Doctoral Candidates Anticipate Hard Times: 'This Is a Year of No Jobs'

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March 20—Can Strategically Aligning (or Re-Aligning) Academic Programs Help You With Your Budget Crisis?, featuring SCUPers Mary Doyle of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Karen Schmid of Purdue University. Discussants include former SCUP presidents Marv Peterson, Joan Racki, and Laura Saunders. Learn more or register now.

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Not that the academic job market has been great lately, but now it's looking so much worse. Fewer and fewer openings, and more and more of the ones there are have jumped off the tenure track:

Fulltime faculty jobs have not been easy to come by in recent decades, but this year the new crop of Ph.D. candidates is finding the prospects worse than ever. Public universities are bracing for severe cuts as state legislatures grapple with yawning deficits. At the same time, even the wealthiest private colleges have seen their endowments sink and donations slacken since the financial crisis. So a chill has set in at many higher education institutions, where partial or full-fledge hiring freezes have been imposed.

A survey by the American Historical Association, for example, found that the number of history departments recruiting new professors this year is down 15 percent, while the American Mathematical Society’s largest list of job postings has dropped more than 25 percent from last year.

“This is a year of no jobs,” said Catherine Stimpson, the dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at New York University. Ph.D.s are stacked up, she said, “like planes hovering over La Guardia.”