Everyone knows that English departments are in trouble, but you can't appreciate just howmuch trouble until you read the new report from the Modern Language Association. The report is about Ph.D. programs, which have been in decline since 2008. These programs have gotten both more difficult and less rewarding: today, it can take almost a decade to get a doctorate, and, at the end of your program, you're unlikely to find a tenure-track job.
The core of the problem is, of course, the job market. The M.L.A. report estimates that only sixty per cent of newly-minted Ph.D.s will find tenure-track jobs after graduation. If anything,that's wildly optimistic: the M.L.A. got to that figure by comparing the number of tenure-track jobs on its job list (around six hundred) with the number of new graduates (about a thousand). But that leaves out the thousands of unemployed graduates from past years who are still job-hunting--not to mention the older professors who didn't receive tenure, and who now find themselves competing with their former students. In all likelihood, the number of jobs per candidate is much smaller than the report suggests. That's why the mood is so dire--why even professors are starting to ask, in the committee's words, "Why maintain doctoral study in the modern languages and literatures--or the rest of the humanities--at all?"
Those trends, in turn, are part of an even larger story having to do with the expansion and transformation of American education after the Second World War. Essentially, colleges grew less e1ite and more vocational. Before the war, relatively few people went to college. Then, in the nineteen-fifties, the G.I. Bill and, later, the Baby Boom pushed colleges to grow rapidly. When the boom ended, colleges found themselves overextended and competing for students. By the mid- seventies, schools were creating new programs designed to attract a broader range of students--for instance, women and minorities.
Those reforms wo
A.The idea of designing a shorter program
B.The completion of a degree in five years
C.The idea of drafting a shorter dissertation
D.The suggestions given in the M.L.A. report