History, English Job Markets Off 15-20% This Year

Story here.  I've not seen reliable data on Philosophy, but the anecdotal evidence is consistent with a similar decline in positions--and there is still the risk, alas, that positions will disappear or be frozen before being filled.  I wish there were some hopeful news to report, but at present there isn't.  I am expecting next year to be at least as bad if not worse than this year (schools budget a couple of years into the future, so last year's financial crisis will start to be reflected in budgets going forward especially).  If there is some sign of economic recovery in 2009, then 2010-11 may show some recovery in the academic job market, though it is doubtful it will be sufficient to deal with the backlog of unsuccessful candidates from this year and next.  So the bottom line, as I see it, is that we are in for several years of very difficult job markets.  Thoughts/data from others?  Ideas about strategies for job seekers?  Non-anonymous comments preferred, but anonymous comments must utilize real e-mail addresses (they will not appear).

Comments

[Richard Moore]

A related question, please: do those who serve on interview panels anticipate that they'll take account of these hard times when conducting future job searches? For example, it's been said here several times that a PhD typically goes stale after two years. Given the current climate, are the interviewers of 2012 likely to look more favourably on PhDs that were defended in 2009?

This is particularly pressing, since many of us in the UK are required (by AHRC and sometimes also university requirements) to submit within four years. Unlike peers in the US we can't delay defending indefinitely.

A further question to UK academics: Is there any way that, given these circumstances, the existing restrictions might be relaxed - at least temporarily? Presumably they exist to prevent people from coasting, but here a reluctance to work hard wouldn't be the reason for extending one's deadline. The motive now may be more to preserve one's chances on a wholly depressing job market.

I'm due to submit no later than September this year. Completing by then shouldn't be a problem, but doing so will leave me vulnerable if there are no jobs to go to and won't be before my thesis passes its sell-by date. Assuming that my department is sympathetic, I may be able to delay defending until January 2010, but as things are there doesn't seem to be much else that someone in my position could do to delay going on the job market. Would allowing candidates in this position to spend a year sitting on a completed thesis, trying to write articles for publication but not yet defending, really be so bad?

[jonathan weinberg]

Given the decline in permanent positions, there may well be an uptick in the short-term philosophy job market (though one can only hope). This makes all the more pressing & worrying the question of what are the implications of the Central meeting's schedule change for its role in the job market? I find myself unsure what guidance to offer to my students -- does anyone have a clear line on what to expect there? Should would-be applicants even bother with the hassle & expense of attending? Will the Pacific become even more important, market-wise, to take up the slack left by the displaced Central?

[PH]

As someone on the market for the first time this year, I can report that the scene was overall quite grim. I know of recent PhDs from top 25 schools, with with multiple publications in very good places, who got no interviews, much less any job offers.

If I could throw a question out to those who served on search committees: was the number of applications you received this year unusually high, or not? City College CUNY reported (in a widely received rejection letter) receiving over 600 applications. I've heard anecdotally of other open searches this year receiving over 400. In the past, I'd typically heard of places receiving 200 to 300 applications for open searches. Is it possible that, far from scaring off applicants, the scarcity of jobs and uncertainty of the future caused a kind of application frenzy? Can such numbers be accounted for merely by the fewer number of jobs advertised?

[Mark Eli Kalderon]

Richard, in the UK the main source of funding is the AHRC, and the AHRC is fanatical about completion rates. In the past it was possible for departments to be barred for two years from making AHRC applications if they did not meet their target completion rates. Given this institutional pressure, there is no way that UK departments will adopt a relaxed attitude about time to completion.

The UK market has a very different structure that the US market. The UK will be hit hard by recession as well, but the structural differences matter. There is no annual market, so nothing determinate to put off.

WRT PhDs going stale, if the future is like the past, they will despite the economic circumstances.

[Aldo Antonelli]

It seems to me it is high time people in the profession start asking themselves whether we might not be producing way too many PhD's. The question is urgent even during normal economic times, it becomes all the more poignant during a recession like this. Too many philosophy PhD's end up feeding university administrators' hunger for disposable faculty, and these are the lucky ones. Only a small number of PhD's end up obtaining the tenure-track position at a 4-year institution they have been training for. Departments are under pressure from administrators to increase the size of their graduate class (albeit with constant or dwindling amounts of money to support the effort). But there is no open debate in the profession about whether this is what we want to do. Maybe we *do* want to put out that many PhD's, but should we not be doing that in a principled and reflective manner?

[Michael Cholbi]

I would like to echo and give general endorsement to Aldo Antonelli's remarks concerning the number of philosophy doctoral programs. (I raised this issue at PEA Soup about two years ago:
http://peasoup.typepad.com/peasoup/2007/02/how_many_doctor.html)

In my estimation, the English-speaking philosophy job market could be adequately served with far fewer Ph.D programs than presently operate. I'm not a consequentialist, but I believe that the status quo is harmful to many and beneficial to few. Putting aside the intellectual benefits of doctoral study, Ph.D. students, especially those at less prestigious programs, spend many years pursuing degrees that often do not result in gainful or stable employment. Furthermore, the glut of Ph.D's suppresses wages for both tenure-stream and non-tenure stream faculty. (To my eye, there's a rough correlation between low wages within academic disciplines and the poor job market in those disciplines. Compare philosophy's situation with that in literature, history, etc. ) Indeed, we are confronting a kind of reverse tragedy of the commons: A lack of coordination has resulted in a surplus of resources that is making almost everyone worse off.

Who does benefit from these Ph.D. programs? Faculty who teach at them, who enjoy better professional reputations and better conditions in which to conduct research. These are worthwhile benefits, but it is hard to believe that these benefits outweigh the harms done to the profession as a whole.

And I am not persuaded by the 'transparency argument': that so long as students are aware of their dim job prospects, etc., no unfairness has occurred. First, I am under the impression that psychologists have discovered various optimistic biases that could be said to make even students' choices who are sufficiently informed less than fully rational. That is, upon hearing, say, that only 1 out of 4 students in a given Ph.D. program will be hired into a tenure-stream position, most everyone thinks that he or she will be that one. Second, the mere fact that an arrangement is transparent and fair in this sense does not mean that the arrangement must be made available to parties that might enter into it. Surely questions of the real benefits to all parties affected, including third parties, factor into the justifiably of such arrangements.

I am under no illusion that a reduction in doctoral programs would happen any time soon, since all programs have their constituencies and there is no central authority to exert pressure to reduce the number of programs. However, as Aldo says, an open debate about this issue is long overdue.

[Richard]

Thanks for your comment, Mark.

I wasn't clear enough when I posted, but part of what I was hoping was that there might be some collective way to put pressure on the AHRC to relax the four year deadline, if only for a year or two. Of course, given the severe penalties imposed by the AHRC, it would be suicidal for departments to relax their submission deadlines without some guarantees.

I don't suppose it's terribly realistic to think the AHRC might be swayed, though.

[Amy Lara]

I agree with Profs. Antonelli and Cholbi that we need to talk seriously about the number of PhDs we're producing. Flooding the market with too many PhDs, who are trained solely to be academics, is only going to play into the hands of larger forces at work in the university system. (I recommend checking out Bousquet's blog, How the University Works). Currently, we are in a much better position than other humanities disciplines, especially English, where tenure-track jobs are scarce and a large proportion of graduates become permanent adjuncts, teaching heavy loads for little pay and no benefits. But we could easily move in that direction if we don't regulate ourselves. However, it doesn't seem likely that grad programs will voluntarily reduce their size. Perhaps a compromise position would be for grad programs to commit to providing more training for their students that will prepare them for other kinds of jobs. Build relationships with other departments on campus (education, the sciences, business) so that philosophy students can get broader training, and talk to NGOs and non-profits that could potentially hire our graduates.

[mvr]

I think I disagree with Michael Cholbi for a couple of reasons.

Reducing the number of graduate positions would make getting into graduate school or not the major determiner of success for aspiring academics in the field. If the remaining graduate programs were very accurate at assessing an applicant's philosophical prospects that might not be so bad. But I guess I don't believe that admissions committees are that good. If I look around I know of a number of really excellent philosophers who were only admitted to a relatively less well-regarded graduate department. But many of them went on to make a success of philosophy. Those folks would not be around in the profession in a world with fewer positions for graduate students.

And second (and maybe this is a generational thing) I think it isn't so bad to go to graduate school for its own sake. When I applied to grad school I got the then standard letter from the graduate chair at Princeton saying that there were few jobs and that things were getting worse. I believed it, but I wanted to pursue my interests in philosophy further. I don't think I would have been wasting my time if I had not wound up with a philosophy job. I would have been in roughly the position I was coming out of undergraduate school with a philosophy BA. I had some skills and some abilities that over the long run would have been useful in any number of other endeavors. I would not have been unjustly treated, nor would I have been in an objectively bad position. I would have found the sort of job that most of our fellow citizens have or wish they had.

One of the things that makes academic jobs worth having is that we have colleagues for whom this is not just a career. The quotation from Gregory Pence which Brian has now put up a couple of posts after this one rings pretty true to me. And I think it speaks in favor of leaving the doors open to those with an interest and a willingness to take a chance (a not so bad chance) at spending a significant part of their lives working in the field.

[Gary Bartlett]

Amy Lara makes a valuable point. Relatedly: it bothers me that grad programs typically provide placement info only about their graduates who went on to academic positions. This goes along with the frequent (usually implicit, sometimes explicit) assumption that any graduate who leaves academia is some sort of failure. Which, of course, just isn't true. Although Philosophy PhD's are trained with academia in mind, they are excellent candidates for a whole range of non-academic positions. Most of which are far better-paid than the average assistant professorship, as well! It would be good if grad programs could be more open about what happens to those graduates, rather than trying to pretend they no longer exist. Some programs already do this, but my impression is that that's pretty rare. The typical stance of grad programs toward such graduates reminds me of the famous Seinfeld line: "Not that there's anything WRONG with that..."

[David Sobel]

Perhaps we could do more to convey an accurate picture of the job prospects. It is great that most programs now list their placement record (hat tip to Leiter et al) but these usually only talk about what happens to grad students who earn a Ph.D. It is also relevant how many of the students who start the program get a Ph.D.

[John Protevi]

I agree with the last few comments, beginning with Amy Lara. When I was DGS of the French Studies department in which I work* I met someone with a PhD in French Studies who took the Foreign Service exam and then a position with the State Department. She has had several excellent postings as a cultural attache, including her current one in Japan. In terms of a personally fulfilling and socially significant career, this seems to be a great example that employment outside the academy for PhDs in the humanities can be much better than the merely Seinfeldian, as Gary Bartlett notes.

* Another angle on the academic job market for philosophers: not all of us academics with philosophy PhDs work in Philosophy Departments.

[matthew smith]

hi folks. this discussion about the number of phd programs (and numbers in the phd programs) has been raised multiple times over the past few weeks.

see, e.g.: http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2008/12/will-the-financ.html

and the attempt at getting a dedicated follow-up discussion going at: http://mattweiner.net/blog/archives/000848.html

in general, it seems pretty clear that there is a lot of concern about this. and, it seems to me that some enterprising soul might consider getting a dedicated discussion about it started at a high profile place, e.g., at the chronicle of higher ed or something like that. i am, alas, not that person.