Not every PhD graduate is good enough for a tenure track faculty position. You need over production so that some selection can take place. Not every law graduate is good enough to enter a partner track at a major law firm. Not every MD has the ability to pursue any complex specialty…
It’s one thing for a few PhDs to have been found to be “not good enough”. From the perspective of older faculty members/folks in academia, if it becomes the vast majority of PhD earners…including those in top 8-10 programs, that’s more of an indication of the following:
- The PhD programs in the field/subfield concerned are admitting too many grad students aspiring to be PhD candidates/PhDs and not doing enough to cull them in the early-mid stages of the program. TL:DR: If a PhD isn't qualified for a tenure-track faculty position, s/he shouldn't have been allowed to proceed to the point of being allowed to graduate with PhD in hand.
- There are too many PhD programs and some/most should be closed down. I've heard the same talk from older attorneys regarding the proliferation of lower-tiered law schools within just the last 2-3 decades. Especially ones with bar passage rates below 80%.
Would the primary care and emergency room specialties be among the most complex ones? A patient can show up with just about anything, and it is the primary care or emergency room physician’s job to figure out what it is.
They do suggest wide variation in the number of adjuncts at various colleges and universities. Furthermore, as you point out, even among the adjuncts they do employ, some are skilled professionals. As I stated above, I don’t see sources or dates, so unfortunately it’s hard to tell if we’re really only comparing undergraduate instructors. Maybe someone else can find better data.
“Not every PhD graduate is good enough for a tenure track faculty position. You need over production so that some selection can take place.”
In old days, the majority of PhD graduates were given a shot at an UNTENURED tenure-track position. What if some of them were not good enough? They would be denied when they applied for tenure. Some of them might subsequently become instructors, clinical non-tenure-track professors, etc.
The problem today is that, the majority of PhD graduates in too many fields would never be given a shot at a tenure track position at the first place to later demonstrate that they are worthy of tenure simply because of overproduction of PhDs.
From the article posted in #69:
"When undergraduates are eager to pursue graduate study, I believe faculty are being professionally negligent if we don’t warn them about the overwhelming odds, low pay, and perilous market conditions that await them. When a new cohort of graduate students arrives on campus, I believe we commit professional malpractice if we don’t frankly and frequently discuss the placement of our students and the sorts of salaries they make two, three, and four years after they complete their degrees. And I believe we are complicit in exploitation if we don’t adjust the size and structure of our graduate programs to improve the placement of our students in decent, satisfying jobs, inside or outside academe.
These problems point to a system larger and more pervasive even than the mighty MLA. But even if all faculty could do all those things by fiat, I’m not convinced that we would have gone very far to change the system that Birmingham rails against."
I agree with the author’s reflection and assessment.
This is something I want to add. What is the percentage of new doctoral students in humanities do not know it will be difficult for them to land a tenure track job? I bet they have seen their fair shares of adjunct professors when they were undergraduate students. Unless they never read a campus newspaper and lived in a cocoon, they should have heard adjuncts’ complains and seen adjuncts’ protects on campus.
A doctoral program is mostly likely a very small program in which everyone knows everyone. When a senior doctoral student cannot land a job, words spread fast. If a newbie doctoral student really cares about job placement, he/she can drop out at a very early stage.
These PhDs made a series of conscious decisions to contribute to the problem of overproduction. I have very little sympathy; my limited sympathy is reserved for those poor kids living in inner cities.
^ Agreed. It would take a deliberate ignorance for a humanities PhD student to think it likely that they will get a TT job. I think the real problem is in STEM, where the failure to get a job is often hidden by the fact that they will have a couple of postdocs elsewhere, and the delusion (for most specialities it is a delusion) that STEM graduate training and postdocs will make them more employable outside academia.
I had my Survey of Classical Music taught by an adjunct. He was well qualified as he was the Conductor of the Fort Worth Symphony. I believe he did it to generate more interest in the symphony from the students. Looking back now, it was a popular class for local residents who knew he was teaching the class. Only a handful of those in the class were college age.
I am not completely disagreeing to your statement that graduate students should be able to choose wisely. But I have seen cases where faculty tries to create a different view: ``Oh … if you are good, then there is a good job for you’’. Essentially saying that struggle is coming from those who weren’t good. The students obviously believe that they are good and continue.
There are some steps being taken to correct the problem. One is to find effective ways to prepare these students to other well-paying careers. It seems to me that those in quantitative fields are OK, since they have options like finance and software development / data analytics. Others could be shaped to get jobs in consulting or government, but need specific preparation like going on internships or networking.
So, where I am, I do see awareness among administrators, faculty, and graduate students on this important issue.
Re: #86 and STEM PhDs
Not all STEM subjects are the same. Engineering and CS PhDs tend to have industry job opportunities that may be less available to biology PhDs, for example.
That’s true of course.
“Not all STEM subjects are the same. Engineering and CS PhDs tend to have industry job opportunities that may be less available to biology PhDs, for example”
The jobs in industry for biology, biochemistry and chemistry PhDs are fairly plentiful in the biotech/pharma/medical device sectors. You will likely have to relocate to a biotech center (Boston, Bay Area, San Diego, NC triangle, etc) or a pharma center (New Jersey, Pennsylvania, etc.) or a medical device center (Minneapolis, SoCal, etc). And you may have to start your first job at a lower-tier company and work your way up to more desirable companies, but the jobs are out there.
If a young person has a desire to earn a PhD in those disciplines and doesn’t mind working in industry instead of academia, I think they should go for it. A decent job of some sort will very likely be there. You won’t have to end up flipping burgers or flipping houses.
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Back in 2011, http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110420/full/472276a.html had a more pessimistic view about the job prospects for science PhD graduates.
I have a PhD in biology and I’ve been employed in biotech since the mid-80s. And in all those decades I’ve seen a lot of new PhDs come along, and I can’t think of a single one who didn’t get a decent job sooner or later. The only ones I’ve known who became “for example, a high school teacher” were ones who for whatever reason moved away to a town where there were few or no biotech companies.
I have known a few who branched off from the scientific careers and went to law school to become patent attorneys. And I have known a few middle-aged or older bio PhDs who got laid-off in a company cut-back and had trouble finding a new job at their age, but that’s a phenomenon that affects all employees, not just PhDs.
Like I said, your first job may be for a company or in a location you don’t particularly like, but you can get a job. And once you’ve got some good work experience under your belt you can move up and/or out to a better position. Bio PhDs are miles ahead of PhDs in areas such as Humanities in terms of employability in their field outside of academia.
The question is whether the 8 years of lost earnings are worth it. I think in stem the real problem is those who have had a postdoc or two.
How many of those jobs are ones which actually require the skills and training imparted to biology/chemistry PhDs?
I’m curious as a cousin who started working for a pharmaceutical firm starting with a BS in Chem and topped out with an MS paid for by said firm a decade later has found himself in the position of being the supervisor of several bio/chem PhDs in positions which even an MS degree would be considered an “overqualification”.
This very issue is one reason why he never bothered to go further than his Chem MS. Why go through extra years and aggravation of a PhD dissertation when he’s already a senior pharmaceutical exec in charge of a lab with several bio/chem PhDs reporting to him?
Money isn’t everything.
One thing that annoys me nearly every time the issue of adjunct faculty comes up on discussion boards like this one is that you have some people pointing out that lots of adjuncts are underpaid labor being strung along by college administrators who are only too happy to keep them oppressed, while other point out that lots of adjuncts are actually well-paid individuals who make money in their “day jobs” and are being paid to teach classes as a side interest.
The problem is that both of these claims are right—but only sort of.
The entire concept of adjunct faculty started out as a completely honorable idea—it was a way for professionals in a field to bring their in-the-field competence into the classroom (whether that’s in one of the professions, like a lawyer teaching law or an engineer teaching engineering, or something like a technical writer teaching composition or a bioethicist teaching philosophy). This has clear benefits for the students, and also for the adjunct in ways such as being exposed to the excitement that students can bring to the discipline, the prestige that connection with a college can bring, a simple change of pace, and so on.
Like I said, that’s a completely honorable idea. However, colleges have started to misuse adjunct faculty status, not just because adjunct faculty are cheaper to put in the classroom, but because they are entirely contingent.
For example: I am tenured faculty. According to my contract, if I am fired without cause (myth to explode: tenure doesn’t mean you can’t be fired, it just means there are extra protections like the following), I have to be given 12 months notice. An adjunct faculty member at my university? They can be fired without cause with absolutely no warning—not even the two weeks you’d expect from an even remotely professional job.
In addition, more and more tenure-track faculty lines are being converted into term-limited (i.e., contingent and paid less, but not quite as contingent and low-paid as adjuncts) and adjunct lines. In my department (where tenure-track faculty teach three courses semester, term faculty teach four a semester, and adjunct faculty are paid on a per-course basis with a maximum of four), we have about half the tenure-track lines we did 20 years go—but we’re teaching nearly double the students than we taught at that time. How has this been accomplished? By administrators cutting costs and “increasing flexibility” by refusing to replace tenure-track faculty members who retire or leave with permanent, tenure-track faculty, and instead hiring adjunct and term faculty who get paid less and have much less power in the institution.
“How many of those jobs are ones which actually require the skills and training imparted to biology/chemistry PhDs?”
Nearly all of them are in the beginning. A new PhD starting out in biotech or pharma will typically be working in R&D at the bench - designing and conducting experiments, basically a continuation of the type of research they were doing in grad school (although almost always on a different topic. Very few get a job working in the exact same narrow field in which they completed their dissertation). In these early years they often supervise a bachelors or masters level technician or two.
After some years they can continue to work and advance in R&D or branch out into related areas such as Clinical Research (designing and conducting clinical trials), Medical Affairs (collaborating with external professors on mutually valuable research), Technical Marketing (working with the commercial organization to generate data specifically to help sell the products), Manufacturing (improving and trouble-shooting mfg processes), and so on.
Some may eventually choose to get out of science altogether and move into say Marketing or Investor Relations - if they have the desire and personality for that sort of thing. But even the ones who stay in research will often have a boss, or a boss’s boss, or a boss’es boss’s boss who does not have a PhD. Except in very small firms it’s unusual to have PhDs in all the business leadership roles all the way to the top. Ultimately the science function will report into a business manager, director, VP, or CEO who often does not have a PhD but instead often has an MBA with or without a masters.or bachelors in science.
But,it is extremely rare to see a senior manager, department head, director, or VP in straight science in the biopharma industry who does not have a doctoral degree - either PhD or MD. So if you want to stay in science with a masters or bachelors you will very likely rise no higher than being some PhD’s assistant. To keep moving up in straight science you need the PhD. You can with a masters end up with PhDs reporting to you or in your department, if that is your goal, but you’ll very likely be doing it as some sort of business manager and not as head scientist.
“Same with business school faculty- I had some brilliant adjuncts teaching in my MBA program- but their “day job” was as SVP of Marketing for a consumer products company and they taught one evening a week. Again- they count as adjuncts to push up the percentage”
Yes, it does push up a little bit, but not whole a lot. I believe the national average of the use of adjuncts in business schools is somewhere around 10%, far lower than those in other schools or academic units, say almost 50%. The main reason for this is that AACSB accreditation specifically requires that academically qualified (AQ) faculty needs to be at least 50%; an adjunct is unlikely to be an AQ faculty because AQ requires substantial research output. The national average number for AQ faculty to the total faculty resources has been quite stable over time, around 80%. The remaining 20% consists of full-time instructors and part-time adjuncts. Another reason is that most business schools are cash cows and have ample budgets, and they do not need to hire adjuncts to save money.
These part-time adjuncts in business schools are quite different from those adjuncts in many other units. They are mostly used to strengthen the program delivery. For example, one of the focuses in our MBA is about sustainability and environment. We hire an adjunct who is a famous environmental law professor from another university. At the undergraduate level, we hire an asset manager to teach a service course about personal finance and investing to students across all academic units. These adjuncts are often termed professionally qualified (PQ) and need “significant professional experiences in duration and level of responsibility,” according to AACSB. A PQ faculty requires a master degree, and does not necessarily have a PhD degree.