Long-term trends blamed for limited academic jobs

This year is particularly bad in a market that has been declining.

By Daniel Everson

Published March 17, 2009

For doctoral students entering the job market, a number of factors, such as the weak economy, have made it increasingly difficult to secure tenure-track positions at universities.

Graduate School Associate Dean George Justice said the academic job market has been largely unchanged over the last 10 to 15 years in that it has become more challenging to get tenure-track positions. He said this year's particularly poor market might just be a glitch in that overarching trend.

Justice also said changes in traditional routes to academic jobs might be impacting the job market. For students of the hard sciences, traditionally, the dissertation advisor refers his students to a friend at another university, who arranges a postdoctoral fellowship for them.

But these patterns might be changing.

Justice said there are now more female scientists who want balanced lives and fewer men who spend all day in the lab.

"It's less the economy than long-term trends in the culture," he said. "In science, academic careers haven't changed to accommodate that. It may be a one-time blip (in the job market), or it may be a signal of restructuring."

Although the job market for the humanities is also struggling, it has actually improved over the past 15 years, Justice said.

And not all MU doctoral students are having trouble finding work in academia, Justice said.

Doctoral candidate T.J. Tomlin is one student who has successfully attained an academic tenure-track position. Tomlin, who will receive his doctorate in history in May, will start an assistant professorship at the University of Northern Colorado in August.

But Tomlin said he considers himself fortunate to have secured tenure-track work.

"I'm just incredibly grateful to wind up with a job I'm very happy about," Tomlin said. "It's unusual to get a job."

He said he sent out about 30 applications in both this academic year and the previous one. Three of his applications yielded interviews this year, which he considered "pretty average."

Tomlin compared this year's job market to last year's. This year, he said, the job searches for at least seven of the positions he applied for were simply cancelled.

"By contrast," Tomlin said. "I don't remember that happening at any of the jobs I applied for last year."

Tomlin, who cited a Jan. 16 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education that reported a 15 percent decline in history jobs, explained the tough market in terms of supply and demand.

"There just aren't jobs," he said. "The number of positions dropped, which makes an already competitive market more competitive."

Students and universities are responding to the economy in various ways.

Justice said colleges will not cut graduate assistantships, which he described as almost necessary for Ph.D. students. They will have to be careful providing assistantships to new students, though, since some may remain in graduate school longer than anticipated. He said students who already hold assistantships might remain another year, decreasing assistantship availability to new doctoral students.

Some doctoral students have also pursued work outside of academia, Justice said. Although most doctoral candidates seek academic tenure-track work at first, he said, students of the hard sciences in particular have become more interested in industrial jobs.

Another Chronicle of Higher Education article from March 13 reported that some universities are hiring despite the economy because so many strong candidates have been left without jobs.

Many universities, meanwhile, are moving to non-tenure-track teaching because it is cheaper, Justice said.

"It's easy to get a job as a teacher," Justice said. "It's hard to get a job with tenure."