I’ve been meaning to return to blogging because 1) I think it’ll get me thinking more in writing rather than in my head, and 2) it’ll get me to actually compose and get in the habit of writing more. As a department chair, it’s challenging to find time to write, and I’ve found that over the last year or so, my writing has become less “good”—more blunt, less nuanced, less organized and less sophisticated. That’s a topic for another post, I suppose.
Tonight I read with great interest Adam Phillips’s recent Composition Forum article, “Charting the Currents: A Deep Dive into the Writing Studies Job Market for Early Career Scholar-Teachers.” I recommend reading this article: It provides some useful data and discussion of that data from recent job markets in writing studies. He documents how there are fewer jobs in writing studies than a few years ago (the trend is going down), and that more jobs are non-tenure-track, and, overall, his discussion is interesting and useful.
But Phillips’s use of data shows us just how bad our data is in the field and how we need better mechanisms for collecting data. One of his suggestions is for the field to document how many PhD graduates there are in our field every year—a great recommendation given how complex and incomplete current data is. For instance, one of his data points is how many PhDs were granted in 2019–2020 in writing studies. He uses CIP Codes to determine the estimated number of of PhDs that year, but he includes Speech communication and rhetoric (CIP 09.0101), which leads to total of 394 PhDs (263 of those are from speech comm and rhetoric). This leads to pretty unfair comparison of PhDs to number of jobs available, since his data doesn’t include job adverts in speech comm (which I didn’t try to look up either). So, the article overestimates how many PhDs there are—or possibly it underestimates, but I’m doubtful of that? While speech comm and rhetoric PhDs are included, PhDs in English that have a CIP code not marked for rhetoric or TPC are not included. For instance, Penn State has a PhD program in English with an emphasis in rhetoric and writing (where I earned my PhD). It graduates probably 1-4 PhD students a year in rhetoric and writing (or used to, at least), but I bet the CIP code isn’t included in the data Phillips uses. I have no idea how many PhDs the field produced in 2019–2020, but I’m guessing it’s somewhere between 150 and 350? Probably toward the lower end of that range, I’m guessing.
My point here isn’t to say that Phillips’s discussion has a bunch of “bad data” (though I do wish the discussion contextualized that data a bit more, for instance, about the inclusion of speech comm in the number of PhDs while not including data about the speech comm and rhetoric job market), but rather to point how difficult it is to have accurate data about our field. Here’s another problem with data about the job market: Yes, NTT job ads seem to be increasing, but without enough data about actual jobs, we don’t know how it’s increasing. For instance, maybe there are more full-time NTT jobs in relation to part-time NTT jobs, and that these jobs are better than they have historically been? We don’t know (and we can’t know, based on the data that’s available, think). And I imagine that, given how part-time and full-time NTT jobs are classified and advertised so differently across the country, we might never have accurate data about this.
On a more qualitative point, Phillips encourages more professional development about the job market for PhD students (drawing on many others’ claims for the same), and I fully agree. Outside of a few excellent programs, professional development around the job market is not happening at the level it should be (and I’m not excluding my institution from this indictment). Having been on multiple search committees over the last decade and now serving as Department Chair, I’ve read lots of materials that show little understanding of the genre conventions of cover letters and CVs. (At Texas Tech, we’re working to improve our job preparation and professional development for graduate students across English studies, though making this sustainable and impactful is a challenge!)
So, some questions after reading Phillips’s article:
- Are we actually over-producing PhDs in rhetoric and writing studies and in technical and professional communication? It seems hard to say without accurate data about how many PhDs are actually produced in the field every year, and the fact that some students go into industry (and want to!) is a contributing factor to understanding this data (as Phillips acknowledges). (Anecdotally: TTU’s TCR program graduates 5-15 PhD students a year. Many of them are online students and stay in the jobs they already have, as an instructor or lecturer. Many of them stay in or change their industry jobs. A few go for new TT or NTT jobs, and almost all of them have been very successful at landing a job they liked.)
- What is the actual nature of NTT jobs that are advertised, and what about NTT jobs that aren’t advertised? Is there any way to actually accurately collect this data?
- How can we collectively improve professional development for the academic job market? And perhaps just as importantly, improve preparation for non-academic jobs?
I’ll admit a bit of suspicion that we’re over-producing PhDs in the field. (We certainly are in English studies more broadly, but I’m not certain we are in writing studies, just based on the data available.) I say this because, at TTU, we only get 30–40 applications for a tenure-line position when it’s advertised. While, granted, our location in Texas probably depresses application numbers because of local politics and location, I would expect more applicants if the field were truly over-producing PhDs. And given that some of those applicants aren’t actually in rhetoric and writing studies or technical and professional communication, these numbers of actual applicants from our field are lower. I’m not saying we aren’t over-producing PhDs in the field, but if we are, I’m not seeing evidence of it from a local perspective.
(If anything, I’d suggest that English studies more broadly is over-producing PhD students who think that just because they studied literature that they’re qualified to teach and research writing studies, rhetoric, or technical and professional writing.)
