Another Reason for the Grad School Glut

If you haven't had a chance to read this column by William Pannapacker (writing as Thomas H. Benton), you owe yourself the pleasure. (Unless you are considering graduate school in the humanities, in which case, you owe yourself the warning.) Benton explains, as only someone who has experienced the misery of the search for a job as a humanities professor can, why the odds of finding a job are so infinitesimal that no one who cares for their students can, except in rare cases, advise them to pursue a Ph.D. in the humanities. While Benton rightly points the finger at universities that admit students to doctoral programs without informing them of the reality of the job market, there is one part of of the problem he doesn't address. I remember when, over 20 years ago, I couldn't decide between graduate school in political science and law school, one of my political science professors advised me that if I couldn't get into a top 10 or 15 program that it was not worth going to graduate school at all. The underlying assumption of his advice was that any school with an opening would fill it with an applicant from a top program. If he was right--and economic theory would predict any rational school would act as he assumed--then, as students wised up to the reality of the market, the numbers of students attending graduate programs at lower ranked institutions would fall. If my university is any indication, however, the problem is that schools don't--even if they can--hire only from the top graduate programs. They hire people from the schools they know best--their own and others like them. The problem with these hires, aside from the disputed issue of whether you are hiring the best person, is that it is difficult to tell prospective students that you have no chance of landing a job with a Ph.D. from a less well known program when there are real life examples of recent graduates who landed decent jobs. The irrational bias of hiring committees, then, enables these programs, at least some of which either shouldn't be in business or should take fewer students, to continue to tempt students into probable vocational suicide.