Every so often, we get someone asking if they can make a career in academia. All the responses I see dealing with the US and UK all say the same thing: boiled down, "Don't do it, there aren't any jobs."

There's this thread from nine days ago from a person asking about becoming a professor, with every response saying "don't do it", most notably from u/warneagle. The situation has been bad for years - observe this Monday Methods thread from four years ago, where the advice was still "don't do it".

Don't do it. There aren't any jobs.

It's just as bad as you've heard, if not worse. Take a quick look at this data. Ignore the rest of the thread though, what the guy is saying is nonsense. There's nothing we can do "as a discipline" to fix this. The jobs are going away and they're never coming back. It's an unstoppable cycle of "no jobs > fewer history majors > declining history enrollment > fewer history courses to teach > less demand for faculty > no jobs", which is only made worse by the overproduction of Ph.D.s. It's a dying profession and I strongly encourage you to do literally anything else with your life and career.

I recently spoke with my former professor at the History Department at a university that is in top 50 worldwide (even higher in History, mind you). He said that the enrolment is really bad and has halved since the year 2010. Government funding followed suit and adjusted. That is, with a lower enrolment, even fewer students can enrol in the next academic year. My peers who decided to go into academia are guaranteed to not have any jobs at this point. Some liberal arts colleges remove humanities departments to save money. This is really depressing for the field. Humanities are underfunded because universities and governments invest into STEM fields that offer way less flexible skillset or even into beautification campaigns to attract paying students.

There is a good side to it though. For one, removal of history programs from liberal art colleges raises the image of history degrees being awarded by remaining, objectively better institutions. I also hope that fewer people working in the field would increase the quality of research and shift the focus from the quantity of papers being published, something, that I believe tarnished the public image of humanities in the last few decades. I do not believe that academic history will disappear, but the postwar humanities with their large departments that offered life-long stable employment are indeed dying.

Getting a tenure track job in the humanities is like getting a job as a player in the NBA or NFL. You have to create a perfect combination of talent, early recognition for training, the right support network for your needs, discipline, self-motivation, singular focus, the knowledge to get to the right place at the right time for recognition by the right people, and luck that you catch their attention. People do it, clearly, but there's a lot more who are really extremely good and try very hard and never get there, believing it's because they weren't good enough when in reality they just didn't hit one of the lotto numbers and couldn't compete with the people who did.

As a phd student in history who has been hearing this from a lot of professors and is honestly kind of frustrated by the way advice is being given, here are my two (three?) cents:

1. The problem is definitely real as far as I can tell, but that doesn't mean there are literally no jobs available. It really depends on the area/time period you are studying, the methodologies you use, and the current trends of the field/world. Some of that isn't predictable but some of it is, and a lot comes down to marketing yourself and explaining your research in ways that make sense to others outside the field. The jobs are shrinking but my department is still hiring and replacing their professors and getting positions endowed so the field I'm in certainly isn't disintegrating entirely.
2. If you are offered full funding and feel like a PhD is worth it for the experience itself, I don't really see any substantive reason to not do it even after reading all of these comments and hearing advice from my own professors. It's ultimately a question everyone has to decide for themselves, especially given the fact that you likely won't be able to save much, if at all, during the process, but there is still value in simply being able to do what you love and getting paid for it. It seems like a lot of professors have gotten so jaded about the process that they have gone too far the other way and advise students to only do the 'practical' courses even if it means not pursuing the topics/research that they love. And I just think it's unfair to tell someone to give up on what they've dreamed of before they even really started. Plus, on the flip side, it's near impossible to complete a project well if you're not passionate about, especially for such long-ranging research. I would prefer to keep my resume active, do the research I came here to do, and get my degree before my funding is up. If I'm able to get an academic position afterwards that's great, if not I'll figure something else out and be just fine. There's a difference between being realistic and completely tossing in the towel, though, and the vast majority of professors are so defeatist it makes you feel like you should do the latter.
3. I was on the job market before starting my PhD and, while this wasn't a deciding factor for me at the end of the day, a lot of think tanks and similar organizations told me that a PhD will get you advancement opportunities down the line that you simply won't have access to without a doctorate. Of course not everyone necessarily has those opportunities, and some companies will pay for you to get a doctorate to work for them, but those opportunities are there and they are real. Sure you could get an MBA instead but I know for a fact I would be miserable while doing so, and then what's the point? It's not fair to ask people to keep sacrificing the present for the future, because eventually there just isn't a future left.

Tl;dr The field is definitely shrinking but I don't see it dying entirely, just shifting in ways that have led to some difficult growing pains, perhaps. I honestly think the advice students get told is really unproductive and misleading precisely because of the 'disheartening discourse' you mentioned. The vast majority of students won't get professor jobs but that doesn't mean that there is no value in pursuing what they love and, in my experience, my phd has been a great way to learn about other, non-academic opportunities that I would still be able to use my (very niche) research focus for. If people are creative about the way they explain their research, pick up tools that will benefit them both inside and outside of the field, and are aware that nothing is guaranteed, I think they'll be just fine.

And, for what it's worth, I'm grateful and perfectly satisfied in my program and I still fully believe that my PhD will allow me to do academic research in the future at a high level even if it isn't in a traditional university environment.

There's a thing called an enrollment cliff, when university and college enrollment dips to the point where only top tier universities can get students and the rest of the universities have to close down. The baby boomers brought enrollment up, but it's been descending since then.

The last enrollment cliff that was supposed to hit in 2008 or so was alleviated by the Great Recession sending millions back to university and college.

The next enrollment cliff is coming. If you can't line up a non university job for your humanities degree, you'd better be getting it for personal enrichment and/or be wealthy. Ivy League schools can't hire all the PhDs.

Librarians are stuck getting a Master's in Library Science, and libraries, unlike universities, are doing well enough. If you are still getting a humanities degree at the Bachelor's level, seriously consider a MLS. There are entirely online MLS programs, and the one university permitted per state (by the ALA) to have a MLS program might survive the cliff.

EDIT: Master's in Library Science (MLS) or Master's in Library and Information Science (MLIS) are functionally and generally the same degree and when I say MLS I also mean MLIS.

In the Netherlands it's not as bad. History has a reputation for just not landing you a job as easily as some other fields but I don't see a decrease in people choosing our field. If anything, universities still have to turn students down. But I'd say the talk you get is not as depressing as some of the stuff I read here. There are good prospects for getting a job (I was shown a graph and me, being a math illiterate humanities scum, was impressed by this magic) although not everyone rolls into some stellar research position they always dreamed of. I'm personally not very worried about people not choosing our field. The bigger threat is pressure and shitty working conditions for academics, or lack of funding.

“In ten years there will probably be only eight or nine history PhD programs in the country, and all the rest will probably just hire from them, and half of them still won’t be able to land a job.”

This is basically already true. If you didn't graduate from a few select schools, mostly Ivy's, your prospect at being hired into a tenure track job at a university drops from slim to basically 0.

This is what fucked me up years after high school. I thought history was the only thing I had any skill in other than drama. Neither of those fields lead to jobs unless you have a lot of luck. I should have realized sooner that public speaking and interpersonal relations were my real skills and that my history knowledge was helping me by providing plenty of fun facts for people.

I applied and was enrolled in a top history PHD program that would have started in fall of 2015, but before applying I went to one of my favorite professors for a recommendation letter. He wrote me a great letter and told me he thought I would be perfect for the position of professor, and then he urged me to consider a different path. He explained how the market was shifting and even top universities are no longer hiring or offering tenure to social sciences professors. Everyone is just hiring lecturers at sub survival level wages. At first I thought he was being dramatic and still enrolled but as I looked into it more myself the statistical support for what he said was staggering. I ended up becoming a lawyer instead. I wanted to be the next Benedetto Croce lol.

I wonder how present this is in Europe also. I recently finished a Bachelors programme in world history in Norway and its looks rough out there when it comes to finding work.

I wanted to get my PhD, but honestly I'm learning more outside of university, at my own pace, and I still get to make money with my "corporate" job.

That being said, it's heartbreaking that academic opportunities (especially for the more interesting subjects imo) have shrunk. It has been that way for awhile though.

I talked to some new students about their career plans and their response was entering the computer games industry. Advisory on scenario of games, the actuality of the life and weaponries, tools used as shown in museums, strategies and what-if scenarios undertaken by players. Are they simply dreaming or is it an opportunity for historians?

It's simple: not everybody goes to high school, not everybody from them majors in university, not everyone does a Phd after their majors, and only a very very few continue after that. So there is quite a narrow, highly skilled field competiting for just a few professorial jobs.

I was a professoral assistant in Switzerland for two years but I could never push myself to continue that career. Even though I knew, that I had the potenti to make it, even if I was very lucky, the chances were so small while the year long waiting was almost guaranteed - I could not do it.

I’m a GenXer with a history PhD. It was already starting to go sideways when I went on the market 23 years ago. For personal reasons I ended up with a job in the financial services sector that paid the bills nicely, and I’ve pivoted to a nonprofit recently that is scratching my itch to be an educator nicely. I should be OK for retirement savings (still about a decade off from that) and at that time I am seriously considering seeing whether I can resume my research (although my interests have evolved a bit). I wonder whether I am the only one like this.

I had a career as a firefighter/paramedic then decided to go to college in my late 30’s so that I could become a historian, which had always been of interest to me. I got my associates, then my bachelor’s in history in 2015. During the last year of my bachelor’s, I had previous professors telling me it probably wasn’t a great idea to plan for a career path in history.

So here I sit with a bachelor’s degree I can’t use and $60k in loans to pay back.

Well, this is all very nice to see two days after I finished applying to PhD programs.

That’s so sad. I already have a doctorate (in another subject) but I’m fascinated with history and feel like that might be more my calling than what I’m doing. I have been seriously thinking about going back for a master’s in history and doing a career change to some sort of teaching. I know with those credentials I wouldn’t be a high level university professor, but I was thinking I could teach community college. Is that a viable career path? I work at a university that provides free education, so the cost of another degree isn’t a factor. I also want to do history writing and research as a hobby (no expectation of being paid for that), which is the other part of my interest in that degree. I am a career writer and love it so much that I already do it in my free time and still want to improve and branch more into history. Tell me if I’m delusional.

Does this apply to smaller universities and community colleges as well, or is the competition for professorships more of a problem only at larger or more prestigious schools? If I were to pursue just a master's rather than investing in a PhD could I get a posting at one of these smaller more locally oriented post-secondary schools?