The Marketplace of Ideas (18 page)

¹⁶
“Re-envisioning the PhD,” at http://www.grad.washington.edu/envision/, and “PhDs—Ten Years Later,” University of California at Berkeley (1999). The latter study was run by Marisi Nerad.

¹⁷
This has changed since 2000. A number of groups have started tracking PhD completion rates, instituting programs that fit PhDs to non-academic careers, and exploring ways to shorten the time to degree. This is partly in response to job market conditions, but partly to concern about the increased use of ABDs (graduate students who have completed “all but the dissertation”) and post-docs (PhDs who do not have tenure-track positions) as inexpensive teaching labor.

¹⁸
PhD Completion and Attrition: Analysis of Baseline Demographic Data from the PhD Completion Project
(Council of Graduate Schools, 2008). The study surveyed students who entered graduate programs from 1992–93 to 1994–95. After ten years, 31.7 percent of PhD students in the humanities had dropped out, 49.3 percent had completed the degree, and the rest, 19 percent, were continuing. Ten-year attrition rates were highest in mathematics and the physical sciences (36.9 percent), lowest in the life sciences (26.2 percent). See http://www.phdcompletion.org/quantitative/book1_quant.asp.

¹⁹
Roger L. Geiger, “The Ten Generations of American Higher Education,” in Philip G. Altbach, Robert O. Berdahl, and Patricia J. Gumport, eds.,
American Higher Education in the Twenty-first Century: Social, Political, and Economic Challenges
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), p. 61.

²⁰
Data on degrees in this paragraph and the next are taken from Bachelor’s degrees conferred by degree-granting institutions, by discipline division: Selected years, 1970–71 through 2005–06,
Digest of Education Statistics
.

²¹
This trend was also discussed in chapter one, in connection with the disjunction between liberal and pre-professional education.

²²
Figures are from my article “How to Make a PhD Matter,”
New York Times Magazine,
September 22, 1996, p. 78. The rise and fall in the number of starting positions advertised annually is obviously to some degree a function of the economy; changes in tax revenues have an impact on hiring at public institutions on almost a yearly basis.

²³
Richard Bernstein,
Dictatorship of Virtue: Multiculturalism and the Battle for America’s Future
(New York: Knopf, 1994); David Lehman,
Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man
(New York: Poseidon, 1991). D’Souza was a graduate student at Princeton, Kimball at Yale, Bernstein at Harvard, and Lehman at Columbia.

²⁴
Christopher Jencks and David Riesman,
The Academic Revolution
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968), p. 536.

²⁵
Thomas B. Hoffer and Vincent Welch, Jr., “Time to Degree of U.S. Research Doctorate Recipients,”
InfoBrief
(Washington, DC: National Science Foundation, March 2006), pp. 2–3.

²⁶
William G. Bowen and Neil L. Rudenstine,
In Pursuit of the PhD
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 255. The authors analyze data on completion, attrition, and time-to-degree rates (pp. 105–41). They conclude that three eras “stand out”: up to 1962, when time-to-degree rates rose; the 1960s, when they dropped back to earlier levels; and after the early seventies, when the time to degree “seems to have risen steadily and significantly in essentially all fields of study” (p. 116). Note, however, that their book was published in 1992.

²⁷
This was a common response to the report: that the vast majority of PhDs surveyed were happily employed somewhere, although a large number were doing work they were not specifically trained for, suggested that social investment in doctoral education was not wasted. See, among others, Peggy Maki and Nancy A. Borkowski,
The Assessment of Doctoral Education: Emerging Criteria and New Models for Improving Outcomes
(Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2006), pp. 109–41.

²⁸
Weisbuch was president of the foundation from 1997 to 2005; he left to become president of Drew University.

²⁹
The remark is not offered glibly. I started in a professional school before going to a liberal arts graduate school; the discursive realms are very different. The non-transferability of specialized academic expertise is a jealously guarded feature of the profession, for reasons discussed in chapter three.

³⁰
For responses and analysis, see Cary Nelson, ed.,
Will Teach for Food: Academic Labor in Crisis
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), on the graduate student unionization movement, and Marc Bousquet,
How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation
(New York: New York University Press, 2008), on the rise of “contingent faculty.”