...The typical person who receives a Ph.D. in English spends eight years in graduate school, accumulates $10,000 worth of debt and is unable to find a job....The typical person with a new Ph.D. in history is 35 years old, has spent more than eight and a half years as a graduate student and faces a less than 50 percent chance of getting an academic job. Still, in 1994 the number of new Ph.D.'s in history rose 10 percent from the previous year; there are now more employable people with Ph.D.'s in history than ever before. The examples go on....
...How Did the American University reach a state in which it seems no longer able to reproduce itself efficiently? The ready assumption would be that if there are fewer jobs for professors, it must be because there are fewer students to teach, but this is not the case. In 1988, at the beginning of the current downward spiral in the job market for professors, there were 13.5 million students enrolled in American institutions of higher learning. Today, there are more than 15 million students. And these are not just part-timers: the number of bachelor's degrees awarded between 1988 and 1993 rose by more than 17 percent. It is expected that 10 years from now, the total enrollment in American colleges and universities will exceed 16 million. The bodies (with minds, presumably, attached) are there.
The academic employment crisis didn't begin yesterday. Like certain other industries, the university was a great beneficiary of the cold war. It was, for many years after 1945, the pet institution of the expanding national Government, which pumped research dollars into its programs and helped to subsidize the educations of millions of people who would otherwise have had no access to higher learning. Between 1940 and 1990, Government funds for academic research grew by a factor of 25 and enrollments increased by a factor of 10. The percentage of college-age Americans actually attending college rose from 16 percent to more than 40 percent, with half of all Americans now enjoying some exposure to higher education at some point in their lives.
The most intense period in this 50-year expansion was the 1960's. In that decade alone, enrollment increased by more than 120 percent, and more faculty positions were created than had existed in the entire 360-year history of American higher education to that point....
Many people expected that the generation of professors who entered the academic economy in the 1960's would be due for professional expiration in the 1990's -- another reason why the actual employment scene in 1996 is so discouraging. The 1990's was supposed to be the time of demographic transition in the university. But the generation of professors who got in when universities were flush is getting out when funds are evaporating. They are leaving, but their budget lines are leaving with them.
For the most striking fact about the expansion of the university since 1960, the decade in which all those professors now due to retire got their jobs, is that it took place overwhelmingly in the public sector. Between 1960 and 1980, the number of public institutions of higher education in America more than doubled -- from 700 to 1,600. And although there are today 1.5 million more students enrolled in private colleges and universities than there were in 1960, there are 8 million more students enrolled in public institutions.
And this is therefore where the crunch is being felt. With less reason to pour money into research and development now that the cold war is over, and with more pressure to lower taxes and reduce spending, the Federal Government and many state governments are reducing subsidies to public higher education. State appropriation to public higher education in California, which has the largest system in the country, was cut 29 percent between 1991-92 and 1993-94. In the same period, state expenditures on higher education nationally have decreased by 4 percent. (State expenditures on corrections, though, have increased by 40 percent. If prison guards were required to hold doctorates, the academic placement rate could be reversed overnight.)...
Academic professionalism has never been more intense, but the point of all the "rigor" is less and less self-evident.
The key statistic in the profile of the typical new Ph.D. is the extraordinary amount of time he or she has spent acquiring the thing. As the old question asks, how many graduate students does it take to screw in a light bulb? One is the answer; but it takes him seven years. The median elapsed time between the B.A. and the Ph.D. is now 10.5 years, of which 7.1 are spent as a registered student trying to get the bulb in the socket. The median age of those graduating this year with a Ph.D. is slightly over 34.
This is not a function of the difficulty of the research. Students in the humanities are among those who take the longest -- 11.9 years between degrees, 8.3 of them as registered students. William G. Bowen and Neil L. Rudenstine suggest in their landmark study, "In Pursuit of the Ph.D.," that this is because it is in the humanities that the paradigms for scholarship have become the most unclear. But whatever the reason, getting a doctorate is now an enormous investment in training for a profession that offers, in many fields, a less than 50 percent chance of employment....
...One thing that has cut American cultural life in two [= inside & outside the ivory towers] in this way is the wall of credentialism that has arisen between academic intellectuals and everyone else....David Damrosch, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia who last year published a book critical of the culture of the university, "We Scholars," points out that in 1969 fully one-third of the nation's faculty members did not have a Ph.D. But during the 1970's, he says, the doctorate became mandatory for academic employment.
When the market tightened, professionalism grew and credentialism became wildly overvalued. And the more the academy walled itself off by specialization and credentialism, the more it exacerbated its division from the rest of the educated world....