It’s not hard to find some pretty dismal descriptions of what labor conditions are like for graduate students and new PhDs in the humanities. Earlier this year The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a two-part series about graduate school bluntly titled, “Just Don’t Go” (part 1, part 2), written by the same author who wrote pieces titled “So You Want to Go to Grad School?” and “If You Must Go to Grad School.” One writer has a whole book and blog dedicated to exposing the misery of graduate students and adjunct faculty. Just today, the New York Times ran an op-ed piece by Mark C. Taylor, titled “End the University as We Know It.” Taylor argues,

The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors.

In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that there will always be too many candidates for too few openings.

So are labor conditions and the job market really for graduate students and junior scholars really as bad as the doomsayers describe? Probably … with some qualifications. That there is a problem seems to be undeniable, given how many different groups are concerned about it. But concerning the debt load for humanities graduate students, the wisest advice that I’ve been given was not to go unless I could get someone to pay for it, and that advice seems to be nearly universal. Concerning the job market, the AHA does seem to be making some progress—or at least some effort—towards getting graduate programs to prepare students for careers in public history, government service, and other non-tenure-track positions. For example, just in the past few months the AHA’s blog has run articles about “Jobs and Careers in History” and about a panel discussion at the annual meeting about the job market, as well as interviews with several public historians (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). I wonder, too, whether graduate students and academics have unrealistically high expectations about compensation and work loads, and an unusually low threshold of tolerance for “exploited labor,” though that may be an unfair insinuation.

I have reason to believe that my conditions during graduate school will be better than dismal. First, Brandeis offers a generous funding package to all of its American history PhD students. There is a lot of discussion on the grad school forums about which schools have the best funding. Brandeis isn’t number one, but it’s still very good. Second, Brandeis is also very generous in terms of what they expect in return for funding. Of the ten semesters that I’ll be funded, I’ll only have to teach for five, and even in those five semesters the load is very light. The faculty that I spoke with frankly said that having graduate teaching assistants relieved them of a huge load, but that there purpose in using TAs was more to give grad students experience than to exploit their labor. Third, Brandeis is probably not the best school for getting public history skills, but the Boston area is sure to be full of opportunities along that line. One of the selling points of the University of South Carolina was its strong public history program, which I considered carefully. One of the reasons I chose Brandeis over USC was that I thought it could better provide an education in the traditional skills of a historian. But following the advice in the article “Every PhD Needs a Plan B,” I plan to diversify my skills as much as possible. All in all, I have much to be thankful for in being accepted to Brandeis.

Do any readers with better knowledge or more experience have any thoughts on this topic?