[Editor's note: Michael Elliot returns! Thanks, Michael, doing this.]
While I was a graduate student, I went to a meeting during which the Director of Graduate Studies was asked about the department’s “placement rate.” The DGS wanted to emphasize the positive, and so he stated that it was nearly one hundred percent: Everyone who had kept looking for a tenure-track position and not given up, he said, eventually found one.
Even I could see the fallacy of the argument: after two or three or four tries at landing a tenure-track professorship, most PhDs will find other kinds of paying work because, well, they need to be paid. (I didn’t bother to ask how such a badly managed department was actually keeping records to document this miraculous job placement.) I thought about this exchange when, in response to Mark Taylor’s antiestablishment polemic, Sunday’s New York Times published this letter:
Doctoral programs that fail to place their graduates in research positions should not respond by attempting to become M.B.A. or M.P.A. programs. Instead, they would better serve their prospective students by setting the right expectations through full disclosure of their recent graduate placement history. With this information, applicants could make informed decisions when choosing a graduate school.
I share the desire for transparency, and I probably would have said the same thing when I was a graduate student. But I am increasingly wary of focusing too much on “the placement rate” as the magic number that will make comparison shopping possible.
To start, “placement” turns out to be harder to measure than you might think. Most people, when talking about humanities, mean it to be the percentage of people who seek tenure-track jobs and find them. But what exactly does that mean? What about those people who seek tenure-track employment but limit their search to a handful of cities — do they get included? What about the people who land a job, but only after traveling the country for years on one-year temporary contracts? Is it the number of people who get a job in any given year? Or, as my old DGS claimed, the percentage of people who eventually get them?
At a pragmatic level, until there’s some shared definition of what “placement history” means, prospective doctoral students should be wary of putting too much stock in the information that they receive. The fact is that a substantial number of PhD’s will never conduct a national search for a tenure-track position. In my program, I often see graduating classes in which the majority are pursuing other options, including other forms of academic work, temporary teaching positions (that allow them to choose their geographic location), and jobs outside the academy. Our current DGS calculated recently that just over 60 percent of our graduates in the last five years are in tenure-track jobs. That is actually higher than I expected — and much higher than was true of my own graduate program when I was there — but it is hardly a “placement rate.”
This is not to say that we shouldn’t keep pressing for disclosure about employment. And I think everyone who teaches in a PhD program should be forced to consider carefully the employment of its graduates. But we should be careful about what we are asking for. First, forget the term “placement.” No one gets placed any more. (Maybe they never did.) PhDs get hired for jobs that they have earned. Second, it’s crucial to ask what percentage of graduates end up teaching in the academy, what percentage of those are on the tenure-track, and what other kinds of positions graduates hold.
Finally, graduate programs should calculate the average time that it takes those who seek tenure-track positions to secure them. (The national average is that it takes just over ten years from the time that a student enters graduate study.) Programs should then ask what kind of financial resources — including temporary teaching employment — their universities can provide to cover that whole duration, including the period that extends beyond when the students actually receive their degrees. Those programs that cannot identify adequate resources to cover that full spread of time should take a hard look at themselves.
10 comments
May 6, 2009 at 12:09 pm
Matt
The best “placement” pages I have seen include some sort of listing of all the people who graduate each year, what their job was the next year, and what they are doing now. This need not list the person by name, or even by dissertation title (though that’s useful- students of different professors often have very different rates of finding jobs.) This allows you to see how many people got jobs of which sort each year and where they ended up some time later. It’s not perfect, but is better than many other options. In philosophy, Rutgers has something like this:
http://www.philosophy.rutgers.edu/GRAD/placement.php
UMass’s isn’t quite as good, but isn’t bad, either
http://www.umass.edu/philosophy/grad_program/placement.htm
Michigan’s is a bit harder to read than Rutgers’ but also isn’t bad.
http://www.lsa.umich.edu/philosophy/graduatestudy/placement/20052010
These still don’t tell the full story, of course, because people who leave w/o taking the degree usually are not listed and there isn’t full information, but things along this line would certainly be useful.
May 6, 2009 at 12:26 pm
bitchphd
Placement also conveniently ignores the dropout rate and how many people end up ABD, both of which also mask the realities of doctoral education.
The “informed decision” meme is really irritating, because it really is impossible to be informed about profound demoralization and anxiety before experiencing it. It’s like saying that people who are addicted should “just quit,” or something.
May 6, 2009 at 2:45 pm
JPool
Placement rates might be useful informaiton if you were in some fields known to me only through misty rumors, but in mine randomness, who your adviser is, and perhaps individual accomplishment reigns.
I remember that, on a prospective students weekend, we grad students has done our best to create a “What to expect from grad school and do you maybe have any questions for us?” panel. Someone asked about placement and those of us on the panel loosely opined that individual experiences varied, but it seemed to be pretty good lately. Another grad student, offered that it seemed only fair to tell the students that we placed mainly to the southeast (where we’re located). She meant well, but a) we were generally suspicious of whether this was true at all (we could each think of half a dozen examples among recent grads that didn’t fit that pattern), b) if it had been true in the past the program had been different then both in where it drew students from and in their placement ambitions, c) some of our students are from the southeast and would prefer to stay there, which doesn’t mean that you, future student, are doomed to living in the region forever if you come here.
Really, I’d much rather know what kinds of support a depatrment provides in the job search process (and generally) than know their placement rate.
May 6, 2009 at 4:34 pm
Colin
OTOH too much worry about this and programs may become over-cautious about admission. A number of us got into grad school because folks took a chance on us.
May 6, 2009 at 8:58 pm
Matthew Ernest
That’s how the commonly used U-3 measure of unemployment in general is counted: if you’ve stopped looking for work, you’re not unemployed.
Why should grad students be counted any worse? They should revel in their non-un-employed discouragement!
May 7, 2009 at 4:56 am
bsci
There are several purposes of future job transparency. This post is focused primarily on answering the entering grad student question, “Will I get a faculty job if I go here?” The better question is “What types of jobs to people get with a degree from this school?” For that question, one doesn’t care exactly how long it takes to find jobs, but one does care if they can only find one or two names of people who got a faculty position within 5 or 10 years of graduation. One also cares about what jobs people are getting and if those jobs might also be interesting to the specific student.
The other key point ignored here is that if graduates are getting jobs in many places that aren’t faculty and the students are aware of this and still come, then the program also needs to adjust it’s mentorship and offered resources. If students are ok with the idea of non-research faculty jobs, is it ok for advisors to act as if those jobs are the only measure of success? Does the department bring in people who have “other” jobs so students can both get a feel for them and know how to get hired for good ones? If a history program seems to place a good number of PhDs in high schools, community colleges, museums, or policy jobs, are they providing and encouraging students to pick up the skills to get those jobs and giving networking resources?
I think engineering PhD programs and some science PhD programs are way ahead of humanities in this regard, but this is definitely something that also applies to humanities.
May 7, 2009 at 9:33 am
Adam Arenson
Grad school, even at a top place with good funding, suggested to me the power of the old pre-med chestnut:
On the first day, look to your left. Look to your right. Look at the student in front of you. (OK, across the seminar table.) Only one of you will make it.
One will drop out without finding a dissertation topic; one won’t finish the dissertation; one won’t find a job, or will be disheartened without a true, adequate, fulfilling job.
It’s true that the academy needs to take a chance on folks to broaden the pool, especially since we know most sorts of pre-assessment (like standardized tests) don’t tell us much. But then the academy needs to commit to taking responsibility for both upholding standards and ensuring success, with emotional as well as financial, practical as well as scholastic resources.
As the past president of Pace University states in response to Taylor (same NYT URL as above): “Universities will not change until three things happen. The first is the need for strict accountability and assessment of learning outcomes. The second is developing a faculty that is much more representative of the students it teaches. And third, American higher education should not be treated as a business and run as one.”
Perhaps starting with the assessment and accountability of graduate instruction would be the most eye-opening.
May 8, 2009 at 6:36 am
dr
It seems to me that we also need to include *type* of job. It could be something akin to the way people post salary information on the job wiki: “small liberal arts college, 3/3 teaching load, urban midwest” or what have you. That kind of information is invaluable while you’re in graduate school, even if you don’t realize it: you may think you’re heading for an R1 job just like the one your professors have, but it’s important for students (and programs!) to realize that those aren’t the majority of jobs people get, and to think about graduate education accordingly.
May 8, 2009 at 6:48 am
dana
One further difficulty with measuring the placement rate is that one is going to be in graduate school a long time, and it is entirely possible that the school that accepts the graduate student in 2009 really isn’t the same department at all in 2015 (or 16 or 17.)
May 8, 2009 at 7:01 am
Michael Elliott
Dana’s point is really a good one, and it’s esp. a problem for compiling data for NRC surveys and the like, esp. if the NRC never actually publishes the damn survey.
I think the key here is that a lot more is needed than a “placement rate” both so a) departments can actually face what their graduates are doing and b) prospective and current graduate students get a true sense of what the pattern is like. There is a lot of self-delusion going around on all fronts. From my own experience, I don’t hold out a lot of hope for “a.” I may try to write a longer post about this, but for now I’ll just say that my sense is that most faculty (at least in the humanities) are profoundly uninterested in thinking about PhD labor beyond touting certain kinds of tenure-track employment.