A Nonapocalyptic Vision of Graduate Education’s Future

In an apocryphal story, Nasreddin Hodja, a 13th-century folk hero, loses a ring inside his house. He then goes outside to look for it.

“Why are you looking outside?” asks his wife, “when you lost it inside the house?” 

“The light is better outside. I can see where I’m looking!” replies Nasreddin Hodja.

Sadly, Hodja’s logic does not seem that different from that evidenced by many of today’s faculty members. A good number of them, as well as deans, and provosts, found their calling when the light shined brightly, illuminating the route to an academic career. And leaders at colleges and universities keep looking down those same pathways, preparing students for careers as academic scholars and professors. 

Many people fear, however, that that light has dimmed—or been extinguished altogether. The enrollment cliff looms near. Whole programs are being shut down. And in the surviving departments, some faculty members are refusing to accept new graduate students on the grounds that their prospects for a job are slim. Those challenges are especially acute in the humanities and social sciences. Small wonder that calls for a radical transformation of graduate education programs and of the entire system of higher education are mounting.

By looking in places where it is easier to see but where answers may not be found, people may be missing the chance to refocus on where the light is not so much dimming as it is diffusing. If the job prospects of recent Ph.D. grads are defined as tenure-track academic positions (which they most often are), then the future does look bleak. However, many M.A. and Ph.D. graduates find success not in the academy but in the government and international organizations, in journalism, and even in the private sector. Indeed, many companies, such as the ones we’ve worked for—IBM, Meta, Nissan, Sapient-Nitro, and Waymo—as well as other prestigious organizations, have actively sought out and employed graduates in the social sciences and humanities because of their training, not despite it.

This asymmetry between the “ideal” career path and the experiences of most graduates highlights the deep and growing chasm between the future that higher education institutions envision—and strongly incentivize—and what is actually happening. The not-so-tacit assumption that academic jobs reign supreme casts a long and abiding shadow on higher education, but it need not be so.

Indeed, what universities seem to have forgotten is that they have more than a bit of a say in how these forces play out. There is a vibrant and prosperous future for M.A. and Ph.D. education not in radical transformation but in reconciliation—reconciliation between academic and applied domains of knowledge production, and in enabling lives as researchers and scholars both within the academy and beyond.

Master’s and Ph.D. graduates are eminently employable outside the academy because they have skills and knowledge that are not easily nor typically developed elsewhere. The ability to evaluate, design, conduct and interpret research in the context of broader social, political and economic trends sets M.A. and Ph.D. students apart from their peers. The embrace of ambiguity is one of the criteria used to recruit and evaluate employees at Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, and M.A. and Ph.D. graduates have this in spades, having steered an independent research project through the unpredictable gauntlet of logistical challenges, financial constraints and stakeholder (read: faculty) disagreements. The rapid growth and expansion of technology and AI have heightened the demand for committed leaders prepared for complex problem-solving who are able to juggle multiple, often contradictory, ideas and worldviews. One could say that the light is not only diffusing but also intensifying.

Nevertheless, the dynamics that reproduce the status quo in higher education are strong. The structure of the higher education system dictates that to achieve status, institutions must place their graduates as professors, ideally at other top-tier universities. Budgets are such that funding must increasingly be secured through large, highly specialized research grants in foundational areas. The preparation of students for a wide array of possible futures remains segregated in subfields and courses in applied humanities and social sciences. While these traditional ways of operating are an important part of the solution, they do not fulfill all the promises of scientific advancement.

Meanwhile, beyond the competitive demands of specialization and maintaining research leadership, faculty members are beset by ever-growing requirements for professional and institutional service. And many are unfamiliar with the requirements of nonacademic professions, rendering them unable to advise and prepare students on those paths effectively.

Three Key Changes

Although the forces of inertia are strong, we see reason for optimism—if institutions, administrators, faculty, students and alumni work together to find new ways to reconcile the inescapable realities of the post-graduate job market. In graduate education, that reconciliation entails three important changes.

First, universities must bring greater visibility to the diversity of job trajectories open to their graduates. Some institutions are hosting occasional panels to highlight careers beyond the academy. Each of us has participated in a number of these forums at such places as Stanford University, Rice University, University of Chicago, the University of Texas at San Antonio, and the Universities of California, Irvine and Santa Cruz, to name a few. Our position is that these should be happening more frequently and earlier and should be more actively integrated with programs of study. Many students opt for applied work later in their degree programs once they have been exposed to the realities of the academic job market or as they come to realize that life in the academy is only one—and maybe not the most attractive—option.

Being upfront and providing students with the information they need to make well-informed decisions throughout their academic careers (and not just on one random occasion, and not just at the tail end) will reduce the disillusionment students face if they do not end up pursuing academic careers and prepare them to be more adaptable and effective scholars if they do. And it will provide faculty members and programs with rich and challenging material from which to frame the shape, direction and futures of their disciplines.

Second, higher education institutions need to put applied career paths on a more even footing with academic paths. That’s trickier to effectuate, but a few simple steps can move institutions in the right direction. Creating more full-time or part-time roles for hybrid applied-academic faculty and establishing programs for alumni to mentor and even teach in, programs like the University of Chicago’s Alumni-in-Residence program, would be a good start.

 They can also learn lessons and take inspiration from the successes of highly regarded applied programs as models and repositories of best practices for these efforts. In anthropology, for instance, faculty members and students at San José State University are deeply entwined with organizations and enterprises both across Silicon Valley and the world. Faculty members involve students in projects such as with the Mosaic Atlas, which connects nonprofits, local government stakeholders and citizen activists to produce a digital atlas of cultural arts in the Bay Area. They engage with the U.S. Geological Survey and community-based organizations in the Bay Area such as Japantown Prepared for community-led disaster preparedness, and a co-author works with students about, for instance, campus-community partnerships for disaster risk reduction. They have also collaborated with the Nissan Research Center to study possible changes to street life should autonomous and electric vehicles enter the ecosystem, as highlighted in these student videos.

Third, mechanisms must be put in place to enable a vigorous bilateral movement of intellectual ideas (and, one day, perhaps, people themselves) between academic and nonacademic contexts of work. The wellspring of scholarship is an intellectual community, and we as a society are missing out on crucial interchange between experts in various contexts. Knowledge, if it flows at all, tends to move from the academy to applied contexts, and then it stops.

This is a huge missed opportunity for the scientific community. The EPIC (Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Community) organization for instance, has a 20-year archive of double-blind peer-reviewed papers and other materials by social scientists analyzing aspects of their work in industry contexts. Why shouldn’t faculty members in anthropology, sociology, business, and beyond be teaching this corpus of work in graduate seminars and inviting the authors to share and explore what work of this type yields—and doesn’t—beyond the academy? The resulting conversations would generate new paths and modes of scientific inquiry, whereby insights from outside the academy could fuel new thinking within. Granting organizations and private companies can support this engagement by developing funding opportunities to encourage collaboration and cross-fertilization across professionals inside and outside the academy.

The point of our recommendations is to strengthen graduate academic programs, not water them down nor radically redesign them. Graduate degrees should not become only professional degrees sought by prospective enrollees to get a specific job. Rather, the experience of going through the milestones of graduate education—from qualifying exams to proposal hearings to foreign language mastery to thesis development—leads to the production of original insight and varied contributions. This process has value. We’ve seen it on the ground. We cannot and should not fundamentally alter the process of scientific knowledge production because we have grown accustomed to the rapidly accelerating pace of most everything else in our world. But institutions of higher education need to expand their way of thinking about graduate education and develop structures that equip students—and faculty members—for a growing array of professional futures.

Graduate education has held an allure for people who want to satisfy their ongoing curiosity and engage in the robust process of learning and endurance that getting an advanced degree demands. Those people are well-positioned to respond to the knotty challenges of our changing worlds. Opportunities for these grads exist in both the academy and the world beyond. And hopefully, by finding ways to mediate between those two arenas, we can expand those opportunities, allowing the light to shine even brighter for future graduates.