MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY, SINCE THE ORIGINAL POST OVERSTATED THE DROP
Reader Stephen Bush writes:
There has been a big drop in offerings in religious studies this year from last, but the statistic you give in your recent post is not quite accurate, assuming the statistic came from the online AAR Job Postings site.
The 235 jobs is not the jobs that were posted on Sept 1, 2008, but throughout the whole month of September 2008. That is, any job that was posted on at least one day between Sept 1-30 counts in the 235.
There is no way to search the AAR's database for the number of jobs on any particular day (besides the current day, of course), so you can't compare Sept 1, 2008 to Sept. 1, 2009.
The 48 jobs is the number that was posted as of Sept 1, 2009, but new jobs are being posted everyday and this will continue throughout the month. As of right now, 51 jobs are posted, that's 3 added since yesterday.
To compare this year to last year accurately, you would have to wait until Oct 1, 2009, then search on September 2008 vs. September 2009.
If we do this for August 2008 vs. August 2009, in August 2009, a total of 41 advertisements were posted (that is, appeared at least one day in August 2009). For August 2008, there were 105 advertisements. That's a drastic drop, but not quite 80%. September and October are far heavier months for job advertisements than August, so we'll have to wait to find out just how bad things really are.
=====================ORIGINAL POST FOLLOWS==========================
Reader Carl Seaquist points out that September 1 marks the analogue of the October JFP in the field of Religious Studies; last year, Religious Studies had 235 jobs advertised on September 1, this year it is 48. What I do not know is whether this fluctuation is at all typical (please e-mail me if you have more history/context about this field--there are smaller fields in which significant fluctuation is not uncommon). I do believe this year's philosophy job market will be worse than last year's, but the anecdotal evidence does not suggest that Philosophy will see a drop of 80% or anything close to that in the total number of jobs. With that in mind, though, I flag again some advice from last year about the timing of your dissertation defense.
UPDATE: Here's a pertinent bit of info that might explain why the drop-off in advertised positions in Religious Studies is so steep from last year, from a reader at the University of Calgary:
One additional factor in comparing this year's jobs in Religious Studies to last year's is that the annual AAR meeting - the equivalent of our Eastern APA, where most first-round interviews are conducted - was about two weeks earlier last year than this year, and almost a month earlier last year than in years past. It might be that departments hurried to get their ads out last year, but are less hurried this year. It will be worth comparing the number of jobs on Sept. 10 or 12 this year to last year's Sept. 1. Both dates will be about two months from the annual meeting.
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