It is known that tenure-track faculty jobs are scarce relative to the number of people with PhDs who may apply for them. This is simply due to the numbers game, since one faculty member at a research university supervises many PhD students to degree completion, far more than the one needed to replace him/her when s/he retires.
But how does the supply and demand situation vary by subject area? For example, in a subject like computer science where someone with a PhD can get a non-academic job relatively easily, is the supply and demand situation significantly different from other subject areas where there is little or no non-academic demand?
It is frightfully difficult for CS departments to grow their departments (as many want to do) because of the competition for talented PhDs from the private sector.
My ex H is an IT consultant. He made the comment the other day that the best CS teachers are people who aren’t actually very good with CS - or something of that nature. I have no idea what he was talking about, so don’t slam me or debate me on it, I just thought it was a curious thing to say.
I was on the academic job market for the last two years (1 year postdocs are both a blessing and curse), so this is a topic that strikes close to home. It’s a pretty soul-crushing experience even for highly qualified applicants.
Yes, it varies quite a bit. Some fields are massively oversaturated (e.g. English), whereas others have better academic job prospects for newly minted PhDs (e.g. business).
Professional associations often make academic job statistics available. Examples:
It’s also due to many colleges moving away from the practice of replacing a retiring tenured faculty member with another tenure-track hire. Currently over 70% of academic jobs are nontenured positions (adjuncts, lecturers, etc.), and that percentage is growing.
I find the exploitation of adjuncts extremely distasteful. Some have have tried in the past to defend the practice by claiming that they’re often professionals with useful experience, that is NOT typically the case – professionals moonlighting as adjuncts are a minority.
I know two CS people working in industry (not PhDs) who also teach a college class or two. I don’t know if this is a common enough practice to make a dent in the number of purely academic positions.
@Dustyfeathers - I don’t think it was meant at all in that way. I think he genuinely meant that people who are less technical in nature, perhaps, are better at teaching? He does have a programmer working for him who can’t even take a simple telephone message.
@Trixy34 - I can completely understand what your husband was saying. Not everyone who is good at the technical aspect of their career also has a good temperament for teaching and the willingness to develop good pedagogical skills.
Good question. I have always thought that my son was born to be a professor. He has had obscure research interests, and has loved teaching other people, and has been extremely talented at doing so, since he was old enough to talk!
But one worry is that pursuing a PhD in History invests years of study into one career option. That contrasts with other types of job training for other jobs that combine service to others with skills in communication and research, yet allow a greater variety of employment options. Examples include law or consulting. A JD could become a law professor. But if a law professorship opening does not immediately appear, there are lots of other things to do with a law degree.
The liberal arts undergraduate degree leaves open many career possibilities, as well as the flexibility to change careers often in life. More importantly, it gives you four years immersed in the “life of the mind,” which is something every intellectual should be able to experience while you are young.
But once you invest much time and money into graduate school, it would be nice to find a job in the area for which you invested all that effort.
I suspect that tenure track faculty positions will likely become even more rare, at least at lower-tier colleges in the regions of the country with declining college-age demographics. As the competition for students ramps up, colleges will want to be nimble and able to continually adjust their programmatic offerings to try to better meet changing student interests as they chase after them…
This is what my BFF did. She was/is brilliant. Undergraduate degrees in math and German. PhD in History from UT-Austin. She wanted to be a professor but could never get a job. Now she works in a fairly low-paying job for the state of Texas, evaluating grants and maintaining a website. Her brother, on the other hand, became an award-winning English professor. I don’t want to give details for privacy, but he’s quite impressive and has done really well for himself.
Is it likely that some colleges want to retain only a small core group of tenured faculty in each department, sufficient to handle the lowest level of student demand in that subject in any given year in the next few decades, while using contingent / adjunct faculty to handle years when student demand is higher for that subject?
Obviously, if colleges do this, they shift all of the risk onto the contingent / adjunct faculty.
The number of PhD granting universities is relatively small compared to the total number of colleges and universities out there. So faculty in a PhD granting department are teaching many students who are going to be working at other colleges that don’t produce PhDs. There might be 100 PhD granting departments in a discipline but thousands of colleges without PhD granting departments that need to hire PhDs.
But sure, demand and supply are different in each discipline. In some fields, a strong nonacademic job market exists and this creates a higher total demand for PhDs in that area. Supply factors matter, too -some fields require specific skills that many students don’t have (like the math requirements for econ PhDs) versus other fields.
D2 would be a great prof and she has toyed with the idea. But having taken a couple of years off after her BA to work, she was concerned about entering a PhD program after finishing her MA, given the number of years of reduced income and the unlikely prospect of getting a tenure track position. Alas, she did not do the MFA, which would have counted as a terminal degree for an academic position.