Let's consider the unfortunate job market for English professors:
There is a market oversupply. This means that the quantity of prospective English professors willing to sell labor is greater than the quantity of demand for that labor. In this scenario the "price" of academic labor for English professors--salary and benefits--is relatively low, as consumers of that labor--universities--can pick and choose from a "consumer-friendly" group of highly qualified individuals, the top end of which are relatively interchangeable. And, naturally, since the academic labor market for English professors has more sellers than buyers, much of the "stock" will remain "left on the shelf to rot" (un- or under-employed). This labor market is highly inelastic. This means that, despite the sinking of the "price" of labor to embarrassing levels for the highly-educated, high-achieving, and generally elite members of a profession that still carries a lot of cache and social capital, the supply quantity of those willing to sell their labor in the market remains freakishly high.
So when professors talk about what to say to their poor, forsaken humanities graduate students, and how to address the market oversupply, there are two basic considerations they need to bear in mind (only the first of which they actually do bear in mind, sometimes and sort of):
1) When we're talking about academic labor in the humanities, there's another supply-demand relationship that must be accounted for: student demand for humanities courses, relative to the university's willingness to supply the appropriate resources (largely consisting of academic labor--professors running courses) to meet that demand. Currently, in many cases, the humanities suffer, from professors to students, because universities cut back on their supply of labor to cut costs, and stretch what labor they have beyond what is reasonable for optimal learning and teaching situations. Even with a decline in student demand for humanities courses, universities have slashed budgets and tenure lines in profitable English departments well beyond the demand reduction to save money, simply because they can get away with it. When a a biochemistry professor says "I need a lab to teach these students," the university can't just say "tough shit pal." But when an English professor says "I can't reasonably teach this material to 100 kids in a lecture hall," the university can and does say "tell your graduate TA to do more grading," or "tough shit pal." In other words, in a shocking paradox, because the cost of resources in this case is human and therefore ambiguously scaled, rather than material and therefore easily and accurately priced, the human capital is considered at once more expendable and more exploitable than the the non-human capital. As a result, one factor in addressing market oversupply is that universities don't properly define or recognize human capital, even though human capital makes up the figurative heart and soul of a university. Universities skimp on the quality of humanities instruction by attempting to squeeze more labor out of one professor instead of hiring another to meet demand--by holding the price of professorial labor low and fixed and simultaneously treating the human labor unit as an endlessly malleable and productive thing. Fixed low price, endless mileage. Sound like a bad used car financing scheme? Nope, it's your modern university.
2) This is what none of the people writing on this subject dare to acknowledge (and it relates to market inelasticity): despite these market realities, much of the reason for oversupply has to do with the basic fact that lots and lots of people always have *DESIRED* and currently do and always will *DESIRE* to enter the academic humanities, more people than the field has ever needed, needs, or will ever need, even in its wildest, most decadent dreams. How about these figures for applications for doctoral degrees in English from a handful of strong institutions (for which PMB could get admission stats readily):
From Columbia University's English department website: "The department typically receives around 700 applications per year for about 18 places in our sequential program."
From Oxford University's English department website: "Admission to the graduate school is very competitive. For entry in 2009 we received over 650 applications from candidates who were, or were about to be, graduates from universities all over the world."
From UC Berkeley's English department website: "The English Department typically receives between 450-550 applications each year and offers admission to 40-45 applicants, of whom 18-20 enter the program."
From Brown University's English department website: "We receive approximately three hundred applications each year, and we are able to offer admission to approximately 18 of those applicants."
Lots of people apply for these programs because they want to for a whole slew of reasons above and beyond the feasibility of academic careers. In this respect, humanities fields like English are profoundly successful, drawing a vast oversupply of highly competitive students with consistency through economically difficult and disastrous times. PMB isn't sure that this is plainly a good thing, considering the smoldering pyre of dashed hopes upon which countless humanities PhDs lay themselves year after year; but let's not fool ourselves into thinking that this problem isn't in part a function of how attractive these fields are, and how interesting and relevant the work is.
