I'm told by various correspondents that it is, in fact, on-line now, and has about 140 ads, though less than half of those are for tenure-track jobs. (I haven't seen the October JFP myself.) If one counts the web ads as well, then there are over 250 positions advertised, but that is still only about half of last year (of course many of those advertised last year disappeared due to budget troubles). This is obviously bad, as expected. I haven't done a systematic study, but my guess (based partly on info we've discussed in the past) is that this is probably one of the worst October JFPs in several decades. There are only two positive notes here that I see: first, most schools, in response to the economic crisis, have been erring on the side of extreme caution in their budgeting, meaning the odds are good that the jobs now advertised will actually be filled, rather than disappear; second, the anxiety about budgetary issues may also mean that November will be more important than in prior years (though November almost always contains a decent number of new jobs), as departments may not have secured their hiring authorizations until later than usual. So we won't have the full picture until November.
But the bottom line is that this is going to be a very tight year on the job market, compounded, of course, by the repeat job seekers from last year who met with disappointment in another very bad job market.
Comments are open for additional data, information, more precise tallies of what's in the October JFP, etc.
