Out of my 12ish friends who got their PhDs in the humanities in the last 10 years, only 2 of them got tenure-track teaching jobs at a university. This is one of the many reasons I opted out of academia. On top of realizing I’m not smart or diligent enough to pursue doctoral work—also that academic writing is boring and no one reads it…and that people actually read and enjoy stuff in journalistic/popular outlets [like this Substack!]—I saw how stressed, depressed, and mentally unstable my friends were while completing their doctoral work. Their inability to get a job in academia only made everything worse. Not to mention the fact that they accrued debt while studying—thanks to the dismal stipends they received—their lack of stable employment post-doc only dug them deeper into the hole.
As I declared alongside Jonah Howell, Kay Craig, and K.C. Johnson, academia is dead…at least if you’re in the humanities. Schools are losing money. Funding for doctoral programs is running low, thus acceptance rates are getting slimmer. It also doesn’t help that we just hit an enrollment cliff, reducing the amount of students applying for undergrad programs—thus sucking even more money out of schools. Furthermore, universities are becoming more corporate and bureaucratic, which is only serving to suffocate academic integrity and campus culture [which I covered in the NYTimes, Compact, and here on Substack].
If you do manage to get into a PhD program—which will require a great amount of effort [and connections] given how competitive the process has become—you probably won’t get a lot of funding. And then when you finally finish, the chances are that you will not find a tenure-track teaching position any time soon.