The Economics of Doctoral Education in Literature

Abstract

THOUGH MY FOCUS IS ON LITERATURE, much of what I say about the economics of doctoral education also applies to the humanities and to the interpretive basic social sciences generally. Some of it is more widely relevant.' I argue that the increasing stratification of the academic workforce, with the accompanying rise of low-paid labor, results not from a cyclical economic crisis in higher education but from a chronic malaise that in the humanities at least has been with us for over a generation. The stunningly high human and financial costs of producing first PhDs and eventually tenured faculty members follow from this crisis. These costs can be moderated, but not brought under control, by programmatic reform designed to reduce time to degree and attrition rates, and by efforts to boost the number of tenure-track jobs-as important as such initiatives may be. Activism aimed against exploitation of cheap instructional labor will certainly help, but it is unlikely to be able to address the basic structural problem. Costs can be driven down more significantly only by constraining the supply of literature doctorates and expanding the demand for their services. The former is the necessary short-term strategy, the latter the preferable long-term approach. Though our highly competitive and stratified system favors the wealthier schools, most institutions possess a certain degree of flexibility. Failure to exploit this flexibility and to turn our intellectual range to account will lead not to the perpetuation of what should be viewed as an indefensible status quo but to the continued degradation of our discipline and not our discipline alone. [I The current crisis in the financing of higher education has been variously attributed to the organizational nature of the university, competition among schools, rising demand, structurally induced climbing costs, a flat budget ravaged by a shift in spending priorities and an expansion of responsibilities, and cuts in government spending out of proportion to those suffered even by other social services (Clotfelter 252-58; Gilbert et al. 3, 38-39nl; Pratt 270; Lauter 75-76). No doubt all these trends have contributed in some measure to the problem. Certainly the sudden explosion in spending at (primarily private) colleges and universities occurred in the 1980s rather than the 1990s. Real costs have escalated for decades, however. This was not an economic problem as long as tuition was low and median family income rose even more rapidly than tuition, as it did during the first twenty-five years after World War II. And it was not a political problem as long as there was broad popular support for New Deal-style public spending, as was probably the case for another decade thereafter. The double hit-economic and politicalhas damaged the financial flexibility of our line of work. The scissors effect between income and tuition reduced people's ability to pay for college. When in the second half of the 1990s that scissors effect ceased to operate for the first time in a quarter of a century, the cultural and political willingness to pay had been eroded, in part by a sustained conservative effort to defund the public sector generally and education specifically. Though humanists and especially literary critics may feel particularly under attack, the effects are experienced across the board. Even in many of the sciences, where federally funded university research expenditures have risen in recent years and will probably continue to do so, the number of qualified researchers has grown still more rapidly and other financial pressures