Congratulations on the PhD — now what are you going to do?
Carleton University will soon host a conference about a question that is making Canadian universities restless: How do you launch a humanities PhD into the work world?
The answer used to involve teaching, but those days are gone, says Heather Zwicker, dean of graduate studies and research of the University of Alberta, who will speak at next week’s conference.
Fewer faculty jobs exist; more candidates are chasing them.
The Conference Board of Canada says the number of PhD graduates in Canada rose by 68 per cent between 2002 and 2011. There were 6,219 grads in 2011, and more than 47,600 students enrolled in PhD programs.
Of the graduates, 18.6 per cent eventually become full-time professors. The rest mostly end up with good jobs, the Conference Board says, but many of them “face challenging initial transitions to careers outside academia.” Where should they work? In leadership positions, Zwicker suggests. “I would point to the federal government, I would point to the provincial governments, I would point to universities” as institutions that often hire humanities PhD grads.
One problem is that these students usually start their program with dreams of becoming professors. Similarly she says employers often don’t think of hiring PhD grads. “They don’t necessarily have a quick sense of the value-add of somebody who has done a deep dive into a research project.”
She deflates the hope of teaching jobs “as gently and unequivocally as possible. Early in the program I have a discussion with all of my PhDs that is frank and candid about their job prospects as a professor,” while offering the university’s help in professional development — such as internship programs and matching students with alumni.
So — English grads in business and government? She says yes.
“I will go to my grave yelling about the value of advanced research ... including in humanities and social sciences. And I will yell on a mountaintop about the value of these PhDs as employees.
“Canada is enriched by the degree to which we can have more education and more knowledge and deeper knowledge, and that’s what a PhD gives you.”
While the subject matter in a PhD tends to be narrow and specialized “it’s how you get there that matters to an employer — how you would frame a question and how you go about answering that question, and sticking to it for longer than a news cycle or something like that.”
These are tough times for humanities, says Paul Keen, associate dean of graduate and post-doctoral affairs at Carleton, an English professor and organizer of the conference. He writes that “pinched between weak student numbers, a vocational mood that reduces the value of education to its ability to guarantee a good job, and an increasingly shrill emphasis on the importance of producing ‘useful knowledge,’ humanities programs have been struggling.”
But he says that “the humanities can help us to understand the ‘shape-shifting’ nature of modern life ... in ways that our ‘data-driven culture’ and endless faith in new technologies never can.”