Grad students fear lack of academic jobs

Falling asleep on a makeshift bed of book and papers, with dissertation notes for a pillow. Cheerios for lunch and dinner -- and maybe even breakfast when it's been a good coupon week. Mom and Dad still wondering what ever happened to becoming a lawyer. Such is the life of a graduate student. But it's all worth it in the end, when -- as professors some day -- they lean back in the red leather chair in their dusty, book-filled office, adjust their spectacles and look out on the eager young intellectuals gathered round to discuss the merits of Emmanuel Kant and the philosophies of Niccol~ Machiavelli. Yet such a reward is becoming increasingly hard to grasp. "There is a deepening insecurity in the academic job market," School of Arts and Sciences Graduate Dean Walter Licht said. While recent publicity has highlighted the effect of constrained school budgets on skyrocketing tuition costs, equally important is the impact on the number of tenured faculty positions universities can offer. Further hit by cuts in government funding, schools have had to borrow business's philosophy of putting the bottom line first. "The University has increasingly taken on a cooperate outlook in how they manage their faculty," said Liam Riordan, a History doctoral student who graduated from the University last year and has spent the time since scouring the bulletins of the American Historical Association for job openings in early American history. Graduates looking for jobs complain about the trend for universities to replace tenured positions with part-time, pay-per-course work -- often without benefits. "They're certainly not jobs to support a family on," Graduate History Chair Lee Cassanelli said. In response to the insecure job market, his department has shrunk the number of doctorates given out. "We've gone from 15 to 20 to 10 to 12 in the last few years," Cassanelli said."We don't want to be sending out Ph.D.s into the market without any job prospects." Such a philosophy has enabled the department to ensure that more than 80 percent of its doctorates will get tenured track jobs. This figure is higher than other departments, such as English, where only 50 percent have such employment prospects. "Our students know that if they become an expert in say, medieval literature, there's not going to be medieval literature spot ready for them right when they graduate," Graduate English Chairperson Jim English said. "Often it will only becomes available after years of fellowships and part-time positions." English noted that one way of tightening those prospects is to publish. "We really encourage students to publish their dissertations," he said. But the competition remains stiff. "We are forced into the rat race," said former Religious Studies major Thomas Eisenmann, who is trading in his Bibles and scholarly interpretations for the calculators and Wall Street Journal subscriptions of a more secure business career. Religious Studies Graduate Chairperson Robert Kraft said, however, that he is confident things will get better. "As the boomers retire more job are going to open up," he said, while noting that universities will never be able to relive the glory days of the 1960s. His department has recently graduated only two or three doctorates per year, most of whom manage to get jobs in three to four years often in growing specialized areas, like Jewish Studies. While humanities students are used to having to beat the odds, they are now being joined by historic foreigners to employment worries -- science experts. "Job insecurity has now started to plague the natural sciences," Licht said. "The? decrease in federal funding? which had previously provided the new Ph.D.s a chance to prove themselves also makes it more difficult for young professors to find research support which in turn stresses the universities," Physics Graduate Chairperson Robert Hollebeek said. He also noted that, thanks to research laboratories like Exxon and Lucent Technologies -- hungry for Physics students who know computer systems like they know Newton principia -- his department is able to send off all its doctorates to a secure job. Similarly, industry picks up employment slack in Geology. "When oil prices are high, companies can't get enough of Geology Ph.D.s," said Geology Graduate Chair Stephen Phipps, remembering the oil crisis of the early '80s. Even in the current era of stable oil prices, however, the department is able to place most of its doctorates in jobs -- about two-thirds in tenure track positions -- as fast growing fields in environmental studies and aqueous geo-chemistry help them buck the trend. Industrial recruiting has also effected in Biology, though rather then picking up graduating doctorates, it often plucks them from the pool before they even try to get the degree. "More and more of the top students are going to med school -- or getting a masters in a field like in Biotechnology," Biology Graduate Chairperson Fevzi Daldal said. Those options are "a lot more stable, then say, a Ph.D. in classical biology, which not a particularly growing field." Yet while the path to the leather chair may be rife with obstacles, Licht remains faithful that graduate students will continue to follow it. "True intellectual passion is among the strongest of motivators," he said.