A friend/colleague of mine adamantly refuses to get her PhD. She teaches in the Hamsterology Department and says in her field, getting a PhD (or its equivalent) does nothing more than increase her pay and ability to become a full proffie, but does nothing to enhance her research skills or anything else that she would be doing in "PhD school."
Our SLAC is pushing everyone to get a doctorate (or terminal degree equivalency) because it looks good for "the numbers." In my department, we have only one person without a terminal degree (this includes adjuncts and part timers). While I understand the idea that someone (all things being equal) with a doctorate is desirable over someone without, is this an erroneous assumption? How many of you earned a doctorate simply for job security?
This article also brings up the notion that some only get a PhD or terminal degree for career advancement. What has your experience been? Thoughts? Agree/Disagree?
Both at the institution where I got my Ph.D. and at the institution where I now work, a Ph.D. is necessary for an academic job of any sort. So I guess you could say that I got my Ph.D. because I assumed there wasn't any other way, and I haven't been disabused of that notion yet.
ReplyDeleteI imagine this varies widely by field. I am in a social science where many industry jobs (certainly the better paying ones) require the PhD. It does result in a number of folks seeking the degree purely for career advancement. We try to weed these out in doctoral student selection because it is fairly likely they'll bolt once they are a semester in and discover the workload is just not worth it (for them or for us).
ReplyDeleteThere's a pretty big split in the reasons for getting a PhD in applied hamster fur weaving. For the typical doctoral student, it's a case of "I'm interested in this-a-here stuff, and I'mma study it." A growing number of doctoral students, though, are MA-bearing instructors who already have teaching gigs but are finding that without a PhD, they're at a dead end. No raises, no promotions, no upper-division courses to teach. Thus, Delusions of Grandeur Mental State U. (from which I got my PhD) offers both online and onsite PhDs in applied hamster fur weaving. The online version mostly has folks working on the degree for career advancement, but the onsite version mostly has your typical nerd who just can't get enough hamster fur.
ReplyDeleteI always wanted a PhD, but I had visions of doctoral school being like my undergrad SLAC experience. I thought I'd have a wonderful mentor, get guidance and wisdom as I worked my way through a topic which greatly interested me, and feel as if I were being groomed to join a community of scholars. I was living in Unicorn Gumdrop Land, in other words.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed the coursework well enough, but when it came time to do the exams and dissertation, it quickly became a form of academic hazing, at least for some of the "scholars" at my uni. My department chair was a control freak. She allowed me to pick my lead adviser, but then she picked the rest of my committee for both the exam and the dissertation. Both included people I'd never worked with who taught fields I hadn't studied. If I hadn't taken a course in Professor X's field, well, by God, I'd better know everything about it or I wasn't worthy to be a graduate. I actually spent the week before comps calling my old proffies who specialized in certain fields trying to cram in enough knowledge to make it through written exams, which I knew would contain questions in areas I hadn't studied since undergrad and hadn't been required to study in my doctoral coursework.
My adviser very well could have been the person I hoped for, but he suffered a severe health setback right after I finished my research and turned in the first two chapters. Thus Dr. Control Freak promoted the person I didn't know to be the head of my dissertation committee and allowed my original adviser to remain on in name only. Since this person didn't know me from Adam, he wasn't terribly inclined to work with me. I had to beg him for the tiniest bit of feedback, and he kept me waiting for months. His feedback made no sense given the topic, but I had to make it work or he wouldn't approve my dissertation.
I got the job at Large Urban Community College just as I finished Chapter 3. I would have given up except that one of my colleagues served as a horrible warning. Like me, he'd gotten stuck in an awful set of circumstances, and he decided not to finish his dissertation. At our CC, promotions in rank are given upon completion of graduate hours past the master's level. Upon being hired, unless one either already has the PhD or earns it during the course of employment, one can bring in only 12 hours toward promotion, which means one possible promotion. All the other hours would have been useless, so I would have been forced to go to Third Rate Regional University to take additional hours, half of which are required to be in education, for subsequent promotions. My poor colleague had to sit through Basics of Teaching Adult Hamsters, The Psychology of the Gerbil in the Community College, and Principles of Capybara Collegiate Classroom Management in addition to field courses in order to get to Full Professor.
The prospect of that, in addition to wanting to just finish the damn thing, be called Doctor in a place where only a quarter of my colleagues are, and spite the department chair who put me in the position of being hooded by someone who to this day couldn't pick me out of a photo lineup, got me through. All this was before online education was widely available. Now several of my colleagues are in or just finished either fully online or hybrid programs. They all did it for career advancement. No one wants to take classes in educating rodents at Third Rate Regional U.
I always lol at people that think getting a doctorate makes you eminently intelligent. Because doing research on 1 hyper focused obscure topic makes you a genius apparently.
ReplyDeleteAnd I'm going to stab the next person that asks "oh why aren't you going to grad school".
And grad school will be grateful!
DeleteAnd if you think you are a genius, you are clearly mistaken.
DeleteAwww did I hurt your feelings of faux-superiority while you scribble your name over and over alternating between Dr. and , PhD?
DeleteGood luck in the real world, KID, you're going to need it.
DeleteFive years of studying should make you smart, if you do it right. You get really smart in one focused area, pretty smart in the general field and capable of learning things quickly for any other subject after that. The time you spend getting a PhD should teach you how to learn what's already known and create new knowledge. Along the way, your drinking ability should advance from playing games to a straightforward need.
DeleteYou're not going to grad school because your application essay would be full of sentence-level errors. Nobody wants to read that dissertation!
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ReplyDeleteI always tell my students, even the best ones, that getting a Ph.D. in astronomy takes 6-8 years. Even then, only about 1/3 of astronomy Ph.D.s ever get permanent jobs doing astronomy, and initially at about $35k/year and no job security as a postdoc. You will make more money for less effort with just about any other job in the world: only fanatics need apply.
ReplyDeleteIn the physical sciences, one's earning potential reaches a maximum for masters degrees. Even then, that's to do useful things, like make electronics, or electric cars that actually work, or generate energy cheaply.
A Ph.D. is the standard for university teaching, but we have one instructor in my physics department who never finished his. He teaches intro physics and upper-level physics perfectly well. Every time there's a budget crisis, though, he gets to worry, since he'll never have tenure, but he's been with us for over 12 years now. So, to answer your question: it depends.
We don't hire anyone without a PhD at our small SLAC. At least for a tenure line. There are a couple of people who aren't on tenure lines and just teach comp and nothing above the 200-level.
ReplyDeleteOne woman does some TESOL stuff--she was told she could get on a tenure line if she got a PhD, but it's not to her advantage because she'd have to pay for that PhD and go to school for years to get it. Then, all she'd get is a tenure line and a modest increase in salary. We're not firing her anytime soon. She has as much job security as anyone. But she's not going to be teaching higher-level classes.
Why not? Well, if you're going to teach upper-division classes, doubtless you'll be teaching students to do a lot of research, and that research is going to be in your own field, most of the time (because usually upper-level classes are the classes we teach in our own specialty). A PhD is proof that the research process has been mastered, that the holder of the PhD knows how to do a book-length work in their chosen field. The PhD can advise students on scholarship in a way that MA holders likely cannot. The holder of the PhD also has more coursework behind them, in several different areas. They have a lot more proven experience and knowledge. I think back to what I knew and what I was capable of after my MA, and then after my PhD...and seriously, there's a huge growth process involved.
Of course I think that if there was a person who only had an MA and had written a couple of (respectable) scholarly books in the field in which they wanted to teach upperclassmen, that might sway me a bit. But that wouldn't happen often, because in general people with MAs do not get (and keep) tenure-track jobs in four-year colleges.
We have a guy with an EdD who teaches upper-level lit courses. That pisses me off, but there's not much we can do about it, since he manages the teacher ed students, and we couldn't find anyone to replace him. But as far as I'm concerned he's not qualified to teach upper-division lit courses.
I didn't know it was possible to get an EdD in literature. Is that a U. of Phoenix scam?
DeleteYou can't. It's a doctorate of education. The person teaches higher-level lit simply because they want to. The final projects in their 400-level lit course are exactly what you would excpect a doctor of education to assign. Collages and diaries and the like.
DeleteBut people that can run teacher ed programs in English are as rare as hen's teeth. Very hard to find.
The real question is, will you ever make back the money spent on tuition, travel expenses for research, and all that grass smoked while writing the dissertation?
ReplyDeleteI suspect I'll be paying this all off well into my retirement years.
DeleteYou can't get a job in my field without a PhD. When I think about how much I knew after my MA, and how much more I knew after my PhD, as Stella says, there's a huge growth process. But growth doesn't stop there (something they don't tell you, because there's no formal way to measure.) It took me 2 years, more, to write my PhD; I could do it in 6 months now, and it would be different and better. But I would pick another project in the first place.
ReplyDeleteSo i can see an argument that you don't necessarily need a PhD - all you need is to keep on working, and as long as you are continuing to do research and to write about it, you don't "need" a PhD. But the fact is that in my case it wasn't until the PhD level courses that I really learned how this should be done; and that's been the basis of my practice since then.
Really interesting topic.
ReplyDeleteI am "ABD" as they say. I passed my comps, didn't get the funding I needed to travel for my research, realized I really enjoyed teaching and moved into the private high school world. But I also adjunct, and have since grad school. I teach the Hamster Fur 101 and 102 freshman surveys. I enjoy straddling the high school and lower-level college worlds, and I think doing so makes me better at both jobs.
Here's where I agree somewhat with Stella: I think I'm a kick-ass instructor of college freshman and sophomores, and despite the stereotypes of high school teachers, I have a MA in my field and am fairly current on research in the areas I teach. BUT, I don't think that I am current enough to teach upper-division college courses in my field. That's because the time I spend grading, planning, and doing all the other little stuff you have to do when you teach high school takes up the time I would otherwise spend reading journals and doing my own work.
I sure wish there were an actual degree in between MA and PhD, though, because I did a helluva lot of work to pass my comps, and despite all that sweat and labor and tuition, all I get to put on my cv is "MA".
And as for people with "EdD" degrees outranking me on the pay and prestige scale: Fuck that shit, man. Fuck it all the way to hell. Those are the assholes who are always absolutely certain to put "PhD" after their names at every opportunity. They are the fuckers that make my job more difficult with their "innovative" ideas and intellectual vacuity.
The road to better education in this country runs straight through the burning wreckage of Ed schools.
So am I getting a sense that EdD is just another word for "not-PhD"? :o)
ReplyDeleteIn chemistry, it's really hard to be in charge of any research unless you have a PhD. That's the reason we get the degree. Research faculty positions are then available and so are better jobs at Dow, BASF, etc. The one exception is that you can be the lead scientist at a startup with with a Masters degree, but that's pretty rare.
ReplyDeleteI think the article's author is correct that people study a subject like English because they love it (and they have the time, energy and money to spend). If English departments are concerned about cranking out too many PhDs, they need to raise grad tuition or make the requirements harder.
Four reasons I got a PhD:
ReplyDelete1. To get the girls.
2. So I wouldn't have to take as much shit from people at work.
3. To have the maître d' call me "Dr. Bubba."
4. To get the girls.
It's the horse that gets 'em, Bubba.
DeleteFame, Glory, Respect, Money and Girls? Boy did you ever get some lousy advising in undergrad!
DeleteThe individual department doesn't get to set the tuition, BB; that's up to the university. Charging differential tuition for academic degrees would be a very unpopular move.
ReplyDeleteI tell my students that if a PhD program doesn't offer them enough money to cover tuition + living expenses, don't go there. For two reasons: they will have offered SOMEONE enough money for tuition & living expense, and if it isn't you, you aren't on their A-list. And you don't want to be on the department's B list before you ever get there, because it's very hard to move off it.
But second, because going into debt for a PhD in Humanities is insane. I can see going into debt for med school. I can see paying to do a PhD because you love it and can afford to do so. But going into debt for a degree with a lower than 50% chance of getting you a job? That's a very bad idea.
Right with you, Merely. I give anyone who asks the same advice re: programs paying your way through tuition waivers, teaching assignments, and fellowships. (Although I saw a very select few people scramble up from the B list to the A list by virtue of pluck and determination.)
DeleteI did just that and graduated debt-free, and would not have seen fit to continue with the program if I'd been forced into any significant debt over basic living and study expenses.
If, "getting you a job" refers to an academic position, yes, I agree. However, the skills developed in doing the Humanities Ph.D. transfer and translate across professional lines beyond the academy. Humanities programs need to do more to make students (and the world at large) more aware of this career potential.
DeleteHrm let's see...
ReplyDeleteMy past two jobs paid for the entirety of my degree. From grad school to Job A earned me a 20K a year wage increase. Not bad. From Job A to Job B earned me an additional 30K.
Grad school sucked. It tea-partying sucked. I met some lovely people that I hopefully will work with till I die but IT STILL SUCKED.
And got me a giant raise.
Huh. Look at that. The PhD paid for itself and was worth it mentally as well.
Every crazy-ass trial by fire circumstance I was put in from conference planning to high speed dissertation editing has paid off. I have developed my own teaching style that works well for me and my students. I have gained contacts across the country. I have gained significant extra pay.
In short--the process sucked but was worth it. While I suspect that it does vary greatly by degree, in my field it has a lot to recommend it.
And? I have a PhD in the Humanities. So pblllllt.
Like many above, a terminal degree is an absolute prerequisite for being hired in our SLAC. Why? Well, because only 1/3 of our job-description is teaching; another 1/3 is service and the other 1/3 is research.
ReplyDeleteEarning a Ph.D. is training in the methods and content of research and a demonstration that the candidate has mastered and applied those prerequisites for 1/3 of what we are hiring them to do.
Sure, there are other ways of acquiring and demonstrating these essential skills; there are self-taught savants who publish groundbreaking books, but I wouldn't recommend that as an ideal track for a tenure-track job.
If there was some teaching-job where research was neither part of the job-description nor adding anything to teaching, I guess then the Ph.D. would be optional. At our place, however, it's written into the faculty-handbook as a requirement.