Mae Ngai on the job market for PhDs
Mae Ngai speaks with Karl Jacoby about the future prospects for aspiring faculty.
Transcript
Well for quite a few years now we have been discouraging students who want to get a PhD and want to become a professor, because the odds are they're not going to get a job as a professor or at least not as a tenure track Professor.
The balance between tenure line faculty and adjunct faculty or contingent faculty has changed wildly and so what what they might see at Columbia is a distortion of what's out there in the real world. So our first move generally is to discourage. But there are students there are people who you know they have a fire inside, and if you have that fire then you should follow it.
I also think the academic job market is uneven. So for graduate students who are looking to teach in ethnic studies, Asian American studies, Native American studies, etc., there actually are a lot of jobs right now because colleges all over the country have woken up and figured out that their students are demanding more of these classes. They don't have anybody to teach them, so right now is a good moment. But they're probably going to fill all those jobs in the next five years, so it's hard to know for somebody just entering grad school now, what what the landscape will look like then.
The balance between tenure line faculty and adjunct faculty or contingent faculty has changed wildly and so what what they might see at Columbia is a distortion of what's out there in the real world. So our first move generally is to discourage. But there are students there are people who you know they have a fire inside, and if you have that fire then you should follow it.
I also think the academic job market is uneven. So for graduate students who are looking to teach in ethnic studies, Asian American studies, Native American studies, etc., there actually are a lot of jobs right now because colleges all over the country have woken up and figured out that their students are demanding more of these classes. They don't have anybody to teach them, so right now is a good moment. But they're probably going to fill all those jobs in the next five years, so it's hard to know for somebody just entering grad school now, what what the landscape will look like then.