Everyone knows that English departments are in trouble, but it is difficult to appreciate just how much trouble until you read the report from the Modern Language Association (MLA).   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 position.   The core of the problem is the job market. The MLA 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 MLA got to that figure by comparing the number of tenure-track jobs on its job list with the number of new graduates. But that leaves out the thousands of unemployed graduates from past years who are still job-hunting.   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. Others point to the corporatization of universities, which are increasingly inclined to hire part-time, “adjunct” professors, rather than full-time, tenure-trackprofessors, to teach undergrads. Adjuncts are cheaper; perhaps more importantly, they are easier to hire.   These 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 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.   Those reforms worked: about twice as many people attend college per capita now as they 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 have had to offer more career-focused majors, in fields like business. As a result, humanities departments have found themselves drifting away from the center of the university.