So You’re Getting a Ph.D.

In the 1990s, Cooley, a graduate student in the University of Michigan’s highly ranked biology department after graduating summa cum laude from Yale, discovered, along with another grad student, David Marshall, that periodical cicadas have the most complicated courtship ritual of any insect known to man. It’s a three-step process in which the male serenades the lady of his choice, and if she likes it, she makes a tiny come-hither flick of her wing. But that doesn’t end the process. The male has to repeat his serenade and receive a second welcoming wing-flick (“yes means yes” seems to be the rule in Magicicada amour) before he can proceed. He then switches to a different, more insistent sound before climbing aboard his beloved for copulation. Cooley wrote up his observations in his doctoral dissertation and received his Ph.D. from Michigan in 1999.

When a 17-year brood exploded into adult life and massive public attention along the Eastern seaboard in 2013, Cooley, who lives in central Connecticut, became the go-to guy for the media, giving interviews to NPR, NBC, Fox News, the Washington Post, and Scientific American, among other outlets. Meanwhile, he had published all but one chapter of his dissertation, plus more than 20 articles, all in top scholarly journals, held teaching positions at a variety of institutions including Yale, and garnered impressive research grants. His magicicada.org website is a compendium of all things periodical-cicada designed for scholars and amateur entomologists alike.

But there is one thing that Cooley, for all his accomplishments, never managed to attain: a tenure-track—that is a full-time, benefits-paying—teaching job at a college or university, with its promise of lifetime employment barring serious misconduct. Instead, he has subsisted over the years on postdoctoral research fellowships and “visiting”—that is, temporary—professorial gigs. At age 47, he is a more or less permanent fixture in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut’s main Storrs campus, but only as “adjunct faculty,” which means teaching jobs for a few thousand dollars per class, no benefits of any kind, and certainly no job security. “I share an office, and right now I have no lab,” Cooley said in a telephone interview. “All my lab equipment is now in a storage unit.” In 2013, Cooley, a cicada celebrity but with little hope of a sustainable academic future, enrolled in UConn’s business school, and he now has an M.B.A. degree. He cobbles together a living and supports his three children via adjunct teaching, marketing consulting for businesses, and a wife who works full-time. He doesn’t fault UConn or anyone else for his fate: “The number of tenure-track jobs is shrinking, and there have been some rough patches on the road for a number of cohorts coming out of graduate school.”

Much has been written lately about the plight of the adjunct professor, nearly all of it grim. For the past 40 years institutions of higher learning have been relentlessly replacing professors on the tenure track—the ones with decently paying (if not often richly compensated) jobs and fringe benefits—with “contingent” faculty, typically part-timers, who cost a whole lot less. Not only is the average adjunct paid a mere $2,700 per three-credit course, according to the American Association of University Professors (although STEM-field and some social-science adjuncts can make around $7,000 on some campuses, and some fortunate souls who adjunct at the Ivies can earn nearly twice that), but adjuncts typically qualify for neither sick leave nor paid vacations. They certainly don’t qualify for time off to do scholarly research, because they haven’t been hired to do research, even though their credentials may be as stellar as Cooley’s.

As human just-in-time inventory, most adjuncts are hired (or fired) on an as-needed (or as-not-needed) basis, and they usually don’t even require office space, because a typical adjunct’s job doesn’t come with an office. Cooley, with his shared office, is one of the lucky few. Many adjuncts are obliged to use their cars as their campus home base, with the trunk serving as filing cabinet. And they need those cars. Most colleges refuse to let their adjunct faculty shoulder more than two courses per semester so as not to trigger the Obamacare “employer mandate” that they be provided with health insurance. So most adjuncts who wish to earn even a barista-level income of, say, $25,000 a year from teaching have to shuttle among multiple campuses, enduring, thanks to the commuting, workdays that can stretch to 13 hours or more. Compare that with the $69,000 on average that brand-new assistant professors at the very bottom of the tenure ladder earn.

And this isn’t even getting into the humiliations: On most campuses adjunct professors can’t vote in the faculty senate, and they may not have full library privileges. They may not be allowed access to departmental support services and on some campuses don’t even get invited to the Christmas party. Their departmental colleagues on the tenure line may express sympathy for adjuncts’ second-class status, but given human nature and its penchant for pecking orders, it’s more likely that they secretly regard adjuncts as academic losers who couldn’t cut it in the full-time job market.

Adjunct horror stories abound. In 2013, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published an op-ed, “The Death of an Adjunct,” telling the Willy Loman-esque tale of penniless 83-year-old Margaret Mary Vojtko, who had taught French for 25 years as an adjunct professor at Duquesne University, never qualifying for health benefits and never earning more than $3,500 per three-credit course. During Vojtko’s last few years on the French faculty, as she was battling cancer and racking up medical bills, Duquesne cut back her teaching load to a single class per semester, meaning that she was earning less than $10,000 a year, not enough to pay her electricity bill, so during the winter she would prepare her classes at night in a fast-food restaurant and sleep during the day in her office. The spring before she died Duquesne had let her go entirely. She collapsed on her front lawn from a massive heart attack the following August as she was fighting to get her job back.

Vojtko’s was perhaps the most pitiable of all adjuncting narratives, but it’s not entirely unrepresentative. The Internet abounds with stories of adjuncts going on food stamps to buy groceries, sleeping in their cars and on friends’ couches because they can’t afford to pay rent, and claiming that once the time they spend preparing for class and grading is figured in, they’re lucky to be clearing minimum wage.

Adjuncting wasn’t designed to be this way. Until relatively recently adjunct professors were typically ultra-educated people who didn’t need the paltry pay because they had other sources of income: retired professors on pensions who wanted to teach a class or two to keep their hand in, high-earning professionals who might teach “clinical” classes in which they shared their real-world experiences with students, and married women with family responsibilities who chose not to teach full-time. The adjuncts of yore essentially taught for love, or to pay for a nice vacation with their spouses.

As late as 1970, more than two-thirds of faculty positions at U.S. colleges and universities were tenure-line, but now the percentages are reversed, with 1 million out of the estimated 1.5 million Americans teaching college these days classified as “contingent” faculty, the overwhelming majority of them working part-time. Parents who have shelled out or borrowed the more than $60,000 per year that it can now cost to attend an elite private college may be shocked to learn that their young Jayden or Sophia isn’t actually being taught by the Nobel Prize-winners advertised on the faculty but by shabbily attired nomads with ancient clattering cars who are wondering how to get the phone bill paid. Some adjuncts have successfully unionized. In 2013 adjuncts at the University of Oregon won the right to a boost in base pay, regular raises, health insurance, and the ability to qualify for multiyear contracts. That still didn’t erase—and perhaps set in stone—their second-class faculty status, and they still would earn tens of thousands of dollars less than the greenest assistant professor.

Explanations for this two-tier phenomenon abound. Marc Bousquet, now an associate professor of film and media at Emory University, contended, in his 2008 book, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation, that the problem was the “corporatization” of the university. Bousquet argued that formerly high-minded academia figured out that it was actually a business. Like the rest of American businesses during the 1980s and 1990s, Bousquet argued, universities adopted outsourcing as their most profitable economic model, transforming their historic teaching mission into a form of low-wage, gig-economy service employment in which the majority of the instructors, like Uber drivers, are responsible for their own overhead.

An alternative and less class-warfare-driven theory came from Benjamin Ginsberg, a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University. In his 2011 book, The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters, Ginsberg targeted administrative bloat as the culprit for the massive shrinkage in tenure-line faculty from the 1970s onward, even as college tuition costs were rising exponentially. He pointed out, for example, that between 1998 and 2008, America’s colleges increased their spending on administration by 36 percent while boosting their spending on instruction by only 22 percent. In an adaptation of his book for the Washington Monthly Ginsberg wrote: “As a result, universities are now filled with armies of functionaries—vice presidents, associate vice presidents, assistant vice presidents, provosts, associate provosts, vice provosts, assistant provosts, deans, deanlets, and deanlings, all of whom command staffers and assistants—who, more and more, direct the operations of every school.”

To conservative critics of academia, the shrinkage of tenure-line faculty may seem to be a good thing: fewer “tenured radicals” shoving their Marxist-derived ideologies down the throats of hapless undergraduates. After all, some 63 percent of college professors define themselves as either “liberal” or “far left,” compared with only 12 percent who place themselves on the right, according to a 2012 survey by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute. Nonetheless, Roger E. Meiners, an economics and law professor at the University of Texas-Arlington, has argued that tenure actually makes sense. In a 2010 article for the conservative John William Pope Center for Higher Education’s website, Meiners argued that colleges may drastically contract their tenure lines in order to exploit the Ph.D. overabundance, but they’re unlikely to get rid of them altogether. Departments need a core of stable faculty, not only to produce the scholarly research on which the university’s prestige rests, but to design classes and programs. Furthermore, Meiners pointed out, alumni are more likely to feel warmly toward Dear Old Alma Mater, and to open their wallets accordingly, if they know that “good old Professor Chips is still around” setting off those amusing desktop explosions in his Chem 101 classroom that they remember so well from freshman year.

All of this means that every fall there is a desperate scramble among the young and the highly credentialed to garner one of the ever-diminishing entry-level tenure-track slots that still exist. A May 2014 report from the Modern Language Association (MLA), representing scholars in English and foreign languages, asserted that every year about 1,000 brand-new Ph.D.s in those fields emerge to chase about 600 new job openings. The report didn’t consider that those newbies are also competing with the 400 leftovers who had failed to obtain jobs during the previous year—plus all the leftovers still in the job market from the years before that. The humanities, where undergraduate majors are in steep decline, are famously overloaded with unusable doctorates, but as John Cooley learned to his chagrin, new STEM Ph.D.s fare only slightly better. Atlantic senior associate editor Jordan Weissman observed in 2013 “a pattern reaching back to 2001” of “fewer jobs, more unemployment, and more post-doc work.” Postdocs in the sciences essentially consist of low-paid lab scut work. “Once it was just a one or two-year rite of passage where budding scientists honed their research skills,” Weissman wrote. “Now, it can stretch on for half a decade.”

How to land one of those elusive tenure-line positions has become a science in itself. In 2010, Karen Kelsky, who had held two tenured professorships in anthropology at public research universities before leaving academia for personal reasons in 2009, launched a consulting business for job-seeking Ph.D.s that quickly grew from a blog to a column in the academic trade paper the Chronicle of Higher Education to a brand-new book, The Professor Is In: The Essential Guide to Turning Your Ph.D. Into a Job. Kelsky’s book, hardnosed, blunt, exceedingly readable, and informed by her anthropologist’s eye for human social hierarchies, is a step-by-step guide to the culture of job-hunting (writing a cover letter, navigating an interview) that could be usefully read by anyone looking for employment. It is also a frightening revelation of exactly how hazardous that hunt is going to be in today’s academic marketplace. “You must choose, consciously, an approach that minimizes risk and maximizes return on your investment of time and money in the Ph.D. enterprise,” she writes. “And you must declare independence from any advisor who peddles false hope.”

Kelsky tells grad students to tailor their lives and their résumés (curricula vitae or “CVs” in academic-speak) not just from their first day in graduate school but before they even enroll, picking a program that will impress future faculty search committees and tapping into every conceivable source of funding so as to avoid the crippling student debt that can drive those who fail to catch the brass ring to consider suicide. Do some teaching because it will look good on your CV, but not too much, because search committees don’t really care all that much about teaching, no matter what they say. Attend academic conferences, but only the right conferences—the big national ones where you can schmooze with the stars in your field and observe them in action. Learn the fine art of grant-proposal writing. Learn the even more important art of getting one or more papers published in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal before you defend your dissertation. The days when “publish or perish” applied only to professors already on the tenure track are long gone—which is one reason why it now takes almost 10 years on average to complete a doctorate, compared with the 5 to 6 years that was the norm only a generation ago.

Kelsky tells job candidates lucky enough to win an on-campus interview exactly how to present themselves: Lose the Valley Girl uptalk, nurse a single glass of wine, not a drop more, at the dinner afterwards—and “[b]e sure and order the neatest item on the menu” so you won’t accidentally spill food down your front. In a chapter titled “What Not to Wear” to said interview, Kelsky scoffs at the ivory-tower dwellers who think it’s superficial to care about how you look: “People are judged on their appearance all the time.” She walks readers whose student wardrobes consist of blue jeans and backpacks through the items of appropriate professional attire that each sex must buy (down to the shoes and socks), and explains how to pack them into a suitcase. There’s even dress-for-success advice if you happen to be an “old school butch dyke”: a well-tailored “men’s suit” coupled with a good men’s haircut. (Kelsky describes herself in her book as a “femme dyke.”)

In a Skype interview peppered with the word “delusional” to describe the grad students and their elbow-patched faculty advisers who imagine that the special snowflakes in their seminars will easily beat the hiring odds, Kelsky maintained that even the most elite graduate programs can’t guarantee that their Ph.D.s will ever find full-time work. “The elite programs have better placement rates, but they also have some of the worst-prepared job candidates,” she said. “It’s part of the problem. The Ivy League has been very slow to adjust to the new economics of higher education. They’re working under an outdated delusion. Their Ph.D.s are the least prepared for the job market. They routinely struggle, and they do not get the tenure-track jobs. The big state schools like Michigan are much better. They now have workshops on cover letters and how to write a CV. Five years ago they didn’t.”

As Kelsky—but almost nobody who is actually still inside academia—points out, there’s an elephant in this clamorous room of underemployed scholars. It’s the fact that from a supply-and-demand standpoint, graduate schools are simply turning out way too many Ph.D.s for the academic market to bear, depressing their wages accordingly. It’s a similar crisis to the glut of new attorneys that law schools were churning out in recent years even as law jobs paying enough to cover sky-high law school debt were disappearing. The law market seems to have corrected itself, with law school enrollments steadily plunging since 2011. That collapse hasn’t happened with graduate schools. Indeed, throughout the 2000s and beyond, new enrollments in master’s and doctoral programs of every kind continued to climb, even in the arts and humanities, where the job pickings are slimmest. In the fall of 2012, for example, new arts-and-humanities enrollments shot up by nearly 8 percent, according to a report from the Council of Graduate Schools. “It’s an ethical problem,” Kelsky said. “The Ph.D. degree in the majority of cases leads directly to unemployment. Five- or six-figure debt and unemployment.”

A professor I contacted sent me this email: “It’s a hypocritical system in which we talk about how much we ‘love’ students while they are undergraduates, only to exploit them as graduate students and then adjuncts.” The professor refused to let me use the email for attribution: “One can’t even talk about these questions from inside the system without risking serious pushback.”

That certainly seems to be the case. In 2003 and 2009, William Pannapacker, an English professor at Hope College in Michigan, using the pen name Thomas H. Benton, published articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education urging high-GPA undergraduates to resist any siren calls from their professors to apply to graduate school (“Just Don’t Go” was the partial title of one of the articles). Pannapacker was excoriated in print by his fellow professors; the phrase “pulling up the ladder” was tossed around.

Similarly, in 2010, Monica J. Harris, then a psychology professor at the University of Kentucky, announced in the online academic trade paper Inside Higher Ed that she believed the hiring outlook in her field to be so grim (a “Malthusian melt-down,” she called it) that she planned to stop admitting new Ph.D. students into her lab. She, too, received unpleasant blowback (although not from her own colleagues), finally taking early retirement in 2012. “The incentives are still in place to admit a lot of graduate students,” Harris said in a phone interview. “You need them for getting grants and staying competitive. Graduate students collect data, they do the bulk of data analysis, and they do a whole lot of the writing. A faculty member will maybe have 15 to 20 projects going at once, so you need to have students working on them.”

It’s certainly true that professors love having graduate students around. They’re generally bright and motivated, they tend to do the assigned reading unlike many undergrads, and they typically don’t show up for class with hangovers. Graduate classes tend to be small, easy-to-grade seminars rather than huge lectures with hundreds of bluebooks. Grad students form an eager slave-labor force for research and teaching assistance, and their very presence on campus assures faculty and administrators that their institution is a serious scholarly enterprise, not a cow college in the middle of nowhere.

Perhaps for this reason the MLA, in its 2014 report, declined to recommend the one glaringly obvious solution to the Ph.D. hiring crisis: cutting back graduate-student enrollments. The report instead recommended streamlining the Ph.D. process: shorter dissertations, less time and expense spent completing the doctorate. Central to the report was the idea that doctoral programs in the humanities shouldn’t be viewed solely as trade schools for future professors but as an immersion in the life of the mind that could be useful training for careers outside of academia.

“People who go through graduate programs in statistics and chemistry regularly go to work in industry and for the government,” said Russell Berman, a German professor at Stanford who chaired the committee that prepared the report. “Only in the humanities do we look down on people who go into other careers. This is an elitist attitude. Even if students don’t go into teaching, the skills are transferable. You know how to run a meeting, for example. You have skills in independent research and writing and making an evidence-based argument. We should honor people’s individual choices as to whether to enroll in a Ph.D. program.”

Berman certainly sounds reasonable, as long as grad students are fully informed of their Vegas-level academic-hiring odds (as, to its credit, the MLA report itself urges). Berman pointed to Overstock founder and CEO Patrick Byrne, who has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford, as an example of making good in the “alt-ac” world, as it’s called. Byrne’s is certainly a success story, but in fact, as the Economist pointed out in a 2010 article, Ph.D.s in all but a few fields such as medicine and finance don’t earn enough more than holders of two-year master’s degrees to make all that extra time in grad school worth their while. “Over all subjects, a Ph.D. commands only a 3 percent premium over a master’s degree,” the Economist noted.

In the end, though, the best course for Ph.D.s facing underemployment—as most do—is probably a version of William Pannapacker’s “Just Don’t Go”: Take the supply-and-demand problem into your own hands, and just say no to adjuncting and its Dickensian miseries. This past April Jason Brennan, a philosophy professor at Georgetown and a self-described libertarian, incurred the Internet wrath of the famously left-leaning adjunct-advocacy community by proclaiming that “it’s hard to feel sorry for [adjuncts].” There’s no reason for them “to wallow in adjunct poverty,” Brennan wrote, pointing out that they could “quit any time and get a perfectly good job at GEICO.”

In a phone interview, Brennan said, “So many people consistently make bad decisions. The system isn’t going to deliver more tenure-track jobs. A small number of people will, and the rest get kicked out for good. Most people won’t get what they want. There just isn’t that much money.”

Charlotte Allen, a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard, last wrote on fraternities.