Holiday season is convention season for many professors in America. The Modern Language Association, as reported on the Knickerbocker page of The New York Sun on December 30, 2004, met in Philadelphia last week; the annual gathering of the American Historical Association gets under way tomorrow in Seattle.

The printed programs list vast numbers of papers that run the gamut from the super trendy through the straightforwardly sober to the transcendentally arcane. But it is more material concerns that bring large numbers of unnaturally elegant young people to these events. These are the doctoral students who have just completed their degrees or expect to get them shortly. Many must begin repaying debts they have incurred in financing their higher educations through 10 or more years; they are therefore intensely interested in the jobs for which colleges and universities are interviewing at these meetings.

Prospects for full-time work, however, are bleak; one position can draw 100 or more potential takers. Some applications are Hail Marys, mailed off in hope of a miracle, and others are insincere. Nevertheless, even after discounting these along with the clearly unqualified, the chance that a freshly credentialed Ph.D. will see a search committee, let alone get the job, is remote.

This disheartening mix of indebtedness and a tight employment market troubles doctoral faculties too. One speaker at the MLA proposed shortening the time it takes to get the Ph.D.; the sooner a student completes the degree, the less debt they will incur. It is hard to argue with this proposition, but it is, in fact, disingenuous. American Ph.D. programs have been slimming down for many years. One must no longer get a master of arts degree to go on for the Ph.D. Nor must a student demonstrate a reading knowledge of two foreign languages, once required of all doctoral candidates, regardless of field. Wide-ranging lecture courses have been de-emphasized in favor of seminar or tutorial study that is often folded directly into the doctoral dissertation. Qualifying examinations are routinely tailored to the student’s upcoming research, rather than to enlarging knowledge of a discipline taken as a whole.

Faculty members find the system convenient; it allows them to use their individual scholarly projects as the basis of their teaching and to turn out graduates who share their interests. They may, however, be trapping many of their students in a nasty paradox. The very reduction of Ph.D. education to dissertation preparation and writing could be a major reason for many to stretch out the Ph.D. process and to fall even more deeply into debt.

Doctoral students generally have always partially supported their studies by working part time. Many serve as graduate assistants to professors, a job for which universities frequently forgive tuition fees as part of the compensation package, or as adjuncts at nearby institutions. Candidates for a Ph.D. in modern languages will teach introductory courses in the language of their expertise. The historian will cover a section or two of Western or world civilization or their equivalents.

Though such classes may be “elementary” for freshmen and sophomores, they can be miserably complex for young Ph.D. candidates, many of whom lack the broad disciplinary data base or spoken-language skills needed to handle these assignments. Forced to compensate for deficiencies in their own educations, they postpone work on their doctorates, particularly on their dissertations, and take out yet another loan to tide themselves over. The problem here may therefore not be with faculty ignorance of the life circumstances of the average Ph.D. candidate, as one member of the MLA suggested, but with flaws in the curriculum that their professors require of them.

Nor are these same professors about to let the law of supply and demand correct their problems. Another speaker at the MLA proposed lightening the financial burdens of new Ph.D.’s with positions in a Jobs Corps. Regardless, apparently, of talents, degree holders who cannot find college or university positions would serve in public schools, government internships and the like, with stipends large enough to pay down at least a fraction of their debts. Financing for this arrangement would come from federal, state, and local governments, and presumably external private sources.

The shamelessness of this scheme is almost embarrassing. Taxpayers, having already subsidized the overproduction of Ph.D.’s in the public universities of their states, would now be asked to pay for their welfare. And just how helpful a crew of out of work Ph.D.’s would be in the public schools is a sizeable question. If the education of these people did not equip them to teach undergraduates, they will be at even greater disadvantage with high school students, whose cognitive peculiarities never have been concerns for doctoral programs. Most Ph.D.’s teach competently, some superbly, but some do it so badly that they will never find jobs. The Job Corps seems willing to support all equally. Moreover, by postponing their inevitable entry into the general job market, students may only be bypassing opportunities to draw salaries that will help them shed their financial burdens far sooner than they would on the pay of an entry-level assistant professor.

Indeed, many applicants should never have been in Ph.D. programs at all. Many have struggled through to their degrees only because their faculty sponsors lacked the fortitude to tell them that they have made bad career choices. There are also professors who pencil Ph.D.’s through because they fear that their institution will eliminate doctoral work in disciplines that do not produce enough degree holders.

Ph.D. overproduction is a grim reality in the humanities and the social sciences; graduate students themselves are the chief victims. Ignoring market pressures will not help them, nor will compressing their already stripped-down educations. It is up to graduate faculties to grapple honestly and unselfishly with the issue and to remedy it. Volunteering to teach materials beyond the narrow confines of their own research would be a good place to start.

Professor Fichtner is emerita at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.