grad students, and the bad consequences for society at large go way, way beyond us. I’d love to talk about that instead!

Those are two different things. I thought people just alway understood that they might not get a job, regardless of what job they were training or applying for.

As for agency, I own the decision I made to go to graduate school and I don’t know anybody who isn’t owning their decision. That doesn’t preclude me from recognizing that my department wasn’t quite straight with me about their less than stellar placement rate. I can still recognize the many, many times I haven’t heard the phrase “you might not get a job” when I should have. The History Enthusiast says it well in her comments above. The message isn’t getting out to graduate students as clearly as you all think it is: academia couldn’t survive if it did. And for what it’s worth, I already know graduate students who think it’s fine to continue to encourage/persuade undergrads to go to grad school (which is different from supporting people who’ve made an informed decision to go).

Finally, I do have to wonder. It seems like at some point, if I somehow manage to get a job in the field, a switch is going to flip and suddenly I’m going to think it’s totally fine that the field as a whole is bringing in people with the promise of a certain kind of job, only to say after 7-10 years, no dice. I hate to think that’s the kind of person I’ll become.

To say that “this is a challenge to job seekers that is unlike any that a young t-t assistant professor experienced in the early 2000s” might be true, if the comparison is to that one moment in time. I have repeatedly commented on my good luck in looking for work, but we can’t abstract one bright moment where things were slightly less crappy out of the past 40 years and use that as a comparison to the current moment. The vast majority of faculty commenting in this thread were looking for work in the 1970s, 1980s, early 1990s, and more recently. (And IMHO: the collapse of the job market for 1970s Ph.D.s was much more traumatic, because their advisors truly couldn’t have predicted the end of the party.)

This is not a new problem. That doesn’t make it any less of a problem, but we can’t hope to find solutions without acknowledging the long history of this ongoing crisis.

Lets translate the grad school decision into another realm of life. If you were buying a car or house would you just go on the advice of a few car-salesmen or real-estate agents? Probably not. If you were smart, you would go to consumer reports, edmunds, etc to research cars. Or you would spend a few months learning about the real estate market in the town you were planning to buy in. If you didn’t and you just took what was offered to you on the lot or in a couple of open houses, then you would be to blame if you ended up with something less than satisfactory. Buyer beware.

2000 – Was a history major but not sure what I wanted to do (this was sophomore year), and my advisor said I’d need to get an M.A. to work in a history field of any sort (museums were my first choice at that point). NO MENTION was made of the job market in the academy at any point in my undergraduate career, even once I had changed to thinking about being a professor. I was uniformly encouraged from all fronts.

2003 – Entered M.A. program at Fancy Public Ivy and was, once again, never told about the job market’s perils, and since I was only a first year student I didn’t form friendships with the ABDs who’d by this point moved away, etc. Advice from other grad students was non-existent.

2005 – Entered Ph.D. program at Top Public University and was only encouraged with sayings like, “The market’s tough, but you’ve got what it takes to succeed.”

2010 – Technically, though I’ve received more honest advice in the past year, I have yet to be told that I won’t be able to get a job. Perhaps this is because my uni has a really excellent placement rate, but all I am hearing is encouragement. This is coming from mentors, my advisor, and people from my program who’ve already landed a t-t job.

And before people trot out all the objections (i.e. I should’ve done more research, I am entitled, etc.), those are categorically not applicable to me and 90% of the students in my program. The concept of working outside academia is appealing to many of us (and I’ve applied for those positions), and none of us would ever, EVER say that we feel entitled to a position once we graduate. None of us come from privileged backgrounds and consequently we’re all up to the challenge when it comes to hard work..

Let me emphasize that: I did not believe that there would be a job just sitting there, patiently waiting for me once I graduated. I am the only academic in my family (only one of my parents graduated from college), so the concept of hard work is something I saw modeled for me each day. Yes, I am white and that accords some special privileges, but my family is lower middle-class and the opposite of elitist. Overconfidence does not run in my veins.

From where I’m sitting, the graduate students who feel betrayed are being misunderstood, and while perhaps that is their own fault in some ways, this is the crux of the matter: while we don’t feel entitled to a sweet t-t gig, there is something fundamentally wrong with an educational system that is so completely out of touch with reality. Yes graduate advisors are only human, and no one I know is studying history with the hopes of making it rich, but in what other profession is it acceptable to train for 7+ years and then be told, there are simply no jobs available!

My comments are probably incoherent at this point and I really am just summarizing what others have said. But, I do want to point out that the market is especially bad this year, so complaints about how terrible it has always been fall on somewhat deaf ears. Yes, it sucked ass three years ago, or five years ago, or whenever. But can anyone who values quantitative data really claim that this year isn’t the worst year in the last few decades? The statistics are becoming available so this isn’t an exaggeration on my part.

I don’t want this to be a “who had it worse” game–’cause frankly the market is always a crap shoot–but I would also encourage everyone to remember the reason why we are having this conversation in the first place. Thanks to the f-up workings of academia, combined with the economic crisis, this is a challenge to job seekers that is unlike any that a young t-t assistant professor experienced in the early 2000s. I don’t mean for this to be a condemnation of any one comment or any one person. My thought is that we need to keep some perspective and understand why this conversation is taking place right now and why students are panicking.

Lest I be the annoying person who will “check back 100 times a day to argue with everyone else in the discussion,” I will leave it at that and not comment further on the matter.

It also occurred to me, though, that we all have to go against the odds to be successful. We submit to the journal with 10 % acceptance rates, we try to be the few that get university press contracts, etc. etc. Being successful in academia takes the tenacity and the determination that would likely make one not take advice to think of other options.

I also loved ADM’s last comment above.