Originally Posted by Bostonian
There is more funding for research assistantships in the sciences than the humanities, and a substantial fraction of humanities graduate students are taking on substantial debt:

http://chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-in-the/44846
Chronicle of Higher Education
January 30, 2009
Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go
By Thomas H. Benton

Wow. That is really scary. I spent part of this morning reading through pieces on this subject and while what I read didn't surprise me, it was still depressing. And it wasn't just the dismal job prospects: it was also the apparent pervasiveness of postmodernist garbage in English departments:

Originally Posted by Ph.D. thesis
I investigate instead how he conceives the relationship between language and meaning altogether. For the inhabitants of Kafka's fictional universes use language in a way that forces into question the conceit of linguistic expression itself.
...
Through the development of these chapters I show how several of the most radical ideas of early analytic language philosophy emerge in Kafka's fictional worlds, and thereby demonstrate themselves with an urgency and immediacy unavailable to the philosophical medium.


and

Originally Posted by Random English Professor
As literary theorists observe, time and thus history plays a central role in making certain identities desirable, and others undesirable. Queer studies, fat studies, and early modern studies all have reasons to "queer" history because a modern form of reductive history makes the study of these subjects of inconsequence. The queer, the fat, and the early modern are made into the "before" of our much-desired "after."

When I wrote my last message in this thread I was thinking of people with graduate degrees in fields like the sciences or engineering (or even history or other fields where getting the degree means that you have to rely on data). I don't even know what this stuff means.

And I agree completely that pushing students into Ph.D. programs that reduce their ability to get a decent job is a pretty seriously bad idea.

Last edited by Val; 05/19/13 08:52 PM. Reason: Hit submit after I'd only started to type