In 2020-21, there were nearly 105,000 doctoral students enrolled in UK universities, which coincidentally was around the same number of staff employed on academic contracts at the time. One survey reported that 67% of doctoral students desired an academic job at the end of it; in reality though, only a small proportion of them could possibly succeed. Since then, the number of PhD students has reportedly risen, yet undergraduate numbers in the arts and humanities are falling, and many universities are either making redundancies or are on the brink. In other words: this does not look like a good sector in which to invest several more years of your one wild and precious life.
Equally though, it is far from clear that doing a PhD gives you an advantage in non-academic fields either. Having perhaps hung around for a couple of temporary research associate jobs after your doctorate, or nearly killed yourself in short-term teaching positions covering other people’s leave, once you eventually accept your fate and get out of academia you will have to start again as a junior to peers of the same age. You will probably have substantially more debt than them, and some employers will now perceive you as fatally over-specialised.
The only recent study I know of which tries to gauge whether there is a financial benefit to getting a PhD finds a “modest” premium for doctorate-holders over the course of a lifetime, but less so for humanities than for other disciplines. It also notes that financial benefits tend to accrue late in one’s career, due an increased association between PhD-holding and management positions. Arguably, this makes the outlook for arts and humanities doctorates worse not better. Temperamentally, the sort of person attracted to spending four years furrowing his brow in a dusty archive may not be a particularly natural fit with management.
So, why do people still pursue PhDs in subjects like History at all? One plausible answer is that they don’t know how poor their chances are of getting a university post at the end of it. Though managers and research council heads occasionally make vaguely deprecatory noises — after all, most universities run doctoral programmes at a financial loss they can barely afford — the information does not seem to be filtering through to the average applicant. And it’s hardly their fault.
On the contrary, university websites tend to contain enthusiastic descriptions of the benefits of postgraduate studies. At departmental level, many faculty members are extremely keen to entice potential doctoral applicants from their existing pool of undergraduate and Master’s students — more plainly, to intellectually groom them — for the self-interested reason that having a strong record of doctoral supervision is often a condition of successful promotion as a lecturer. Other staff have research specialties that don’t lend themselves to teaching on big undergraduate courses and so also have a vested interest in supervising as many PhDs as possible, in order to maintain an appearance of earning their keep. And then there’s the fact that, for some, having doctoral students around the place is treated as a sign of prestige, and speaks more to their vision of the leisurely discursive joys of academic life than giving repetitive lectures to masses of bored undergraduates.
“Many are exploited by management for cheap teaching labour while pretending it will increase their career chances, and that doesn’t help dispel the fantasies either.”
In short, then, those already working in universities cannot be trusted about the true value of a PhD in relation to the prospects of those they supervise. They have too much skin in the game. Lured in by fantasies — both their own, and those of their supervisors — it is all too easy for doctoral students to start imagining themselves as fully-formed lecturers before they have finished their first chapter; at which point nobody wants to tell them they don’t actually stand a chance in hell. Many are exploited by management for cheap teaching labour while pretending it will increase their career chances, and that doesn’t help dispel the fantasies either. In my experience, trying to warn someone halfway through a PhD that they should conjure up an alternative plan for the future doesn’t go down well — the time to say this was probably before they told all their relatives they had decided they were going to be a lecturer.