Education: Bleak View from the Ivory Tower

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Ph.D. candidates in the humanities face a degree of uncertainty

Mark Horowitz, 33, is a candidate for a Ph.D. in Tudor history at the University of Chicago, where graduate-school tuition is more than $7,000 annually, and the doctorate requires an average of six years of work. In 1980 Horowitz took a full-time public relations job for the university's business school to support himself and his family. With about a year's work left on his degree, Horowitz labors on his dissertation in his spare time and still hopes to become a professor. The prospects are not good. As the student population shrinks, and tenured faculty members cling to their jobs, Horowitz can look forward to a string of one-or two-year academic appointments, paying between $15,000 and $23,000 a year. Admits Horowitz: "You've got to be a hopeless romantic to get a Ph.D. in the humanities today."

While job-minded college graduates have been flocking to business and law schools for the past decade, fewer and fewer have been devoting themselves to scholarship, particularly in the humanities. Nationwide the number of doctorates awarded in the humanities has dropped from 5,049 in 1972 to 3,745 in 1981. At Harvard, for example, a total of 1,765 students applied to graduate programs in the humanities in 1969, and 251 enrolled. Last year the number of applications was down to 776, and only 82 matriculated.

Part of the problem is the high cost (up to $40,000) of a Ph.D. One out of every two graduate students is borrowing money from the Guaranteed Student Loan program and going into considerable debt. The number of federal fellowships for Ph.D. candidates decreased from about 50,000 in 1968 to fewer than 10,000 today. Says University of Chicago President Hanna Gray: "Someone attempting to get a Ph.D. is facing a very large commitment, a large financial investment and an uncertain job market."

Doctoral programs expanded at a fierce pace in the wake of the baby boom of the '50s and '60s. While only 107 institutions granted doctorates in 1940, 326 award them today. Some 30,000 new Ph.D.s graduate each year, but only a projected 100,000 academic positions will be available from 1980 to 1995.

Confronted with these figures, many universities have been cutting back large programs and ending marginal ones. Columbia eliminated Egyptology, the University of Michigan closed its geography department, and the State University of New York at Albany is phasing out its Ph.D. program in French literature. Duke decided that its education department was not distinguished enough and shut it down. As they sort and cull, most universities are committed to maintaining what they do best. "You don't destroy one of the greatest classics departments in the world because there is not a great demand for Latin teachers," maintains Richard Sutch, chairman of the graduate council at the University of California at Berkeley.