Over at Crooked Timber, Michael Bérubé describes how “extra extra dismal” this year’s job market looks to be in modern languages. Why the extra “extra”? Well, because …
the effects of the Great Collapse of 2008 are only hitting this part of the academic machinery now. Colleges and universities have already taken—and administered—hits elsewhere, via salary cuts and/or freezes, furloughs, elimination of travel and research budgets, etc. And I don’t know how many searches were cancelled last year after being advertised. But I do know that in the modern languages, we might be looking at a 50 percent dropoff in jobs from last year, and there’s no federal stimulus coming to bail us out. …
He goes on to explain that in recent years …
the number of positions advertised in English has hovered around 1600-1700. This year, one of my students told me that she’d heard the number would be something like 250. “WTF,” I calmly replied. “Where did that number come from?” It came from a wiki of some kind, which is apparently what These Kids Today use when they’re not twittering on the FaceSpace. “That would be a Depression-era number,” I said, “because I don’t believe there’s been a time since the MLA started keeping stats when the number was below 1,000.” Well, it’s now looking like 250 is indeed a very low estimate. But it’s quite possible that the number will wind up being below 1,000, which is a problem, because all the MLA charts run from 1,000 to 2,000, so that 2009-10 might require the MLA to redesign the things or face the prospect of publishing one of those cartoon-charts where the plummeting line runs right off the page.
More seriously, a number below 1,000 is a problem for the actual Ph.D. candidates searching for actually existing jobs. No word yet on how many of those perhaps-fewer-than-one-thousand jobs will be tenure-track.
As if that’s not depressing enough for those in the modern languages, Bérubé notes that this year some universities have devised a new torture for job applicants, demanding that they submit an (even more) massive pile of paperwork up front — including “[t]ranscripts of graduate school grades, and even, in some cases, transcripts of undergraduate grades,” he writes — at their own expense, of course. All that for jobs for which there will most likely be 500 to 1,000 applicants, Bérubé adds. Talk about rotten odds.
Have you noted this trend in your discipline?
Follow On Hiring through your favorite RSS reader:
7 Responses to From Bad to Worse
11147726 - November 5, 2009 at 4:24 pm
I’ve seen one or two ads like that in Info Studies. An ad that requires undergrad transcripts is an ad to which I don’t respond. I would not be happy working for that organization. They are jerks. And they did me a big favor by tipping their hand early on and saving me the time and effort to discover their true nature.
yitzi - November 6, 2009 at 1:59 pm
What I noticed in the sciences is that the more teaching-oriented a department, the more likely they are to ask for transcripts, while the more prestigious instutions ask for letters of recommendation up front, so most of the liberal arts colleges asked for both.I do think the first insults the applicant and the second is inconsiderate to his references.
rchill - November 7, 2009 at 8:01 am
Why is asking for transcripts an insult? Your undergraduate transcripts were necessary for graduate school admittance, so it seems reasonable that graduate school transcripts would be necessary for employment.
mbelvadi - November 7, 2009 at 10:26 am
rchill, it’s expensive to get, and excessive for the first cut of the process. If you made the short list of candidates, it might be appropriate then, but as the article points out, these jobs attract hundreds of applicants per job opening. That’s a lot of money wasted on transcripts that may never even be looked at by anyone outside of HR.
pengland - November 12, 2009 at 12:01 pm
We’re not seeing a collapse in modern languages: we’re seeing a scaling back to what’s really needed. We’ve been producing far too many phds for far too long.Competition is good. Keeps you healthy.
laoshi - November 12, 2009 at 7:21 pm
Transcript requests don’t bother me. Nagging former advisors and employers for reference letters does bother me. And it bothers them. Whilst I understand less jobs means more competition, my only request is that employers hold off on requiring letters until candidates are short-listed. That being said, there’s a hella lot of modern language work outside the formerly great United States.
charlie00 - November 17, 2009 at 11:34 pm
English and Modern Languages are different markets. Please keep that in mind when discussing it.