http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15557443

Bottom line is that if you've got reasonable statistical skills, you should have no difficulty finding a job that pays [very] well. Though not necessarily the job you were originally trained for, nor the TT position that you so richly deserve at one of the ten or twenty top-3 R1s. And your dissertation committee may view you as a complete failure, though when you visit campus in five years and park your Ferrari next to your committee chair's Hyundai, you won't feel so bad.

[of course, I'm making up the last part, since even if you come back to campus in a Ferrari, you won't be able to get a parking permit.]

And even with statistics skills, you will only have a job until such time that some of the Asian students who are constantly getting trashed on PSJR pool the useless dollars earned by their companies, buy yours, and shut it down purely out of spite. At which point you can join the political theorists who are living in appliance boxes under the freeway.

Any questions?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/06/technology/06stats.html

And if an submission's "writing style" including meandering around while making contradictory points and non-sequiturs, yes, I'd reject it.

Tulsa, are you one of those assholes who rejects manuscript based on grammar and style?

In any case, yes, supply is exceeding demand of Ph.D.s. Point taken.

Look, it's no big deal, so relax. It's just difficult to understand the substantive point you were making in the post. Again, no big deal, as you say it's not a journal submission.

Quando omni flunkus, moritati.

If the women don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy.

I also graduated from a non-ranked PhD program. I got a job my first year out (as did every one of our program's graduates that year -- btw, we have nearly a 100% placement rate). I now teach at a flagship R1. Smaller PhD programs are already specializing, at least the good ones. And they encourage their students to do the things that will get them good jobs.

I agree that too many people were entering grad programs in the last few years, perhaps because university education was expanding nationally (so there was a large demand, particularly in certain areas of study). But the idea that only top-25 schools should put out PhD is ridiculous. Frankly, many "elite" recent PhD graduates I've met have not been that impressive. And the attitude that they're entitled to jobs translates to their behavior in the classroom.

But to respond to hal2001: Why shouldn't ABDs spend time teaching? I taught a course per semester while finishing my diss. Frankly, it's less than the teaching load of any TT academic -- who also has to continue research. Teaching (not as a TA, mind you) not only funded me, but it gave me valuable experience on how to juggle teaching & research, which helped me on the job market and in my professional career. A large share of what college professors do is teach. In fact, it's the lion share of what we do. Too many top 25 programs place so much emphasis on research that they're graduates don't have enough teaching experience. In some cases, this is a product of the reality that some schools (e.g. Chicago) have *more* grad students than undergraduates. But the result is that they then go on the job market pitted against graduates of lesser schools who already have a track record of teaching -- and teaching while doing research.

I like Smallville's suggestions in principle, but the specialization tactic is flawed. If you follow such a route, your department quickly becomes inhospitable to faculty not working within the narrow area/subfield/method chosen for specialization. Departments that do this can get very narrow very fast. While this may help with graduate student placement, it is not good for departmental culture, scholarship, or undergraduate teaching - at least in my opinion.

My thoughts on your idea are that below top 25 should definitely NOT close down. I graduated from a non or low ranked program, considered tier 3 for law school if I recall, and maybe hovering around 100? in political science when I graduated not too long ago. Most of my friends could not locate my school on a map, yet I do have a very good job at a large public research 1. But I do agree with considering reducing grad student numbers all around and for the discipline to work harder to be more forthcoming regarding job prospects to potential students . I think TAing is a very valuable training tool for students, while certainly helping the department meet obligations, but we could do a whole lot more cost-wise with adjuncts versus grad students if TA duties were really our interest (teaching, scholarship, and training future scholars are more our interest) . They are simply an apprenticeship in my view, if used right, and intended for a limited time and it is a trade off. The time TA’s free up, allow faculty to teach less, publish more and train graduate students, which takes time. But I really don’t think any program recruits grad student to be cheap labor. It’s a convenient phrase I hear, but the degree earned, the training received, and the experience gained , stipend, and free education are well worth the time it takes to TA. It was for me, students and fellow peers that I know. Keep in mind, I am 1 person with my limited pool of colleagues, but I really would be surprised to find it too much different elsewhere.

Universities with more limited budgets for graduate programs and less certain of yield, often have to rely on TA-ships as the primary - sometimes the only - means of funding students. This is especially true at large state universities where there are vast numbers of undergraduates and adjuncts are even sometimes in short supply. I would hope no department admits students simply as TA fodder, and in many departments there are not enough TA jobs to go round (leaving at least a few students out in the cold each year). But there are no more than a handful of top departments that can fully fund all their students with minimal TA work, making the institution something we'll likely have to live with for some time.

I agree that adjuncts are cheaper than TAs, that poor students take up more time than good ones, and that departments' reputations suffer when many of their students fail to complete the PhD or when they can't place many of those who do finish. But there are competing demands and incentives that often prevent departments from following Keyzer.Sore's prescribed optimal scenario.

Perhaps this brings up another question: should programs below the top 10, 15, 25 or whatever consider closing down? That is, given how difficult placement is for even those completing PhD's at the country's very top departments, would the best way of trimming supply not be for programs further down the chain to shed their programs? I am not advocating such a solution, both because it would shut down programs close to my heart and because schools a little way down the rankings sometimes produce absolutely top scholars who might otherwise fall through the cracks, but I think it is worth discussing if we are going to say that schools should be fully funding all their students, that cohorts need to get smaller, etc. - solutions not practicable at mid-to-lower ranked schools if they are to maintain the PhD programs at all.

Just my two cents, even though I agree with most of what Keyzer.Sore said in principle.

These figures may have changed a bit as departments have become more selective in admissions, but they don't seem to have changed dramatically.

I don't think so, I think health benefits is the most a TA could get (at least in my institution). However it's a much better deal compared to a gas station clerk or a Walmart worker (who normally gets no benefits whatsoever). TA w/health benefits are even better off compared to adjunct/part-time instructors, who also don't get benefits. This explains why most TAs don't want to give their position up even when they live w/ a near (or below) poverty income for 5 or more years.

Of those 15-18 people who finished, I think about 10-12 are placed in tt political science jobs somewhere, maybe 6 or 7 at good LACs or R1 schools.

None of the above numbers or explanations are official or authoritative. They are based purely on my personal recollections and annecdotal sampling of conversations.

I suspect that attrition and placement may have been a little bit better if we were not expected to use TA jobs as a primary source of funding and if there had been more internal money available for things like fieldwork funding and write-up grants. This would have made it easier for more people to complete their research and dissertations faster and publish more. That said, I am not sure it would have changed things too much.

On topic (kind of): you can teach big classes without TAs, it just means no discussion sections and nothing but multiple choice exams and quizzes. Not sure this is a good educational solution, but it does solve the "lots of undergrads, few faculty" problem without increasing grad student cohorts.

Also on topic, there's always going to be some attrition among grad students even before they fail on the job market. So if a program thinks it can place, say, 5 students a year, they probably want to admit more than each year, maybe even 2 to 3 times that amount.

undergrad development class from undergrad.

Redundancy police...pull over.

Many private schools with smaller departments in terms of FTEs - think Columbia and Chicago for example - transitioned about 10 years ago to a new and different model under which they admit many fewer students than they had in the past but fund them much more generously with stipends and fellowships rather than making them teach very much. Such schools - along with others that adopted such a model even earlier, like Princeton and Stanford - enjoy the luxuries of more abundant funding, far smaller undergrad populations, lower teaching loads, and smaller faculties in comparison with their public school counterparts that allow them to behave in a more "market-rational" manner.

>> History graduate students shouldn't just know how to write a scholarly article but how "to translate it into four pages for a Congressional staffer." He said he believes strongly that history scholars have the knowledge needed by the government and the public, but he's not sure that many know how to communicate that.

And Balleisen went further. He said that while great research has come from the "cultural turn" in historians' focus, he finds himself wondering if the job market reflects the trend that "far fewer" historians study "institutions, military or political, compared to 30 or 40 years ago." <<

One solution: restrict access to higher education. I wouldn't want to be the university president, state legislator, or governor who makes that proposal."

There are other ways to get TAs than relying on grad students, including using undergrads. At my UG institution, intro level math and econ courses (and perhaps some in other departments, but I'm not as familiar with those) used TAs who were junior/senior majors. In general they did a pretty good job, and spoke much better English than the mostly-foreign grad students in those disciplines (some of whom TAed as well). Really, there's not that much difference between a senior majoring in a given subject (including polisci) and a first year grad school in terms of ability to work as a TA.

So as long as we pack 500 students into a classroom, the need for TAs (i.e., grad students) means that grad students will be admitted. That's unfortunate for them because we admit them knowing that many (most?) won't be successful doing what we train them to do.

Not sure there's an easy solution. As a country, we've decided that open access to higher education is a desirable goal. To achieve it, we need to offer either a large number of classes (costly) or a number of large classes. The latter requires cheap labor in the form of TAs.

One solution: restrict access to higher education. I wouldn't want to be the university president, state legislator, or governor who makes that proposal.