MLA

Taking Cover

~ devo3000
Been looking at the MLA’s Job Information List — the first jobs for the fall hiring season just listed — while revisiting Gerald Graff’s “Taking Cover in Coverage” with our intro to grad studies seminar at USC.
 
I want to set aside the question of just how “bad” the market will actually be, with the incremental release of jobs on the JIL, etc., though I note Romanticism and Victorian lit are currently showing a dozen jobs in Romanticism, Victorian, or C19 British lit COMBINED.  I’m struck by the relation between the seeming collapse of some of the more specific fields and Graff’s argument about the postwar expansion: “One of the most conspicuous operational advantages was the way the coverage model made the department virtually self-regulating” and it allowed faculty fo avoid harder questions about rationale, the integrity of the major, etc. Left out of the analysis (but implied, I think) is the closed circuit between a coverage model-based curriculum, graduate training, and hiring that subsisted during the expansion and during smaller retractions in hiring.
 
Things look different now, and recently some have resumed Graff’s call. (Eric Hayot, in “The Sky is Falling“: classes should “ask big questions and teach you how to do things” rather than cover “The Modern Novel or Medieval Europe.”)
 
And further setting aside questions of the causal relation or the Wisdom of How it All Happened, it *does* seem like expanding enrollments coincided with the expansion of coverage-based courses. And it makes me wonder what it would look like to actually decouple education and training from period coverage. For me this raises a series of questions.
 
(1) What might we do with graduate exams, especially as some argue for graduate training that is flexible about period, public-oriented, or concerned with alternative career possibilities?
 
(2) How do you articulate a non-coverage curriculum to a “technobureaucratic” administration in which distribution requirements, core curriculums, etc. seem to be the rage — especially when we’re lucky enough to be able to run a search?
 
(3) Should we be looking to universities in countries that experienced a postwar recession rather than expansion — thinking the UK, Germany, Italy? — to see how they adapted their curriculum?
 
I’m raising these questions because it seems clear, when talking to graduate students today about the market tomorrow, that the It That Shall Not Be Named is undergrad enrollment — something they have no control over, but we might. And this is doubly, triply true when training graduate students in fields like “Victorian literature” or “Modernism” or even “Romanticism” that have little or no meaning for a matriculating freshman.
 
Where are people at with this?
(Link to a discussion of these questions on Facebook here.)
[UPDATE: I’ve gathered the discussion around this post into  Google Doc with the working title “Fixing English” — link here. There are some fascinating discussions of periodization, historicism, & enrollments, and various political, economic, and administrative pressures on the major.]

MLA Statement on Student Debt

~ devo3000

I’m glad the MLA Executive Council has issued a formal statement addressing the problem of student debt. Nothing could be more timely. They suggest three main avenues of address: adjusting financial aid to reduce the proportion of loans, holding tuition in check, and decreasing time to degree. I wonder how much impact we can have if we focus on working within departments and even institutions to address these problems; an increasingly competitive job market combined with uncertain job prospects outside academia both serve to increase pressure to stave off graduation and lengthen time on the market and, as a result, increase long-term debt.

More generally, it is at least as important that we broaden our focus beyond the university and even state legislatures. As I mention in a previous post, increases in tuition and an increased reliance on student loans have been shaped by a long-term shift in federal priorities away from direct funding to the state and toward federal subsidy of student loans. This encourages states to spend more money on medical care (which triggers federal matching funds) and less on education, at the same time that slack is taken up by student debt that is federally financed. The net effect is that federal money that used to indirectly subsidize universities through the states is now indirectly subsidizing education through student loans. This hardly seems like an optimal solution

Both the increase in student debt and the increase of the costs of higher education in general put particular pressure on the Humanities. Many of the recommendations advanced by the MLA were put forward last year by Peter Conn (a colleague here at Penn), in a lengthy and detailed editorial for the Chronicle. In addition to making specific recommendations to reduce the number of graduate students enrolled in Ph.D. programs, Peter emphasizes what is perhaps the core challenge, to communicate that the humanities “are not merely ornamental and dispensable. They lie near the heart of mankind’s restless efforts to make sense of the world.” As MLA Pres. Berman notes in a letter that accompanies the MLA’s statement:

[T]he liberal arts celebration of an education not linked to professional preparation has existed alongside the promise that higher education would open the door to a fulfilling career. This gap between the appeal of the liberal arts, on the one hand, and the dismal job market, on the other, persists and puts pressure on the MLA’s mission: promoting the study of language and literature.

I still think that we need concrete ways to define the value of a liberal arts degree in the face of a weak economy. Even our intuitions regarding the economics of the liberal arts are often wrong. To take two examples:

(1) Yale University released a report last year that analyzed the cost of graduate programs and found that graduate students in the humanities were far more expensive that those in the sciences; the net cost of a six-year humanities Ph.D. was $143,000 compared to $17,000 for the natural sciences. At the same time, the calculation only includes the cost of grants, benefits, and teaching fees that are paid to those graduate students — not the course tuition that is paid by the students they teach. In other words, the core financial value that humanities graduate students return to the university, their teaching, was excluded (at the same time that the study subtracted grant money supporting graduate students in the sciences). At a school like Rutgers, where I earned my Ph.D., the number of students we taught over the course of six years was considerable (I estimate I taught approximately 150 students in stand-alone courses, excluding TAships that supported other faculty). Even taking this into account, I’m willing to assume that a humanities graduate student is more expensive that a graduate student in the sciences.

(2) But this imbalance stands in an inverse relationship to the value of undergraduate tuition in both fields. I was talking yesterday to a member of the science faculty who attended a lecture, presented by Penn’s financial team to the science faculty, which explained that tuition for science coursework does not cover the expenses of establishing science labs — which are in fact subsidized by humanities courses. This confirms what I’ve read and heard elsewhere about the cost versus value calculations that universities use for the sciences and humanities. I would even be tempted to link these two observations, by suggesting that the increased cost of humanities graduate students is in part a product of their greater teaching value to the university.

The Value of a Humanities Degree

~ devo3000

Inline with my ongoing discussion of the costs of higher education, I’ve noticed a lot of recent discussion that tries to evaluate the value of different college degrees. On the one hand, I think that humanists lose the argument when we try to fix the value of a degree in monetary terms. But as a practical matter, the economic environment and the skyrocketing costs of higher education demand we engage the question.

In an article just published for Bloomberg, Peter Orzag, the Obama administration’s recent director of the OMB, notes that we can expect current economic conditions to depress wages for college graduates as much as ten percent after ten years. Orzag makes a pragmatic case that decreased wages imply we should make a college degree less expensive, particularly at public universities already squeezed by tightened state budgets and higher medical costs. But this also implies that students will be shopping more carefully for degrees regardless of the public vs. private university path they choose. Yesterday, Kevin Drum posted a WSJ chart that purports to break down unemployment rates by profession and degree. Drum highlights the top-paying careers, which are heavy with engineers. But unemployment tells a different story. Engineers seem to be about average, with around 5.1% unemployment. Holders of science degrees fare a little worse, with 5.2% unemployed. It turns out the sector you really want to be in is education — only 4% unemployment. (An engineer might argue that this marginal difference in unemployment is compensated by economic value — their median salary is $78,000 versus $43,500 for teachers.)

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