What will you do with that humanities Ph.D.? Even you may not know.

Doctorates in the humanities take too long too finish: The median time has passed nine years, during which degree candidates live on a pittance and often postpone important life decisions (such as having children). Around 50 percent drop out. The key to the kingdom is a dissertation: a strange beast, always more ambitious than any normal academic paper but usually less readable and accessible than a book. This usually needs to be reworked before anyone will publish it — if anyone will, as library budgets fall and university presses teeter on the edge of bankruptcy.

Then come the horrors of the job market. Hundreds of candidates apply for every position. Able scholars who have been widely published spend years as postdoctoral fellows or visiting assistant professors, and many never find a permanent berth.

Worse still, many critics argue, is that those who do undertake this strange quest actually make themselves unemployable outside the university as they do so. The dazzlingly talented young man or woman who leaves college ready to conquer the world, open to hundreds of possibilities and confident that one of them will pan out, becomes a narrow specialist who can only study and teach a restricted sliver of history or literature or philosophy or religion. If he or she enters the non-academic job market, the Ph.D. turns out to be a liability, better omitted from CVs to avoid their being deep-sixed without being read by HR staff.

Many students report that they don’t dare bring up the possibility of a career outside the academy, much less ask for advice and help, since their advisers and colleagues either categorically reject or ignore the existence of the idea. Yet something like a third of those who earn humanities Ph.D.s will end up working in other professions. An institution that offers professional training but rejects or ignores the careers that 33 percent of its products follow doesn’t exemplify professionalism.

Let’s change lenses, from the national to the local. In many ways Princeton isn’t typical. Statistics kept by the Graduate School show that students in humanities departments and in history — which in some ways resembles the humanities fields more than those in social sciences — finish in higher numbers than elsewhere, around 80 percent, and in a shorter time, between six and seven years. Many Ph.D.s seem to find work (but see below). We could certainly do better, but our system is already operating more efficiently than most.

In other respects, however, we don’t do as well. Students shouldn’t enter any graduate program until they know in detail the sorts of jobs that previous students have obtained, and it’s not easy to glean those facts from our web pages. Let’s start with academic jobs — the jobs most people hope for when they enter graduate school. At Princeton, humanities departments offer this information in a startling variety of ways: On one web page you’ll find a paragraph naming all the places where Ph.D.s have found positions in the last decade, without further details; on another, the percentages of tenure-track and short-term academic positions that Ph.D.s have won; on another nothing whatever.

Some departments and programs list all of their Ph.D.s by name and year, with their positions; some, in order to protect former students’ privacy, list dissertation titles, with the positions of their authors. But not all of these lists are systematically updated: Students who have long held permanent jobs at excellent schools still appear as postdoctoral fellows. The history department sins in this last respect, and it’s not alone. This is not good enough. Every department should provide a full, clear and regularly updated placement list. Students, and others interested in what happens to humanists, need to know not only how Princeton Ph.D.s’ careers began but also how they have developed.

For non-academic jobs, the situation is worse. Information on those who pursued non-academic careers is sometimes ancient, sometimes absent and often far less detailed than information on those who have found a place on the tenure track. Have these graduates found rewarding jobs? Do they still use what they learned while in graduate school? Did their training help or hinder them when they changed professions? Out on the blogosphere you’ll hear a lot of bluster about the uselessness of humanities degrees in the real world. In fact, we have a lot of anecdotes, but very little data.

It’s time to do better. Departments should make this information just as available, and just as visible, as data about academic placements. Programs on professional development should cover non-academic careers. Graduate alumni should be invited to return and tell their stories. Any student applying to graduate school in the humanities at Princeton, and any student who studies here, should do so with full knowledge of what might await. And scholars and students elsewhere should be able to find what we have learned on the web. If we do this — and others follow our example — we can give intending humanists actual facts to chew on.

After World War II, Princeton supported the expansion of higher education by offering graduate fellowships to induce veterans to pursue Ph.D.s. This local enterprise morphed into a national one that still exists: the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. Princeton could become a leader again by giving students proper guidance and, over time, by bringing information and clarity to a national discussion where both are in short supply.

Anthony Grafton is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History. He can be reached at grafton@princeton.edu.