Too few jobs: The other side of the equation
Of course, the problem isn't simply the result of an oversupply of Ph.D.s. It couldn't exist without a concomitant undersupply of jobs. And that's a hot topic.
The population grows, undergraduate enrollments increase; don't we need more teachers?
The number of tenure-track faculty has not increased as universities had hoped, says González. The MLA made prominent mention of that in its 1997 report. It notes that, as the cost of higher education has increased and as entitlement programs have taken increasingly larger slices of the public funding pie, lawmakers have called for greater productivity on campuses and downsizing has been counseled. The result, the report contends, has been an increase in lower-paid part-time faculty: "In 1970, 22 percent of [college and university] faculty nationwide consisted of part-timers, but in fact, as we assemble this report, the face of higher education has changed so drastically that part-timers constitute 40 percent of the faculty."
This year members of the MLA--spurred on by its Graduate Student Caucus--passed a motion requiring the organization to collect and publish data on the salaries and working conditions of part-time faculty members.
One member of the caucus and chair of the UC Davis Graduate Student Association, Sonja Streuber, bristles at the use of the word "oversupply" in connection with Ph.D. recipients. "There's been a lot of talk nationwide about the 'oversupply,' about the 'overproduction' of Ph.D.s. And coming from the humanities, of course, I look at how people phrase things," says Streuber. "We are really dealing with corporate rhetoric here, and that really disconcerts me."
Linda Morris, professor and chair of the UC Davis English department, also points to the "corporatization" of universities as a contributor to the problem. As corporate downsizing sweeps the country, trustees and legislators exert pressure on university administrators to implement similar cost-cutting techniques, she says. She knows of other English department chairs who are allowed to hire only 49 percent-time instructors for positions not to exceed three years.
The UC Davis English department does not impose similar restrictions; all lecturers are allowed to work full time if they so desire, with benefits, without a cap on the number of years they can stay. Still, says Morris, "these people all have Ph.D.s and all anticipated when they received those degrees that they would have a formal academic career and did not imagine themselves being lecturers. Even for the people who are most successful and have created for themselves a very good situation, there is underlying resentment."
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What's to be done?
What's the answer to the Ph.D./employment imbalance?
One solution often discussed is reducing the size of graduate programs.
The size of a program is primarily determined at the departmental level. In the University of California system, the Office of the President conducts coordinated planning and sets target enrollments for each campus. Those targets can then be adjusted at UC Davis by the Office of Graduate Studies. But it's the departments, closest to the action, that make the final decision based on the number of applications received, the quality of the students applying, the funding available to support the students and the profession's need for graduates.
Departments do occasionally reduce their programs in response to a declining job market, but that practice raises issues of its own.
For one thing, it's notoriously difficult to predict just where the job market is heading. Given the average seven-year lag between enrolling and graduating a Ph.D., matching the market takes some unusually prescient prognostication.
"Even as we sit here agonizing over whether we may have been overproducing graduates in a field, the market may be turning around," points out JoAnn Cannon, dean of the UC Davis Division of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies. "That's the problem. You always try to adjust, but even as you're adjusting, there's a new context."
Even if a profession is impacted, should a successful program be reduced? It doesn't make sense to reduce programs that are highly regarded and successful in placing their students, Cannon says. "I would argue that if our students are faring well in the job market, then we shouldn't worry about the overproduction."
And there's still another consideration, she points out: free choice on the part of the students. If they are informed about job prospects and still desire advanced training in a particular field, "should we police the flow?" should students with the excitement for a field that Graduate Council Chair Gilchrist mentions be barred from studying that field?
Acknowledging these concerns, the reports by the Association of American Universities, the National Research Council and the Modern Language Association still recommend, in some cases, that program reductions be considered.
All three call for self-examination by departments, with an eye toward cutbacks of programs that have been less successful in the placement of their graduates. And even for those that have been fairly successful, they have some suggestions.
One is the promotion of alternative careers--recognition that under the best of circumstances a large percentage of doctoral recipients will go on to careers outside academia. That's long been a common practice in the sciences; Dean McNamee points out that, for science Ph.D.s, jobs with industry aren't even considered "alternative."
Jobs outside the academy for humanities students are less common, but the value of advanced thinkers in the world beyond the ivory tower is increasingly recognized. The president of the MLA, Elaine Showalter, a Princeton professor who also happens to be a UC Davis Ph.D. graduate, class of 1970, encourages graduate students to consider careers outside academia and advocates putting this brain power to work in the world beyond the academy.
That doesn't sit well with everyone, most notably some members of the MLA Graduate Student Caucus. On its Web site, the caucus has posted an article by University of Illinois professor Cary Nelson who writes: "Advocacy for alternative careers, which the MLA is ready to embrace with giddy abandon, is without question the most cynical and self-interested solution anyone has offered to the job crisis. . . . No graduate student who loves reading literature and being in the classroom wants to be told cheerfully that insurance companies are hiring."
Nevertheless it's a cry being taken up in quarters across the country. One example: In December the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation announced its plan to offer grants to help humanities Ph.D.s explore non-academic careers, providing funds to departments that encourage students "to interact with the world," providing grants to doctoral students who have identified meaningful internships and setting up a national mentoring program that would pair doctoral students interested in non-academic work with Ph.D.s who have such jobs.
At UC Davis, the Internship and Career Center--which routinely provides workshops and individual counseling for student jobseekers--is putting increased efforts into alternative career assistance. It has begun offering a seminar series to help graduate and postdoctoral students explore career options and meet with professionals in public and private industry. The center has also secured funding to launch a new internship program for doctoral students in the environmental sciences and hopes to hire an additional staff person to work in the area of graduate student placement.
For graduate students, though, the majority of career placement assistance occurs at the departmental level--and here, too, efforts are being strengthened to encourage alternative careers. The animal science department, for example, is holding breakfasts to bring together graduate students with alumni and industry representatives. And bioscience graduate students, as a part of the regular curricula, spend five to 10 weeks in rotations in various laboratories. Many students are now doing one of those rotations with a biotechnology company.
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Setting the right example
An important component in the promotion of alternative careers is assuring students they aren't failures for not following in a faculty mentor's footsteps. And that requires a process of re-education for students and faculty alike.
Dean González believes that graduate students at a research university come to believe they have fallen short if they don't go on to work at a similar institution. "Many students have this idea. Are we putting it into their heads? Can we change this?"
Even if students themselves don't share that perspective, they may fear that faculty do, points out Jennifer Cross, graduate student assistant to the dean of Graduate Studies and to the chancellor.
"A lot of students are interested in teaching but not necessarily in a tenure-track position at a big research school. But many are afraid to tell their professors that; they're afraid that they'll be taken less seriously as students.
"I know one student who, this past year, got a job at a state school--a teaching job. And she was thrilled to get that job. But she was hesitant to tell her major professor. At first he was a little skeptical--but eventually he was very supportive."
Like parents eager for their children to follow in their footsteps, faculty naturally are pleased when their students go on to fill similar roles in academia, says Margaret Ferguson, English professor and graduate director. Academia is what they know. "I think, though, that with the broadening of the demographics in the professoriat--with the entrance of many more women, with the changes in ethnicity and economic background--that they are a little bit more likely to see some value in doing something other than what they were trained to do."
Curriculum changes can also be made in support of alternative careers. The AAU report recommends that curriculum be evaluated "to ensure that it equips the students with the knowledge and skills needed for a broad array of postdoctoral careers." Steps are being taken in that direction at UC Davis. One important initiative is the creation of areas of "designated emphasis"--graduate minors--that allow doctoral students to take courses in a related area of emphasis to complement their primary field of study. Second-
language studies is one such designated emphasis, for example; it can be paired with study of a specific foreign language to prepare a graduate to teach students who speak English as a second language.
New degrees are also being created--degrees that provide the advanced study that students might seek but that require less time than a Ph.D. and prepare students for professional positions outside academia. These degrees include what's called "terminal" master's degrees; they are complete programs of study in themselves and not just a first step to a Ph.D.
At UC Davis, several new master's degree programs have recently been approved or proposed, including programs in medical informatics (designed for health professionals seeking to strengthen their computer skills), health-care ethics, forensic science and international commercial law.
In addition, the University of California will soon be granting a new Master of Advanced Study degree, designed chiefly for working adults. Using planning grants from the UC Office of the President, individual campuses are drafting proposals for pilot programs leading to the degree. At UC Davis, proposals have been made in the areas of computer science, maternal and child nutrition, and infant development.
The master's degree is a real growth area in the country, says Dean González. But, she points out, UC campuses have to decide which master's programs are appropriate for them to offer and which should more appropriately be offered on California State University campuses. "What we are trying to do here is to have the kinds of programs that are appropriate for research institutions. We can't do everything, so we have to do something that makes sense for us."
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Postdocs: In limbo
In addition to providing assistance to graduate student jobseekers, campuses are increasingly aware that they must also assist their postdoctoral students--those students who have graduated and secured temporary jobs as researchers in campus labs. New science Ph.D.s are twice as likely today to take a postdoctoral position as they were in previous decades and to hold them longer, points out the NRC report. And it's now not unusual for Ph.D. graduates to spend five years or more as postdocs building the research credentials required by employers both in and out of academia and to fill time while they wait for permanent employment.
Unfortunately, these recent Ph.D.s--no longer graduate students, not yet faculty--feel "kind of adrift, almost invisible," says Dean McNamee, who recently formed a committee to assist postdocs in the Division of Biological Sciences. The committee plans to survey the division's postdocs to assess their needs and perhaps provide courses, speakers and opportunities for them to interact. Similar efforts are being proposed for postdocs systemwide by the Council of Graduate Deans.
McNamee notes that many postdocs have expressed their pleasure at working in a university setting and their desire for more opportunities for permanent research employment on campus. "They wish there were more ways to sustain a research career that aren't faculty positions, allowing them to work in a stimulating environment with some security of funding, to do topnotch research and not worry about becoming a professor or going to a company. Many people feel this is an overlooked option."
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Keeping track
Few universities keep systematic data about former students' career activities, especially students who are more than one or two years out. "This lack of information about Ph.D. student placement should not continue," the AAU report states emphatically.
At UC Davis, tracking is on the agenda, says Dean González. "Tracking is something we would definitely like to do. We need to know where our graduate students are going in order to help them get there."
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A plan for action
For those students committed to entering academia, there are some optimistic signs. Community colleges in California are expected to hire some 700 tenure-track instructors this coming fall, providing an infusion of full-time faculty into a system that has relied heavily on part-timers. Four-year institutions in the state are also starting to rebuild following the poor budget times of the early 1990s, replacing many faculty lost to early retirement and expanding programs in select areas.
At UC Davis, the Chancellor's Fall Conference is just one indication that the campus is committed to solving problems facing graduate education. Conference participants brainstormed an extensive list of recommendations addressing recruitment, curriculum, mentoring and placement, and Dean González is currently at work developing a plan to follow up on those recommendations. Participants drawn from across campus returned to their departments, many eager to put those ideas to work. It is hoped that those efforts, coupled with a strong economy and job growth, will ensure strong employment of UC Davis graduates.
And that will be important. The campus plans to increase its graduate enrollment by some 700 students over the next eight years as it accommodates the state's growing student population. It has no desire to give substance to the oft-told joke that Ph.D. stands for "Pizza Hut delivery."
Graduate student Streuber offers the reminder that the mater in alma mater comes from the word for mother, and says, "If the university wants to understand itself as alma mater, it needs to assume greater responsibility for the job placement of its 'children.'"
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