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  3. Everyone knows that English departments are in trouble, but you can’t appreciate just how much trouble until you read the new re

Everyone knows that English departments are in trouble, but you can’t appreciate just how much trouble until you read the new re

admin2019-06-08  39
问题    Everyone knows that English departments are in trouble, but you can’t appreciate just how much trouble until you read the new report from the Modern Language Association. The report is about Ph.D. programs, which have been in decline since 2008. These programs have gotten both more difficult and less rewarding: today, it can take almost a decade to get a doctorate, and, at the end of your program, you’re unlikely to find a tenure-track job.
   The core of the problem is, of course, the job market. The M.L.A. report estimates that only sixty per cent of newly-minted Ph.D.s will find tenure-track jobs after graduation. If anything, that’s wildly optimistic: the M.L.A. got to that figure by comparing the number of tenure-track jobs on its job list (around six hundred) with the number of new graduates (about a thousand). But that leaves out the thousands of unemployed graduates from past years who are still job-hunting—not to mention the older professors who didn’t receive tenure, and who now find themselves competing with their former students. In all likelihood, the number of jobs per candidate is much smaller than the report suggests. That’s why the mood is so dire—why even professors are starting to ask, in the committee’s words, "Why maintain doctoral study in the modern languages and literatures—or the rest of the humanities—at all?"
   Those trends, in turn, are part of an even larger story having to do with the expansion and transformation of American education after the Second World War. Essentially, colleges grew less elite and more vocational. Before the war, relatively few people went to college. Then, in the nineteen-fifties, the G.I. Bill and, later, the Baby Boom pushed colleges to grow rapidly. When the boom ended, colleges found themselves overextended and competing for students. By the mid-seventies, schools were creating new programs designed to attract a broader range of students—for instance, women and minorities.
   Those reforms worked: as Nate Silver reported in the Times last summer, about twice as many people attend college per capita now as did forty years ago. But all that expansion changed colleges. In the past, they had catered to elite students who were happy to major in the traditional liberal arts. Now, to attract middle-class students, colleges had to offer more career-focused majors, in fields like business, communications, and health care. As a result, humanities departments have found themselves drifting away from the center of the university. Today, they are often regarded as a kind of institutional luxury, paid for by dynamic, cheap, and growing programs in, say, adult-education. These large demographic facts are contributing to today’s job-market crisis: they’re why, while education as a whole is growing, the humanities aren’t.
   Given all this, what can an English department do? The M.L.A. report contains a number of suggestions. Pride of place is given to the idea that grad school should be shorter: "Departments should design programs that can be completed in five years." That will probably require changing the dissertation from a draft of an academic book into something shorter and simpler. At the same time, graduate students are encouraged to "broaden" themselves: to "engage more deeply with technology"; to pursue unusual and imaginative dissertation projects; to work in more than one discipline; to acquire teaching skills aimed at online and community-college students; and to take workshops on subjects, such as project management and grant writing, which might be of value outside of academia. Graduate programs, the committee suggests, should accept the fact that many of their students will have non-tenured, or even non-academic, careers. They should keep track of what happens to their graduates, so that students who decide to leave academia have a non-academic alumni network to draw upon.
What does the author mean by saying "that’s wildly optimistic" in Paragraph 2?
选项 A、The job openings for newly-graduated Ph.D.s are incredibly promising.
B、It seems impossible for newly-graduated Ph.D.s to find a tenure-track job.
C、The M.L.A.report has overestimated the number of tenure-track jobs on the job list.
D、The M.L.A. report has exaggerated the difficulties to be encountered by newly-graduated Ph.D.s.
答案C
解析 推断题。根据该句后面的内容可知这则报告只记录了应届毕业生的数据，并没有将仍在求职的往届生以及没有找到终身教职的老教授们考虑在内，因此可以说这则报告的数据是过于乐观的，实际数据要比这个更低，即M．L．A．的报告高估了就业数据。A项“对于刚毕业的博士生们来说就业前景很光明”，不符合文意，故排除。B项“对于刚毕业的博士生们来说找到一份终身教职似乎是不可能的”，文中只是说比较难，没有提到不可能，过于绝对，故排除。D项“M．L．A．的报告夸大了刚毕业的博士生们找工作的难度”，与文意相反，故排除。故本题选C。
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