Blog CLXXVI (176): Another Study

Last week, I discussed The Many Careers of History PhDs, the first of two studies on the history professor that this blog will explore.  This week I want to look at that second study, which is profoundly troubling for a number of reasons; particularly when read in combination with Many Careers.

This statistical study came out in the journal Science Advances and it examined the hiring practices in the academic fields of history, business, and computer science. This article has gotten a lot of attention because Aaron Clauset, the lead professor of the research team that produced this study, condensed the findings into a short essay on Slate.com. If you want to read either article in full, you can find them here:

• Aaron Clauset, Samuel Arbesman, Daniel B. Larremore, “Systematic Inequality and Hierarchy in Faculty Hiring Networks,” Science Advances (February 2015) vol. 1, no. 1 http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/1/e1400005

• Joel Warner and Aaron Clauset, “The Academy’s Dirty Secret: An Astonishingly Small Number of Elite Universities Produce an Overwhelming Number of America’s Professors, Slate.com (February 23, 2015), http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2015/02/university_hiring_if_you_didn_t_get_your_ph_d_at_an_elite_university_good.html 

Here is the short version: this research team of three examined the placement of more than 16,000 faculty at 242 schools. What they found was a “steeply hierarchical structure that reflects profound social inequality.”

What does that mean? Long story made short, it ain't good.  Only a fourth of all universities accounted for 71 to 86 percent of the tenure-track faculty positions in both the U.S. and Canada. In the case of history—which is what this blog is all about—eight schools filled half of all the professor jobs. That is right—eight.

The data the team collected also suggests that merit plays less of a role in the hiring process than people would like to think. Schools from the top ten history programs place three times as many future professors than those in the second ten. Overproduction is a problem even at the “Magic Eight.” These elite schools are training more Ph.D.s than they can hire, so even if you go to one of these prestige programs, the odds indicate you will end up at a lessor school. To quote the Slate.com article, these “findings suggest that upward career mobility in the world of professors is mostly a myth.”

I got curious about this study. Who are the “Magic Eight” of history? I went to the original study and found the answer to that question as well as their rankings of the top 144 programs in history. (They got different results in their examination of business and computer science.)  I have a lot of comments to make about these articles, this list, and the AHA study, but that will all come in other postings. For now, here are their rankings of the top 144 schools for a history Ph.D. with links to the department web site—or the closest representation of history department. (Several of these universities have merged departments, a few have schools, and two appear to run their Ph.D.s out of their graduate colleges without a department of any sort). They are:

1. Harvard University
2. Yale University
3. University of California, Berkeley
4. Princeton University
5. Stanford University
6. University of Chicago
7. Columbia University
8. Brandeis University
9. The Johns Hopkins University
10. University of Pennsylvania
11. University of Wisconsin
12. University of Michigan
13. University of California, Los Angeles
14. Northwestern University
15. Cornell University
16. Brown University
17. University of California, Davis
18. University of Rochester
19. New York University
20. University of California, San Diego
21. Duke University
22. University of Minnesota
23. Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
24. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
25. University of Virginia
26. University of Southern California
27. University of Washington
28. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
29. University of Texas
30. Emory University
31. Indiana University
32. Stony Brook University-State University of New York
33. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
34. Washington University in St. Louis
35. University of California, Riverside
36. Michigan State University
37. University of California, Irvine
38. University of California, Santa Barbara
39. Binghamton University-State University of New York
40. Georgetown University  
41. University of Arizona
42. University of Maryland
43. Catholic University
44. University of Florida
45. Carnegie Mellon University
46. University of Pittsburgh
47. Tufts University
48. University of Notre Dame
49. Rice University
50. University at Buffalo-State University of New York
51. University of California, Santa Cruz 
52. Boston University
53. Vanderbilt University
54. George Washington University 
55. University of Connecticut
56. University of New Mexico
57. The Ohio State University
58. University of Georgia 
59. University of Iowa
60. University of Massachusetts
61. Northern Illinois University
62. University of Miami
63. Boston College
64. University of Illinois at Chicago
65. Temple University
66. Claremont McKenna College
67. Louisiana State University
68. University of Kansas
69. University of Hawaii
70. Case Western Reserve University
71. Tulane University
72. Wayne State University
73. Florida State University
74. Drew University
75. Pennsylvania State University
76. Princeton Theological Seminary
77. College of William and Mary
78. University of Cincinnati
79. Florida International University
80. University of Tennessee
81. University of Colorado
82. Ohio University
83. University of Delaware
84. University of Oregon
85. University of Kentucky
86. University of Toledo
87. American University
88. Georgia State University
89. Arizona State University
90. University of Missouri
91. University of Utah
92. University of New Hampshire
93. University at Albany-State University of New York
94. City University of New York Graduate Center
95. Clark University
96. University of Houston
97. Syracuse University
98. Marquette University
99. Kent State University
100. Bowling Green State University
101. University of Maine
102. University of Mississippi
103. Washington State University
104. Miami University
105. Kansas State University
106. University of Oklahoma
107. Howard University
108. University of Missouri—Kansas City
109. University of Nebraska
110. Jewish Theological Seminary of America
111. Saint John's University 
112. Northeastern University
113. Texas Christian University
114. Auburn University
115. Iowa State University
116. Graduate Theological Union
117. Lehigh University
118. Purdue University
119. University of South Carolina
120. University of North Texas
121. Loyola University Chicago
122. Texas A&M University
123. University of Arkansas
124. University of Northern Arizona
125. West Virginia University
126. Fordham University
127. University of Alabama
128. University of Southern Mississippi
129. University of Akron
130. University of Texas at Dallas
131. University of Nevada
132. Illinois State University
133. Southern Illinois University Carbondale
134. Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
135. Western Michigan University
136. Saint Louis University
137. University of Texas at Arlington
138. University of Idaho
139. Texas Tech University
140. University of Memphis
141. Mississippi State University 
142. George Mason University
143. Oklahoma State University
144. Middle Tennessee State University

Blog CLXXV (175): A Study

Guess what? The job crisis in history is over. At least that is the impression a report by the American Historical Association suggests. Or—and this is important—it gives hard data that shows how dire job market is for the history Ph.D.

This examination is the first of two studies on job placement in history that all of us should read and consider seriously.  (I will get to the other study in the next posting on the blog.)

Returning to the AHA report—this study did a random sampling of 2,500 Ph.D.s earned from May 1998 through August 2009, which the researchers took from the 10,976 names that appeared in the AHA’s Directory of History Departments and Historical Organizations during that period.  It found that 50.6 percent of the individuals it sampled had tenure-track jobs at four year institutions.

In the Perspectives on History article announcing the findings of this report, Allen Mikaelian, the newsletter's editor, and Julia Brookins, a member of the AHA staff observed that it was “a perfect half—empty, half-­full finding. In sharing this discovery informally with historians and graduate students, we’ve found that people tend to take it as evidence of their already-­formed attitude—­be that optimistic or pessimistic.”

Other important findings: sub-fields are important to the history profession and this study found that non-Americanists had a better chance of finding jobs than Americanists.  Job placement broke even on gender.

My take: these numbers are better than what I expected.  The thing is, though, a half-full glass is actually not that great considering the amount of work that an individual invests in getting the Ph.D.  I should also note that there is a big difference in having a job in some place like Chicago versus an isolated region of the country, like southwestern Nebraska.

The 16-page study is available on the AHA website: L. Maren Wood and Robert B. Townsend, The Many Careers of History PhDs: A Study of Job Outcomes, Spring 2013—A Report to the American Historical Association, http://historians.org/Documents/Many_Careers_of_History_PhDs_Final.pdf 

Blog CLXXIV (174): The History Ph.D. as a Lot More of Things

Over the past couple of years the American Historical Association has had a feature on its website called "AHA Member Spotlight."  These biographical profiles, offer short professional sketches of various historians.  After going through all of these postings I have come to the less than startling conclusion that most AHA members are primarily academics.  No big surprise there.  Every once in a while, though, there were some outliers.  Below are a series of links to the "Spotlight" of AHA members that are doing something that is a bit unique; that are teaching in departments other than history; that are working overseas; that teach in high schools; or those that are public historians of one sort or another. These features are highlighted here in the hopes that they might give the viewers of this blog unconventional ideas about future employment.  The "Spotlights" were not developed with that purpose in mind, but a highly creative mind can look at these features analytically and find new insights in them.  Enjoy:

• Peter Kizilos-Clift, independent scholar

• Blaine Brownell, academic administration, University of Alabama at Birmingham; University of North Texas; University of Memphis; Ball State University; University of South Florida

• Ellen Griffith Spears, New College/American Studies, University of Alabama

• Nancy McTygue, Executive Director, California History-Social Science Project, University of California, Davis

• William M. Ferraro, editor, Papers of George Washington 

• Carl Abbott, Urban Studies and Planning, Portland State University

• David J. Trowbridge, Director, African and African American Studies, Marshall University

• Ronald J. Granieri, historian, Office of the Secretary of Defense

• Craig Perrier, high school social studies and history specialist, Fairfax County Public Schools

• Daniel Geary, Trinity College, University of Dublin

• Marty Blatt, Chief of Cultural Resources and Historian, Boston National Historical Park/Boston African American National Historic Site

• Amalia D. Kessler, Stanford Law School, Stanford University

• Colin F. Wilder, Associate Director, Center for Digital Humanities, University of South Carolina

• Michael Cullinane, Department of Humanities, Northumbria University 

• Beth Boland, historian, National Park Service

• Taylor Stoermer, historian, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

• Jeffrey S. Reznick, Chief, History of Medicine Division U.S. National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health

Blog CLXXIII (173): The History Ph.D. as a Lot of Things

This post represents a return of the "History Ph.D. as ...." series (sort of).  The original series was a series of guest essays from individuals with a Ph.D. in history (with one or two notable exceptions) who found themselves working somewhere other than in a history department.  Starting in 2013 the American Historical Association's newsletter Perspectives on History began a similar series called "Career Paths."  In running this blog I have always preferred to avoid articles from other media outlets that were widely available elsewhere.  When I have reproduced stories, I have tried to do so from outlets that most of the readers of this blog would not regularly consult.   While Perspectives is clearly a publication that many readers of this blog read regularly, there are a number of articles in it that are similar to the "History Ph.D. as ..." series and since there are so many accounts that can be consulted quickly I am presenting links to these first-person accounts here:

• Think Tank: Ted Bromund, “From Academia to a Think Tank: Reflections on How to Be Lucky”

• Non-profit: Robert Oxnam, “Launching Pad-PhD, Target-TBD”

• Academic Administration: Lauren Apter Bairnsfather, "What I Learned at AHA 2014: A Mentor's Perspective"

• Government Service/Novelist: Clifford Adelman, "The Edges of History"

• Business Consulting: Joshua Wolff, "A New Course: Converting a Passion for History into a Private Sector Career"

• Academic Administration: Lauren Apter Bairnsfather, Pam Lach, Jason Myers, and Anne Mitchell Whisnant, "In Admin: Four History PhDs Discuss their Alt-­Ac Careers"

• Congressional Staff: John A. Lawrence, "A Historian on the Hill"

Administrative Post 32

The blog is in the middle of a small break.  (The semesters at the Naval War College differ a lot from most of those in use at colleges and universities around the USA).  I am currently using this time to work on some of my writing projects.  (This blog can often be quite demanding when it comes to time; which is one of the reasons it saw so little attention in 2014 and 2013).  Rest assured, the blog will return next week with the return of "The History Ph.D. as..." series and several other posts about publishing, writing, and employment trends in history. 

Administrative Post 31

This note is the last post to the "Job Tips" series (sort of).  This series was enormously popular by the standards of this blog, drawing on average a thousand visitors a week.  The individuals who contributed their insights did so out of their own generosity—so if you have the chance you should thank them.  A few of them, though, sent in replies after I had already posted the relevant collection of comments.  As a result, I decided to take advantage of the dynamic nature of the internet and folded their advice in after the initial posting.  As a result, every essay in the "Job Tips" series saw revision and expansion in this past week.  Go back and take a look at them again.  There is a lot of good stuff in these new points.