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 M.L.A. is the professional association for teachers of literature and language.) 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. Motivated by “concern about the future of humanistic study,” the M.L.A. asked a committee of eight scholars to go on a listening tour, talking to professors, administrators, students, and “employers outside the academy” about how the system might be fixed. Professors are always complaining about “committee work”; judging by the report this one produced, this was the least fun committee imaginable.

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. (The report name-checks these groups, but, strangely, makes no effort to incorporate them into its overall estimate.) 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?”

Different people will tell you different stories about where all the jobs went. Some critics think that the humanities have gotten too weird—that undergrads, turned off by an overly theoretical approach, don’t want to participate anymore, and that teaching opportunities have disappeared as a result. (For its part, the M.L.A. committee cites “anti-intellectualism, anti-aesthetic hostility to literature, antipathy to theory, [and] nativist animosity to the study of languages other than English” as playing a role in the crisis; I’m inclined to fault the bad economy for declining enrollments.) Others point to the corporatization of universities, which are increasingly inclined to hire part-time, “adjunct” professors, rather than full-time, tenure-track ones, to teach undergrads. Adjuncts are cheaper; perhaps more importantly, they are easier to hire. Whereas it takes a committee of experts months to decide if someone’s scholarship is good, it takes an administrator only a few minutes to decide if that person can teach. That makes it easy for faculty size to track student demand. Today, more than half of all the academic jobs at American universities are part-time, non-research positions.

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 élite 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, bulking up on professors and graduate programs. When the boom ended and enrollments declined, colleges found themselves overextended and competing for students. By the mid-seventies, schools were seeking out new constituencies—among them, women and minorities—and creating new programs designed to attract a broader range of students. (Louis Menand offers a thorough overview of these trends in his book about higher education, “The Marketplace of Ideas.”)

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 élite students who were happy to major in the traditional liberal arts. Now, to attract middle-class students—students who were choosing school over the workforce—colleges had to offer more career-focussed 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-ed. 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, some more practical than others. 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 (that one seems unlikely to be a time-saver); 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. In an appendix containing reports from graduate programs, the Humanities Institute at the University of California, Davis, says that they’ve instituted “speed-dating-style informational interviews with possible employers.” That’s the sort of thing you see at business schools.

Only briefly does the report address what, to many people, is the most obvious solution: reducing admissions. “In the face of the post-2008 contraction of the academic job market, proposals to reduce the size of graduate education in our fields have been heard,” the committee writes: