Context for Careers for History PhDs
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
1 like•812 views
Slides for a workshop discussion on career opportunities and challenges for history PhDs.
Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
Similar to Context for Careers for History PhDs
Similar to Context for Careers for History PhDs (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Context for Careers for History PhDs
- 1. Context for the Careers of History PhDs American Historical Association September 8, 2014
- 2. Varying (and often Conflicting) Goals • Quality of Preparation • preparing “first-rate” scholars regardless of outcomes? • Placement Rates • Placing into Research I programs? • Time to Degree • Reducing time in program to five years? • Department Ranking • Emphasizing published output by faculty • Lowered Attrition Rates • Range of Career Preparation
- 3. History PhDs and Departments, 1901 to 2010 PhDs Departments 200 180 160 140 120 100 80 60 40 20 0 12,000 10,000 8,000 6,000 4,000 2,000 0 1901-10 1911-20 1921-30 1931-40 1941-50 1951-60 1961-70 1971-80 1981-90 1991- 2000 2001-10 Departments PhD Recipients
- 4. Number of New History PhDs and Advertised Job Openings, 1970–71 to 2012–13 History PhDs AHA Job Ads 1400 1200 1000 800 600 400 200 0 1973–74 1977–78 1981–82 1985–86 1989–90 1993–94 1997–98 2001–02 2005–06 2009-10 2013-14
- 5. Recruitment
- 6. Average Number of Applicants and Doctoral Students in History PhD Programs, 2006 to 2013 Avg. # of Applicants Avg. # of Doctoral Students 140 120 100 80 60 40 20 0 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013
- 7. Average Number of Applications to PhD Programs in Conference, 2007 and 2012 400 350 300 250 200 150 100 50 0 2007 2012 CIC Schools Ivy League schools Pac12 Schools SEC schools
- 8. Average Number of Matriculations into PhD Programs in Conference, 2007 and 2012 25 20 15 10 5 0 2007 2012 CIC Ivy Pac12 SEC
- 9. Diversity
- 10. History PhDs by Race/Ethnicity, 1995 to 2012 100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% White, Non-Hispanic Other/Unknown Races & Ethnicities Black, Non-Hispanic Hispanic Asian or Pacific Islander American Indian or Alaska Native Humanities Indicators, 2014 · American Academy of Arts & Sciences
- 11. Bachelors Degree Recipients in History by Race/Ethnicity, 1995 to 2012 100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% White, Non-Hispanic Other/Unknown Races & Ethnicities Black, Non-Hispanic Hispanic Asian or Pacific Islander American Indian or Alaska Native Humanities Indicators, 2014 · American Academy of Arts & Sciences
- 12. Women among History Degree Recipients, 1987 to 2012 Doctorate Degrees Bachelor's Degrees 100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% Humanities Indicators, 2014 · American Academy of Arts & Sciences
- 14. Status of Previous Matriculants at Programs, 2012 100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% Completed In Progress Quit Status Unknown 5-year's after Matriculation 10-year's after Matriculation
- 15. Approximate Track of a Doctoral Student Cohort over 10 Years 100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% Student Transitional Employment Tenure Track Appointment NonAcademic Employment Will Not Finish Year 1 Year 2 Year 3 Year 4 Year 5 Year 6 Year 7 Year 8 Year 9 Year 10
- 16. Proportion of Students with Financial Support 100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% CIC Ivy Pac12 SEC PhD Students Receiving Financial Aid PhD Students as TAs
- 17. Preparing Students for Careers
- 18. Institutional Priorities in Preparation of PhD Students, 2001 100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% Research Universities Other 4-Year Colleges Historical Societies/Sites Government Business High Priority Moderate Low/ Not a Priority
- 19. Areas of Employment for All History PhDs, 2013 2-Year Non-tenure Track 3.1% 2-Year Tenure Track 2.4% 4-Year Non-tenure Track 14.7% 4-Year Tenure Track 50.6% Other Employment 24.2% Retired 1.1% Deceased 1.1% Not found 2.8%
- 20. Movement of Graduates from Two History Doctoral Programs to Academic Employment in 2011
- 21. Movement between Conferences from History PhD to Job 14% 12% 10% 8% 6% 4% 2% 0% CIC Ivy Pac12 SEC CIC Ivy Pac12 SEC
- 22. Employment of Recent History PhDs, by Conference, 2013 100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% CIC Ivy Pac12 SEC 2-Year NTT 2-Year TT 4-Year NTT 4-Year TT Other Employment
- 23. Academic Employment of History PhDs by Field, 2013 100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% Tenure Track Non-Tenure Track Research Univ. 4-Year 2-Year Research University Other 4-Year 2-Year
- 24. Jobs for History PhDs Outside the Professoriate 5% Asia Latin America Europe North America 4% 3% 2% 1% 0%
- 25. PhDs in the History of North America Deceased, 1.3% Federal Government, 3.2% Business, 2.9% 4-Year Tenure Track, 43.8% 4-Year Nontenure Track, 15.4% 4-year Administration, 3.5% 2-Year Tenure Track, 2.9% 2-Year Nontenure Track, 4.0% 2-Year Administration, 0.2% For-profit Admin or Faculty, 0.5% Independent Scholar, 2.7% K-12, 3.6% Library/Museum/Archive, 2.0% Non-Profit, 3.9% Not found, 3.3% Other, 0.4% Publishing/ Editing, 0.8% Researcher, 0.7% Retired, 1.2% Self-Employed, 2.5% State/ Local Government, 1.2% The Job Picture for Two Specializations PhDs in Latin American History Deceased, 1.9% Federal Government, 3.1% Business, 3.8% 4-Year Tenure Track, 65.4% 4-Year Nontenure Track, 8.8% 4-year Administration, 1.9% 2-Year Tenure Track, 0.6% 2-Year Nontenure Track, 1.9% 2-Year Administration, 0.0% For-profit Admin or Faculty, 0.0% Independent Scholar, 1.3% K-12, 1.3% Library/Museum/Archive, 0.0% Non-Profit, 2.5% Not found, 1.3% Other, 0.0% Publishing/ Editing, 1.3% Researcher, 0.6% Retired, 0.6% Self-Employed, 2.5% State/ Local Government, 1.3%
- 26. Type of Employer of History PhDs, by NRC Ranking of Program 100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% Univ. w. High Research Activity Other Coll. or Univ. Non-faculty Employment Top-Quartile 2nd Quartile 3rd Quartile 4th Quartile Ranking of Program that Conferred Degree
- 27. Distribution of History PhDs Recipients by Subject and NRC Ranking of Program 70.0% 60.0% 50.0% 40.0% 30.0% 20.0% 10.0% 0.0% Top Rated 2nd Quarter 3rd Quarter Bottom Rankings Africa Asia Europe Latin America U.S.
- 28. Employment of History PhDs by Field Specialization, 2013 100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% Research Univ. 4-Year 2-Year K-12 Other (Business/Gov't) Africa Asia Latin America Europe North America Public History
- 29. Field Specializations of Jobs and PhDs, 2012 and 2013 500 450 400 350 300 250 200 150 100 50 0 Africa Asia Latin America Middle East Europe North America Junior Faculty Openings, 2012-13 New PhDs, 2011-12
- 30. Digital History
- 31. Digital History in AHA Job Advertisements, 2003-04 to 2012–13 900 800 700 600 500 400 300 200 100 0 AHA Job Ads Digital/New Media Jobs 2003–04 2008-09 2011-12 2013-14
- 32. Digital and New Media Historians in AHA Directory, 2014 Other Faculty and Historians 99.7% Digital/New Media 0.3%
- 33. Engagement with Digital Humanities, Fall 2012 100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% Offered Seminar Focusing on Digital Method Formal Guidelines for Evaluating Digital Pub's for Tenure and Promotion History Liberal Arts Colls Comprehensive Coll. And Univs Research Univs History Depts at… All History Depts English Depts Foreign Language Depts Religion Depts Philosophy Depts Humanities Indicators, 2014 · American Academy of Arts & Sciences
- 34. Technology Activity of Historians by Age Cohort, 2010 100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% Under 45 46 to 65 Over 65 Digital Humanist Active User Passive User Avoider
- 35. Proportion of History Depts. Offering Online Courses, 2012-13 100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% Liberal Arts Colleges Master's Coll. and Univ's Research Universities Public Coll. and Univ's Private Coll. and Univ's Fully Online Courses Hybrid Courses Humanities Indicators, 2014 · American Academy of Arts & Sciences
- 36. Future Issues
- 37. Alignment of Jobs and Undergraduate Students AHA Job Ads History as % of All Degrees 3.5% 3.0% 2.5% 2.0% 1.5% 1.0% 0.5% 0.0% 1200 1000 800 600 400 200 0 All Undergrad Degrees Job Openings
- 38. Average Age AHA Job Ads 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 Alignment of Jobs and Demographics 1200 1000 800 600 400 200 0 Average Age Job Openings
- 39. Crucial Factors for Successful Reform • Shared sense of purpose by the entire department • Collective sense of responsibility • Clear objectives
- 40. For additional data and information: See the AHA web site at http://www.historians.org/info/AHA_Data.cfm and visit my new home at http://HumanitiesIndicators.org And feel free to e-mail me at rtownsend@amacad.org with questions.
Editor's Notes
- One of the challenges for any program thinking about reform, particularly of a doctoral program, is the multiplicity of often conflicting goals. Among reformers outside a department, the goals are generally the reduction of time to degree and attrition. For reformers in an academic administration, it is often increasing the department’s ranking. And for faculty within a department, it can range from adjusting the departments focus to improving the quality of the graduates from the program. These goals are not mutually exclusive, but they are often held with widely varying levels of intensity, so gatherings like this are vital to make sure everything is on the table, and every voice is heard.
- Let’s step back and take a look at the big picture. As you can see that the number of PhDs conferred in any given decade has risen and fallen, usually about five to ten years after the corresponding shifts in the job market. But the number of programs has moved inexorably upward regardless of the number of jobs and degrees being conferred. While a handful of programs tend to close in years with bad job markets, a larger number of programs invariably make the case that their departments could serve a distinct niche—that can be state need, or a specialization in Latin American history or digital history.
- Among other problems, the extended time to degree tends to make it very difficult for a department to act flexibly in response to fluctuations on the academic job market. In my time series showing the relationship between AHA job ads and history PhDs, there were very few years in which more jobs were advertised than PhDs—which seems like reason enough to take a more expansive approach in the preparation of doctoral students. What is perhaps most notable on this graph is that even with the rise and fall in jobs over the past 15 years, the number of PhDs since the late 1990s has been fairly consistent at about 1,000 each year.
- Moving from the general to the specific, let me start with some data on the input side of the equation.
- It is worth noting that despite the anxieties about the academic job market, the number of applicants to history programs actually increased through the worst of the recession—in part due to federal incentives to back to school, and in part to people looking for something to do while out of work. Notably, the number of doctoral students in the program increased only slightly.
- To provide a closer visualization to your situation, I clustered the findings of the data into the conferences. In part because it provides useful regional comparisons. As you can see, the CIC schools generally fit midway between the Ivy league and the flagship schools that comprise the Pac 12 and SEC schools.
- Despite the increase in the number of applications, the average number of students matriculating into programs was lower in 2012 than in 2007, as departments have been responding by reducing admissions. I think it remains to be seen how the departments respond to the recent declines in applications, since the threshold number of students necessary to maintain a functioning program remains uncertain.
- I noted that diversity was listed among the goals of the department on the recruitment side, and have been working on that very subject at the Academy, so I can provide the trends and perhaps demonstrate some of the challenges for you here.
- As you can see the PhD recipients in the field are still largely white and non-Hispanic, with much of the change in the past 17 years occurring in the proportion of respondents declining to select a racial category for whatever reason.
- As you can see, however, our problems start much higher in the pipeline with a similarly small representation of students from racial and ethnic minority groups entering history even at the undergraduate level. Too many history programs I’ve spoken to in the past simply focused on recruiting from the already small pool, but frankly, until we can expand the overall pool of students looking at history as freshman and sophomores, this is likely to be a hard challenge.
- A similar problem presents itself in the area of gender diversity as well. The proportion of women earning doctoral degrees in history is almost identical to the representation of women among those earning bachelor’s degrees.
- After admissions, programs face a range of additional challenges that tend to be lumped on the rubrics of time to degree and attrition. In my experience, university administrators rarely understand why it takes so long, while most faculty cannot understand why the administrators want to sacrifice quality to an artificial deadline.
- One of the ways I’ve tried to measure progress is simply be taking two snapshots—asking the status of students 5 and 10 years after entering the program. Just looking at the CIC schools, you can see the challenges in trimming the number of years to the degree. Among the PhD programs in the CIC schools, at the five year mark only 13 percent of the students had completed the degree. A larger proportion—22 percent—had already left the program. At the Key recommendation: Have early consultations with students to assure they are making a good transition, and appropriate progress.
- My best approximation of how those snapshots play out over time is shown here, which tries to average out the experience of a typical cohort of doctoral students in history in the decade after they enter the program. Part of the challenge is simply the range of changes that can take place within a five to ten year span. As you can see, on average about 8 percent will not even finish the first year, and another large batch will wash out as they reach the dissertation stage. Those who press on to year five will generally either finish or linger on for a long time. As you can see, by the end of year ten, I estimate that almost ten percent are still nominally on the books, and a few of them will finish. But after the eight-year mark, their odds of entering the tenure track are incredibly slim. Meanwhile, about 28 percent of those who started a decade earlier are in tenure track positions, another 16% are in non-tenure track faculty positions, and another 14% will have taken up employment outside the professoriate.
- Even though CIC is second in terms of average number of PhDs, it was last in the proportion of students receiving some sort of financial aid, though with a notably lower percentage of those receiving aid working as TA’s. Even though solid funding increases time to degree, a substantial amount of funding in the form of TA-ships will slow the time to degree.
- Turning then to careers,
- It will come as no surprise, but history doctoral programs focus much of their training on academic jobs. And these percentages are generally quite similar in surveys of doctoral students about their priorities for work after the PhD, with about 70 percent focusing in on academic employment. I think the students bring many of these expectations in with them before they even start in the program, but as you can see, PhD programs do little to adjust this sense of priorities. And to some extent the numbers match the employment outcomes quite closely—even as this suggests a problem for the 25 percent of the sample who took employment outside of academia, and the 20-odd percent who are employed in adjunct positions.
- As my recent report with Maren Wood demonstrated, two-thirds of all history PhDs conferred between 1998 and 2009 went on to jobs at four-year colleges and universities, and another 5.5% got jobs at two-year colleges. But of course the numbers look rather different when you start to break them down by some of the qualitative aspects of academic employment, such as the proportion on and off the tenure track. In a study I am now working on for the Academy about the distribution of faculty in humanities departments, one of the persistent questions has been why people would choose to take and linger on in these terribly underpaid and underappreciated positions. Many factors come into play, such as geographic mobility and other life choices, but a significant factor is in the expectations that are there from the beginning of graduate training.
- The other reason for thinking beyond the simple cutting of programs or students is the disparity between the job markets that different programs serve. There is a marked difference between the Harvards and the lower ranked PhD program in the academic job markets they serve—at least in a relatively normal job market. In an analysis I did a few years ago, I found the PhDs from the elite schools were working on a more national job market—and choosing a life outside of academia if they could not find an academic job to their level of expectations, while the smaller lower ranked programs were serving closer by academic institutions (2-year and 4-year) that students from the elite programs would tend to ignore.
- As it turns out, the CIC schools are fairly unusual in the proportion of students who move out onto the national market. Just looking at circular motion into the flagships of the four conferences, you can see, much higher proportions of the students generally end up in the doctoral programs in their own region, with the Ivy League being the most insular. This focus on local markets is quite normal as the length of time spent in doctoral study increases the odds that a students will put down roots and become much less mobile
- The mix across the different conferences is quite telling, as you can see that they are is less variation in placements to four-year tenure track positions. Even among the Ivy League schools, less than two-thirds of the PhDs go on to tenure track. What is particularly striking is the way that they send none of their students on to two year employment. Their students seem more likely to go on to employment outside of academia rather than take up the kinds of jobs that state flagship and other programs serve.
- At the risk of making this point hopelessly complex, I thought it might be useful to further break out the academic sectors by employment on and off the tenure track. As you can see, the breakdown of employment on the tenure track generally corresponds to field specializations once again. Even as specialists in the history of Europe and North America are less likely to land jobs in academia, they are also less likely to land jobs on the tenure track in academia. (The one outlier here is in African history, where you can see a slightly larger portion of PhDs in our sample ended up off the tenure track at 4-year colleges and universities.
- Just to zoom in a bit on those jobs outside of academia, you can see that we are talking about a not inconsiderable number of PhDs in a number of areas of employment, with the government sector serving as a particularly large section of employment. For the moment, this data can only suggest the diverse array of jobs that PhDs might take, as our data cannot provide a clear sense of the connection between something the PhD recipient might have done during their studies. But at a personal and anecdotal level I can say that creating courses and opportunities for study that fall outside the usual textual research and writing can serve as a vital entrée to careers in these sorts of jobs. In my own experience, it was a class in quantitative methods—a class that I took only because it was a requirement, to be perfectly honest—that opened my way into my career at the AHA. And my classes in new media at the program in George Mason both enriched my work at the AHA, and helped open up my current job at the Academy.
- Part of our rationale for taking up this project was to provide a clearer sense of the full array of career options, and if you can see it, here is an example of how two fields compare on the full range of job categories that we used in the study. In both cases, it was our interest to provide a better sense of the sorts of careers history PhDs have from different field specialization, and to demonstrate that a significant portion are likely to continue to enter into jobs outside of academia.
- This becomes more evident when you look at a distribution of employment by the ranking of students’ doctoral programs. I was surprised to discover that the proportion of history PhDs going on to jobs outside the professoriate was pretty consistent across the different tiers of history doctoral programs—as a bit less than a third of the students at each quartile went on to nonacademic jobs. The real disparity was in the mix of employing academic institutions for those in the professoriate. Students receiving their PhDs from the elite institutions were much more likely to wind up at institutions that promote high research activity, while PhDs from other programs tended to wind up in colleges and universities with greater teaching orientations.
- The issue of field specialization leads on to another issue that looms large in many minds—the ranking or status of the programs conferring the degree. When we parse the field specializations of students receiving degrees across the most recent rankings of history PhDs programs by the National Research Council, you can see a very interesting pattern emerges in the programs. Programs that wound up in the lower tiers of the rankings were more likely to have a smaller number of specialties than the top ranked programs, and confer a disproportionate number of degrees. (Could go into the chicken and egg issues here—are they lower ranked because they have fewer specializations, or do they have fewer specializations because they have smaller programs and are less capable to serve a wider array of programs—if you look at the list, I think you could spot programs that fit into either and sometimes both categories. Suggestion that programs need respectable core number of faculty and students specializing in a particular subjects. That is part of the reason American history and world history are so evenly distributed across all the rankings of the colleges and universities. As you can see here, around 60 percent of the PhDs in the other specializations are all coming from the top-ranked programs—because they can speciali
- The complexity about training expands when we shift the picture out to factor in the fields of specialization of the PhD recipients. As you can see, Americanists are less likely to wind up in 4-year academic institutions of either type—and are more evenly distributed across the major employment categories outside academia, which suggests the need for some further consideration and analysis of the types of job preparation in particular fields of specialization. And what this does not show, is that specialists in American and European history are also more likely to wind up in adjunct faculty positions, since the ratio of PhDs to jobs is the most out of balance. Notably, only a quarter of the PhDs are finding jobs of any sort in research universities. From most of our research, it appears that most programs focus their training on preparing their students to research, critically analyse primary and secondary source materials, and write books. Preparation for the sorts of academic jobs that they will take up at most academic institutions—generally involving a significant amount of teaching—is treated haphazardly at best. And training for jobs outside of academia, even those involving a significant amount of historical research—as in public history—is similarly accidental.
- In the end, these disparities are hardly surprising, as the gap between the number of PhDs and the number of academic jobs is quite pronounced in a number of fields—as you can see here from the latest jobs report—the gap between academic jobs and new PhDs in U.S. history is almost 2 to 1. We do not have any data to suggest that the 70 percent of history PhDs aspiring to academic jobs is evenly distributed across the disciplines. In my own experience, as someone who dropped out of a European history PhD and back in a decade later for a PhD in U.S. history, I suspect that U.S. history PhDs include a disproportionate number of PhDs who are back in for job reasons outside of academia. That seems like an area that PhD programs should be aware of, and consider in the organization of their programs.
- I know that digital history is an important priority here in the department, so let me share a little information about where that fits in the profession.
- Digital history is a rising field, relative to the larger mix of jobs the AHA has received through the years. As you can see here, while the number of job ads has been going down over the past ten years, the number of jobs specifying digital history would benefit a candidate
- Despite the rise in the number of jobs advertised, the number of faculty actually listing a specialization in either digital or new media history in the AHA’s directory of history departments and organizations remains miniscule—just 0.3% in the version that is currently online.
- At the departmental level, there is actually a bit more engagement with digital history. These are findings from a study I will be releasing in September. Less than 15% of the history departments report teaching classes in digital methods, and less than 10% report including digital media in the guidelines for tenure and promotion. History is not alone among the humanities, but it suggests some of the inertial forces
- Even though there is a tendency to think this is a passing phase (one that will be addressed, in the words of one new media proponent, “one funeral at a time”), that same survey showed only modest differences between the age cohorts on the creative integration of new media into their work. Even among the under-45 cohort in 2010, barely 6 percent indicated they were using technologies to do more than simplify and aid traditional research and writing tasks.
- While digital history may still be struggling to find a toe-hold as a scholarly enterprise, it is becoming a substantial aspects of the teaching enterprise at history departments. Over 70% of the departments at public colleges and universities, particularly among graduate level programs, are teaching fully online courses. To the extent you can incorporate preparation for this kind of teaching into your preparation of students, you will be adding another tool for your students careers.
- Just to wrap up. I am not much for predictive statistics, but I can share a couple of indicators that might suggest the future direction of employment for our discipline.
- The most obvious factor that is cited is the play a significant role, is the number of undergraduate students in history that require teaching. As you can see looking simply at the number of majors is not a perfect
- A lot of factors play into the job market for history PhDs, but we can look ahead and see one of the variables pretty clearly. On this chart, I’ve plotted the average age of the faculty at various points in relation to the AHA’s job ads. As you can see, the peak in job advertisements that occurred in the early 2000s corresponded to a wave in the average age that peaked near 60 in 2001. That demographic wave has now subsided, and the average age had fallen to the lowest level in my records as of 2012. Looking ahead, it seems likely that retirements from history departments will remain relatively low for the next decade, so in the absence of other factors, such as a sharp rise in majors, the number of openings is likely to remain at a fairly low ebb for some years to come.
- So that is about all I can say out of the data. While I cannot speak to broader issues of program reform from the numbers, there are a few characteristics of that seem to make these true: shared sense of purpose by the entire department, the establishment of clear objectives, and a collective sense of responsibility for their implementation.
- Just to sum up, I think none of these issues are entirely insurmountable, but I suspect it would require substantial structural changes at the doctoral level. For the integration of digital history, for instance, we would need a concerted effort to actively seek and provide incentives to students interested in making a substantive use of new media, and then develop a curriculum that separates the assessment of research skills and content knowledge from the forms in which it is assessed—allowing a web site to substitute for a research paper for instance. And in the case of the relationship between jobs and PhDs, unless there is a sudden and unexpected systemwide enthusiasm for doctoral eugenics, the only other alternative is the development of training programs that provide the flexibility to move forward with an array of career opportunities. Unfortunately, for the reasons I’ve set out here, I do not yet see the will or energy to substantially change the discipline’s ways, which is why I suspect the future of the history PhD will look very much like its past. Thank you.