In this post I want to grapple with the linguistics-specific versions of some broader questions about goals and purposes that apply to research degrees of all types. Is the experience that a student has in a PhD program a legitimate end in itself? Or can the PhD program only be justified with reference to an external career goal? Usually, this goal is a permanent faculty position as a linguistics professor. Is a long-term career goal the only legitimate aspiration for those embarking on a linguistics PhD?

Let me clarify that the questions I am interested in here are questions about goals and not questions about outcomes. About outcomes, one can talk about / quantify what does and does not happen. The ground truth about outcomes is that most people who receive a linguistics PhD will not become a linguistics professor. The question is what one should do with this fact—note the should, deontic. Should the goals for the PhD be crafted primarily with an eye to the outcomes? Or can the goal of doing the PhD be understood as complete in and of itself, independent of what comes after?

I raise these questions knowing they will stir up feelings (esp for any graduate students who might be reading this) and also granting that they are part of the broader "should you go to grad school" discourse that has been discussed many many times before. In my view, those are both reasons why these questions are important to talk about—people's major life choices are at stake, and the advice landscape is relatively cacophonic.

In the style of a handbook article: I'll start by saying what I think the standard answer to these questions is, and why I think that answer deserves to be recognized as the standard. After that, I will defend an alternative to the standard answer, because I think the standard answer is wrong. (TLDR yes I think it is absolutely legitimate to do a linguistics PhD for its own sake.) Then I'll list a few takeaways (ok yes I already told you one) for current grad students, prospective grad students, and faculty. I illustrate with trees (literal). 🌲

Vocationalism is the view that "the goal of education is to provide students with the necessary skills, knowledge, and expertise to enter and perform jobs within a particular profession" (Driscoll 2020).¹ At least in the US you cannot be remotely proximate to an institution of higher education without having a lot of vocationalism in the air all around you all the time. Vocationalism is in every "what are you going to do with that?" and in every "but there are no jobs in that!" It is the ambient cultural understanding of what all education is for, generally.² For that reason alone it has a serious claim to be the standard view of what a linguistics PhD is for, specifically.

A fact that I have come to see as slightly curious is that there are people who actively resist vocationalism about undergraduate education but who are happily vocationalist about graduate education. I myself have held this particular combination of views, which I think is not uncommon among faculty who teach linguistics and other “impractical” things. Here, for instance, is English professor and former Chronicle of Higher Education advice columnist William Pannapacker rejecting vocationalism about undergraduate education, to the point of suggesting we reconceptualize the modern university on medieval principles,³ and here's the same author writing that "graduate school in the humanities is about the implicit promise of the life of a middle-class professional, about being respected, about not hating your job and wasting your life"—text I can only understand in context as meaning, the implicit promise of a professor job, for which you are training.

What do graduate students think of the matter? At least a strong contingent of them seem to be vocationalist as well, or at least to think they should be vocationalist. In my experience, I have talked to many students who did not want to pursue academia and were somewhat shy about this, but none who did want to pursue academia and were similarly shy.⁴ Less anecdotal evidence for the same conclusion comes from studies that show "uncertainty about job prospects" or "career prospects" ranking at the very top among predictors of grad student life satisfaction/mental health. Such findings suggest that career prospects are top of mind for grad students while they are in grad school, which of course follows straightforwardly if grad students also are, generally, vocationalist.

I want to conclude with a note about vocationalism in the particular genre of online "don't go to grad school" arguments. One can read such arguments for a variety of disciplines online, e.g. political science (Musgrave), humanities (Pannapacker), + a bottomless well of similar content for basically every discipline, on reddit; they are invariably vocationalist. The one I particularly want to talk about is this one, by a linguist, Rachael Tatman (at the time a PhD student at the University of Washington). Tatman's argument against linguistics grad school is two-fold. One, the standard: the purpose is a faculty job (vocationalism) + there are no jobs = don't go to grad school. Two, grad school is hard. Ok. But what I find interesting is the difference between what Tatman assumes about the motivations of others (they are vocationalist, they don't want to do hard things) and what she reports about her own motivations. Tatman is doing grad school because she finds it intrinsically valuable to do so. But she can't come out and say that without implying that hers is a weird, sort of irrelevant minority position:

Just a nerdy idealist, right?!

Let's now talk about the radical alternative to the standard view: recognizing grad school in linguistics as something that it is legitimate to do for its own sake.

This is not the alternative to academia-oriented vocationalism one sometimes hears these days among faculty, which is that instead of training for professor jobs we should be training students for some other kind of jobs. (This almost always seems to mean jobs in tech.) Such “alt vocationalism” seems to have taken hold in some departments much more than others. It is still vocationalism, just pointed in a different direction.

This is also not the alternative to vocationalism about undergraduate education one reads about in NYT op-eds or whatever, the idea that colleges are "meant to produce informed and enlightened citizens who are better equipped to leaven passion with reason" (Frank Bruni). I am all for informed and enlightened citizens. My point is, this is still instrumentalism, just pointed toward a social good rather than an economic one—"job training" replaced with "citizen training". What I am pitching (for linguistics grad school) is a fully non-instrumentalist view.⁵ What if we were to see the thing as valuable in itself, independent of what might come next?

What is the thing? Research. A PhD is researcher training; you learn the state of current research, how research can be carried out, how to assess research, how to share research with others. You learn those things by doing research. In much of linguistics, you're doing basic research (this sense not this one). Your research is driven by curiosity about some aspect of reality, and you make progress to the extent that you unlock some bit of understanding of how reality works.

It’s easy to be curious. It’s hard to figure out which (if any!) parts of reality are actually going to be legible on your terms. So, research is hard. It's also, as Tatman said, "valuable and interesting" -- interesting [to you] because it springs from your own curiosity, and valuable [to you] in part because it is hard. And of course the goal of understanding reality can be argued to be inherently valuable not just to the individual but also socially—”in some small way, helping the world” (Tatman)—maybe because enriching our shared human understanding of reality is among the most important things that humans can do on this earth? “When you believe in things you don’t understand, then you suffer” (Wonder 1972): maybe basic research in some fundamental way prevents human suffering?

So, here is my pitch. Linguistics research is inherently valuable. One way you can do linguistics research is by being a linguistics professor. But, because that is not the sort of thing that our society has seen fit to fund in any reasonable quantity, most people cannot access the valuable thing in that particular way. What if we had some other way that people could do linguistics research? Like, a five year program where people could take some time out from whatever else they might do in their lives, and just do linguistics research, because they find it valuable and interesting? Maybe a stint in a monastery or in the Peace Corps or whatever is a meaningful thing for you to do with some part of your life. My pitch is that we reclassify linguistics PhD school: out of the bin of vocational training, into the bin of things that people do just because they find them meaningful.

Here is the part where I boldly predict that what I've said here will become, over time, less controversial. Vocationalism about PhDs may currently be the standard view among grad students and faculty, but that view is already collapsing, and it is collapsing with particular speed among grad students.

One common feature of "should I go to grad school" advice is the exhortation to consider the opportunity cost. How much earning power in your future career are you giving up by doing this grad school thing? Instead of grad school you could just get a job, and make some money, and climb the career ladder; is it worth it to you to give that up? Consider how this argument looks right now. Yes you could go get a job--or also not, try though you might. Career ladders, do those even exist in a world where AI destroys all the junior jobs? What is so weird about a five year stint in grad school, followed by something totally different, if you expect to move around between a lot of different jobs anyway?

A positive thing I have noticed recently is a rise in the extent to which students are willing to come out and tell me that they are in grad school because they want to be. Yes they know that faculty jobs are extremely rare and that many smart and talented people will not get one. So what? Their work in grad school is something that they enjoy and find meaningful. That is why they're doing it. The next thing they do with their lives, if not linguistics research, is something they'll get to when they get there. In the meantime, they want to do this thing, and do it well.

Tatman was ahead of the curve.

Let me speak first to current graduate students. Get clear with yourself about whether being in grad school is inherently valuable to you. If you're in grad school, why? And how is it going? Do you find your work interesting and valuable? If you do, and if the material conditions of graduate school are workable for you⁶, you win! If not, you should find something else to do with your life. You tried grad school. Now go try something else.

People thinking about grad school but not yet in it: do you want to be a linguistics researcher? When you think of the various things you might do with the next five years of your life, how does being a linguistics researcher rank? How important is it to you that you spend the next five years of your life working toward a long-term profession as opposed to doing something you find currently meaningful? Are you ok with making a major pivot in the kind of work you’re doing, five years from now?⁷

Faculty: you already know that most of your students are not going to become faculty themselves. Hopefully, you’ve long since made your peace with that. One reaction to this is what I called “alt vocationalism”, which comes with the idea that we should build things into grad programs that prepare grad students for a broader/different range of careers, rather than just faculty positions (again: this usually means tech jobs). My proposal: before we invest resources in attempting to prepare students for whatever possible career, we should try harder to understand whether (individual) students actually want career preparation out of us. Maybe what students most want from us is a visible “allegiance to prevocational ideals of the university—to learning for its own sake rather than for instrumental reasons, to student development in broader forms other than employability, to public values rather than individualistic gain, to the value of the university as a haven from the acquisitiveness of commerce” (Grubb and Lazerson 2005). Maybe, to the extent they want these things, that’s not an immature perspective that we should paternalistically protect them from. Maybe it’s a reasonable response to questions of value and purpose in the world in which we actually live.

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