Need Help Regarding Major Selection -- Long Post Alert

juillet
Wed, 04 Nov 2015 08:31:13 +0000

1. Yes! Yes it is! BUT I have found that most undergraduates don’t actually realize this. They’ve never thought about it! They just assume that if you get a PhD, and you want a tenure-track job, you can get one.

The math isn’t necessarily the problem; the vast majority of professors are not producing doctoral students or future faculty, so there is a very small percentage that is preparing future faculty not just to replace themselves but for the entire field. For example, there may be 100-150 doctoral programs in your field with an average of 15-20 faculty training doctoral students, but there might be 3,000 or more colleges in the country that need professors in that field to staff their departments.

The problem is really that tenure-track jobs are largely going away in favor of adjunct positions. So when professors are retiring, particularly at the smaller colleges with less financial support, instead of replacing them with a new tenure-track professor administrators are instead breaking their job up into the work of several adjuncts, who get paid on average $3,500 a class with no benefits (and no office, and no control over the curriculum).

2. There are large differences per field, and whether or not the competition is fierce for those tenure-track jobs relies a lot on the field itself.

For example, in engineering or economics, a lot of your classmates don’t necessarily want tenure-track jobs. Many of them want to start their own business, or go work at one of the many non-academic private and public labs and research groups out there, or work for a non-academic corporate tech firm or investment bank or hedge fund. The fields just attract more people with more diverse post-grad school interests. (And many people change their minds along the way.) There are also a variety of options for those who want to stay in academia: an engineering PhD could potentially teach in an engineering school/department but also potentially in a physics or math department, depending; an economics PhD could potentially teach at a business school, or a school of international affairs, or a school of public policy, etc.

So fewer people who actually want TT jobs + more opportunities both within and without academia = better job prospects and outcomes for people with PhDs in those fields. In some fields - like nursing and accounting - there are actually shortages of faculty members. Meaning that people who really want to teach in that field probably will.

A field like philosophy attracts far fewer people who want to do something non-academic with the PhD, largely because there are few directly relevant non-academic options for philosophers. So you can be surer that the majority of your cohort will become your competition in a few years when applying for jobs. But in the likely event that you don’t get a TT job, there are fewer obvious places for you go to go with that preparation and be rewarded for it. I mean, you’ll get a job - the unemployment rate among PhDs is very low - but it may be doing a job that you could’ve done with a BA, with equivalent pay.