Jane Stahlhut, a graduate assistant in history, says applications to her department dropped from more than 700 in 1992 to 400 this year. Those admitted dropped from about 100 in 1992 to 67 this year, partly in order to offer more funding to graduate students. The Love of Scholarship Many of Berkeley's humanities programs have downsized a bit, largely because of a lack of graduate fellowships, says Classics Chair Donald Mastronarde. We don't encourage undergraduates to go to graduate school, because it's a long haul with a very uncertain outcome. We wait for them to come to us.
Students go into classics out of love for the field and a love of doing scholarship.
The employment picture for the sciences, where many pursue postdoctoral study or enter industry, is very different. The Sept. 3 issue of Science magazine will feature findings by Dean Cerny and Maresi Nerad, Berkeley's director of graduate research, on postdocs in science and engineering. Departmental placement committees in the humanities and social sciences that help graduate students land jobs say it can take two to three years for Berkeley PhDs to land good, tenure-track positions. In the meantime, many graduates take postdoc or temporary teaching positions, sometimes well below their level of expertise, says Paolo Mancosu, who chairs the philosophy department's placement committee. Mancosu adds that Berkeley had 300 applications for its one philosophy faculty opening this year.