The recent comment that there are more jobs out there than are given credit
may be true (and I have my doubts) but when looking at jobs at community
colleges, junior colleges and the like, the trade off for (potentially!)
greater quantity is frequently short term, lower paying jobs. I have
watched too many of my friends from graduate school struggling to put
together enough sessional jobs to have much faith in this particular
solution. Too often they face the prospect of going from position to
position, which makes academia a gamble for many people.
I firmly believe that the profession as a whole needs to take a serious
look at how we produce scholars. Currently there are far more phd students
graduated per year than there are positions. A couple of years ago
"Prospectives" published the number of phd graduated per annum. To the
best of my memory it was somewhere in the neighborhood of 600 phd's in
history per year. Academia cannot absorb this many phd's! And given the
ongoing cutbacks post-secondary institutions across North America have been
dealing with, I can't see the situation improving. What we are facing is a
decline in the need for phd graduates. And yet we continue to require that
a great deal of time, money and energy must be exerted to obtain a degree
which is primarily aimed at academia. While obtaining a graduate degree in
and of itself is a perfectly reasonable activity, most students attend
graduate school to get a job.
One method of addressing the need to produce graduates who can go on to get
jobs is to integrate universities more effectively into communities at
large (it's still too easy for universities to be labeled as Ivory Towers;
and in too many cases the label is accurate). Many universities are doing
this at an undergraduate level -- why not at the graduate level? Making MA
and Phd degrees in history more usefull to the larger communities in which
we exist may be one way of better serving students -- who are afterall
customers who are purchasing a service. The million dollar question is how
is this to be done? Any ideas on how to establish external ties that will
aid history graduate students in becoming marketable OUTSIDE of academia?
-- Diane Crowe EMail: John_Kershaw@mindlink.bc.ca