Plan when you graduate...(J. Stanley)

The most recent Chronicle of Higher Education has an article about the excellent job market in history, entitled "Job Market in History Heats Up". The same is true of the philosophy job market; there are many, many more jobs than there were in the 1990s. For example, when I went on the job market, in 1994-5, I remember there were less than 25 jobs in all of metaphysics and epistemology broadly construed, and only two Leiter top-twenty departments were advertising, Cornell and UCLA. UCLA ended up deciding that year that no one was appointable in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and related areas, and so did not make an offer.

In contrast, this year alone there are junior positions in M&E broadly construed at NYU, Princeton, Michigan, MIT, UCLA, Berkeley, Cornell, Harvard, USC, and many other leading departments (and more than one of these schools have multiple positions). In addition, there are a healthy raft of positions at departments along the full spectrum. Whereas people in M&E in the mid 1990s would apply for 20-30 total jobs, job candidates now in M&E regularly apply to more than 100 jobs. I was incredibly fortunate to get a great job, and the consequences were extraordinary in several ways. First, because I was offered what seemed to me to be an essentially unique opportunity, I could afford to invest my self-confidence completely in my work. In contrast, this sacrifice would have been more difficult if I had been at a much less prestigious institution. I would have probably pursued other projects outside philosophy to protect myself against the more salient risks of failure. Furthermore, I had graduate students to help conduct my research. Finally, I had that all important 2-2 teaching load.

My peers who were essentially indistinguishable from me in terms of philosophical promise in graduate school (e.g. David Hunter at Buffalo State College, Lenny Clapp at Illinois Wesleyan) have had great difficulty moving up from their difficult teaching positions, despite impressive records of publication (records that are especially extraordinary considering their high teaching loads). It appears that in times of academic plenty departments of all kinds clearly prefer to hire students right out of graduate school over people who would have gotten outstanding jobs, had they not finished their PhDs during lean years.  Furthermore, my impression (though this is definitely anecdotal) is that in years in which there are fewer jobs, more departments decide not to hire at all. None of this behavior seems rational; after all, it's not like there are worse philosophers graduating in years with fewer jobs. Perhaps the air of desperation during lean years removes the mantle of confident genius than departments prefer  their candidates to wear during interviews.

Comments

[Colin Farrelly]

While Jason’s depiction of the realities of the fluctuations of the job market are no doubt true, I don’t think it supports the prescription (if he indeed intended it to be one) stated in the title of his post—plan when you graduate. The problem is we have limited information (with respect to the jobs on offer in any given year) and (finite) lives that need to be lived (rather than postponed indefinitely). Perhaps one could delay graduating a year, maybe two. But the reality of the job market, like life in general, is that it is a crapshoot. Given that there is no crystal ball with which we can gaze into to see what opportunities may be on the horizon a few years down the road, I think the best advice is to have the strongest application you can (e.g. publications, etc.) and keep your fingers crossed!

[Tim O'Keefe]

Exactly right--the bias towards shiny new ABDs and against people a few years out in less prestigous positions makes little sense. I think that the best evidence of scholarly potential is actually producing articles, and usually--leaving aside those grad school prodigies who have a huge raft of pubs as ABDs--we're in a much better position to make these sorts of evaluations on job candidates a few years after receiving their PhDs, when we've seen what they've done. Yet somehow 'workout wonders'--people who have great pedigrees and glowing letters, yet zippo in track record--often get the nod over people who have demonstrated an ability to publish by doing so.

I probably shouldn't mention this, as I hope that my department can exploit this irrationality to improve itself, but it bugs me enough that I'll do so anyway.

[Andrew Mills]

Implicit in this post is the idea that there is no distinction between a great job and a job at a prestigious institution. These are, to my mind, orthogonal categories. Whether the job is great or not is largely dependent on intra-institutional factors (the quality of one's colleagues, the city in which one is living, salary, the quality of students, the nature of one's teaching load, the fit between one's professional ambitions and the work required of one for tenure, etc.), whereas the prestige of the institution is measured in terms of the professional reputation of one's colleagues. One can have a great job at a non-prestigious institution, or a rotten job at a prestigious institution. The other two combinations are also, of course, possible.

If I were to offer advice to new PhD job seekers, I would encourage them to focus on getting a great job rather than focus on being at a prestigious institution. While it is of course true that for many the prestige of the institution is a factor in the greatness of the job, there is a greater chance that one will be happy if one seeks a great job--a job where one is a good fit, where one enjoys one's colleagues, lifestyle, daily work, etc.--than if one focuses on the prestige of the institution to the exclusion of all else.

Jason uses the idea of "moving up" to refer to an increase in the prestige rating of one's employer, and it's fair to use the term in that way. But I hope job seekers will not be blinded by the klieg lights of prestige to the following fact: we can "move up" when we move from a job where we are miserable to a job where we are happy.

[Timothy J Scriven]

As something of an outsider I am curious, is the job market better in Analytic or Continental philosophy? Is there a distinction?

[Tom Hurka]

1. This is going to sound like the Monty Python sketch -- "We would have killed to be able to sleep in a shoebox in the middle of the road" -- but conditions were much tougher, i.e., there were many fewer jobs, in the early 1980s, after the hiring boom of the 1960s and 1970s ended. There might be one tenure-track job in all of Canada in a given year. As a result, many talented philosophers spent a series of years -- four, six, even eight -- in one-year jobs at different universities. But when proper jobs became available the best of those philosophers got them. Canadian universities did what Jason rightly calls the rational thing and preferred people with an established track record over shiny ABDs.

2. My current department (Toronto) is perfectly happy to hire junior people already teaching at what may be less prestigious universities so long as they are pre-tenure. But that's a crucial condition. If you're administratively authorized to hire an Assistant Professor, you can't bring in someone with tenure. Post-tenure someone's a senior hire and in competition with other senior candidates. So the window for being hired post-PhD but in competition with fresh PhDs is comparatively short.

3. Re the preference for pedigree, isn't there lots of sociology about how, no matter what the discipline and no matter what a department's place in its disciplinary hierarchy, it will hire only from other departments above or only so far below it in that hierarchy? For example, top-10 departments essentially hire only from each other and never from outside the top 10. So if you've got a job at a low-prestige department you're pretty much out of the pool at top-10 departments, and also at departments more than, say, one grouping above you in the status hierarchy. Rational? Of course not. Common? Couldn't be more so.

[Robert]

Jason, I hope you are right that the job market may reveal a growing bias toward fresh faces. Some of us have adopted a hiring strategy that will then flourish. Since 'promise' out of grad school is such a risky predictor of future performance, it is only reasonable to hire late assistant/early associate level... even more so now, if you are right that those people may be overlooked.

[Brian Weatherson]

I don't know that there's as much of a preference in favour of new faces as Jason suggests. At Cornell (to pick a non-random example) the last three young people we've hired have been Tamar Gendler, me, and Matti Eklund, all of whom had been at other places first. (And I believe none of us got tenure-track jobs at all, let alone 2-2 jobs, straight out of grad school.) So we're at least one data point against. Jason's currently employer has made precisely one junior hire in living memory so they don't have a 'fresh faces' bias either. These are just anecdotal, but I think there is at least some variety in how departments approach this problem.

[john doris]

I'm wondering how robust Tom Hurka's "top-10 departments essentially hire only from each other and never from outside the top 10" generalization is. At least, apparent counterexamples come fairly readily to mind, such as Princeton's recent offer to Richard, Arizona's hiring of Nichols from Utah and Rosati from Davis, Michigan's hiring of Caston from Davis, and the less recent Rutgers hires of people from Syracuse. Going further back, there's Michigan's hire of Curley from Circle. Of course, all of these people had extensive records at the time of hire/offer, and Tom's generalization may be more robust for less established folks. --jmd

[J.U.]

A quick question: given that so many of you are willing to acknowledge that various types of irrational decisions are quite frequently made during the hiring process, how come nothing gets done to correct them? Presumably, many of you have served on hiring committees. What prevents you (and many others like you who have also spotted the sorts of biases being talked about here) from providing a "voice of reason?"

[Tim O'Keefe]

"A quick question: given that so many of you are willing to acknowledge that various types of irrational decisions are quite frequently made during the hiring process, how come nothing gets done to correct them?"

I wouldn't say that nothing gets done to correct them. These decisions are being thrashed out on countless search committees, and many people work to correct these irrationalities in order to make sure their own departments hire the best people they can. And it's not clear-cut what will count as an irrationality: there can be honest disagreement about how to weigh various factors, and I think the vast majority of people on search committees work in good faith.

Even though I commented above on what is (in my opinion) a common sort of irrationality in the hiring process, I think that at end of the day the it works fairly well. It's far from perfect, and we can point to lots of individual cases where the results are off, but overall it's not too bad. The real problems spring mainly from the wretched job market, not from the way search committees go about deciding who to hire in that wretched job market.

[matt]

Some of the places I applied to this year told me how many applicants they had, as did friends on hiring committees. The numbers ranged from about 100 (a job in my area) to 560 (an open position).

That suggests that, perhaps unlike in history, there is still a very unfavorable ratio of positions to applicants, at least if one is an applicant. Does anyone have a sense of whether that ratio has gotten any better (for applicants)?