It’s an extreme story in these boom times. We’re living in the strongest job market in 30 years; from fast-food counters to corner offices, companies are desperate to hire. But that prosperity isn’t uniform. “In our community it’s anything but the best-ever job market,” says Phyllis Franklin of the Modern Language Association. Her colleagues, who hold Ph.D.s in humanities disciplines like English, history, philosophy and poli-sci, have faced bleak employment prospects for years. Despite a recent uptick, “these professions have been down for so long, they don’t know what ‘up’ is,” says Robert Weisbuch, president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. These workers represent a tiny slice of the labor market–roughly 5,000 people earn humanities Ph.D.s annually. But their status illustrates how pockets of the work force can miss out on a boom–and how a low unemployment rate doesn’t measure “underemployed” people doing jobs for which they’re vastly overqualified.
The reasons for the Ph.D.s’ plight are complex. Aging tenured faculty don’t feel like retiring just yet, and universities are relying more on part-time, low-paid adjuncts to cope with booming enrollments. The lack of teaching jobs is no problem for grad students in fields like engineering, computer science, biology or economics, who can become hot properties on Wall Street, at consulting firms or at other companies. But corporations haven’t developed a taste for humanities Ph.D.s, so grads who fail to find the ideal tenure-track job are often left to cobble together careers by taking several part-time teaching gigs. To increase their prospects outside of teaching, the Wilson Foundation has started a program in which companies like Microsoft and Merck agree to hire one humanities Ph.D. apiece each year. For many folks who’ve run the doctoral gantlet, though, settling for anything outside the ivory tower can be a struggle.
Bouricius, 42, probably could have found work as a university administrator, in publishing or in the nonprofit sector. But “I’m not an eight-hours-in-an-office kind of person,” she says. She admits she’s hampered by her unwillingness to relocate beyond the Northeast, and dismisses the thought of teaching high school. So she’s trucking by choice, not desperation. She’ll earn more driving (roughly $35,000) than many first-year professors, but money isn’t the attraction. Regulations limit drivers to 10 hours a day behind the wheel, giving Bouricius free time in the cab to write academic papers and on-the-road essays on her PowerBook. So far she’s logged 11,000 miles through 37 states, carrying laundry soap, grease, sugar, soda and plumbing supplies. She likes the driving, and she’s adapted to truck-stop food and days without showering. The biggest problem: lack of sleep during training, which requires near-round-the-clock “team driving” with a supervisor. She expects the schedule to ease when she starts driving solo next week.
Other doctoral grads find the transition to nonacademic life easier, and some are even starting to embrace it. Even before earning a doctorate in political science from Vanderbilt in 1998, Suzanne Martineau realized she’d have to look outside the academy. “I never burst into tears or had the ‘Oh my God, my hopes have been dashed’ moment,” says Martineau, 33, now a copywriter at a Chicago ad agency with no regrets. Kaz Tanaka, 28, who finished his Ph.D. in physics at MIT last spring, figured if he was going to face long odds to get a tenure-track job, he might as well pursue a different risky career. He’s working to become a cartoonist for Japanese manga comic books, while working a day job as a software engineer. “My professors were cool with it,” Tanaka says. “They know I’m using my other talents.”
Despite predictions that a boom in faculty hiring is just around the corner, no one can guarantee the supply-and-demand lines will ever intersect as nicely as they do in Econ 101. The good news is, research shows that 10 years after graduation, Ph.D.s who’ve taken nonacademic jobs are just as happy as (and earning more than) their colleagues who’ve become professors. So for now, Bouricius will stay on the road. And perhaps she’ll add a new wrinkle to an old trucking tradition. When trucker alumni drive by the United Tractor Trailer School, they blow their horn. “They’re saying, ‘I’m working–thank you’,” says Fred Camp, the admissions director. If Pleun Bouricius blasts her horn while driving her rig through Harvard Square, it will signal a slightly more complicated message.
