Goodbye Academia Part 2: The Job Market

I love studying and teaching, but I can't do it forever and still manage to pay the rent. That means that, unfortunately, the academic job market has been a factor in my PhD application process, and my recent drifting away from academia. Here are a few thoughts on a profession that is apparently scarce, not particularly high paying, and takes forever to qualify for. (read part 1 of this series here!)

First, getting a professorship in the humanities is really, really hard. And it's no better in film departments. Recently, a few friends of mine have circulated this article, which paints a pretty dire picture. It says that hiring of humanities professors may be down 40% this year, and that's on top of the already low hiring rates that were declining before the recession. (During one semester in BYU's master's program I took a class in which we spent at least a month studying academia and its job environment, among other things. My understanding from that course, and other things I've read, was that a few years ago about 40% of recent English PhD holders got jobs. More recently, I've heard that number drop to 20%.)

So that's pretty terrible. It's also one of the main reasons I only applied to prestigious schools. I figured that with a degree from NYU or UCLA, the chances of getting a job increased. Of course, my professors always noted that a motivated job seeker can distinguish him/herself no matter what school he/she attended. But realistically, if there are two job candidates that are equal, coming from a better school counts. And there are a lot more than two candidates who are equal. 

The other weird thing about this whole situation is how much time it takes to get through a PhD program (most of those I applied for claimed they took five years, though I know many professors who have taken longer to do theirs.) According to that article I linked to above, a lot of people finish with debt. And in some cases, a lot of debt. Many professors don't get paid that well either (especially considering that how long they've been in school), so the debt/money issue could continue to be a real problem for years to come.

This is another reason I only applied to a limited number of prestigious programs. All of them potentially offered funding, and if any of them accepted me without funding, I was prepared to decline. (With the exception, perhaps, of NYU, simply because it'd be great to study film in New York City.) 

Realistically, however, I didn't want to invest five or more years and a whole lot of borrowed money, only to spend many more years looking for an endangered-species-of-a-job. If I was going to do a PhD, I wanted better odds at having some security. Of course, I wasn't attracted to the profession by the money, but I was (and still am) growing tired of being a starving student. 

It's worth mentioning that there are other kinds of jobs for PhD grads. Read that article above for more info on things like adjunct teaching. I'm currently an adjunct, and while it's an interesting socio-cultural experience, it's no way to survive.  

Ultimately, then, I saw the PhD application process as a forerunner to the job application process; getting into a good school foreshadows, in my opinion, the possibility of getting a good job. Getting into a mediocre school or getting rejected, on the other hand, foreshadows getting a bad job, or none at all. There are exceptions to this pattern, but they are just that, exceptions. And I didn't want to bank on being an exception.