Unless BA-holders are going into finance, they’re almost certainly going to bounce around in some low-paying jobs. Perhaps even more disheartening is that these will be low-responsibility jobs, too. Because students have a difficult time imagining how they’ll ever make the transition from temping to something more meaningful, it’s tempting to latch onto the idea of a vocational or credential-building course of study: law school, MA in education, etc. What we need to make clear is that a PhD in the humanities is not a sound path to a specific career. The opportunity cost argument is a way to demonstrate that there aren’t just risks, there are costs.

I don’t buy the idea that my current academic colleagues would have spent those six or eight years of their 20s and 30s temping or working at Starbucks or whatever. Intelligence aside, we’re talking about people who are highly motivated and organized. If grad school in the humanities is your “only option,” you haven’t really considered your options.

Mark, you must know that I’m sympathetic to Whitson’s argument. Thanks in large part to CHNM, my department is one of the few places where non-traditional career trajectories in public history and digital history are not second-rate consolation prizes for our graduate students, who are deeply involved in grant writing and project management. It remains to be seen how transferrable or replicable this environment will be at other institutions.

I would also like to address Holger’s point about selectivity. If we encourage students only to attend the most selective programs, then they’re more likely to get a good job. We already know this, anecdotally from looking around our departments, and of course from the excellent work of people at the AHA, etc. But who gets into elite graduate programs? As the same researchers have shown, people from elite undergraduate programs, of course. And who attends elite undergraduate programs? And now we’re back to the Anthony Grafton’s updated version of the Aryan from Darien.

I would just add to this discussion that for a fair lifetime comparison, you need to consider the realistic alternative jobs for people who choose a PhD in History. It is not “manager at a Hooters” but similar careers requiring post-graduate education, like law. (I have often talked with students torn between law school and grad school. I have never talked with a student torn between grad school and managing a Hooters.) These careers have starting pay much higher than academia and lifetime earnings far above those for all but a tiny, tiny handful academic stars.

Short version: Mark is absolutely right.

Another point to consider is that whatever we’re doing before graduate school (if we do go to graduate school) itself has opportunity costs. Teaching high school had opportunity costs. IBM, I’m sure, had opportunity costs. But these costs are often non-monetary. Social costs. Emotional costs. Intellectual costs. Sanity costs. These hidden costs can eventually turn into financial costs as well (years of counseling to get over the meth habit I picked up while teaching high school chemistry, for example).*

In the end, the best argument to me for advising students against grad school remains the scarcity of tenure track jobs. There are plenty of numbers to support this fact and we need to share them with students. But more crucially, and more systemically, we need to retrain the way both ourselves and our students think about graduate school. The end result of a Ph.D. in the humanities need not be a tenure track position. I’m thinking of Roger Whitson’s recent post on how graduate students and programs should reform themselves to address this new reality.

* Purely hypothetical. I never required counseling.

I still don’t quite get the opportunity cost argument. It basically assumes that a high-paying job such as the one you had would be the obvious — or at least the average — alternative to doing a humanities PhD. That doesn’t strike me as particularly realistic. I would presume that many of the kinds of students that are drawn to academia would be attracted to the kinds of jobs that are often less secure and less lucrative than working for IBM. Personally, before I started my PhD, I temped for two years while working in film and theatre, and that’s what I would have continued to do if I hadn’t gone back to grad school. (I was making a tiny bit more money in that “career” than as a grad student, but I also had higher living expenses.)

But I also don’t understand why opportunity cost is an argument against going to grad school at all — which is how Cebula seems to use it. It may be something we should alert our students to and it’s another argument for being selective in choosing where to do one’s grad work. But do you regret having given up your IBM job? Would you regret it if you hadn’t got a tenure track position? Would you ever consider going back to your old career? (All of which is to say, I don’t quite get why the “cost” part is more important than the “opportunity” part.)