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English Ph.D. graduates struggle to find tenure-track jobs

Tenure-track faculty positions at universities have been on the decline for years — and a recent study found that even at the top universities, less than half of English Ph.D. graduates wind up on the academic tenure track.

There are more than 130 graduate programs in English nationwide. David Colander, a professor of economics at Middlebury College in Vermont and co-author of the study, said the report organized these programs into four tiers based on the common academic job entry level upon graduation.

He found that 39.5 percent of graduates from the top Ph.D. tier will go on to a tenure-track position, while just 27.9 percent of those from Tier 4 universities went on to fill the same spots. UNC-Greensboro was classified as a Tier 4 school, while UNC-CH wasn’t mentioned specifically in the study.

Colander said professors, students and others requested that he do the study, which mirrored a previous report he’d released on economics.

“The reaction has been significant,” he said.

Less than 50 percent of the graduates from the top Ph.D. programs end up in tenure-track jobs, while many of the graduates end up with jobs at universities that are ranked lower than the school they attended.

The academic jobs are arranged into different groups — with tenure-track positions as the highest ranked, non-tenure-track positions in the middle and high school teachers or editors as the lowest ranked. The report then shows the percentage of graduates from each tier who go on to each profession.

Examples of Tier 1 universities are Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania; Tier 2 universities include Cornell University and Princeton; Tier 3 universities are Boston College and Boston University; and Tier 4 schools include Lehigh University and the University of New Hampshire.

Colander said the problems faced by students earning their Ph.D. in English might be worse than the study suggests — no matter what tier they are in.

“I don't pay attention to rankings like this because I think the quality of a program is very hard (or impossible) to measure,” said Meagan Blair, a UNC English Ph.D. student.

Ying Daisy Zhuo, Ph.D. operations research student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, assisted Colander with the study. She said she was interested in the different approach that the study was using and thought it was helpful for academics.

“My hope (is) to provide more insightful statistics to people who need better information to evaluate the option of getting a Ph.D. in English,” she said.

Blair said though university rankings are extremely important, the quality of the students graduating from the programs matters as well.

She said she thinks UNC-G’s English Ph.D. program is producing solid graduates and professors, and she wouldn’t have been concerned if UNC had been ranked beneath UNC-G.

“Students who are producing the best work, I hope and believe, will get the best jobs, no matter what school they came from,” Blair said.

state@dailytarheel.com

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