The Challenge of Career Diversity for Humanities PhDs
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Slides for a talk at the Council of Graduate Schools' Research and Policy Forum
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The Challenge of Career Diversity for Humanities PhDs
- 2. @americanacad /americanacad The Humanities Indicators 2
- 3. @americanacad /americanacad The Data Graveyard 3
- 4. @americanacad /americanacad Estimated Number of Postsecondary Faculty, 1999 to 2015 4
- 5. @americanacad /americanacad Distribution of Four-Year College Faculty by Tenure Status, Fall 2012 5 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% Linguistics Classical Studies Folklore History Art History Musicology Philosophy Religion English Lang. and Lit. other than English Communication Tenured Faculty Tenure-Track Faculty (Not Yet Tenured) Non-Tenure-Track, Full-Time Non-Tenure-Track, Part-time
- 6. @americanacad /americanacad Number of Jobs Advertised with Humanities Disciplinary Societies 6 0 200 400 600 800 1,000 1,200 1,400 1,600 1,800 2,000 English Lang. Other than English History Philosophy* Religion Classical Studies
- 7. @americanacad /americanacad Occupational Distribution of Doctoral Degree Holders, 2013 7 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 70 Other** Service Sales Office & Admin. Support Sciences & Engineering Management Library & Museum Legal Healthcare Education—Other Education—Postsecondary Teaching Education—Precollegiate Teaching Computer Community & Social Services Business & Financial Operations Arts, Design, Entertainment, & Media Share of Employed Ph.D.'s in Occupation (%) Management&Professional Humanities All Fields
- 8. @americanacad /americanacad Share of Doctoral Degree Holders in Postsecondary Teaching 8 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 Humanities Arts Behavioral & Social Sciences Business Education Engineering Health & Medical Sciences Life Sciences Physical Sciences All Fields Percent
- 9. @americanacad /americanacad Share of Master’s/Professional Degree Holders in Postsecondary Teaching 9 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 Humanities Arts Behavioral & Social Sciences Business Education Engineering Health & Medical Sciences Life Sciences Physical Sciences All Fields Percent
- 10. @americanacad /americanacad Share of Doctoral Degree Holders in Science and Engineering 10 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 Humanities Arts Behavioral & Social Sciences Business Education Engineering Health & Medical Sciences Life Sciences Physical Sciences All Fields Percent
- 11. @americanacad /americanacad Share of Doctoral Degree Holders in Management and Other Education Positions 11 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 Humanities Arts Behavioral & Social Sciences Business Education Engineering Health & Medical Sciences Life Sciences Physical Sciences All Fields Percent Education—Other Management
- 12. @americanacad /americanacad Two Distributions from the Humanities—Majors and PhDs 12 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 70 Other** Service Sales Office & Admin. Support Sciences & Engineering Management Library & Museum Legal Healthcare Education—Other Education—Postsecondary Teaching Education—Precollegiate Teaching Computer Community & Social Services Business & Financial Operations Arts, Design, Entertainment, & Media Share of All Employed PhDs in Occupation (%) Management&Professional Humanities Majors with a PhD in any Field Humanities PhDs with Undergraduate Degree in Any Field Humanities Indicators, 2016 · American Academy of Arts & Sciences
- 13. @americanacad /americanacad Median Annual Earnings of Full-Time Workers with a Doctoral Degree, by Field, 2013 13 0 20,000 40,000 60,000 80,000 100,000 120,000 140,000 160,000 Dollars
- 14. @americanacad /americanacad Median Annual Earnings of Full-Time Workers with a Doctoral Degree, by Field and Gender, 2013 14 0 20,000 40,000 60,000 80,000 100,000 120,000 140,000 160,000 Dollars Men Women
- 15. @americanacad /americanacad Median Annual Earnings of Full-Time Workers with a Doctoral Degree, by Field and Gender, 2013 15 0 25 50 75 100 125 150 175 200 225 250 Humanities Health & Medical Sciences** Life Sciences Education All Fields Behavioral Sciences Business Physical Sciences Engineering Annual Earnings (Thousands of Dollars) 25th Percentile Median 75th Percentile Humanities All Fields The broken black line indicates the median earnings of
- 16. @americanacad /americanacad Debt Accumulated in Graduate Studies by New PhDs 16 0 5,000 10,000 15,000 20,000 25,000 30,000 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 Constant2014Dollars Education Behavioral & Social Sciences Humanities All Fields Life Sciences Engineering Physical Sciences Humanities Indicators, 2016 · American Academy of Arts & Sciences
- 17. @americanacad /americanacad Primary Funding Source for Doctoral Studies, 2014 Cohort 17 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 Humanities Behavioral & Social Sciences Education Engineering Life Sciences Physical Sciences All Fields Percent(ofPh.D.'sReportingaPrimarySourceof Support) Field Teaching Assistantships Grants (including Fellowships) Own Resources Research Assistantships/ Traineeships Employer Humanities Indicators, 2016 · American Academy of Arts & Sciences
- 18. @americanacad /americanacad Next Questions • The connection between occupation and salary • Parsing two- and four-year college employment • Contingent faculty • Levels of job satisfaction in particular sectors • Age cohorts (25 to 34, 35 to 44, 55 to 64, 65 to 74) 18
- 19. @americanacad /americanacad Visit us at www.HumanitiesIndicators.org And contact me with specific questions at: rtownsend@amacad.org or on Twitter @rbthisted
Editor's Notes
- Just by way of some quick background for those of you who don’t know who we are. The Indicators is an online data aggregator and research shop, modeled on the NSF’s Science and Engineering Indicators, but updated on a rolling basis throughout the year. Our origins extend back to the late 1990s, but the site first went online in 2008. In the context of this conversation, it is important to note that the Indicators extend broadly across all areas of humanistic activity, and are not just limited to higher education, much less humanities PhDs. So long before academic and disciplinary societies in the field started making career diversity for PhDs a priority, we were already thinking broadly about the field and trying to provide the bigger picture.
- That said, from the beginning, we have been trying to track the occupations and earnings of humanities PhDs, relative to other fields. Unfortunately, the data sets that provided answers started dying off before we even posted up our first web site. As many of you know, the humanities were dropped out of the Survey of Earned Doctorates after 1995, and the National Study of Postsecondary Faculty was “suspended” after 2004. As a result, we have been struggling to find useful data points that can answer basic questions about career outcomes for PhDs in the field.
- As a result, we have taken to looking to other measures to track potential outcomes for humanities PhDs. In recent years, for instance, we started using the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s estimates for the number of postsecondary faculty in particular fields. Unfortunately, the BLS data only provides a total headcount, but it provides a useful picture of general trends in the field. For instance, as you can see here, the data show some plateauing of recent growth in the total number of faculty, and also provide some comparative numbers between two and four-year institutions, which has served to drive an external data collection effort, focused on community colleges, that we will be undertaking in the Spring.
- And while we do not do much in the way of original research, one of our ongoing projects is an occasional survey of departments in four-year colleges and universities. The most recent survey was conducted for the 2012-13 academic year, and among other things, it allowed us to track the number of faculty in part-time and adjunct positions. Notably, despite considerable talk about an explosion of contingent faculty employment, we found very little change between our 2007 and 2012 surveys—with more than half of the faculty in the departments either tenured or on the tenure track.
- But that is not to say things are well in the field. Over the past two years we have gathered and reported the trends in job listings posted with the major humanities disciplinary societies, and as you can see here, the trend across the board is rather grim. Job ads have fallen more than 31% across all of the major humanities disciplines. Not surprisingly, a strong interest in career diversity coincided with the particularly dramatic drop you can see here at the beginning of the recession. With that as background, at the recommendation of Nimmi Kannakuty at NSF, we decided to look at the National Survey of College Graduates, which is how we arrived at the data analysis we published last month.
- To fill in the gap, we hired an expert who has assisted us in the past with data runs from the American Community Survey. Using the public use data file, she provided runs on the occupational distribution of graduate degree recipients from humanities and other select fields. Given the sample size we did not feel comfortable trying to get down to the discipline level, so we reported using field and occupational clusters we used for past runs on the ACS. If you can make it out in the graph, you can see here the comparison between graduates with humanities PhDs to the entire population of PhD recipients. The results highlight the challenge for current efforts to promote greater career diversity in the field, as 60 percent of humanities PhDs in 2013 were employed as academic faculty, as compared to just 30% of the graduates from all fields. Part of my reason for pursuing this data came from a series of cross-disciplinary meetings I attended over the past year. The issue of academic employment came up at both meetings, but with a rather abstract quality at the science meetings, and more of a hair on fire tone at humanities meetings. The relative concentrations of employment provide a clearer explanation of the tonal differences.
- So you don’t have to strain to see the details on the graph, and to highlight some of the variations between the fields, let me focus in on a couple of the key occupational categories in our analysis. My primary interest was on the subject of postsecondary teaching, where as you can see, the humanities (shown here at the bottom) are much more concentrated than other fields. By our estimate, 60% of the employed PhDs from the field are employed in this sector, as compared to less than a third of employed PhDs in the science fields.
- Perhaps equally intriguing to us, this relative concentration in postsecondary teaching was also evident among recipients of terminal master’s degrees in the field—and I should emphasize, these are people who only have the master’s degree, and did not go on for the PhD. As you can see here, 22% of the master’s degree holders from the humanities were employed in postsecondary teaching, as compared to 4% of all master’s and professional degree recipients, though at this level the life and physical sciences are closer to the humanities.
- As many of you probably know, the science fields have a much larger array of applied and practical occupational opportunities. We found high percentages of PhDs from STEM fields are employed in what we have traditionally clustered as science and engineering occupations. About 4 percent of humanities PhDs find themselves in these occupations. Somehow. But the larger takeaway is that these fields have large and thriving employment categories outside of academia. Part of the challenge for the humanities is that we largely lack a category of practitioners outside of postsecondary teaching, so the gravitational pull toward the practices modeled by their grad school mentors remain quite strong. To put it in personal terms, there are very few people who are paid to be historians, we are generally paid to provide historical perspective under other titles and other labels.
- Two of the other key areas that draw humanities PhDs—as well as PhDs in other fields--are Education Administration and Management jobs, shown here. If you look at the red bars, you can see that a relatively large share of humanities PhDs are concentrated in these other education-related positions—typically administrative positions at the secondary or postsecondary level. Humanities falls only behind Education and Business PhDs in this category—with a share almost twice as large as the science and engineering fields. I note this because I developed an analysis of a cyberstalking survey for the AHA a couple years ago, and the share we tracked down into non-professorial academic positions was quite remarkable to me. The findings from this study highlight again how unusual the humanities are relative to other fields in the tug of the academic life for our field. And while the share shown here as employed in management jobs may seem relatively small in comparison to the other fields, it is diminished by the large share in academia. As a proportion of PhDs employed outside of academia, the share of humanities PhDs in management positions is twice as large as the share in any of the science and engineering fields.
- At the risk of making things overly complex, let me take a quick side trip along the two separate pathways through humanities to the PhD. The blue line here represents the population of humanities majors who went on to earn a PhD in any field; compared here again to the population of people who earned their PhD specifically in the humanities. As you can see here, a major in the humanities does not enclose subsequent PhD recipients as narrowly into an academic career trajectory as a PhD in the field—as the share in postsecondary teaching is 13 percentage points lower. If you look here, you can also see that just over 10% of humanities majors who went on to earn a PhD were in science and engineering jobs. We did not pursue this line of analysis further, because trying to link field of major to field of PhD introduced larger error rates than our reviewers would allow. Nevertheless, I have found it useful as a vantage point for looking at the numbers.
- Given the average faculty salaries in comparison to other areas of activity, it is not terribly surprising that the humanities wind up at the bottom of the salary scale in our tabulations. Due to cell size, we could not include the fine and performing arts, which typically serve as the Mississippi to our Arkansas on these sorts of scales. So humanities PhDs have a respectable median salary of $75,000, but that puts them well below the other fields, as the average for all is $99,000.
- I had very few expectations about what the gender gap would look like, but even with that, the earnings gap between women and men seemed shockingly large. In proportional terms, the humanities had the second largest gender gap among employed PhDs—with a 34% gap in median annual earnings between men and women—a difference of $95,000 for men and $63,000 for women. Among the STEM fields, the gap was 30% (in the life sciences), and even smaller in the other STEM fields.
- To the extent it makes things slightly better, when we break the earnings out into interquartile ranges, you can see that the bottom half of the range is fairly tightly bunched for the humanities, with the bottom 25th percentile for PhDs in the life sciences slightly lower than the humanities. And the top quartile is higher than the medians in all other fields, so there is at least a decent-sized segment in the field that are doing alright for themselves in the humanities. But, the median salary raises an important question about whether this is satisfactory compensation for longer than average times to degree and higher that average levels of debt.
- All that brings me around to some new data we published earlier this week. In the interest of trying to track the full ecology of the humanities PhD experience, we went back to the SDR, and decided to track trends in the costs of a PhD. One of the more troubling trends, especially given the data on earnings I just showed you, is that the humanities tend to be on the high side in average accumulated debt when they earn the PhD. Even adjusting for inflation, as you see here, average debt levels in the humanities increased more than 50% in the past 12 years. Education and social science PhDs are there to make the field look a little better, but the large and growing divergence from the average highlights another emerging challenge for the field.
- Perhaps not surprisingly, the differences in debt levels are pretty closely associated with the share of the students who are self-funding their studies. Shown here in the red bars, you can see that the highest share of self-funded PhDs are in education, the second-highest are in the social and behavioral sciences, and the third highest is in the humanities. And all three fields have comparatively low shares of research and traineeships, which brings us back to the perceived career pathways for graduates from the respective fields.
- Prompted by the interest and questions we have received so far, we are already looking at some additional data runs. The most obvious for those inside the humanities is to parse the average earnings for those employed in postsecondary teaching as compared to those who are employed outside the professoriate. But this reflects some of the other questions we have been discussing, and hope to sharpent them up over the next couple of months. I would welcome any thoughts or suggestions you might have for questions we missed or other angles we might take in a second look at the data.
- SO, with that, let me just encourage you to visit the site, and I will be happy to hear any questions or concerns you might have.