The Chronicle of Higher Education
Date: April 27, 1994
Section: Personal & Professional
Page: A17
By Denise K. Magner
Remember that major 1989 study of the academic job market? Most graduate students do.
It projected a severe faculty shortage beginning in the late 1990's, especially in the humanities and social sciences. Others recall similar forecasts about a shortfall of mathematicians and scientists.
But the optimism generated by those forecasts has disappeared, replaced by disappointment and even bitterness, in light of today's job market for new Ph.D.'s.
Instead of a mushrooming demand, doctoral recipients are finding a shortage of tenure-track openings and a glut of candidates. The market has been bad for several years, they say. And no one seems to have a grip on when -- or if -- it will improve.
In English, art, physics, mathematics, and many other fields, graduate students are swapping hard-luck stories. Many of them sound a lot like Lynda G. Lippin's.
Ms. Lippin, who is finishing her dissertation in philosophy at Temple University, remembers hearing how the market was going to really open up by the time she was done. So far, she has been unable to find even a one-year post.
"As I've been getting the rejection letters, every school I applied to got over 300 applications," says Ms. Lippin, who has mostly limited her search to the Philadelphia area. To keep active in her field, she works as a part-time instructor at Drexel and Villanova Universities. "It's pretty hard to write," she says, "when you have to schlep all over the place teaching five classes to make $12,000."
For more and more budding academics, part-time work, one-year appointments, and postdoctoral positions have become the norm. Some people are finding tenure-track jobs, but anecdotal evidence suggests most are not fielding a wealth of offers. They're not securing positions as quickly as their predecessors and they're not always landing at the caliber of institution that they expected.
"Those who came to graduate school in the mid- to late 80's certainly came with a different expectation than they've found five years down the road," says Salah Baouendi, a mathematician at the University of California at San Diego and a leader of the American Mathematical Society's policy committee on the profession.
Amid the cynicism about the job outlook, there is also much resentment: Many white males contend that colleges are mostly hiring women and minority candidates. Graduate students of all backgrounds complain that departments do a poor job of preparing people for the job hunt. Given the current market, some people are calling it unethical for departments to continue producing doctoral recipients at the same pace.
Departments, however, say it's hard to know what to do since reliable data about the academic labor market are hard to come by.
William G. Bowen knows that firsthand. Mr. Bowen, president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is co-author of the 1989 study that projected the market would start to improve in 1992 and a serious faculty shortage would begin in 1997 as a result of a wave of faculty retirements and increases in enrollment. He defends the study, Prospects for Faculty in the Arts & Sciences. It was a set of projections of what could happen, he says, not predictions of what would happen.
All labor markets are subject to great shocks that cannot be foreseen, he says. In this case, "what intervened was a massive set of budgetary cutbacks afflicting colleges and universities, particularly public ones. What those cutbacks led to were hiring freezes, and what those freezes led to were limited job opportunities for many people getting their degrees now."
Mr. Bowen says he knows some graduate students are disappointed, even angry about his study and others like it. "I don't think I misled them but I can understand how they might feel that way," he says. His own daughter is finishing a doctorate in art history and will soon be looking for a job. "I have quite direct and firsthand experience on the job market."
Mr. Bowen believes the outlook will improve eventually. So does Jack H. Schuster, one of the authors of a 1986 book that warned of a major faculty shortage. He is a professor of education at the Claremont Graduate School. The recession blindsided many prognosticators, he says, but other factors have been at work, too, such as an influx of foreign academics.
Mr. Schuster, who is seeking a grant to conduct a new project on the academic market, believes a faculty shortage will occur. "There are going to be lots of jobs," he says. "They're not going to be here as soon as people had hoped for, and there may not be as many as people had hoped for."
Unemployed Ph.D.'s are more interested in what's happening now. Many view the job listings in disciplinary associations as good indicators.
The news in most fields has been grim. For example, the Modern Language Association reports that the number of positions advertised in its quarterly Job Information List has fallen every year since 1988-89, although the drop in 1993-94 was the smallest yet.
The American Mathematical Society gathers employment data annually from both departments and new doctorates. In its 1993 report, the society said U.S. institutions had awarded 1,202 doctorates in mathematics in 1992-93. A total of 721 found jobs in the United States -- 554 in academe and 167 in business or government. An additional 227 in this country were still seeking jobs or their status was unknown. The society said the unemployment rate for new Ph.D.'s last fall was 12.4 per cent -- the second highest rate since 1975, when 13.7 per cent were out of work. In the 1980's, the unemployment rate in the field averaged 5 per cent.
Robert J. Zimmer, chairman of the mathematics department at the University of Chicago, says that the best doctoral students are securing tenure-track posts at leading universities. "The problems are those students who don't stand out," he says. "They are good, solid people, capable and deserving of a decent job. But they're having a very difficult time."
Last year and this year, Mr. Zimmer's department hired six young Ph.D.'s as assistant professors and instructors. It received between 600 and 700 applications in each of those years, he says. A number of years ago, it would have had about 400.
New Ph.D.'s face competition not only with each other, but also with people who earned their Ph.D.'s a year or two ago and never found tenure-track jobs. "The market is not absorbing these people," Mr. Zimmer says. "There are a lot of people who were on the market last year who are on it again this year."
It used to hurt a young scholar's reputation to be repeatedly on the job market, says Steven Knapp, vice-chair for graduate studies in English at the University of California at Berkeley. The applicant would be perceived as "used goods," he says. Now, some departments see one-year posts as a strong credential.
"We've had some striking instances of someone not getting anything for two years and then suddenly getting a very good tenure-track job," Mr. Knapp says.
However, many Ph.D.'s end up in a long series of one-year jobs.
Stephen Kennedy earned his doctorate in mathematics from Northwestern University in 1988. Since then, he's been in temporary jobs in Texas, Illinois, Delaware, and most recently at St. Olaf College. "It's miserable," he says, adding that he knows of lots of "migrant math workers."
His luck has just changed. This fall, he will start his first tenure-track job, at Carleton College. He will be sharing the position with his wife, Deanna Haunsperger, who earned her doctorate in mathematics from Northwestern in 1991.
Mr. Kennedy says the profession needs to begin preparing students better for what he believes will be a difficult job market for years to come. "What I'd like to see the professional societies doing now is telling people that there is a probability that this is going to happen to you," he says. "The American Mathematical Society is starting to do this, but I think they could do a lot more."
Some graduate students and professors have started to question the ethics of universities' continuing to produce new Ph.D.'s, knowing the state of the job market. They are pressing departments to cut back. Some departments are doing just that, both because of budget pressures and the labor market.
One such place is the English department at the University of Virginia. "We were admitting 25 to 26 people a year up until two years ago," says Patricia Meyer Spacks, department chairwoman who is also president of the Modern Language Association. "Now we're admitting about 22 to 23 a year, and we'll probably go down to 20."
Paul A. Cantor, an English professor at Virginia, is the placement officer for the department's graduate students. When he first started in the job in 1985, he says, "we were placing three-quarters of our candidates in tenure-track jobs."
"That rose to nearly 100 per cent around 1988-89," he says, "and now it's dipped down to a third."
Berkeley's English department also cut back its graduate program due to budget problems and the job market. Last fall, it accepted only 25 doctoral students, instead of 30. Mr. Knapp, the department head, says he can't cut back any more without hurting the program.
"There's been a proliferation of doctoral programs," Mr. Knapp says. "It's not just that doctoral programs individually may be producing too many Ph.D.'s, but that there are too many programs."
Richard N. Boyd, a professor of physics and astronomy at Ohio State University, agrees. As vice-chairman for graduate studies in the physics department, he questions the wisdom of reducing its number of doctoral students.
"If there are too many physicists, the way to kill the problem is to eliminate the weaker programs," Mr. Boyd says. "I don't think cutting back the stronger programs is the solution."
The idea of limiting the production of new doctorates makes many professors and graduate students nervous. Many don't want to prevent someone from studying a field they love. Others admit that departments need a certain number of graduate students to help out with undergraduate teaching.
Instead of cutting back, some talk of the need to tell doctoral students the truth going in. They also say that faculty members, rather than disparaging jobs outside academe, should encourage students to pursue such opportunities.
Some worry that the weak job outlook is not a temporary dip, but the new status quo. Says Mr. Knapp of Berkeley: "What people are now nervous about is the perception that the fate of the university will not simply follow the fate of the economy -- that the recovery from the recession will not automatically translate into as many new jobs as people would have hoped for.
"The university administration seems to be settling for a smaller-sized faculty."
Mr. Bowen of the Mellon Foundation wonders about that, too. "Will the downsizing continue? Are we going to see a turnaround?" he asks. He answers his own questions: "I do know the underlying demographics, and conditions should improve by the end of the decade. That's probable. That's the best guess one can make."