At the smallish state directional college where I teach, we had 271 applicants for a tenure track economics faculty position. And we don’t offer an economics major or any graduate level courses in economics.
An accounting PhD would have good faculty prospects, but that is because most accountants can make more in industry without a PhD. Unless you really, really want to be a professor, you would have little incentive to get a PhD.
^But a high number of applicants per job may be true in many other fields as well. I hire elementary school teachers in a desirable district in a suburb outside NYC. We get about 1000 qualified applicants per opening.
So I am having trouble understanding whether getting a tenure track position at a college would be hard for even the most talented applicants, or if it would be like those elementary jobs, where it is hard for most people but the best applicants rise to the top really quickly and make it through several rounds of interviews at multiple schools before accepting a job at one of them. Thoughts?
Even when 300 prof candidates apply for a job, in my experience so many of the applicants can be easily sorted into the no pile. Wrong field mostly. Research that doesn’t interest anyone on the hiring committee is another.
@TheGreyKing Lately I’ve been wondering if my son isn’t destined to teach also. It wouldn’t be a shock - his father’s side of the family is full of well respected,/beloved,/accomplished academics. But knowing how terrible the job market is, I’ve been comforting myself by saying, “oh, he’ll probably end up in consulting like his father” I think I’ll continue on this path of denial for a bit longer.
Agreed. I only advise students to consider a PhD program if they can’t see themselves doing anything else.
It is very, very difficult to get into a top PhD program in most liberal arts fields, so successful applicants are virtually all highly qualified. Even so, not all finish – about 50% of all PhD students drop out before finishing. Mental health issues run rampant among graduate students.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/03/06/new-study-says-graduate-students-mental-health-crisis
Despite the shortening of the time-to-degree, PhD programs still take 6-7 years on average, and it’s not unusual for students in the humanities to take 8-10 years to finish. While graduate school can look really appealing for a nerdy kid at age 22, (s)he may have very different feelings about graduate school at age 29 while still making $24K a year and juggling teaching responsibilities, dissertation research, and job applications (i.e. when many people drop out as ABDs). It’s not uncommon for professors to advise taking a year or two off after college before deciding to take the plunge and apply for PhD programs.
It helps enormously to graduate from a top program/school with a good publication record. The lion’s share of TT jobs in art history and museum curatorial positions, for example, are going to go to recent PhDs from places like Harvard, NYU, Princeton, and Columbia; less selective art history programs may struggle to place even a single student in a tenure-track position. That said, it also depends a great deal on what the market happens to look like when you graduate. Trends change, and what’s hot today may be out of fashion in 7 years. You may luck out and finish that degree in 16th century Ottoman diplomatic history when there’s several great jobs open in early modern Middle Eastern history, or you may finish your PhD when all but two jobs in Middle Eastern history that year are looking for specialists in modern history – ouch.
Finally, with the saturation of the job market, expectations for new hires are higher than ever. Newly minted PhDs could snag jobs with sparse publication records a few decades ago; my own advisor was hired at a top public university with only two articles and a single conference presentation under her belt. These days it’s not unusual for successful applicants to have a lengthy list of articles, a good track record of conference presentations, department service and outreach, a book contract (or two!), etc. (Note that these may be considered necessary but not sufficient conditions for landing a job in academia.)
And then getting tenure after all of that is not a given. My daughter had a prof, trained at UT-Austin, who was absolutely wonderful. She threw her heart into her job and went above and beyond to help her students. D was devastated when she was denied tenure last year. Apparently, she didn’t do enough publishing/research. 
Some of D’s classmates transferred this year because of the professor’s leaving. D wanted to, but we told her we couldn’t afford it.
Yes, getting tenure is hard. And most of the time it’s all about publications. Publish or perish: it’s a thing.
Depends on the school. At a small student-centric school, bad teaching evals can be equally as negative as lack of publications.
Wow $24k would be nice. My kid gets $16k. The years of study have to be valuable in and of themselves. Jobs later may even be tangentially related.
Adjuncts almost qualify for food stamps. I see it as equivalent to the per diem aides in elder care.
ps there ARE jobs for history PhD’s outside of academia: public history, preservation, museums, and entrepreneurial educational organizations for instance
@warblersrule provides a good summary. If the username describes the research interest, we are in the same field, but with different organisms.
@CheddarcheeseMN Of those 300 applicants, about 100 are likely not qualified and applied for no discernible reason. The other 200 are likely qualified enough to do the job well, and another 100 would be excellent for the job.
@TheGreyKing “So I am having trouble understanding whether getting a tenure track position at a college would be hard for even the most talented applicants, or if it would be like those elementary jobs, where it is hard for most people but the best applicants rise to the top really quickly and make it through several rounds of interviews at multiple schools before accepting a job at one of them. Thoughts?”
The interview of a faculty candidate bears very little resemblance to that you described for school teacher. There are only two interviews that a candidate goes through - short phone or conference interview, and a long three day interview. Only about 12 are interviewed by phone, and only three or four get to an onsite interview. Most of the culling, from 300 to 12, is done based on CV, teaching and research statements, and letters of recommendation. Nobody will not speak to a single candidate before they have rejected 90% of them.
A VERY important issue that non-academics don’t always know. So bear with me if you want to hear how it’s done, and why it is like few other hiring processes in the USA.
The selection of new faculty member is not done by HR people, nor is it done by a boss. It is done by a committee of very busy faculty members who are not paid any more for the time they spend sifting through hundreds of applications. They also generally have a single hire every few years, and the committees are made up of different sets of people. So the people who are doing the work of hiring are not trained in hiring, have little experience in hiring, and are doing it instead of the work that they gets them things like research grants. Moreover, the decision they make is very important, since this person will be there for at least three years, perhaps six, or maybe even get tenure. If they make a mistake they get stuck with a dud, and even of they get rid of the dud, they will likely not be able to replace them for some years.
OK, so far?
So these are the people who are looking through 300 applications, these are the stakes, and these are the conditions. Of that committee of 5 looking for a faculty member in basket weaving, one wants an underwater basket weaver, another wants a mountain basket weaver, while another two want an island basket weaver, but disagree on which basket weaving theory is the best. Each will only consider their favorite field, while the two island basket weaving people will also fight over every applicant who specializes in island basket weaving.
Are you still with me?
So, they don’t have the time and energy to each look through all 300, so each looks through 50. Despite having agreed on the criteria for discarding applicants, each will have their own criteria. So excellent applicants will be discarded, because one committee member thinks that no West Coast graduate program trains their PhDs well enough, so they’ll discard twice as many of those, and another will discard every application from a graduate students of any of the people they don’t like. Since they are all older White men, they will discard most of the applications by women of PoC.
I hope you’re not too bored or confused yet.
Now they have 50 top applicants, over which they fight for a couple of hours, and produce 12 applicants who nobody hates too much. They run phone interviews and reduce this, after some more fighting, to 3 who they decide to invite for on site interviews. They send the list to HR to OK the funding, and are asked why the three are all White men. They are asked to produce the list of 12, it is found that these too are all White men, as were the 50. So now they have to go back to the 300 applications, and pick out some women and minorities very quickly so they have another 6 who they call. They decide that they don’t like any, and another fight ensues. So one more person, a woman or a minority, is added to the interview list.
Still there?
The four are invited to 3 day interviews during which they meet faculty member with similar interests or not, the graduate students (if there is a graduate program), they give an hour talk, perhaps a sample class, and are either feted or abused, or both. Since many faculty are awkward people, much of this is very awkward. After all have visited, the committee gather and compare notes, check out notes from students, faculty and department head and debate who they like. After a few more fights and a couple of new feuds are started, the candidates are ranked, with the one most similar to the committee members being #1, and the woman/minority being #4. The department meets, and votes on the ranking, the head weighs in, the rankings maybe change, and the head of the search committee calls the new #1 and offers them the job. The person either says “yes” and negotiations start, or “no”, and #2 is offered the job, etc. Eventually, after a few more weeks of negotiations, a new faculty member is hired. Or it fails, and the department is down a faculty member.
Not done yet.
Faculty are almost all hired between October and May. Job adds appear between September and January, and interviews go generally between December and April, A search takes about three months or longer. so If no hire is made. It waits until the next year. if you have not found a job by May, you will not have a TT position until the next year, and you need to find a way to feed yourself until then, often by being an adjunct. if a department does not hire somebody, the search is considered failed, and they may not be able to do it again, with the money going to another department.
So, why are there so many applicants per job?
While there are 2,000 four year colleges, and 1,000 community colleges, and there are only 230 or so universities that produce PhDs, departments in most fields only hire a TT faculty member every 5 or 6 years, while CCs it may be 10 years or more. At the same time, the number of PhDs is actually very high. About 1,500 PhD in English are granted every year. Yes, 1,500. So each year there are maybe 700 English TT jobs open, an 1,500 people looking for jobs. about 700 will get temporary gigs as adjuncts, and 100 will work at coffee shops or bus tables.
THAT, my friends is why there are 700 applicants per job in academia, and that is why they are not getting jobs. Not because they aren’t good enough, or because it’s so difficult, it’s because there are not enough jobs.
That’s an unnecessary and untrue assertion. Old white men who are academics are generally not stupid, and they know perfectly well the benefits of finding a well-qualified woman and/or “PoC”, along with the sense of fairness that most people (including aged white men) bring to a search committee.
I would say that if about half of PhDs can get a tenure track job (700 out of 1500), that is a good situation, there definitely are enough jobs. A much worse situation would be more TT jobs than PhDs, then unsuitable and untalented candidates would get jobs that they wouldn’t generally perform very well.
@MWolf been a couple of years since I got pulled to sit on a hiring committee, but I would say your description is spot on!
I detect a certain amount of snark in @MWolf 's description of the hiring process, but indeed it is not far from the mark.
Of course there will be slight variations from institution to institution. At mine, HR keeps a pretty tight reign on the faculty search committee – each application has to be reviewed by at least two members, first for minimum qualifications, then for preferred qualifications, etc… At each step, the search committee chair has to fill out a form explaining why (with reference to the stated qualifications sought in the job ad) candidates are not being advanced. At our institution the faculty search committee is advisory to the Dean (we report the strengths and weaknesses of each finalist), who then makes a recommendation to the provost…
The (economic) opposite of not enough jobs is too many grads; in your example, 2x newly-minted English PhDs as needed.
btw: this is no different that US Law schools, which produce 2x as many JD’s as the country can absorb in any given year. Essentially only half of law grads can get a law job which requires a JD for which they just spent 3 years and hundreds of thousands to achieve.
The obvious solution from a public policy standpoint is to start shrinking production of (English – again just to use an example) PhD’s and law schools. At a minimum, those currently in the academy can be a beacon to strongly discourage any student from a PhD program that is not fully funded for at least 5 years and to shame those schools that do not fully-fund its doctoral students.
Adjusting department capacity is difficult if departments are made up of first class (tenured) faculty. Perhaps the need to adjust department capacity quickly in response to changing demand is another incentive to increase the use of second class (adjunct) faculty.
@ucbalumnus Difficult, yes, but it’s happening at many humanities departments nationwide. I recently spoke to the chair of a history department at a big state flagship. They’ve cut the number of PhD students by 50% in the past decade, and plan to cut another 20% in the near future. The reason: no jobs and by making the department more selective, they’ve also raised the standards and are now getting more accomplished applicants. But he knows the department will be a fraction of the size it was when he started his career there.
Super anecdotal here. I did a physics phd at Berkeley. It’s a big department - I think there were about 50 of us who started when I did. I think most of us thought we wanted to go into academia when we were starting out and over time some dropped out and many decided instead to go into industry. Of my close friends that I still keep in touch with who still wanted to go into academia at the end of grad school, they did all get jobs eventually, but some had a longer path through post-doc positions and had to settle for less-desirable geographic areas.
Re: #37
https://www.aps.org/careers/statistics/upload/phdinitemp-0316.pdf is a survey of where physics PhDs found initial employment.
Table 1 shows that, out of those who found “potentially permanent” jobs (38% according to Figure 1), only 20% found them in academic employers, while 70% found them in non-academic private employers.
Figure 3 shows that, out of those who found “potentially permanent” jobs, 62% were employed in non-physics fields (engineering 20%, computer software 14%, business/finance 11%, etc.), 18% were employed in physics (different subfield from dissertation), and 20% were employed in physics (same subfield as dissertation).
@sorghum And you make this claim based on what?
@bluebayou You are absolutely correct - it is more a problem of overproduction. Many departments in many fields continue to accept students to PhD programs, despite the knowledge that they will be unlikely to find jobs upon graduation. It’s actually worse than law schools, since university faculty should know what is going on in the job market for university faculty. Moreover, unlike JDs, PhDs have a long relationship with their advisers, and advisers usually know what’s going on with most of their ex grad students, so they know how many of the PhDs who graduated from the department in the previous few years were able to find academic positions. So a Law school professor can convince themselves that THEIR JDs were getting jobs, but the faculty of an English department who are still writing LoRs for their grad students 6 years after their graduation should figure out that they aren’t getting jobs.
If departments in the fields with the highest rate of unemployment/underemployment stopped accepting PhDs, departments would run out of the ready supply of cheap adjuncts, and would also need to replace the few tenured lines that remain. Especially for departments like English, which provide the required language courses, colleges would have to pay adjuncts enough that it would be more cost effective to start bringing back TT positions.
Unfortunately, funding for departments is often dependent on number of graduate students, and the ranking of a department is dependent on the number of graduate students, the publication rate, which is also dependent on graduates students, and the research funding, which is also dependent on graduate students. So faculty are required to graduate PhD students to get tenure, to get promotion, to get office space and research support, etc. Graduate students don’t stop applying, since they are even more delusional about their chances of getting a faculty position after graduation than the kids and parents here who are applying to HYP universities and cannot believe that they were rejected. Imagine if those kids could keep on applying for the next 10 years or so…
A bit cynical, I know, but the process has been going on since before I started academia, and has just gotten worse in the past 20 years. For years beginning in about 1985, there was magical thinking that “soon the massive hires of the 1960s and 1970s will retire and will need to be replaced”. Never happened, even though people were claiming that it would “happen soon”, until the 2008 recession. I think that there are still some older professors who are tell young graduate students not to worry about getting a faculty position because of the upcoming massive retirements…