Should I Encourage Students to Consider Grad School?

There won't be that many history jobs in the future, but there will be some...

“Dr. Gehrz, I’ve been thinking of going to graduate school.”

That’s not an unusual start to a conversation during office hours. According to our last survey, approximately 60% of recent Bethel history, philosophy, and political science alumni have either finished a graduate degree or are in the middle of such a program — everything from law school to medical school to master’s degrees in business administration, divinity, education, library science, public policy, social work, and our three core fields.

If part of what the humanities have to offer is a heightened ability to continue learning throughout one’s life, then we certainly ought to welcome questions about continuing education. But my heart always sinks a bit when the student adds one more sentence:

“See, I’d really like to be a history professor.”

Oh boy. Where to start…

My grad school home: Yale’s Hall of Graduate Studies (now known as the Humanities Quad) — CC BY-SA 4.0 (1701historian)

I mean, I get it. I was that student thirty years ago.

Having exchanged my International Relations major for one in History, I spent little time my sophomore year deciding what I was to do with my bachelor’s degree. Ill-considered ideas of law school evaporated, and I didn’t think myself patient or charismatic enough to be the kind of inspiring social studies teacher I’d had in middle and high school. But I had seen enough of my college professors’ lives to grow enamored with the idea of being paid a comfortably middle-class salary to teach and research history — and to mentor young adults like me. So I started researching doctoral programs and writing query letters.

Ten years to the month after I started college, I returned to my hometown with a PhD from a top-tier institution and a full-time, tenure-track job that I hold to this day.

But I can’t tell students that cloyingly happy story without thinking of graphs like the one below, published in the January 2010 issue of Perspectives, the newsletter of the American Historical Association (AHA):

Even back in the good old days when I was a graduate student, there were 150-200 more History PhDs issued each year than positions available.¹ That gap was even closing early in the 21st century. But by the time of the Great Recession, it was twice as big and growing.