Graduate training will sharpen your critical faculties, give you some research skills, and perhaps equip you to do some scholarly writing. It could open up to you the possibility of a spell as a college teacher, conceivably even a lifetime in that occupation, and you cannot other-wise add that option to your string.
But you should not enroll in graduate school on the assumption that teaching in college is even what you will want to do, let alone what you will do.
If you end up in a line of work where an advanced degree in humanities is not a job qualification, the opportunity cost of your time in graduate school will obviously not have been zero. On the other hand, it will not necessarily turn out to have been high. Although your pay and status may at first be lower than if you had gone to work sooner, there is a good chance that in the long run you will do a better job and be better compensated by virtue of the finer tuning of your critical faculties and research talents.
If graduate departments could become comfortable about saying something of this sort to would-be applicants, their own inhibitions about admitting new students ought to relax. Their admissions quotas could then become functions not of professors' consciences, abetted by pressures from incumbent graduate students, but of the applicant pool, their own training capabilities, and their particular system for pricing graduate instruction.
Although realistic advice to graduating seniors, coupled with changes in the admissions policies of key graduate departments, would improve chances for recruiting scholarly talent, some other changes may be necessary complements. A senior aged 22 might reasonably conclude that, as a business executive of 40, he or she would be better off and more satisfied with life if 2 of the intervening 18 years had been spent in graduate school instead of on the job. Contemplation of a doctoral program with a median duration of 7 years, however, could well lead to an opposite conclusion.
It follows that universities desiring to recruit humanities doctoral candidates should develop programs enabling students to move into nonteaching careers with a minimum of lost time and effort. The New York State Regents "Careers in Business" program pioneered at NYU provided a 7-week cram course that enabled carefully selected Ph. D's and near-Ph.D.'s to move into jobs at levels of salary and responsibility well above those for people with B.A's alone. Other universities adopted the NYU model. For the most part, these programs served to facilitate career change by people who had completed Ph.D.'s and spent some time as college teachers, but concluded that they preferred different types of challenges. The short summer course offering orientation to business or government is, however, a device that universities could well borrow as an add-on to 1- or 2-year master's degree programs. Potentially self-financing, it could be an actual source of revenue to universities.
Another possible device is a master's program combining initial training in scholarship with training for a profession. A multiyear curriculum could lead to simultaneous award of an M.A., M. Phil., or M. Litt. in a humanities discipline and an LL.B., or J.D., or M.B.A. or even M.D. Though entailing interfaculty negotiations and some redefinition by humanities departments of the requirements for initiation into scholarship, such programs could attract potential scholars who would otherwise never acquire the rudiments of training or test their talent for research and writing.
A third variant could be introductory training in scholarship coupled with formal, tested practice in concise writing, clear oral exposition, and guidance of small groups-skills associated with teaching but equally useful for and prized in other occupations. For such programs, universities in large cities could almost certainly draw at relatively little cost on alumni or others professionally engaged in providing comparable types of training in corporations or government agencies, thus providing some genuine capability for certifying acquisition of general capabilities beyond those of a B.A.
These suggestions are merely illustrative. Many possibilities exist. Since charges for graduate study are already artificial, one other line of experimentation could involve additional tinkering with prices. For example, course fees could be set at attractively low levels with most real or apparent charges being levied only when and if a degree is awarded. Yet another possibility, perhaps too radical even to be suggested, is for major graduate departments to schedule some courses and seminars for weekends for the convenience of part-time students who have full-time jobs.
What is appropriate or feasible may differ from university to university, even from department to department. The critical shift required is one of attitude-toward the view that the aim of graduate education is to train people interested in scholarship, not to feed a particular labor market. If that shift occurs, the rest is mere adaptation.
With regard to the character of the training offered as distinct from recruitment into training programs, a separate set of issues exists. Traditionally, humanities doctoral programs have had three components. Featuring seminar papers and a culminating dissertation, preparation for research has been the most prominent. The acquisition of broad knowledge has come second, oriented to a qualifying examination-usually the daunting "doctor's oral"-presumably because of student need to be able to define research topics and to teach. The third component, seldom required and sometimes dispensed with, has been practice teaching.
The new circumstances do not demand changes. Research training is the heart of any doctoral program, and both seminars and dissertations seem necessary. When University of Michigan Ph. D's were polled in 1974-1975, only a handful, whether in academic or nonacademic jobs, questioned the usefulness of their dissertation work.
