Thread by @BretDevereaux

So there's been a bit of cross-talk about the shape of the current academic jobs market on this here birdsite today I think a lot of it was very anecdotal and experiential and so a lot of people talked past each other.

I like data, so let's focus on some, with this chart: 1/25

It is a chart of the number of jobs posted to the AHA per year as compared to number of PhDs graduated (from their job report: historians.org/ahajobsreport2…)

I'm focused on history because that was the argument this week, but most humanities look like this; many look worse. 2/25

What we can see pretty clearly is that from 1978 to 2008, the number of job postings and the number of PhDs graduating is fairly well correlated. Economic contractions (e.g. '82-'87 or '02-'04) do cause lower hiring (often on a short delay)... 3/25

But that is followed by bounce-backs ('87-'91 and '04-'08) which make up - or more than make up! - the difference. Presumably in the bad years you would have new PhDs finding themselves 'stuck' on the job market, but they'd be reabsorbed in the good years that followed. 4/25

You can see that in the assumptions that get made by academics who remember these years. I was absolutely still hearing older academics in 2017-2019 assuming that sure their new grads might be stuck adjuncting for a year or two, but that would pass. 5/25

They assumed that because it was true in the job market they remembered.

But that job market is dead. Super dead. Cadaverrific. 6/25

The other comment I've seen is the assumption that, on a year-to-year comparison that the bad years now aren't that much worse than the bad years then or that 2021 isn't meaningfully worse than 2012 was. 7/25

The issue with that is that this is a stocks-and-flows problem. Each year that the number of new PhDs is much higher than the number of jobs, the job market is essentially picking up job-debt, because those PhDs do not go away or poof out of existence. 8/25

Some handful of them, each year, give up and do something else. Of the people I know in that category, very few of them are happy about it. Universities and sometimes departments like to say nice things about alt-ac, but fairly few people in alt-ac WANT to be. 9/25

It's not *none* mind you, some people thrive in alt-ac jobs...but there's a lot of bitterness and broken dreams in alt-ac too, especially since many supposedly alt-ac jobs don't even remotely require a PhD. They're not alt-ac jobs, they're just jobs. 10/25

But of course a lot of a given year's unlucky candidates do not just leave. They get adjunct gigs, or teach high school, or university admin jobs or whatever and then apply again because they want to actually get the job they spent a decade training for. 11/25

There are a ton of scholars on that particular merry-go-round on this birdsite.

That means that each year the job market is bad (blue line below orange line), it is getting worse, because most of the gap from the previous year rolls over into the next. 12/25

So when you are assessing 2019, you don't just want to think in terms of comparing it to another year, you need to be thinking 2019, plus most of the 2018 jobs gap, and the 2017 jobs gap, and the 2016 jobs gap. 13/25

In history, that gap only goes back really to 2008, but in some other humanities disciplines, hiring has been underwater since the 90s. The terrifying thing about the history graph is that for the humanities, history is relatively *better* than most. 14/25

All of that then runs into this year. Obvious there's no data for this year, but signs point to a year probably not meaningfully better than 2019 or 2020. But we know one thing that is likely to be higher: PhDs granted. 15/25

Most departments I have knowledge of either formally or informally did the same thing: they extended all of their PhDs an extra year. Which means both the classes of 2020 and 2021 are going to be on the market this year. Along with a *decade's* worth of job debt. 16/25

Of course everyone thinks they have it hard! We are humans and so we can feel our own hardships but can only observe the hardships of others.

But, my friends, this is why we have data. And the data tells us that, yes indeed the current situation is *different.* 17/25

I understand why it seems like so many academics off of the job market want to believe that current conditions aren't *that* different from what they experienced. It's comforting, it lets them believe that they got their jobs from merit and not luck... 18/25

...that if they were on this job market today, they'd succeed there too. Those kids, they think, just need to stick it out a year or two, like I did! There's comfort there.

But just because something is comforting doesn't make it true. 19/25

Worse yet, that vision provides an excuse not to do anything, to tell one's self that, with a bit of (someone else's) elbow grease, at least the 'worthy' candidates will all find jobs. 20/25

But a system with this much of a mismatch stops being able to detect the best candidates. Given so many candidates and so few hires, departments hire 'for promise' accepting sight-unseen candidates with good pedigrees.

You can see it here: 21/25

It sure seems to me that most departments have at least one disaster hired 'for promise' so this is hardly good for departments either.

Meanwhile good candidates with great CVs languish because they were unlucky in that crucial first year...22/25

...and hiring committees that don't understand what has changed don't give them a second look because they assume that if you've been on the market for 3-4 years you must be bad.

But that's just *normal* now - those candidates are fine! 23/25

Solutions?
1) Jobs-having academics need to abandon the comforting lies for the uncomfortable, data-driven truth. Yes, the job market is different now.
2) Stop 'hiring for promise.' It's a bad strategy that is all about delaying compromises by accepting risk. 24/25

And finally:
3) The market is never coming back. Given that, grad programs need to cut slots, probably by about half. Keeping current numbers is actively perpetuating a system of academic exploitation - and we all know what we think about labor exploiters.

end/25