Thomas H. Benton - Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go

I came across this article while surfing about yesterday. I want to share it because it describes what motivated me to warn the philosophy 101 students I once taught to stay away from such degrees.

"Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go

By Thomas H. Benton

Nearly six years ago, I wrote a column called "So You Want to Go to Grad School?" (The Chronicle, June 6, 2003). My purpose was to warn undergraduates away from pursuing Ph.D.'s in the humanities by telling them what I had learned about the academic labor system from personal observation and experience.

It was a message many prospective graduate students were not getting from their professors, who were generally too eager to clone themselves. Having heard rumors about unemployed Ph.D.'s, some undergraduates would ask about job prospects in academe, only to be told, "There are always jobs for good people." If the students happened to notice the increasing numbers of well-published, highly credentialed adjuncts teaching part time with no benefits, they would be told, "Don't worry, massive retirements are coming soon, and then there will be plenty of positions available." The encouragement they received from mostly well-meaning but ill-informed professors was bolstered by the message in our culture that education always leads to opportunity."

[ click here to read the full article ]
That is what I realized about halfway through my master's degree studies - degrees in the humanities are largely go-nowhere endeavors that mainly benefit the professors and staff of the given department (and the only reason I stayed is that I was already almost done, and I did not pay a penny for my MA - I got a full ride and was paid a relatively large stipend for working as a teaching assistant). If they have students in their classrooms, they have a job. If the students get a degree in one of these fields, they may find work but it probably won't be much better than what they could have gotten without the degree, and it probably will have nothing at all to do with the degree that they get. Much of what these academic departments do anymore is serve as the support system for people who want to live in ivory tower bubbles of unreality where they get to be constantly convinced of their own greatness and importance, and naive students are the ones who pay for it.

That is what I told my students, that if they really enjoyed studying philosophy that they could do so on their own with a public library card - you don't need a classroom and a piece of paper saying you studied philosophy to study philosophy, and you certainly do not need to pay for it. For the students who still wanted to pursue the subject while at the university, I suggested minoring in it, or at most taking it as a double major. But aside from that I implored them to get a more marketable, monetarily valuable degree, something that could measurably improve their lives. I told them to watch out for academics trying to rope them into investing years and tens of thousands of dollars into something that may only support and perpetuate the world the academics want to stay in. I know for a fact that some of them listened (a few told me after the semester ended that they had thought of majoring in philosophy, but realized they wanted careers to result from earning a degree), and I hope that all of them did.