In this trailer, Maggie Nettesheim Hoffmann, co-host of PhD Futures Now!, talks about the most significant problem for graduate education in the Humanities today. 

Transcript:

One of the places perhaps where our PhD program in the humanities has gone astray, is to really combine or link the job outcome with the training. I want to sort of up end that a little bit, right, as opposed to thinking that the only career path one has available to them with a PhD in history is a tenure track, teaching position or research position. That’s obviously shifted in the 21st century, not just because of necessity. But because we live in a world where there are so many different variety of options and lifestyles and places to live, we don’t live in the 19th century German world, where we trained PhDs to become researchers and professors, that world doesn’t exist anymore. And so I think it’s very kind of arrogant to assume that someone who wants to earn a PhD or work on a PhD, automatically believes that they’re going to be or want to be a tenure track professor. And that if you somehow go against that grain, you are a failure, or that you are not really committed to being a true academic. I would like to see us separate the job outcome from the actual education we receive as PhDs.