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[dogvomit]

Ahem...according to Yahoo! we have nothing to worry about:

http://education.yahoo.net/degrees/articles/featured_six_flexible_careers_that_pay_70k.html

"Post Secondary Teachers

Did you know that many college teachers and university professors are retiring? You'll work on a school calendar, with summer, spring, and winter holiday vacation time if you want it. Some professors only report to campus two days a week. They make up for it by the work they do at home, but not reporting to campus every day can lead to flexibility.

You'll need a master's degree to teach at the community college level and a doctorate in your field to qualify for tenure-track professorships at four-year colleges. Positions for post-secondary teachers are predicted to rise by an exceptional 12 percent through the 2006-2016 decade. 2007 salary averages were $98,974 for professors, $69,911 for associate professors, and $58,662 for assistant professors."

Thanks, Yahoo!, for perpetuating the myth that ALL professors a) only work 2 days a week, b) make the same money regardless of discipline, and c) will be in high demand since EVERYONE is retiring.

EVERYONE SHOULD CONTACT THE AUTHOR, GABBY HYMAN, and tell her to do some homework...

http://gabbyhyman.com/contact.htm

[normative_]

The OECD* is predicting that unemployment in the US will continue to get worse in the first half of 2010, but that it will peak and start to decline in the second half. For Europe, they expect that there will be a turnaround in 2011.

That might not be in time to generate a quick uptake in new university hires for the 2010 academic year, but the light may be at the end of the tunnel.

http://www.oecd.org/document/9/0,3343,en_2649_34109_44083593_1_1_1_37443,00.html


* Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the club of advanced economies.

[aristotelian]

Universities generally lag the job market in the real world because of the way they calculate their budgets.  Probably won't be for at least a couple of years before you see any positive movement in higher ed hiring.

[t_r_b]

Universities generally lag the job market in the real world because of the way they calculate their budgets.  Probably won't be for at least a couple of years before you see any positive movement in higher ed hiring.

And even then, if you think that all the currently frozen TT lines will come back as TT lines, you're Pollyanna reborn.

The good news is that schools need bodies to put in front of classrooms, so there will presumably be more adjunct jobs available (especially if you are in, or are willing to move to, a geographically undesirable location).

The bad news is that an economic recovery would by no means turn those adjunct jobs back into TT lines. Some of them, yes. Many, maybe most of them, no.

[normative_]

This is all true. When I think of the downturn in 1991, it took about 8 years afterward to see a new boom in hiring. But a potential turnaround is better than none at all, and sooner is always better than later.

I would also look to growth in jobs at overseas universities, as investment in this sector is big in Asia and economic recovery will be quicker and stronger.

[t_r_b]

The real danger here is that overly optimistic advisors will tell their brilliant, starry-eyed undergraduates that, yes, the job market is really bad right now, but in a few years (i.e., by the time they've finished their PhDs) the economy will have rebounded, plus all those baby boomers will have retired, and there will be heaps and piles of tenure-track jobs for the picking.

As we all know, there are undergraduate advisors out there who are in fact clueless enough to give that kind of advice. And some of the less ethical (or just more clueless) Directors of Graduate Studies will be feeding prospective applicants the exact same line.

[mad_doctor]

I have been thinking about this for several months now, and have come to some conclusions which, some might say, should be evident from common sense.  Somebody else upthread mentioned the possibity of cutting tt faculty and not replacing them down the road.  I agree with this.  I believe university administrators nationwide will operate under the "never let a good crisis go to waste" philosophy and massively cut tt positions next year and the year after, and continue to do so as long as they can get away with it under the "crisis" banner.  They will replace these positions as necessary in the years that follow with non-tt and adjunct positions.  The same thing happend but to a lesser extent in the early 90s recession and the early 2000s recession.  When it's all over the proportion of tenured and tenure-track faculty will probably be diminished by 5% - 10% overall.  The overall trend for the last 30 or so years has been in the same direction, but the economy will accelerate the losses.