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[red_queen]

Yet just 2 years earlier there were more history jobs advertised than PhD recipients. 

I know we're speaking of aggregate numbers here, but I can't help but recall that in that year there were 12 positions I was eligible to apply for and hundreds of applicants applying for those 12 positions.

[onion]

Watermarkup,

If you don't like the applicant/job metric for employment difficulty, then by all means provide an alternative.  With numbers, please.

By 2008-9, there were about 1100 new PhDs and 800 advertised job openings.

Yet just 2 years earlier there were more history jobs advertised than PhD recipients. 

I believe things were getting better in nearly every field before last year's collapse, and I also believe that people getting degrees in recent years tend to underestimate how hard it was for the previous academic generation.

Nobody is saying the situation is easy now, only that it has been difficult other times as well, often worse, sometimes far worse.  - DvF

One of the problems with the AHA's statistics is that they don't account for the people who didn't get jobs the year before, or are in VAPS or post-docs and applying for the same advertised job openings as the new PhDs.  In other words, the field of job seekers is much larger than the AHA reflects (or even seems to want to publicly acknowledge).

And no, I didn't type in all of the stats for the last 30 years, but they do certainly reflect peaks and valleys.

[cranefly]

I'm not sure that it matters if things are better or worse than they used to be. My point was that we all seem to like to play that card--but why? Does it mean we're a better scholar if we got a job in a harder market? Does it mean that paying our dues as an adjunct for a few years means we deserve more financially when we do get a job?

I'm not sure why we feel this competitiveness. It's the old "we used to have to walk uphill both ways" argument, as far as I can see, but almost in reverse: "we have it so much harder than you older folk who walked into jobs with barely a BA"...  who cares? Just go by what they are doing now, not in the past. If they're "deadwood" or a "young arrogant turk" then call them on it. But if not, then let's not lump everyone in together.

 

[daniel_von_flanagan]

I'm not sure that it matters if things are better or worse than they used to be. My point was that we all seem to like to play that card--but why?

You also said that difficulty "really" increases monotonically with time, which is not necessarily the case.

It is not helpful for people having a difficult job hunt to tell them how much easier the market is than it was 15 years before.  However, just to be clear: had your senior colleague told you that today's job market was worse than it was 15 years before, when he was hired, you would have lost respect for him in exactly the same way?  Because what mattered about his statement was not whether it was true or not, but rather simply because relative markets is a stupid thing to bring up? - DvF

[larryc]

Can't we just say that the job market has been horrific for a generation or more?

[terpsichore]

Can't we just say that the job market has been horrific for a generation or more?

Yes, more or less since the post WWII expansion of higher education was completed.

[terpsichore]

I'm not sure that it matters if things are better or worse than they used to be. My point was that we all seem to like to play that card--but why? Does it mean we're a better scholar if we got a job in a harder market? Does it mean that paying our dues as an adjunct for a few years means we deserve more financially when we do get a job?

I'm not sure why we feel this competitiveness. It's the old "we used to have to walk uphill both ways" argument, as far as I can see, but almost in reverse: "we have it so much harder than you older folk who walked into jobs with barely a BA"...  who cares? Just go by what they are doing now, not in the past. If they're "deadwood" or a "young arrogant turk" then call them on it. But if not, then let's not lump everyone in together.

 

I don't have an answer to your questions. But it is damaging when academics buy into these stereotypes about senior or junior faculty.  When we use terms like “deadwood” as a broad description of senior faculty, we are tacitly accepting (and reinforcing) the view of a segment of society that academics don’t have real jobs or make real contributions. I reject that view. I know there are examples of senior faculty who are unproductive, and examples of junior faculty who are completely clueless, but in my experience both of these are the exceptions.

(Sorry to double post.)

[cranefly]

I'm not sure that it matters if things are better or worse than they used to be. My point was that we all seem to like to play that card--but why?

You also said that difficulty "really" increases monotonically with time, which is not necessarily the case.

It is not helpful for people having a difficult job hunt to tell them how much easier the market is than it was 15 years before.  However, just to be clear: had your senior colleague told you that today's job market was worse than it was 15 years before, when he was hired, you would have lost respect for him in exactly the same way?  Because what mattered about his statement was not whether it was true or not, but rather simply because relative markets is a stupid thing to bring up? - DvF

Yes, the point was that they brought it up as if they were somehow superior. In my field, things have gotten progressively worse. So bad, that I left my field and re-tooled to another field in order to get a job.  So for me, being told how easy I had it was a bit of a kick in the teeth. But really, the point was--why would you say something like that, unless to try to put someone else down?

[watermarkup]

Watermarkup,
If you don't like the applicant/job metric for employment difficulty, then by all means provide an alternative.  With numbers, please.

I did provide an alternative metric, and I've done the research so that I can provide the numbers for my field. You'll have to do the legwork for your field, however. If you don't care to think about weaknesses in the metric you're using, you should start ignoring anonymous interlocutors in online forums.

LarryC, the problem with saying the the job market has always been horrific is that there really are measurable differences in horrificness over time. In MLA fields, the mid 80s and mid 90s were notably worse than the years around 1990 or 2000-2007, for example.

[daniel_von_flanagan]

I did provide an alternative metric, and I've done the research so that I can provide the numbers for my field.

If you mean your statement "One better way to measure how good or bad a year is would be to divide the number of Ph.D.s granted by the number of assistant-level positions" I don't see that this is different from the "applications-per-position" basis I mentioned in my earlier post.  From the 80s to around 2008 this has largely gone down in the fields I monitor (Math, Physics, and Statistics), while the figures from last month's Perspectives that Onion alludes to shows that the situation has been wildly variable for History, starting from bad-market years in the early 70s.

My 'local' metric (observing applications/job in my department) corresponds pretty well with the national figures, and is pretty insensitive to the factors you mention (desirability, wording).  I can't see any way of interpreting a 4-fold drop in the number of applications in other than an easing up of the market. - DvF

[watermarkup]

DvF, I'm in a field closer to history, with variability similar to that history, so that motivates my initial skepticism. In my field, an open-specialty search at a name-brand school in a state with good weather can attract 5 times the total number of Ph.D.s awarded in a year, while the average position gets a tenth as many applications. Most of of the numbers that get tossed around are single incidents--"I can't believe how bad the job market is, 500 people applied for one job at Harvard this year," that sort of thing--when a single incident doesn't reveal much.

Now if you're using an annual average of applications per position for your discipline, then that is, mea culpa, an entirely reasonable way to gauge the relative strength or weakness of a job market over time.

One question: I don't see how the number of applications to a specific position wouldn't be sensitive to seemingly small changes in describing the position, but again, I'm looking at this from an MLA field, where everything-but-the-kitchen sink wish lists are not unknown, and "ability to teach Baroque Faeroese drama preferred" might elicit a much different response rate than "research specialty in Baroque Faeoese drama required." Are the subfields in the disciplines you follow clearly delineated enough so that something similar does not happen to your local searches?

[daniel_von_flanagan]

We nearly always do fully general searches, and the wording we use in ads has hardly changed at all in the past 20 years. - DvF