Program to Ready Ph.D.s For Careers in Business

The educational analysts agree: the academic job market looks bleak now, and during the coming decade it will worsen considerably. Optimists estimate annual job openings will plummet from the current level of 15,000 to about 4500 during the early 1980s.

As one Harvard faculty member says, attempting to project just how bad the job crunch will be "is like predicting the numbers of traffic fatalities on Labor Day weekend." The humanities disciplines will be especially hard hit; during the coming decade, it is estimated that 2500 new recipients of humanities doctorates will have to scramble for 900 academic posts each year.

Graduate students have sought a wide variety of solutions to the academic job crunch, ranging from driving cabs to belatedly enrolling in law school. In an experimental program at the New York University (NYU) School of Business Administration scheduled to start in June, 50 carefully selected graduate students and recent Ph.D.s from the humanities and related social science disciplines will trade in their Kierkegaard and 16th-century French history studies for a hard-nosed look at the world of corporate management.

Nearly 125 Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) students turned out last week at the Lamont Library Forum Room to hear the coordinators of the experiments--Ernest R. May, chairman of the History Department, and Dorothy G. Harrison of the New York State Education Department--explain the rationale and goals of the "Careers in Business Program."

The seven-week program, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and grants from private corporations, will attempt to teach graduate students basic entrepreneurial skills, such as business language and corporate strategy.

The students will meet daily, both in the classroom and at informal luncheons, with executives of 20 major U.S. corporations, such as CBS, General Motors, and American Telephone and Telegraph, which have made tentative commitments to hire the students at the program's end.

The program coordinators expect to receive more than 1000 applications for the experimental program from doctoral candidates and recent Ph.D.s from universities throughout the Northeast.

May and Harrison believe the relationship between academia and business is a potentially fruitful one.

The two program coordinators cite a study they recently completed for the Mellon Foundation which shows that Ph.D.s who enter administrative and managerial occupations tend to be more satisfied with their jobs than Ph.D.s who hold academic appointments.

The study, which surveyed the recipients of doctorates from 40 leading universities, shows that "the joys of teaching are overrated by graduate students and the joys of other jobs really aren't known," Harrison says.

May and Harrison, who plan to publish a book entitled "You Don't Have to Teach" based on the findings of their study, emphasize that the majority of available academic posts do not permit academics to devote themselves to scholarly research.

"The intense research work in graduate school has very little to do with what most people then do in the academic world," May says, citing the Mellon study.

"There's just a handful of institutions where the structure is such as to encourage scholarship," he adds.

At the same time the Mellon study notes cases where Ph.D.s who found jobs in corporate management were able to continue their scholarship outside their vocation, publishing articles and books.

Individuals with doctorates in managerial and administrative posts find that graduate work "greatly enhances