The future is not bright for those of you in a PhD program, at least according to the Department of Education statistics. Here are the number of doctorates awarded nationally from 1970 to 2004:
Academics don’t seem to have the smarts to understand supply and demand, so let’s break it down. The more doctorates in your field, the less yours is worth in the job market. You have probably been told that in just a few years, there will be massive retirements. That is an exaggeration. The retirements have already begun, and in many departments, have already been replaced. Your odds of ending up either not being able to find a job at all or only being able to find an adjunct position are massively greater than those who completed their PhDs ten or fifteen years ago.
And whose fault is it? The universities for handing out PhDs like candy. Let’s see who the worst offenders are:
| Doctorates conferred by institution: 1994-95 through 2003-04 | |||
| Institution | 1994-95 | 2003-04 | Increase |
| University of Florida | 400 | 694 | 294 |
| Nova Southeastern University | 450 | 705 | 255 |
| Georgia Institute of Technology | 189 | 311 | 122 |
| Johns Hopkins University | 271 | 362 | 91 |
| University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | 369 | 439 | 70 |
| University of Georgia | 342 | 404 | 62 |
| University of Pittsburgh | 324 | 382 | 58 |
| University of California, San Diego | 274 | 327 | 53 |
| Stanford University | 574 | 625 | 51 |
| Arizona State University | 305 | 355 | 50 |
Although general requirements for graduate school admissions are typically handled by the graduate school, PhD program admissions are controlled by the department committee, and data on PhD students are not publicly available. There is no way to know if departments are lowering their admission standards for their PhD programs. However, if faculty had any sense–and consistency, given their fondness for screaming about the unfairness of adjunct faculty hires–they would be admitting fewer, not more, students to their PhD programs.
Oops. That would assume these faculty had the sense to understand supply and demand, which they do not (though academic elitism, and the resulting belief that they are worth more than they in fact are, feeds this).
You’re only worth what the market will bear. Your “contribution to society,” or your idea of what you’re worth has nothing to do with it. If there are only a few people with your qualifications, you’re worth quite a bit, and if there are lots of people with your qualifications, you’re not worth much. So Monday when you see your committee, thank them for the tenure you won’t get.
Adrian says:
Well, that all depends on how the demand goes, as well. If more people are signing up for PhD programs, you need more PhDs out there to run them, don’t you? The rub will only come in if people stop signing up and we’re stuck with all these PhDs with nothing to do. They might have to go and get real jobs out in private industry. They might even, dare I say, be reduced to programming or something.
Oh my God! These are the End Times!!!
April 7, 2007, 7:57 pmRobert says:
First of all, I just want to note that the biggest drop in Ph.D. outputs shown here occurs shortly after I received my Ph.D. in 1997. Draw whatever conclusions are appropriate there.
That said, there are data I’d really like to see that would add some context here. (I browsed around the link you provided and didn’t find an exact match.)
(1) How many Ph.D.’s in the last 10-15 years have come from soft and/or nontraditional academic areas? If you looked at just the Ph.D.’s handed out in the traditional academic areas in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, how would the numbers look?
(2) Also, what proportion of these newer Ph.D.’s are coming from smaller, lesser-known schools with startup PhD programs that are barely accredited? Or online universities offering doctoral programming?
(3) How many of these “doctorates” that are being counted here are actually PhD’s at all, and how many are degrees such as the EdD or the PsyD which are “doctorates” but which don’t require a dissertation (usually)?
Finally, two questions: First, what on earth happened between 1985 and 1990 to cause such a big jump in doctorates produced? Second, who the hell is “Nova Southeastern University”?
April 7, 2007, 9:55 pmCasting Out Nines / Doctoral glut says:
[…] Rightwingprof has an article noting the rising number of doctoral degrees being given by tracking some stats from 1970 to the present and the implications of supply and demand on the academic job market. […]
April 7, 2007, 10:04 pmrightwingprof says:
I’m getting to that. I was starving, and had to go eat, and the dept of ed data are bizarrely categorized by discipline, so I’m having to go through and aggregate so we end up with categories (humanities, etc.)
Ow. Smaller universities I could do, but hunting around to find out about PhD programs is way more than I’m willing to do.
These data do not distinguish between different doctorates.
My answers are, “Dunno,” and “I wondered exactly the same thing,” respectively.
Anyway, watch this space.
April 8, 2007, 8:07 amRight Wing Nation says:
[…] Yesterday, I looked at the Department of Education data on doctorates awarded from 1971 up to 2004. I was going to look at the aggregated data by discipline, but, well, first, I don’t know if you’ve actually downloaded data from the Dept of Ed, but whoever sets up the Excel files doesn’t have a clue that Excel is for analyzing data, and not making something look like a dot matrix printout. In between each column of data you have a column that’s there just to put in a | so there will be a little line. Complete idiocy. Oh, and I was starving and had to eat. […]
April 8, 2007, 9:02 amcoderprof says:
Nova Southeastern is a brick-and-mortar not-for-profit university in Fort Lauderdale. The reason they show up on this list is that in addition to a substantial campus, they also have significant distance learning programs, including doctorates, which they have been doing for a long time.
They are very popular among college and public school administrators who feel they need a doctorate in order to advance their career. Look at almost any community college in the country, and I bet you’ll find a Nova grad either on the faculty or in the administration. I think the argument could be made that they are filling a genuine need. Obviously Nova grads are not, for the most part, competing for R1 tenure-track jobs with the grads of every other instituion on the list.
One more notable fact about Nova is that they grant more (by a wide margin) doctorates to minorities than any other university.
April 8, 2007, 2:06 pm