The current higher education landscape presents as many challenges as it does opportunities, which can make it daunting to decide where to direct reform efforts. In this chapter and the one that follows, I use the context and arguments of previous chapters to begin building an action plan. First, I turn to faculty members, advisors, and deans of graduate study to offer suggestions both for programmatic change and for better supporting individual students, grounding my advice in the context and arguments of previous chapters. Students will also find this chapter illuminating, as it will provide a glimpse into the concerns and limitations that faculty members face while also suggesting ways forward—topics that students may wish to use to ground discussions with their own advisors. The strategies I offer in this chapter will be complemented by those in chapter 5, which focus more specifically on ways that students can find support, advocate for themselves, and put their PhD to work in a meaningful way.

A growing number of faculty members, as well as graduate programs and professional organizations, are working on interventions that support broader future opportunities for students.[1] These efforts are hugely important—and yet many graduate students still fear that their advisors will not support their consideration of a broad range of professional opportunities. When I visit schools to talk about career pathways, I often find a certain tension among the faculty members and administrators who have invited me or who attend. On the one hand, they are invested in the importance of the topic and, by the simple act of arranging the event or even just participating, they are likely more informed than many of their colleagues on the topic. On the other hand, despite being interested, open, and informed, they often still feel unsure of where to begin. With that tension in mind, this chapter will focus on how faculty members and administrators can take action right now to support both current and future students, through advising and mentorship, curricular reform, connecting with supportive communities within and beyond the university, and tracking alumni outcomes over time.

There are several key principles that undergird the recommendations in this section. One is that graduate programs should not grow beyond what they can ethically and sustainably support. Graduate students work hard as junior colleagues, and their studies and apprenticeship should be compensated as such. If programs cannot provide a funded opportunity for students with adequate mentorship and structure, they should admit fewer students until they reach equilibrium. Doctoral students should not be expected to take out student loans to pay for tuition.

At the same time, expanding access to humanities doctoral study and broadening the view of what constitutes meaningful scholarship would benefit students, the field, and the public. While programs need to provide adequate support, which in some cases means accepting fewer students, reducing the overall number of people with humanities PhDs is not the goal. Trying to reach a balance between the number of graduates and the number of tenure-track jobs by reducing the size of all humanities graduate programs will not solve the jobs issue. The reliance on adjunct labor is not caused by an oversupply of people receiving PhDs, but rather is a separate matter of institutional priorities and cost-cutting that is largely unaffected by the number of doctorates awarded, as I discussed in the first chapter. Moreover, the effects of cutting the size of graduate programs across the board are likely to be detrimental to the overall diversity and vibrancy of humanities programs, as discussed in chapters 2 and 3.

Finally, talking about career pathways is a necessary component of graduate education reform, but it is not sufficient. In particular, any push for reform must include a fight for better labor practices. The current two-tiered system of tenure-track and tenured faculty on one hand, and under supported adjunct faculty on the other, is detrimental to the learning process and often harms both adjuncts and their students, as I discussed in chapter 1. The structural inequality stems in part from a devaluation of the practice of teaching at research-intensive universities, which is deeply ironic considering that teaching is perhaps the single most central element of education. Because R1s are often seen as more prestigious than many teaching-focused institutions, the values they espouse can be felt throughout the higher education landscape. In particular, the high prestige value of research and publication and the intense pressure that faculty members are under to publish at R1s means that research tends to be showcased while teaching (often) and service (almost always) are pushed into the margins as unpleasant chores. Even the terminology that tends to be used to describe how many courses a faculty member teaches—one’s “teaching load” suggests that it is a burden.[2] This is partly tied to gender bias: service work, teaching, and even collaborative research are routinely seen as feminized labor and are subsequently undervalued, as are fields that tend to be more commonly associated with women or femininity (including many humanities disciplines).[3] While teaching-intensive institutions may have different expectations around the balance of research and teaching, there is often still an implicit sense that high-caliber grants and publications carry the most weight. Changing this value system means implementing better recognition and reward structures for teaching and service. As I discussed in chapter 1, meaningful reform does not happen in isolation. The push for broader career preparation will be most powerful if it accompanies support for other efforts, such as improving wages for adjunct faculty, converting adjunct positions to long-term and tenure-line positions, and improving transparency in tenure and promotion processes.[4] These principles of fair labor standards and meaningful recognition of all forms of work inform the suggestions I make in this chapter. I will focus first on the roles of individual faculty members working with individual students, then zoom out to consider opportunities for programmatic change on a broader scale.

Improving Advising and Mentoring

One of the most important things that faculty members can do is help students feel more comfortable talking about career pathways from the moment they begin their program. This costs nothing, and does not require any specialized training to implement. Faculty mentors have an important opportunity to open up these lines of communication with students, and to do so from the earliest days of a student’s involvement in the program so that conversations about careers are normalized over a period of several years, rather than rushed at the end. Of course, there are limits to what any single advisor can do or convey, and so mentors can also help students look to a broader community for support and guidance—both within and beyond the university.

As students and faculty alike know well, the support of individual advisors and mentors is crucial to student success. Faculty mentors are deeply trusted voices for graduate students, and the advice that they offer—as well as the unspoken signals—can have a profound effect on students’ professional choices. However, in many cases, professional development is treated as something entirely separate from the intellectual work of graduate school (or so deeply integrated as to be synonymous, even though it is clear that many graduate programs do not systematically prepare their students even for academic careers). No matter what is being communicated at an institutional level, or what opportunities are made available, the signals that students receive from their advisors will often carry more weight than what they hear from a centralized, service-oriented space (like a career center, library, or center for teaching and learning—as crucial as these spaces are). After all, it is a student’s advisor and department that have the final say in approving their dissertation—and therefore, their degree completion. Central spaces are nonevaluative, which allows them to do many things that academic departments cannot, but also sets them apart from a student’s core intellectual work. That separation can create a certain suspicion that thinking about careers is disconnected from—and less important than—talking about research questions. However, when incorporated in a thoughtful and systematic way, thinking more expansively about the ways that graduate programs prepare students for their futures can strengthen students’ engagement with the subject matter, methods, and teaching approaches that are core to the academic enterprise. Mentorship from faculty members is a key component of this. Flipping this paradigm in order to understand professionalization as an integral part of how students apply their research and have an impact in the world may mean the topic of career preparation and exploration as a part of mentorship and advisement will resonate more meaningfully with both students and faculty members.

The advising relationship goes well beyond guidance on research and professional development. Advisors can also help smooth the road for graduate students in matters that are not directly related to their studies—for instance, navigating institutional hurdles, understanding tacit rules that govern the academy, and offering insight into confusing or frustrating situations. This is an extra layer of work for advisors—and many times it is largely invisible, emotional labor—but it can be invaluable, especially for students who may be newer at trying to understand the university’s structures and politics.[5] For first-generation students and students who identify with underrepresented minority groups, the advisory relationship can either ease or exacerbate points of friction that may hinge on differences of race, class, language, or culture, as I discussed in chapter 2.

Students really need these supportive advising relationships in order to make timely progress toward their degree—not just to support their research, but to support them holistically in the ways that their lives and studies affect one another. Offering such support is in itself a contribution to the student’s future career path, as it helps the student to gain confidence, receive feedback in a professional way, and make progress toward a goal. If the student is able to meet interim deadlines and complete a deadline in a timely manner, that becomes a major achievement that the student can point toward in demonstrating their likelihood to succeed on the job. Treating graduate study—and especially the dissertation—in a professional way prepares graduate students to succeed both in their program and after completing their degrees.

Help Students Feel Safe Talking about Careers—from Day One

Students commonly rely on mentoring and advising relationships when they begin considering their career search, but perhaps even more important is the advising that happens in the earlier stages of study. Whether intentionally or not, advising in the first years of graduate school serves to socialize the student into the norms and expectations of the profession. Advising relationships are also one of the key ways in which students learn the “tacit knowledge” of graduate education, as they receive varying degrees of guidance on how to succeed in their discipline: how to write successful conference proposals, fellowship applications, and grants; how to signal their ownership and expertise in an area through word choice, demeanor, and more; and, most simply, how to successfully complete their degree.

Given the depth and breadth of influence that advisors and mentors have on students, it is not an exaggeration to say that for many students, the ability to successfully complete their program hinges on their relationship with their advisor. The high stakes mean that doctoral students worry about pleasing their advisors, and the fear of disapproval about career choices adds to an already sky-high level of anxiety among many—probably most—grad students. The concern is understandable, but it creates a significant problem when it causes a student to avoid the topic altogether, as avoidance only increases anxiety and limits the possibility for solid preparation. When clear communication is lacking, there is much more room for fear, projection, and misinterpretation. The fear of being “found out” or of betraying an advisor is something I hear over and over again from advanced graduate students who are beginning to feel the realities of their impending academic job search more acutely.

Disapproval from advisors can indeed be a real problem. At the same time, some of this anxiety is misplaced, or projected—or simply anticipatory. Most advisors don’t want their students to feel ashamed to talk with them about their goals and plans, even if those plans differ from the anticipated faculty route, but without a signal that this is a topic that the advisor is willing to discuss, students may be reluctant to initiate such a conversation. It is important to make it clear to your students that your office is a safe and judgment-free place for them to discuss their goals and future opportunities. Advisors can help their students to succeed by proactively and nonjudgmentally raising the topic of career pathways with their students from the very first advisory conversation, as well as in discussions in group or class settings. Given the high level of anxiety that students experience about the topic of professional pathways, waiting for students to bring up their career interests may mean that the conversation never happens, all while students grow increasingly paralyzed—potentially impacting not only their career paths, but even their degree completion.

The vast majority of advisors really want the best for their students. However, much hinges on what is understood by “best.” Two factors often contribute to what students perceive as reluctance or judgment. First, most faculty advisors’ own career paths do not include much—or any—experience outside of the university. They typically have deep but narrow experience, having progressed through the familiar pathway of the academy. Even if they wanted to offer their students advice on how to attain their scholarly goals while also opening doors to new and varied opportunities, they rarely have the personal experience that would give them the knowledge and confidence to offer concrete and genuinely helpful suggestions.

Second, and in large part because of the first point, advisors may have a very particular and firmly held idea of what constitutes a successful outcome for their students. When a faculty member is advising a particularly brilliant student, the clearest outcome for success is a tenure-track position, ideally at an R1 or a prestigious liberal arts college. In an academic context, this model of success is familiar and well understood, whereas the definition of a “good” nonfaculty position is highly contextual and personal. Watching a student take another path can feel like a loss—the loss of a prospective colleague and of the potential to advance the field. Moreover, faculty advisors may feel they cannot help the student to build a strong network outside of the university; they may not know the players involved; they may not have a clear sense of how their student’s strengths map to particular sectors, institutions, or roles. What the faculty member may not be seeing, though, are the ways that the choice of a different path could actually enliven the student’s research, benefit the field, and serve a broader public.

Advisors rarely know the full picture of their students’ circumstances, and when advisors focus exclusively on faculty careers, they do a disservice to their students. While a faculty position may be appealing in some respects, a student may also be balancing many competing needs and desires: a partner’s job, limitations on geographic location, proximity to family, a child’s school or caregiving circumstances, health, and many other potential factors.

Even beyond material considerations, a limited message around career pathways may cause students to miss opportunities that they are well suited for and that would be every bit as rewarding as a faculty career. Because the academic job market is centralized and systematized in a way that is rare for most other professions—with job postings available at certain times of the year in certain publications, and with interviews happening all at once at major academic conferences—it can be difficult to undertake other kinds of career searches in parallel. Doctoral students often find the “nonacademic” job market to be unruly, confusing, and difficult to navigate. Hearing an implicit or explicit message that they need not bother is sometimes the only nudge they need to ignore other job opportunities altogether.

This is not to say that every faculty member needs to be an expert in the opportunities available—not at all. Rather, advisors should be prepared for the kinds of questions they are likely to receive, and should encourage students to be self-reflective about their needs and to pursue the resources that are available to help them. This can be incredibly simple—just recognizing that a student may wish to consider other possibilities, and directing that person to relevant resources can go a long way toward enabling a student to feel like a faculty career is one of many possibilities, rather than the only option.

The advising relationship is highly idiosyncratic, and there is really no way to systematize it, given that it depends on the personalities, strengths, and weaknesses of two individuals. Further, no single advisor has expertise in every single area where a student might need support. Even so, developing strategies to influence the discussions around professional development and career pathways that take place in advising relationships may have a profound influence on broader cultural change. I propose offering career advice workshops and training sessions for everyone advising humanities graduate students, in partnership with graduate career offices (where available). Giving advisors the tools they need to make strong recommendations and recognize their students’ unique strengths would go a long way toward reducing their reluctance to offer guidance (or simply an open attitude) toward careers beyond the classroom.

If mentors and advisors transmit to students an expansive vision of what scholarly work can encompass, those students are more likely to internalize, enact, and share those same values. With no perceived stigma against career paths in sectors across and beyond the university, students will feel greater freedom to creatively apply their training in a field that makes sense for them. For those who do become professors, they may be more likely to advise their own students in ways that they themselves were advised, creating genealogies of mentorship that embrace a wide range of paths and outcomes.

Connect Students with Supportive Communities

In the best scenarios, an advisor guides a student to greater reflection and self-critique about their research and project development, helps to improve their final product, and offers guidance on professionalization and the daunting steps that follow the dissertation defense. But all of that puts a great deal of pressure on a single faculty advisor, if they are the only trusted voice available. Faculty members (and programs) can also serve their students by cultivating a wider circle of voices offering guidance. There are many people within and beyond the university community to whom an advisor could direct a student for more specific types of support. Graduate career centers are the most obvious example, and are becoming increasingly common across many universities. Situated in different institutional environments—perhaps within central career services, or within the university’s graduate school—graduate career centers offer highly trained (and neutral) counselors who work exclusively with graduate students and understand the kinds of roles where they tend to succeed.

Another part of the university community that can offer support for students considering other paths are alumni. If programs value knowing where their graduates’ pathways lead, and follow through with a concerted effort to track their students after they graduate, then that alumni network becomes a rich community of people who are likely quite willing to talk with current students from their own program. It also offers students a wider range of models to look to as they consider what the future holds.

A third community that can support the advisor in guiding students are PhD holders who work within the university itself. Every university employs PhDs in a wide range of positions—in the library, in student services, in senior administration, in centers and research initiatives. While care must be taken not to overburden these staff members with uncompensated (and emotionally intensive) labor, they could be a valuable part of the discussion about potential career paths. Whether through direct conversations (in the form of informational interviews, for instance), or via career panels, talks, or other formal programming, the people working within the university can provide a terrific window into intellectually engaging opportunities that graduate students may not have previously considered.

Overall, students need more exposure to people working in different sectors. This could be structured in many ways, from a speaker series to a database of willing mentors to finding ways for students to observe or even work in different settings. Of course, establishing and maintaining the kinds of relationships that would be required for partnerships of this nature takes a great deal of time and care. But, if done thoughtfully, it could be of benefit both to the university and to the partnering organizations. Even directing students to free online resources like Imagine PhD, PhDs at Work, and Twitter hashtags like #withaphd and #altac can offer a low-stakes way of providing students with useful connections, suggestions, and frameworks for thinking about career pathways.

Finally, helping students to establish stronger peer mentorship networks with one another can help create space for informal guidance and advising of a different kind. In addition to encouraging students to form support systems, such as writing groups, within their own cohorts, peer and near-peer mentorship structures can create leadership opportunities for students as they progress to mentor and support incoming students. Not only can more established students help junior students to navigate departmental and university systems, they can also help spark open and nonjudgmental discussions about career opportunities and more. Further, setting up structures that enable students to become leaders within their programs is a tremendous skill that will help them succeed in any career that they choose—both in the classroom and beyond it.

As an illustration of the power of peer mentoring, I would point to the Futures Initiative. Our program’s efforts at developing peer mentorship have become some of our most valuable programming, supporting not only graduate students but also faculty members and undergraduate students, many from underresourced backgrounds. One such effort centers on the fact that CUNY graduate students are typically the instructors of record for introductory-level courses across the CUNY system. In the Futures Initiative’s first year, we selected three graduate students from a class of ten to run a two-day peer mentoring workshop for CUNY undergraduates, then invited the 350 undergraduate students from all of the graduate students’ courses to apply. In the end, we accepted thirty-five students to participate, providing them with transit fare so they could easily reach the Graduate Center, a stipend to compensate for the time they would have to take off from work, and meals during the workshop.

The graduate students carefully planned the structure of the two days in a way that scaffolded the ideas and leadership skills that they hoped students would come away with, while also gradually building in more autonomy so that students could apply those skills as they learned them. During the afternoon of the second day, the graduate students as well as the Futures Initiative staff left the room after charging the undergraduates with setting their own course for how they wanted to connect with their peers in the academic year ahead. When we returned to the room, they didn’t notice that we had come in. They were too busy working with each other, discussing ideas and possibilities for what they might do in the future. They built a new website where they could share resources about their colleges and invite questions from their peers. In short, they had fully embraced the idea that they were leaders, that they had skills and knowledge that could be useful to others.

This example focuses on undergraduate students, but the same model applies to anyone. By making it possible for people to lead as well as learn from their peers, we have seen graduate and undergraduate students take charge of their own learning in astounding ways.

Opportunities for Programmatic Change

Tracking Outcomes and Sharing Stories

Whether engaging in small or large reform efforts, programs need data to use as a foundation for their decisions, as well as examples of other programs on which they might model their own. One important way that varied career outcomes can be normalized and celebrated is by simply sharing what those outcomes are. There is a major gap in data about postgraduate humanities pathways, because the humanities portion of the Survey of Doctoral Recipients, the only broad- based longitudinal survey work in this area at the federal level, was discontinued twenty-five years ago, in 1995. Fortunately, in the last few years, a growing number of organizations have realized that there is tremendous value in simply telling the stories of people’s career paths. As a result, there is a growing effort to share personal trajectories in an attempt to share models more visibly. Much of this work is taking place within scholarly societies and professional organizations, such as the Council of Graduate Schools, the Graduate Career Consortium, the Modern Language Association, and the American Historical Association. In Canada, a collaborative university-based effort is under way through the Track, Report, Connect, Exchange program (or TRaCE), based at McGill University and a consortium of other Canadian universities. TRaCE pairs an awareness of—and stories about—graduates’ pathways with programmatic change. In some cases, the work of sharing pathways and stories has been taken up by private networks and consultancies, such as PhDs at Work, From PhD to Life, and, until recently, Versatile PhD.[6] In addition, recent funding initiatives such as the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Next Generation Humanities PhD program have exemplified the growing need to transform current programs and celebrate—as well as cultivate—broad successes. 

Among these efforts, the Council of Graduate Schools in particular has leveraged significant private and public funding to work toward a major, national effort tracking career pathways. Having completed both a feasibility study, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and a period of survey development, funded by Sloan, Mellon, and the National Science Foundation, the Council of Graduate Schools is now proceeding with a pilot phase (funded by Mellon and the National Science Foundation) in which they will collect information from PhD students and alumni from fifteen institutions. 

The fact that such a study is moving forward, and with such varied support from funding agencies, is a hugely important shift. Almost across the board, humanities programs can do a much better job of tracking where their graduates go after they earn their degree; otherwise, any discussion of career possibilities is awash with myth and misinformation. Moreover, the effort to surface not only job titles and institutions but narratives and pathways offers an even more valuable glimpse into how people have gotten to their current positions, and why they made certain decisions along the way. 

From a technical perspective, the notion that it is difficult to track people is puzzling. We tend to share more personal and professional data on the internet than ever before, making it easy to conduct a quick search and turn up a LinkedIn profile, an institutional directory, or even a full CV. While 85 percent of graduate deans reported dissatisfaction with the success of tracking former students, and cited lack of current contact information as the greatest hindrance to such tracking, research by a third-party consultancy, the Lilli Research Group, has shown that it is possible to determine the professional outcomes of graduates with a surprising degree of accuracy using only public records.[7] More recently, in a 2018 project called “Where Historians Work,” the American Historical Association has documented not only the first job of new history PhDs, but a ten-year trajectory (2004–13) of their professional pathways.[8] Collecting such information is tedious, time consuming, and sometimes resource intensive. But it is not especially difficult. What we lack is collective motivation to value this information, to prioritize its collection, and to devote resources to compiling it in a consistent way. It is important that this effort originates within academic spaces, rather than simply outsourcing it to for-profit platforms like LinkedIn or academia.edu, where that personal data can be sold or shared in unscrupulous ways. 

The values of academic programs are on display in the data they gather, share, and celebrate. In a prestige-driven environment like academia, the fact that many programs either do not share career outcomes or only share faculty careers indicates that prestige is located primarily or exclusively in the cycle of doctoral students going into faculty careers. The value other careers might hold—in terms of research impact or individual professional satisfaction—is often far less important in the calculus of enticing a certain kind of prospective student and broadcasting a certain kind of success. 

To be sure, some institutions do care a great deal about knowing where their students get jobs. For example, community colleges and for-profit colleges—two very different types of institutions that serve students from similar demographic groups—both tend to be highly aware of alumni career outcomes.[9] Job-seeking and professional advancement is a primary goal for students considering enrollment in for-profits and community colleges, and the schools know it; their success depends on students feeling confident that they can get started in a solid career after graduation. Liberal arts colleges, on the other hand, sometimes give the impression that employment statistics are beneath them and their students—that students should enroll to expand their mind and better themselves, without primary concern for where they will work when they finish. This is often especially true at the graduate level. The privilege of such a stance is enormous. The assumption is that students will do fine no matter what, and that focusing on the material realities of work and wages is somehow unbecoming in the work of the life of the mind. This is the first step to the devaluing of academic and intellectual labor at the postgraduate level. 

A glance at many graduate programs’ websites reveals a pattern in which certain statistics are proudly shared and others quietly buried. What tends to be emphasized, if anything, are “placements”—faculty positions, especially those at elite institutions. Even short-term lectureships are sometimes shared in these statistics, even though such positions are precarious and can be exploitative. But what about those who become academic publishers, journalists, center directors, policy advisors, museum curators? Unless they were in a program that specifically aimed for those careers as desired outcomes (public history programs are a good example), it is likely that those high-achieving alumni are not listed on the department’s website. 

One reason for the lack of visibility of people’s careers outside the university may be that many departments lose touch with their alumni a year or two after graduation. It is not likely that someone will step into a director-level role immediately upon receiving their PhD; rather, it might take five or ten years before that leadership role is attained. But that is all the more reason to ensure that programs don’t lose track of where their alumni are working. What starts as a seemingly uninspiring position may, in time, blossom into an opportunity with incredible impact. 

The other reason is that collectively academic programs do not truly and fully see such positions as powerful and meaningful. Moreover, not only are many of these positions important from a public impact standpoint, but in many cases they help to make the apparatus of higher education possible. Academic publishing and librarianship are obvious examples; without publishers, scholars would have no mechanisms to review, polish, publish, and disseminate their scholarship, and without libraries there would be few ways for readers to access that scholarship. But other professions that are adjacent to university structures are similarly crucial to the scholarly enterprise, bringing research and methods into the public sphere and developing new insights that can inform future scholarship. 

Narratives of alumni pathways are incredibly important, and not particularly difficult to gather. In fact, one of the easiest (and most cost-effective) things a program can do to normalize a broader range of career paths is figure out who among their alumni is doing exciting work and make those stories visible and celebrated. If programs start doing a better job keeping in touch with their students after they graduate, then that alumni network becomes a rich community of people who are likely quite willing to talk with current students from their own program. Beyond the individual narratives, the collective statistics are important as well. More robust information will make it easier to see and understand the patterns across demographics—race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and more—as well as illuminating the arc of people’s careers over time. Individual stories are powerful in their own right, but it is the patterns that will better enable educators and administrators to fashion programs that truly foster multivalent success stories in a structural way. 

Institutional reward structures are reasonably good shorthand for the values of the academy. Based on what is required for professional advancement and tenure, it is clear that the academy has a hard time knowing how to ascribe professional value to things like service, mentorship, and public scholarship. These elements may not be easy to quantify, and they lack the easy sign-posting of things like the imprimatur of a highly respected publisher. But that doesn’t mean they are impossible to evaluate in a meaningful way. This challenge points to a larger underlying issue: that of prestige and how universities measure success. Prestige is the coin of the realm. Programs continue to emphasize tenure-track placement rates because those are the positions that increase prestige by influencing rankings—and because these kinds of positions are the ones that programs are accustomed to tracking (if any). However, this is not only an inadequate measure of a program’s success, but is actually damaging, both to students and to programs. Failing to signal the interesting, challenging work that a graduate is doing beyond the walls of the classroom effectively signals to the former student and their peers that their work is not valued, thereby perpetuating the myth that the only successful outcome is a tenure-track job. Further, it’s a missed opportunity for programs, since the public—including prospective students—greatly values and esteems a wider range of work. If a program’s graduate is working for a nationally celebrated public radio program, that is as good an indicator of their success as a faculty position would be—and garners admiration from those for whom academic markers of success are not the only ones that matter.

Incorporating Professional Development

One of the biggest issues with career preparation in graduate programs is that it often starts far too late, when students are at the dissertation stage and thinking actively about what their next steps will be. By that point, students who are interested in other opportunities and skills may feel like the rug has been pulled out from under them, and indeed there may not be time for someone to gain the kinds of experience they might need in order to be competitive for a range of roles. With that in mind, my strongest suggestion to faculty members is to begin planting the seeds for career preparation and professionalization as early as possible. 

There are competing demands that make the goal of early preparation difficult to achieve. With many interventions in graduate program structures focusing on reducing time-to-degree, adding something new can be a tough sell. Rather than adding, though, a certain amount of what I propose could be accomplished through new approaches within existing systems. Seen this way, career preparation is a deepening of the kinds of skills and approaches that programs already offer, rather than a departure. The results of the SCI “Humanities Unbound” study showed that once people are in new careers, they often realize that they are continuing to use the skills and knowledge from their doctoral studies in unexpected ways. Notably, regardless of respondents’ primary responsibilities, many reported that they still engaged in some type of research or teaching. Just over half of respondents (51 percent) continue to teach in some way, while an even greater proportion, 68 percent, perform research as a part of their job. Many (61 percent) also pursue these activities outside their position.[10]

Incorporating professional development into the core intellectual work of doctoral education is not only possible, but can foster excellent research and timely degree completion. I discussed the importance of rethinking the structures and platforms of scholarly work in chapter 3; reform of this nature is also an important component of how faculty can better support students in their academic and professional pursuits. Take the dissertation as an example. The humanities dissertation often assumes a particular form—the protomonograph— and writing it can be a deeply isolating or even a disheartening experience. Yet the issues raised, the implicit audiences, the stakes of the arguments—none of these are intrinsically bound to a particular form, and indeed scholarship may be greatly enriched by moving beyond the conservative containers that constrict our most advanced and groundbreaking thoughts. Enabling and encouraging graduate students to craft a dissertation project that is suited to their research topic as well as to their own skills and work styles can lead to surprising and exhilarating new work. Even minimal flexibility, such as allowing the dissertation to take the form of a collection of articles rather than a single cohesive book-like structure (already widely accepted in a number of STEM and social science fields, but relatively uncommon in the humanities), can help students to make steady progress while still engaging in rigorous research and analysis. Such flexibility also puts more ownership in the hands of the student, and carries with it the expectation of clear project management—determining an appropriate scope for the project, setting a timeline, and sometimes collaborating with others. With no sacrifice to the intellectual work, students gain valuable skills for any workplace and may even feel a greater sense of joy in their work. A critical consideration of core elements of humanities graduate training—things like research methods, archival practices, close reading and analysis, cultural understanding, writing, and more, depending on the field—can help move beyond the particularities of structure and tradition and distill core values that can be applied more flexibly. 

Changes like these not only help students to develop new skills but also, perhaps more importantly, make it easier for them to see connections between those skills and different ways they might be applied. Even on an assignment level, projects that encourage more critical inquiry into matters of audience, project management, and collaboration can be invaluable. To expand the knowledge and skills gained through writing a research paper, faculty could consider adding a public component to course projects that requires students to reframe their argument toward a different type of audience. For instance, students might build a website that considers the implication of design in the way readers approach a text. Or they could pitch versions of their scholarly work to nonspecialist publications—perhaps developing an op-ed for a local paper, or a deep dive into a humanities topic with current relevance for an online magazine. Students in social sciences might develop policy briefs or community resources that build on their research and analysis. Such projects insist on deep mastery of content and research methods, while also helping grad students learn to take on varied roles, acquire new skills, and key their work to different kinds of audiences. 

At the same time, graduate students often need practice in translating or reframing their skills in language that resonates with prospective employers in different industries. One aspect of career training that would be beneficial to graduates is learning how to recast their skills. For instance, a dissertation may be more interesting to a potential employer if it is framed as a complex, long-term project involving research, written and oral communication, and a series of deadlines completed on time. Further, the core skills of graduate training— especially research, writing, and analytical skills—are highly valuable to employers, and often enable employees to learn new skills quickly. 

Because the processes and products of skills like teaching and research can seem foreign in new employment environments, it is critical that students don’t undervalue (or insufficiently articulate) the ways that graduate study equips them for other roles, particularly in terms of methods and generalized skills that can be broadly applied. Respondents in the “Humanities Unbound” study noted that in their roles, teaching and research often differ significantly from the usual forms they take in academic settings, and are frequently much less formal. Activities that feel much like teaching may be described as presentations, mentorship, and management. Research may be fast paced, requiring that one seek out and synthesize information quickly in order to facilitate decision-making. Other skills, like navigating complex university bureaucracies, creatively solving problems, and adapting to unexpected circumstances, are not explicitly valued within the educational system but are nonetheless powerful and broadly transferable skills that can be the difference between surviving and thriving in other employment contexts.

Rethinking Core Curricula and Methods Courses

In addition to rethinking the kinds of scholarly project opportunities available to students during their studies, another way to build in better preparation for a wider range of careers from the very beginning of a degree program is to take better advantage of methods courses. Incoming students are highly sensitive to learning their department’s expectations, so the first semesters are a key moment to demonstrating that a program takes an expansive view of why graduate study matters and how it can be applied. And yet methods courses are often ad hoc and idiosyncratic, even within a single department, depending on the faculty member who happens to teach it in a particular semester—and nearly 30 percent of humanities doctoral students report that their departments offer no methods courses at all.[11] While these courses do often teach valuable disciplinary foundations and research methods, more than anything they often serve as a socialization course, showing students the norms and unspoken expectations of the discipline. Given that, it is a prime opportunity to rethink the norms that new graduate students are learning, and to start providing not only skills but also implicit support for public engagement and broader application of educational training. 

A more thoughtfully designed “keystone” course (to complement the dissertation capstone) would not need to sacrifice the essential content—research methods and disciplinary foundations. Rather, it could teach that content using approaches that implicitly show the value of collaborative, project-based, public-facing work. In a blog post that proposes killing off methods courses in the way that a gardener might uproot weeds to make room for fragile seedlings to grow, Bethany Nowviskie reimagines methods courses that not only prepare students for the academic trajectory that lies ahead but also enables them to “feel empowered to build and re-build the systems in which they and future students will operate.”[12] A common first-year course across a cluster of departments that introduced students to the structures, power dynamics, and key challenges of higher education alongside research skills would be eye-opening for most students, and would put them on a better footing for their degree and for a wide range of leadership opportunities thereafter. 

By rethinking core curricula in such a way that graduate students gain experience in skills like collaborative project development and public engagement, departments would be strengthening their students’ future prospects regardless of the paths they choose to take. While students are generally well prepared for research and sometimes for teaching, they aren’t necessarily ready for the service aspect of a professorship, which incorporates many of the same skills that other employers seek. Collaboration and an understanding of group dynamics, for instance, would help committee members to work more effectively together. Many of the skills also contribute to more creative teaching and research. Better project management would help faculty to make good use of sabbatical years and to balance the anticipated fluctuations in workload, while technical knowledge would lead to new kinds of assignments in the classroom and new research insights. And yet these skills are not typically taught as part of the graduate curriculum. Methods courses, which could be used as an opportunity to introduce students not only to the critical skills and approaches they will need but also to key issues of professionalization and postgraduate realities, are inconsistent and sometimes completely absent. 

It is not surprising that employers find that humanities-trained employees need to develop or refine skills like project management and collaboration. Employees themselves also recognize that these are by and large not skills that they acquire in graduate school—at least not through the official curriculum of their graduate programs. Skills like collaboration, project management, interpersonal skills, and technical skills are all valuable in a range of career paths that attract humanities scholars, but graduate programs do not typically prepare their students in these areas. Even those who felt that their skills in these areas were strong noted that they gained them outside of their graduate program—for instance, through jobs or internships. Graduate programs could include opportunities to learn and apply these kinds of skills by partnering with organizations willing to host interns, or by simulating a work environment through collaborative projects with public outcomes. 

Career-related reform efforts in doctoral programs are not a new idea. On the contrary, some institutions, funding agencies, and individual researchers have been working on such reform for decades. Maresi Nerad, professor emerita at the University of Washington, has conducted vital research on doctoral education and career pathways since the late 1990s, including a survey of PhD holders ten years after degree completion.[13] Around the same time (from 2000 to 2005), the Woodrow Wilson Foundation established the Responsive PhD program, a comprehensive, multi-institutional effort that engaged graduate deans at twenty institutions across the country in significant programmatic interventions to support adventurous scholarship, new pedagogical practices, greater diversity and inclusion in the academy, and community partnerships.[14] More recently, the Humanities Without Walls program (supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation beginning with a planning grant in 2012), a consortium of fifteen midwestern institutions, offers predoctoral workshops in career diversity and collaborative research opportunities centered around grand challenges research. The impressive work of participating programs, such as the University of Iowa’s Obermann Center and the Humanities PhD Project at the University of Michigan, are amplified and strengthened through the collaboration. The programs highlighted by the Praxis Network, which I discussed in chapter 3, are also excellent examples of fresh, high-impact thinking in graduate programs. 

This constellation of reform efforts is impressive and gives much hope. How can we collectively move from grant-funded efforts to lasting cultural change? Relying on external funders presents challenges to sustainability, since grants come to an end and funding priorities can shift. For example, in 2016 the National Endowment for the Humanities launched a $1.7 million matching grant program, called the Next Generation Humanities PhD, that envisioned similar reform efforts. The program, however, was short-lived, ending after two cycles of planning grants and a single cycle of implementation grants. This highlights a key challenge facing many innovative doctoral programs: often, the most groundbreaking work is funded by grants, making sustainability and longevity a real challenge. Fortunately, the work of graduate education reform continues through a number of other avenues, including other funding initiatives, major institutional efforts, and smaller, grassroots programs (sometimes spearheaded by a single faculty member looking to better support their students).[15] A key goal moving forward should be to find ways to support such efforts through stable institutional budget lines in order to have a lasting impact.

Community Partnerships

In addition to curricular reform, another powerful avenue for change involves looking outward—to organizations and companies that benefit from partnerships with graduate programs. While research and teaching assistantships are long-standing and valuable channels for a certain type of professional development, there is room for much more creativity in the ways that student positions that offer tuition remission and funding are structured. For some students, a part-time position in an organization outside the university could provide valuable job skills, an important network, and a sense of how the skills and knowledge they are gaining through their studies might be applied in a very different setting. 

For such apprenticeship-style positions to be mutually beneficial, strong and clear partnerships are needed between university programs and companies or nonprofit organizations in the surrounding community. Taking on new staff with limited experience can be a drain on the organization, but if care is taken to work with leadership at those organizations, it is possible to build in reciprocal arrangements that are valuable to them. In some cases, it might be that employees at the partner organization would like to be able to take courses within the department. In other cases, the organization might wish to have someone from their staff teach a course from time to time, thereby baking in the development of skills and perspectives that the organization finds important. 

In return, it is important that the organization have a clear role in mind for any students who may be embedded there. Perhaps students can take ownership of a particular project, or conduct a series of “rotations” that allow them to see the full picture of how the organization works. Ideally, the position should also be incorporated into the student’s research in some way—perhaps the role will come to influence their dissertation topic, or they may shift their research goals based on what they learn. Those kinds of connections should be encouraged. One way to do so would be to have students write frequently and publicly about their experience. 

In many universities in Canada, as well as some in the United States, the co-op model of education does exactly this, though more commonly with undergraduate education rather than doctoral programs. Co-op programs, for instance at the University of Victoria, British Columbia,[16] or at Northeastern University in Boston,[17] provide paid employment, course credit, skill development, a network, and a chance to explore different career opportunities. Thanks to funding from the Mellon Foundation, the Graduate Center has implemented a program of this nature through PublicsLab, a new center designed to expand career horizons while also supporting publicly engaged research. In a program that is well established, such as the one at the University of Victoria, the university also offers the support typical of a career services office—helping students to discern their strengths, matching them with possible opportunities, and offering workshops and guidance to help them succeed. 

Many work opportunities in programs like these are local (some even within the university), but others are built on national and international partnerships, allowing students to apply for positions relevant to their studies that may be place-specific. For example, Rowan Meredith, a Slavic studies student, spent a term working in the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland— something that had direct connection to her expertise and research interests.[18] At the graduate level, some of the University of Victoria’s co-op placements have included work at the United Nations headquarters in New York; program administration for Nepal- and Australia-based nonprofits working on Nepali migrant workers’ rights; and a placement with an indigenous law co-op in Canada.[19] To gain these opportunities as a fundamental (and funded) part of one’s studies, rather than have to break with one’s program in order to pursue them, is a huge advantage for students who wish to pursue any pathway—even a faculty career—as it gives them a chance to see and experience other employment environments and test out whether they might fit. 

Modifying the ways that graduate students can receive funding will help them to explore opportunities, build a network, and gain skills and experience that will make their résumés more competitive for positions when they complete their degree. In the current system, by contrast, students may complete their degree without having much or any job experience, meaning that they may need to start in an entry-level job, where their deep educational background may make them seem paradoxically overeducated but underprepared. Some programs actively discourage or forbid their students from taking outside employment, and international students are often unable to work while pursuing their studies, which makes it extremely difficult to gain professional experience prior to graduation. The sense that one may need to take an entry-level job also fuels the feeling that taking a job outside of the classroom is not a successful step. Many do find that they are able to advance quickly once they take the first step, but it makes far more sense to gain experience early, when the stakes are not as high.

Suggestions for Getting Started

There is much work to be done at the level of both individual faculty members and of departments or programs. The following suggestions offer starting points for those whose programs may just be beginning to have conversations about expanding the notion of successful postgraduate career pathways, as well as more complex and resource-intensive ways to continue that work once a program has shown a willingness to move toward lasting structural change.

For individual faculty members:

• Build trust with your students and use that trust to help them explore meaningful opportunities.

This is perhaps the single most important step, and one that can be taken immediately, regardless of institutional context or available resources. In advising students, take care not to implicitly convey that a faculty career is the most important sign of success. Take care not to inadvertently shame students who consider more varied pathways; on the contrary, do all you can to normalize and valorize such considerations. This can happen through individual advising conversations, classroom discussions, and through the kinds of programming a department offers. If you feel unable to offer advice on a particular matter, point students toward resources or people who may be better positioned to help.

• Encourage (and if possible, provide funding for) students to become members in relevant professional associations, even if the students do not intend to pursue careers as faculty.

Professional associations can provide useful opportunities for networking and professionalization that extend beyond the limitations of an individual department. Some, such as the American Alliance of Museums or the American Association for State and Local History, offer professional development opportunities more specifically geared toward careers in various realms of public humanities.

For those with input into programmatic decision making:

• Consider evaluating and modifying required aspects of master's- and doctoral-level curricula in favor of including courses that help students to prepare for the wide-ranging career paths that they must pursue upon completion. 

This is not to say that graduate programs should become vocational training grounds; rather, this recommendation encourages programs to reconsider the ways in which they currently train graduate students for a single career path—that of the professoriate—and instead broaden the scope of training in order to reflect more accurately the postgraduate realities of their students. Incorporating such training will better equip students for any career—including the professoriate—without detracting from more traditional methodological training. In fact, done well, helping students to learn some of the critical skills that are widely legible and valued in professional environments (like collaboration and project management) can actually deepen their grasp of standard disciplinary methods.

• Rethink standard methods courses to structure them around a collaborative project in which students must apply a range of skills toward an end goal centered on methodological understanding.

Such a project would not only guide students toward the disciplinary framework that they will need throughout their degree program, but would also enable them to learn and apply skills that will improve their research skills and future employment prospects. Good data management habits, project planning, collaboration skills, and more will have immediate value as well as future value. Such courses could even be transdisciplinary to encourage critical thinking about field-based assumptions and theoretical lenses.

• Create one-credit courses that center on ecosystems crucial to the academic landscape, such as scholarly publishing.

Graduate students wishing to pursue an active research career will benefit with a greater understanding of traditional and emerging publishing options, and best practices for planning, research, writing, and submitting scholarly articles. Students uncertain about what career they wish to pursue, or those explicitly interested in alternative academic career options, will also benefit from a greater understanding of the research and publication environment, a sense of existing platforms and opportunities for new developments, and a deeper understanding of broader academic structures, which many employers and employees have noted is valuable.

• Form more deliberate partnerships with the inter- and para-departmental structures—either within or outside your home institution—that are already engaging in this kind of work.

Humanities centers have jump-started excellent training programs, research projects, and public-facing work. For example, under the direction of Kathleen Woodward, the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington offers a cross-disciplinary Certificate in Public Scholarship, numerous fellowships, and a slate of public programing; the center has also cultivated numerous campus-community partnerships.[20] The reports from SCI’s meetings on graduate education reform highlight a number of similarly strong examples, as well as future possibilities.[21] Departments that would like to move in similar directions can model the kinds of programs being offered by these centers, and might also consider pursuing interinstitutional collaborations as appropriate. There may be valuable opportunities to share infrastructure (physical and digital), expertise, time, and funding across multiple institutions, as a new partnership between Hope College and Michigan State University demonstrates.[22] Departments, libraries, and centers should model the best practices they hope to teach to their students: collaboration, equal credit, public engagement, and transparency. 

• Cultivate partnerships with the public sphere, both to provide graduate students with valuable experience and exposure and to make a clearer case for the public value of humanities education.

Many respondents cited an internship or previous employment as crucial to their current position, yet graduate programs more often encourage students to remain cloistered within the confines of the department. Departments could build alliances with local cultural heritage organizations in their city or town—such as museums, libraries, and archives—and work with students to engage with those partners either through their research or through short-term employment or internships.

• Critically examine the kinds of careers that your program implicitly and explicitly promotes, and consider ways to increase the visibility of the varied paths that scholars pursue.

One way to do this is to compile lists of people working within the university system that hold advanced degrees, so that students can see potential paths and make useful connections. Stanford has taken positive steps in this direction by listing staff members who are willing to serve as mentors to humanities doctoral students, and by developing a speaker series to highlight the varied careers of these members of their community.[23]

• Make a much stronger effort to track former students (including those who may not have completed a degree), and to encourage current and prospective students to connect with former students.

At present, very little data is available from departments about the career outcomes of their graduates.[24] While social media can provide a surprising amount of information about former students’ current careers,[25] concerted efforts from departments and professional organizations are critical to standardizing the process to make it easier for prospective students to compare results across institutions. Doing this work retroactively is a major undertaking; making it a routine part of departmental expectations would make it much less labor-intensive. Robust, standardized tracking would also make it possible to compare the results of different kinds of programs in order to better evaluate the effectiveness of new models.

Faculty members, advisors, and administrators have a vitally important role in changing the ways that students and institutions perceive career diversity, even if their own professional experience has been exclusively within a university setting. The opportunities for intervention range from modest individual efforts to major systemic changes. Reform might start small, perhaps by changing the ways careers are discussed in mentoring relationships, or offering project-based or public-oriented assignments in graduate courses. At a structural level, working toward broader curricular change and fostering partnerships with organizations outside the university can open the doors for public engagement and deeply creative scholarly work, while also creating organic opportunities for students’ individual growth. When students feel well supported, they do their best work—whether that work takes the form of traditional scholarship, or something that breaks the mold in new and exciting ways.

Notes

[1]  Two very good resources for faculty members are “Promising Practices in Humanities PhD Professional Development” (Council of Graduate Schools), and the Modern Language Association’s “Graduate Student Career Planning Guide,” which carries the added benefit of helping to establish norms for professional pathways in language and literature fields.

[2] Thanks to Maureen McCarthy, director of the Center for Research and Scholarship at Quinnipiac University, for highlighting the connotations of this phrasing.

[3]For more on this, see Muhs et al., Presumed Incompetent. 

[4] One of the most concrete examples of how institutions can shift from employing a large number of adjuncts to a more stable employment model with robust shared governance comes from Bérubé and Ruth, The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom. Their plan, which involves converting some adjunct lines to teaching-focused faculty lines, is perhaps the most practical and widereaching plan for structural reform that has been put forward to date, and, indeed, they have been able to instrumentalize it at their respective institutions. And yet there is a risk that this plan would effectively create a new two-tier system, with research-intensive positions held in higher esteem than teachingintensive positions. I believe this in part simply because the academy as a whole does not seem to value teaching to the degree that it claims. Such a plan may cement an imbalance between research and teaching, such that teaching-focused roles will continue to be undervalued, despite the hard-won gains of shared governance, job security, and institutional support. Even if their plan is not perfect, however, it is a positive and concrete action that others can hopefully build upon. What is abundantly clear is that the current system must change.

[5] For more on the challenges that students from families with low socioeconomic status face in navigating the hidden structures and politics of the university, see Terenzini, Cabrera, and Bernal, Swimming against the Tide. 

[6] Versatile PhD was acquired by the predictive analytics start-up PeplWorks in 2018. What PeplWorks will do with users’ data is unclear. It is because of circumstances like this that I strongly prefer directing people to tools and platforms developed by educational and nonprofit organizations, rather than for-profit consultancies. 

[7] Wood, “What Doors Does a Ph.D. in History Open?” 

[8] American Historical Association, “Where Historians Work: An Interactive Database of History PhD Career Outcomes.” For an overview of the project and preliminary analysis, see Swafford and Ruediger, “Every Historian Counts.” 

[9] However, the data that for-profit institutions share may not be trustworthy; for much more on this topic, see Cottom, Lower Ed. 

[10] Rogers, “Humanities Unbound.” 

[11] Rogers, “Humanities Unbound.” 

[12] Nowviskie, “It Starts on Day One.” Emphasis in the original. 

[13] Nerad and Cerny, “From Rumors to Facts.” Already in 1999, the authors remarked that “for over 20 years the crisis in the academic job market for humanities PhDs has been lamented.” 

[14] Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, “The Responsive PhD: Innovations in U.S. Doctoral Education.”

[15] For an excellent overview of like-minded efforts, see McCarthy, “Summary of Prior Work in Humanities PhD Professional Development.” 

[16] “UVic Co-Op Program and Career Services—University of Victoria,” UVic.ca, accessed August 1, 2018, https://www.uvic.ca/coopandcareer.

[17] “Cooperative Education in the Liberal Arts,” College of Social Sciences and Humanities, Northeastern University, accessed August 1, 2018, https://cssh.northeastern.edu/experiential-learning-2/cooperative-education.

[18] Sharpe, “Passion for Travel Brings a Humanities Grad Full Circle.” 

[19] For these and other stories, see “Co-Op Student Experiences—University of Victoria,” UVic.ca, accessed January 15, 2017, http://www.uvic.ca/coopandcareer/co-op/experiences/stories/index-old-filter.php.

[20] “Simpson Center for the Humanities,” Simpson Center for the Humanities, accessed June 17, 2013, http://depts.washington.edu/uwch/.

[21] Rumsey, “Rethinking Humanities Graduate Education, March 2013,” and “Rethinking Humanities Graduate Education, October 2012.” 

[22] Pannapacker, “Cultivating Partnerships in the Digital Humanities.” 

[23] Stanford University, “Alt Ac Speaker Series: Alternative Academic Career Paths for PhDs,” 2013, http://vpge.stanford.edu/students/altacseries.html.

[24] Pannapacker, “Just Look at the Data, if You Can Find Any.” 

[25] For instance, see Patton, “Where Did Your Graduate Students End Up?”