This Is the End

It's time to shut this blog down. I'll leave up the content, but my time as Adunct Nate Silber is over. I spent a long time studying how the job market in German works, but I can't do it anymore. When I started, no one really knew and no one was tracking the data that mattered. By the time I figured out how it worked, it was already too late. Now that we know how it works, no one with any influence over the profession actually cares.

So here's where we are. About 25 tenure-track jobs in German each year, tendency falling. Plenty of NTT jobs to place new PhDs in, enough to keep a lot of people on the treadmill for years, but not enough for a stable career. The grad programs are still churning out 75 new PhDs each year. And the biggest contingent of new TT faculty is still being hired from outside the system, from Germany or from comp lit or elsewhere.

For 2010-2019, there have been a handful of grad programs with TT placement rates topping out at 50% (Cornell, Harvard, U Mass, Virginia, Texas, and the UNC/Duke conglomerate). Wait another five years, and it will be a different set of programs. Not long ago, Princeton was at the top; now it's down to 37%. You could be accepted to an Ivy League grad program and still face an abysmal placement rate (Columbia at 15%, Brown at 0%), or a big prestigious private university (Vanderbilt at 13%), or a big public flagship (Wisconsin, 40 PhDs, 20% TT placement rate).

Your overall chances of getting a TT job are 30%. You're still likely to fail, but perhaps you will fail better than we did.

How to shrink the Ph.D. in German Studies. Part two

The first half of this post identified our target—41.3 Ph.D.s in German per year, less than half of the current number—and the reasons for making this our goal. This post will lay out one way to get there.

To establish program-specific targets, I started with the number of each program’s average number of tenure-track placements per year since 2008. Then I added bonuses (worth a quarter of a TT job) to those programs with post-2008 TT placement rates at or above 30% (Princeton, Texas, Penn State, Cincinnati, U Washington, and Massachusetts), and an additional similar bonus to those programs that seem to be operating efficiently (Cincinnati, Florida, Harvard, Virgina, UC Davis, Stanford, U Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Illinois). Then I applied geographic bonuses based on regional balance; schools in the Southwest and Southeast get a bonus and the Plains schools suffer no penalty, while the New England, Great Lakes, and Mid East schools take a quarter-point penalty and the Far West schools take a half-point penalty. I multiplied the result by 1.43 (based on the ratio of Ph.D.s to TT jobs in 1981-2007). I didn’t apply the outcome mechanically, but instead used the resulting figures as a guide. The table below summarizes the results.



The path to 41.3 Ph.D.s per year is littered with corpses and the emaciated figures of the gaunt survivors. I present the plan here only as one possible variation on the least bad option for restoring some balance to the job market in German Studies.

The programs that don’t have to change a thing. Princeton, Texas, Cincinnati, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Florida, and Tennessee can keep on doing what they’re doing. Their record of TT placement and/or their geographical good fortune mean that they’re already producing about the right number of Ph.D.s each year that the market can bear from them. Florida and Tennessee seem too small to me to be sustainable, but presumably they know something I don’t. If they can avoid growing, then they can keep going.  North Carolina and Duke have already done the hard work of combining programs, so the future UNC/Duke program can continue at a rate slightly above UNC by itself right now, but not as high as UNC and Duke added together.

The dirty work’s already done. The easiest cuts are the ones that have already happened. The average number of Ph.D.s for 2008-2013 includes some now defunct programs, including Iowa, Oregon, Pittsburgh, Nebraska, and Utah. That’s already 1.2 Ph.D.s per year on average.

Close the programs that are too small. Brown, CUNY, UC Santa Barbara, Connecticut, and Purdue: I’m sorry. You had a good run. But your doctoral programs produce Ph.D.s in such low numbers that they’re either tiny, or bad at turning grad students into Ph.D.s, and your graduates don’t seem to be finding TT jobs. It’s not much, but we need the 1.7 Ph.D.s per year that you contribute together.

I’m assuming that 1 Ph.D. per year is around the lower limit for the size of a healthy program. If you admit only 3 M.A. students each year in a 2-year program, of whom 1.5 (on average) continue on to the doctoral program for two years of doctoral coursework, followed by three years of dissertation writing (with .5 students from each year stopping at the ABD stage), then you have a total program enrollment of 12 grad students (6 M.A. + 3 doctoral + 3 writing dissertations), including 9 grad students in coursework. If students are offered little choice on electives and the dean is understanding, that might be enough enrollment for the seminars to make.

The stillborn. Colorado, what the world needs now is not more Ph.D. programs in German. I know, you’re doing innovative things, but we need less innovation and more immolation. Your plan is to put all your grad students on the five-year plan to cut down on grad school dropout rates. But we’ve only got 41.3 Ph.D.s to award each year. I know your region is underserved, but three years of efficiently mass-producing Ph.D.s in German will serve your region’s needs for the next two decades. Arizona’s program is too close to graduating its first Ph.D.s to shut it down now, but it belongs on this list, too. Allowing one Arizona Ph.D. per year means shutting down some other program that probably deserves to continue.

Close the departments that are too redundant as departments. This is the list where the hurt begins: Georgetown, three more UC schools, Illinois-Chicago, Maryland, Michigan State, NYU, Northwestern, and Wayne State. Between them, they account for 10.7 Ph.D.s per year. There are several excellent programs on this list, but none of them have impressive placements rates, and all of them face too much local competition. Keeping Arizona (or any other program) alive at a minimal rate of 1 Ph.D. per year means losing the legacy of Heidi Byrnes to SLA in German Studies. Keeping Georgetown means losing someone else. That’s how painful these cuts are going to be.

Modest reduction. People who know the local programs better might argue that it would make more sense, say, to keep Georgetown but close Rutgers, and it’s quite possible that they’re right. Some of the programs on the following list benefit from the demise of their neighbors, possibly unjustly. Programs that can meet their targets with only modest adjustments include Rutgers, Johns Hopkins, Virginia, Stanford, UC Davis (or some other UC school outside of Berkeley), Penn State, Kansas, and Vanderbilt, who need to produce only one Ph.D. less every two years, on average. This only adds up to 3.1 Ph.D.s less per year.

Major reduction. Other programs need to graduate around one Ph.D. less every year. These are programs of significant size that need to become programs of modest size: U Washington, Ohio State, Indiana, Cornell, Illinois, Michigan, Harvard, and Columbia. Together it results in 7.3 Ph.D.s less per year.

Over-producing Ph.D. programs that have to face the music. The biggest cuts have to come out of the largest programs that have modest to poor placement rates in order to get the job market back into balance: Chicago, U Pennsylvania, Yale, Washington U, Wisconsin, and Berkeley, who all need to produce around two Ph.D.s less per year. Their reductions together provide another 11.0 Ph.D.s less per year.

The UNC-Duke project might provide a model for programs to follow. Georgetown and Johns Hopkins could choose to partner with Maryland, for example. Or Illinois with UI-Chicago and Purdue with Indiana. Michigan partnering with Michigan State and Wayne State seems like a logical step. NYU and CUNY could talk to Columbia (NYU actually has better placement rates than Columbia, but Columbia has a better name to trade off of). Brown is not far from Harvard, and Connecticut is not far from U Massachusetts. Berkeley and Stanford are within commuting distance. UC Los Angeles, Irvine, Santa Barbara, and Davis could set up a consortium. (Davis has the better placement record, but with Berkeley/Stanford up north, it might turn out more feasible to have a program based in southern California.)

This is the least bad future for our discipline, and the most equitable way that I can find to distribute the pain. It leaves 31 doctoral programs in German Studies still functioning, distributed in all regions of the country.

There are other options. One could let the biggest programs survive at their current size and close all the smaller programs. That option leaves only 16 doctoral programs still operating. Or we could do nothing and let a Ph.D. in German Studies turn into a career crapshoot reserved for those with a significant trust to fall back on. We can imagine different methodologies that value different things and arrive at a different list of casualties and survivors, or even more other undesirable possible futures for doctoral-level German Studies in the United States. Unfortunately, one of them will become reality whether we like it or not because the job market of 1981-2007, the one that your adviser thought was bad when she got her first job but that actually looks pretty good in retrospect, is never coming back.

German Ph.D. programs: their products and their wasteproducts

Let’s imagine that you have decided, contrary to the advice of every responsible adult in your vicinity, that you want to pursue a Ph.D. in German. Of course you have scanned the list of the programs whose Ph.D.s have done the least badly recently in finding tenure-track jobs. Of course you know not to go to grad school without a decent financial aid package, and you’re prepared to walk away if you don’t get funding. But you also want to know which programs do a good job of turning grad students into Ph.D.s rather than washouts. What should you be looking for?

Imagine a Ph.D. program (Able University) with ten students. All of them eventually finish their Ph.D.s, taking five years on average. Consequently, the program graduates two Ph.D.s in an average year.

Now imagine a second program with ten students (Baker University). All of its students eventually finish, but it takes them twice as long—ten years. So there is only one Ph.D. graduate on average each year. You don’t know why it takes the students so long, but ten years seems like a long time to finish a Ph.D. If you could choose between them, Able University seems like a better option. If you finish your Ph.D. in average time at Able and get the TT job you’re convinced is waiting for you, you’ll be preparing to go up for tenure when the average member of the same Baker cohort is just finishing a Ph.D. Attending Able will add five years to your career and mean a half-decade less spent living on grad school income (*cough* food stamps *cough*).

Now imagine a third program with ten students (Cutthroat University). Cutthroat moves its students through the program with all due haste, but a large fraction fail out of their quals (you can’t translate humanistic Latin verse without a dictionary? too bad, you fail), and another big chunk reach ABD status but never finish their dissertations (this chapter is terrible, but I can’t quite put my finger on why; just rewrite it). Of the doctoral students that start, half finish in five years, but the other half never finish. Consequently, Cutthroat also graduates only one Ph.D. per year on average. A fifty percent chance of finishing grad school dismays you. All else being equal, attending Able seems like a better choice than Cutthroat U.

Now it’s not a bad thing at all if students choose to drop out of a grad program or abandon a dissertation. In even the best program, some students will discover that their talents or interests lie elsewhere, or the long road to the Ph.D. just isn’t worth it. But in general, prospective students will want to steer away from programs whose students are so unhappy that they are bailing out in high numbers, or whose qualifying exam requirements are so unrealistic that many students are failing them, or whose faculty mentoring is so unhelpful that few students are finishing their dissertations.

In the real world, how do you tell which programs are more like Able? You would need to know the enrollment of every Ph.D. program in North America and how many Ph.D.s they are graduating each year. If you knew that information, you could divide the average enrollment by the average number of Ph.D.s granted and arrive at a figure that is close to a reasonable number of years for someone to spend earning a Ph.D.: five, in the case of Able, compared to ten for Baker and Cutthroat. You won’t be able to tell the difference between Baker and Cutthroat—that is, you won’t be able to say if a program’s students are taking a very long time to finish, or if they are dropping out—but you’ll just try to avoid them both anyway. In general, the lower the number, the more efficient a program is at turning grad students into Ph.D.s, and that’s what you want. If only someone published that information somewhere…

Here is where the annual “Personalia” feature of Monatshefte comes to the rescue. It does in fact publish grad program enrollments and the number of degrees granted. For master’s degree enrollments and degrees awarded, the results are unsurprising, with the number of degrees generally falling close to half the number of students enrolled, about what you would expect from two-year M.A. programs.

For Ph.D. programs, the results are more revealing. If you compile all the numbers for the years 2007-8 through 20012-13, you could rank all the doctoral programs from most to least efficient. And this is what you would find:

Ranking of Ph.D. programs in German according to Ph.D.s earned by average enrollment, 2007-8 to 20012-13 (rank, average doctoral enrollment, total Ph.D.s awarded, average Ph.D.s awarded per year, and average enrollment divided by average number of Ph.D.s awarded)

Note that I’ve used my own counts of Ph.D.s, which I believe are more accurate than those in “Personalia” (and since they’re higher, my numbers cast the grad programs in a better light than they would otherwise appear).

There is a lot of interesting information in this table. The average program has an enrollment of 18 doctoral students, while Wisconsin, Berkeley, and Washington University in St. Louis are twice that size or larger. The average program graduates 2.3 Ph.D.s per year, or 85.7 among all programs. The three schools just named produce the most Ph.D.s, followed by Texas, Princeton, and Harvard at three Ph.D.s per year.

But none of the programs mentioned so far fare well in terms of how efficiently they move students towards completion. The top program in those terms is Cincinnati, whose graduates have also done relatively well at finding TT jobs through competitive searches. The example of Cincinnati shows that grad programs can prepare doctoral students for academic employment at a range of schools without requiring many years in a grad program or a string of failed comps and unfinished dissertations. (I’m not associated in any way with Cincinnati, but now I wish I were.)

Florida, in second place, is the smallest program included in the ranking, and with less than five students on average it was almost too small to include. But its size fits an unmistakable pattern: Every single one of the ten most efficient programs are smaller than average, with an average of just 12.5 doctoral students as a group. Small size is not necessarily a sign of efficiency, however; the lowest rankings, places 31-38, are also smaller programs, with an average of 14.1 students. The second tier (places 11-17) also tend to be smaller, with 13.9 students on average, while the largest programs, with 24.6 students on average, are found in places 18-30. Smaller enrollments might indicate more personalized attention from faculty, or it might be a sign of institutional neglect.

* * *
Dear DGS’s and department heads: If you think my figures are in error, then please submit accurate “Personalia” questionnaires, because the figures here are based on what you yourselves reported, and improved in your favor by my own research.

Above all, the next time a discussion of “How to Improve the Ph.D. in German for the Twenty-First Century” comes up at GSA, please take the microphone away from people whose programs massively overproduce Ph.D.s, have shamefully low TT placement rates, or take the better part of a decade to create grad school failures instead of turning grad students into Ph.D. holders. I’m tired of hearing people who hide their failure behind their prestige telling the rest of us how to be just like them. Let’s hear instead what the folks at schools like Cincinnati have to say about doctoral education in German and how to prepare graduates for today’s academic careers.