Sorry about the length of this, but I wanted to offer a follow-up to my post on PhD oversupply from a few days ago. I’d like to thank everyone who responded on and off-list, and note that if I haven’t yet responded to you personally, I have read your e-mail and appreciate your thoughts. It should surprise no one that I was contacted by many PhD students and graduates in a similar position to mine, stuck in the perpetual grind of casual work or long-term unemployment, on top of which must be balanced unpaid efforts in academic writing, project proposals and (sometimes absurdly onerous) job applications. I certainly don’t feel ungrateful for the opportunities and privileges I’ve enjoyed as a PhD student and I don’t sense those feelings from any others. After everything, I still don’t feel like my PhD waste of time. I’m more interested in finding solutions to problems than cursing my bad luck, and I hope that’s the attitude taken by others in my position. However, after hearing diverse views from faculty, graduates and students, there does seem to be a fairly widespread acknowledgement that we are collectively engaged in something rather illogical and potentially damaging by channeling significant resources into professional training programmes for a shrinking and largely inaccessible profession. When these concerns are voiced publicly they’re typically met with three types of response: 1) Generally sympathetic comments from people with experience or inside knowledge of the situation; 2) Some variation on ‘The world doesn’t owe you a job!’; 3) Some variation on ‘If you’re half as smart as your doctorate would suggest, then why didn’t you study science or engineering? What made you think you could get a job with a PhD in arts/humanities/social science?’

Arguments 2 and 3, however snidely they may be phrased, can often strike a chord of self-doubt in anyone whose ‘Job Applications’ folder is as fat as mine. I want to address that issue later, but first it’s important to note that many PhD programmes aren’t to likely downsize any time soon, irrespective of the job prospects for their graduates. If anything, some will continue to expand (see http://www.economist.com/node/17723223). One obvious reason for this is that universities aren’t going to turn down tuition for the sake of limiting job market competition (nor should they). There are also other, trickier, factors at play. As one professor (who hopefully doesn’t mind being quoted anonymously) put it to me: ‘Maybe it is a tragedy of the commons -- we all want to protect our own programs, even as we recognize that there is a problem with oversupply. And we wait for the axe to fall, for administration to decide that graduate programs should be cut entirely, or whittled down, and we hope it isn't us who feel the knife, but if we do, at least we didn't do it to ourselves...’ Furthermore, it’s no secret that graduate education often serves as a welcome escape from a stagnant, uncertain and lacklustre career path, particularly in an era of diminishing economic opportunity (real or perceived). Hate your job? Feel like you’re not utilising your full potential? There’s still somewhere you can go. Yes, it takes years of hard work. It’ll be emotionally draining and financially debilitating, but the payoff will be totally worth it. Imagine getting paid to do research – to study what you’re passionate about! And did I mention get paid?!?

And this is where I want to respond directly to arguments 2 and 3. It’s extremely patronising to imply that anyone who earns a PhD feels an automatic entitlement to the job of their dreams. If anything, those of us who started our doctorates within the last ten years are intimately aware of the grueling job competition – so please give us some credit for that. Nobody is going into this completely blind to the realities – the realities are just getting tougher by the day. We’re well aware of the difficulties and yet we choose to do this anyway. Why? Because we care about what we do, just like the generation of academics that came before us, and we’re willing to make some sacrifices so that we can feel good when we get up in the morning. We want to take pride in where we work and what impact our work can have, and to know that our knowledge and training isn’t being wasted on jobs that demand none of it. This resolve grows stronger throughout our academic careers, first on master’s courses as we grow to understand the practice of professional scholarship, and then as doctoral students, where our confidence develops along with our range of skills in data collection, analysis, writing, public speaking and – not insignificantly – navigating the complicated byways of university structures, funding agencies and the publishing industry. This period is fundamentally formative in that it reveals many of the frustrations and challenges of an academic career, enough to ensure that some students will decide not to pursue one. For those that do choose to continue, much of what happens to us as doctoral students reinforces our desire and our assuredness. However daunting the conference talks may be, however glacial the publishing process might seem, however burdensome the teaching duties are, we still make it through. And that convinces us that we can do this thing after all.  Everything else then conspires to reinforce this conviction: the enthusiastic responses at conference talks, the acceptance of a journal paper, the positive feedback from students, the sincere and complimentary references from well-respected scholars… Everything to this point is telling us that we can beat the odds, and we carry this confidence through graduation.

For a majority of us, the full horror of our situation unfolds slowly but inevitably, as 10, 15, 30, 50, 60 job applications all meet with the same stock response. On the advice of elders, we initially believe that we can ‘pick up some teaching’ or ‘just do research assistant work for a couple years’ before landing something more stable. If only it were that easy. An even more misguided comment, to which we are regularly subjected, suggests that we should consider ‘just going back’ to another sector, where the pay is allegedly better and HR managers are apparently appreciative of our qualifications. In most cases this is completely deluded. Unless we’re willing to erase all of our most significant achievements from our CVs (as I’ve done to secure my current job), there is often nowhere else to go. We realise, probably later than we should, that every time we apply to a job, we are competing with dozens of people whose achievements match or surpass our own, and are likely to be carrying some other kind of advantage. Often this advantage is as simple as the good fortune to have finished a PhD a couple years sooner. So chance didn’t favour us with this application, and it probably won’t with the next. Tough shit. It’s not just the financial stress that weighs so heavily, but also the depressing recognition that we may never have a chance to execute some of our ideas, that we hold the key to research that will probably never get done. It’s hard to keep that thought at bay as the weeks and months pass at our office and retail jobs, which we perform diligently while knowing that another Statement of Research and Teaching Interests awaits us at home, and more writing for the financial benefit of Wiley or Elsevier is what the weekend holds in store. If we publicly question how this situation came to be, or why universities continue to perpetuate it, we get hundreds of virtual fingers jabbing us in the chest, telling us that the world doesn’t owe us a job and that we should have studied something useful.

So that’s why we fight for these jobs, not because we feel like we’re entitled to an easy life. We’ve undergone years of top-level training for a profession that, if student numbers and research funding are any indicator, is still in demand. I know I don’t represent everyone and I’m not pretending that my situation is universal, but I’ve heard from enough people to know that it’s a fair representation of what many of new PhD graduates face. The question is what to do about it. No one really seems to know, but I think it’s time we start talking about it a little more seriously. This e-mail list contains more than 3500 addresses. Some people probably won’t read this and some might be too comfortable to care, but even if a thousand feel like this is an important issue, then that seems like a pretty strong collectivity. I’d hate to think that we’re too powerless to do anything at all. I don’t expect to see any immediate result from writing all this, but I do hope that if nothing else I can encourage scholars in relative positions of power to think hard about what kind of opportunities await the next generation of geographers that they’re training, and what they can do to strengthen or expand them. That’s less a demand for senior academics to solve the problem for the rest of us than a call for everyone to work together to figure this out.

Thanks for hearing me out.

-       Andrew

________________________________________
From: A forum for critical and radical geographers [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Hillary Shaw [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 25 February 2014 10:12
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: PhD surplus and post-doc deficit

There's an interesting, albeit rather strange-sounding, model, of job search by candidates and hiring by employers, called the Diamond Coconut Model (DCM), after an economist called Diamond.

http://home.uchicago.edu/~msteinbaum/lecturenotes.pdf

Essentially, this model focuses on the disutility (effort) of climbing a (cocunut) tree (=applying for all those jobs, or PhD funding even), versus the benefit (utility) of having a job, or grant (=getting the coconut at the top).  Helps if you're into econometrics but is understandable even without analysing all the algebra.

The model can probably be applied to all sorts of situatiuons where you need a partner, niot just employer-employee, or student-grant provider, also girlfiend-boyfriend, maybe housebuyer-houseseller.

What all these 'markets' (for jobs, research grants, lifepartners, houses) have in common is they're all very inefficient; transaction and search costs are high. It's not like buying baked beans in Tesco when you know where the nearest Tesco is and what the standard price is and all the cans have the same attributes (are homogenous), and also Tesco knows your cash or Credit Card is reliable.

In all these highly inefficient markets, enither side has 'perfect knowledge', indeed far from it, each side actually knows very little about the other, including how truthful they actually are to each other when face-to-face.  That's life, we haven't got perfed telepathy on each other (and I suspect society would rapidly descend into insanity if we had), so, sorry, we just have to rescign ourselves to making perhaps 100s of job apps, grant apps, dating approaches. And the inefficiency of the system means more effort must then be made to sort through 100s of apps than might actually be soent on useful knowledge-generating society-improving work.

That said I have seen what can only he described as extremely peverse job hiring decisions. No names, obviously, but from conversations and experience with colleagues at a considerable number of universities, I can definitely say that the most able candidate is freequently NOT hired.

I'm not a pyschologist but the reasons for this (not sure what Diamond has to say here) seem to be,

1) Managerialism, managers not academics staff the selection board (academics are far too busy researching to bother with such boards), and managers want someone not imaginative, but pliable, a go-to-guy, even though academically they might not be the brightest.
2) Similar to (1), too bright candidates probably won't fit in, be disruptive, even outshine the recruiters, and we can never have that of course. As Einstein said, the reasonable man, fits in to his surroundongs, the unreasonable one seeks to change them, so all progress depends on the unreasonable man. But who wants progress when it's upsetting to the archic order?
3) Substandard recruitiing procedures, e.g poor questions at interview that don't elicit the candidate's true abilities (or dis-abliities), and worse, recruiters who have obviously not read the CV or other documentation the candidate painstakingly prepared.
4) Poor job ads, that fail to make clear what the recruiters want (maybe they don't fully know / haven't decided themselves), so the wrong candidates turn up, or the result is a broad trawl of all applicants, wasting much time.
5) - yes this really happens, I've seen it - applicants see an ad and apply for a job that never was. Either the financial situation of the employer has changed for the worse between ad placement and interview, or someone higher up is sabotaging the recruiting department and lets them do interviews but no-ome will ever be taken on. Candidates wonder why they never got a job they seemed syited for and the interview seemed to go really well. To save face, the application /interview process goes through, rather than pulling it before interviews and fessing up to all short-listed candidates.
5)a) Related to above, there is already a preferred candidate, e.g. internal promotion, and the whole interview process is almost a sham, to justify the pre-selected candidate. This is hardly moral in a Kantian sense, it instrumentalises other applicants, who are wasting time in applying for jobs and travelling to interviews they have absolutely no chance of success at.

Oh well, applicants (for funding, jobs etc) just have to be as hard as diamonds, I guess.

Dr Hillary J. Shaw
Director and Senior Research Consultant
Shaw Food Solutions
Newport
Shropshire
TF10 8NB
www.fooddeserts.org



-----Original Message-----
From: Steven Cummins <[log in to unmask]>
To: CRIT-GEOG-FORUM <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Mon, 24 Feb 2014 21:09
Subject: Re: PhD surplus and post-doc deficit


Dear all

I guess one obvious question is a surplus of PhDs in what?

 In my own field of quantitative health geography we often cannot
recruit PhD candidates for studentships, and later postdoctoral
positions with the right training and skills, my colleagues is
quantitative education, sociology, GIS, and some areas of health
economics often complain of similar issues - we are crying out for well
trained students and staff!

Maybe there is oversupply some areas of research and teaching, but there
is definitely a deficit in others!

Steve

On 24 Feb 2014, at 20:20, "Rosa, Brian" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Greetings from another infrequent but interested critterŠ.
>
> As a recent PhD myself, I don't have any answers for Andrew, but I
think
> that his questions and personal narrative are absolutely topical to
the
> purposes of this listserv (though should not be contained to it).  The
> question of academic labor practices in the US is getting increasingly
> politicized though the adjunct unionization movement and the strike at
UIC
> are encouraging.  And I agree, there is a proliferation of PhD funding
in
> proportion to the number of faculty appointments available for
graduates.
>
> One thing to consider, along with the increasing shift toward
casualized
> labor in the form of adjunct positions, is that universities may use
PhD
> students as instructors for significantly cheaper than full-time
> academics.  It seems like a good deal for getting paid to do a PhD
(and I
> am glad I benefited from it), but it completely distorts the academic
job
> market.
>
> I think that this really needs to be a discussion among scholars,
> particularly those who already have the luck/privilege of obtaining a
> secure position in academia (knowing full well that this is not the
norm).
> How do we act in solidarity with the majority of recent PhDs who are
> stuck in limbo?  The conversation needs to go beyond discussions of
> supply, demand, and scarcity, or the institution of tenure, and to the
> root of the neoliberalization of universities and the marginalization
of
> faculty  (Gaye Tuchman's book "Wannabe U" is eye-opening in this
regard).
>
> Best,
> Brian
>
>
> --
>
> Brian Rosa, PhD
>
> Lecturer, Urban and Community Studies
> University of Connecticut
> Box 1172
> Storrs, CT 06269-1172
>
> Phone:
> (860) 486-6752
> Office:  Philips Communication Sciences Building,
> Room
> 229
> Map <http://maps.uconn.edu/index.php/m/info/PCSB>
>
>
> Website <http://urban.uconn.edu>
> Facebook
>
<http://www.facebook.com/pages/UConns-Urban-Community-Studies-Program/15587
> 2437770980>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On 2/24/14 2:45 PM, "Andrew Wilbur" <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
>
>> I¹ve hesitated to write about this since I contribute to the forum
only
>> rarely, and since my last few posts have concerned my perpetual
>> underemployment,  I don¹t want to come across as entitled or a
habitual
>> complainer. That said, any time I see funded PhD studentships
advertised
>> on here, I find myself questioning the wisdom of training so many
people
>> for a diminished and increasingly precarious job market.
>>
>> Obviously I know that not everyone who does a PhD plans to work in
>> academia, and that some graduates are able to find work right out of
>> their studies. I also understand that universities have an obligation
and
>> desire to educate PhD students for reasons that none of us need
explained
>> here. I¹m more concerned about the imbalance between PhD and post-doc
>> funding (Does anyone have some data on this?). For example, there was
>> recently an ad posted to the forum for 16 new PhD fellowships and 4
>> post-docs. Putting on my (rather uncomfortable) neoliberal university
>> administrator hat for a second, wouldn¹t the research institute get
more
>> Œvalue¹ from using the same budget for, say, 8 post-docs and 4 PhD
>> students, given that the post-docs>> (Œresources¹) as PhD students? I¹m not
asking rhetorically - I¹d
really
>> like to know the answer, from someone with inside knowledge of how
these
>> things work. University funding strategies seem to be lagging far
behind
>> economic realities, resulting in unprecedented applicant numbers for
>> every vacancy. Anyone now undertaking a PhD should be well aware
that,
>> statistically speaking, they are highly likely to spend many months
after
>> graduation receiving letters stating, ŒWe received (insert number
between
>> 50 and 100) applications and were very impressed by the high standard
of
>> the applicants. Unfortunately you were not successful on this
occasion.¹
>> In fact, I know that I¹m not alone in discouraging friends from
applying
>> for PhD funding, given the bleak employment prospects that follow. As
>> much as it pains me to say it, getting a doctorate was probably the
>> biggest financial blunder I¹ve ever made (even though I had a funded
>> studensthip), as I¹m now apparently unsuitable for any job outside
>> academia and not qualified enough for one within. This will almost
>> certainly become the condition of many of the people who take the
>> studentships that I regularly see advertised.
>>
>> My own woes aside, it seems logical to me that one way of addressing
this
>> situation would be to reduce the number of funded PhD studentships
and
>> reallocate that money toward creating actual jobs. I¹m sure there are
>> more complicated issues that I¹m not addressing, but that¹s why I
brought
>> this up. Is this situation even being discussed at senior
administrative
>> levels? Aren¹t academics on hiring panels also a bit sick of
reviewing
>> 60+ applications for every post? Is this a 'situation' at all, or
have
>> things always been this way - in other words, am I just paying more
>> attention now that I"m acutely affected? Looking at things from a
more
>> positive angle, what specific contributions do PhD students bring
that
>> justifies their relative over-representation?
>>
>> I realise that what I'm saying  might sound rather ungenerous to
funded
>> PhD students, and I don¹t mean it to. I was one recently, and I¹m
still
>> very grateful for the opportunity and the support I received while
doing
>> my PhD. However, I¹ve been applying for research and teaching jobs
since
>> 2011. Currently I do full-time manual labour work for which I earn
less
>> than half the US median income. A huge amount of my spare time is
spent
>> on job applications, article writing / editing / reviewing and
research
>> into funding opportunities, and every day I seriously consider just
>> giving up on all of it. Scores of news articles, blog posts and forum
>> discussions confirm that my situation is not at all unusual, and
people
>> involved in PhD programmes - as students or administrators - should
be
>> aware of that. I don't want, nor expect, some kind of paternalistic
>> answer to all my problems, but it seems to me that, viewed
objectively,
>> what I'm discussing is in fact a problem, but one that I haven't
really
>> seen addressed here or in any other forum.