In writing this edition, we have spoken with many concerned faculty, administrators, and career advisors who advise and provide career services for doctoral students and postdocs, all of whom are engaged in the conversation about career outcomes for doctoral students. While the road to a faculty career is challenging, the steps to get there are not uncharted territory. We hope that by clarifying the process we can reduce some of the anxiety and uncertainty of the academic job search.
Part I
What You Should Know Before You Start
Chapter 1
The Structure of Academic Careers
Now more than ever, getting a doctoral degree presents one with an uncertain return on the investment of time, energy, and thought. Even with the credentials you need to become a tenure-track faculty member, the desired outcome is not guaranteed: you are entering the job market at a time when higher education is subject to intense financial constraints, external and internal assessment, competition, and accelerating technological change. These national trends have significant impact on individual careers. Higher education is now characterized by a consumer-oriented model, with increasing demands placed on institutions by employers, donors, legislators, parents, and students themselves. Institutions of higher education, both nonprofit and for-profit, are also under increased political scrutiny. The pressure to compete for research grants has intensified, and the amount of research required to achieve tenure has increased. One of the surest statements that can be made about the next generation of academic careers is that many of them will be unlike recent or current ones.
Technology has enabled faculty members to work with students inside and outside the classroom and to connect with colleagues and students across the world in a manner that was not possible ten or twenty years ago. There are also more ways for academics to share their work with others, not only in the academy but with a broader audience. Now institutions of higher education overtly seek to build a more diverse and international student body, believing that doing so enriches the intellectual and social experience of all. Many institutions are actively working to bring on board faculty who are diverse in their intellectual outlook as well as in their background.
In spite of these many changes, it is important to understand how academic jobs have traditionally been organized. The system of higher education in the United States is bewildering in its variety and complexity. Unlike many countries, the United States has no national, in the sense of federally funded, universities, though much funding for research, particularly scientific research, comes directly from the federal government. Its major universities, both private and state-funded, house faculties of arts and sciences and major professional schools. There are also a variety of smaller institutions, some that are publicly funded, and many that are private, and that peculiarly American institution, the four-year college. Privately funded institutions are mostly secular. Those funded by religious institutions have a religious influence on campus that varies from nonexistent to omnipresent. Two-year community colleges are an increasingly important segment of higher education. Students, parents, and policy makers look to them to increase access and affordability. Universities run as for-profit businesses have been part of the educational landscape for many years. Students at all these diverse institutions who are U.S. citizens are able to fund their education with federal loans.
Both colleges and universities (or campuses of major universities) may enjoy either regional or national reputations. As a general rule, universities of national reputation place the most emphasis upon research as the criterion of success for faculty members. Teaching is most likely to be emphasized at less prestigious universities and at four-year colleges, although four-year colleges of national reputation also require substantial research of their faculty members. Moreover, institutions of all types are offering online programs, some of which allow students to complete a degree without ever being on campus.
Both student and faculty life are affected by conditions of faculty employment. At some institutions, most faculty are full time. Others rely on many part-time instructors. Faculty and other staff members at some institutions are unionized. Where unions exist, membership may be high across the board or vary widely from school to school and department to department.
The Structure of Academic Positions
Given the variety of institutions, the similarity of their promotional structures is surprising. The structure of academic hiring has been dominated by the tenure system, with a fairly orderly ladder that at most institutions leads from assistant professor to associate professor (with tenure) to full professor. This “tenure-track” route leads to status as a standing member of the faculty with full rights of participation in institutional decision making, and what is close to a lifetime guarantee of a job, barring economic upheaval or conviction for criminal activity. Tenure continues to be scrutinized by state legislatures and boards of trustees, and a few institutions have dismantled their tenure systems. For now, however, achieving it is still the goal of almost everyone who first accepts a faculty position.
Tenure-track positions have been supplanted in many institutions by a variety of positions once conceived of as temporary: instructorships, lectureships, and visiting and research assistant/associate professorships. These positions are often called “contingent” positions. The American Association of University Professors released longitudinal data on the trends in instructional staff employment from 1975 to 2011. In 1975, faculty members with tenure or on the tenure track made up 44.5 percent of instructional staff; in 2011, this number was 23.5 percent. Part-time and full-time non-tenure track faculty made up 57.2 percent of instructional staff in higher education in 2011, up from 35.3 percent in 1975. Graduate student teaching held constant; graduate students represent about 20 percent of instructional staff. (If they are counted as contingent faculty, the percentage of contingent faculty making up instructional faculty rises to 76.4.)
Contingent teaching positions have always existed for a variety of institutional reasons: to cover heavy teaching loads for introductory courses in a department that does not have enough, or any, graduate students to meet the demand; to replace a faculty member who is on sabbatical; to enable individuals able to secure research funds to be associated with a university. In a professional school, such as a school of nursing or a school of architecture, there may be a preponderance of part-time clinical professors or professors of practice. These faculty members are often professionals who supplement their main employment with teaching and provide students with hands-on experience. Some contingent faculty members prefer working part time for other professional or personal reasons. Nevertheless, many, if not most, of those working in contingent positions would prefer to have a tenure-track appointment and its benefits. Because adjunct salaries are lower and typically include few, if any, benefits, these positions are primarily created as institutional attempts to avoid the costs of tenure-track positions. In addition, use of adjuncts affords institutions more flexibility in curriculum planning.
Struggling with government cutbacks in funding for higher education, colleges and universities have also had to deal with the effects of the “uncapping” of a mandatory retirement age. By federal law, institutions cannot require faculty members to retire merely because they have reached a certain age. Many tenured faculty members of traditional retirement age (who also tend to be the highest-salaried members of their departments) are choosing to continue teaching, adding greatly to personnel costs and, by some accounts, providing fewer entry opportunities for new Ph.D.s. Not uncommonly, when a faculty member does retire, his or her expensive tenure-track position is converted by the institution to a non-tenure track position.
Even though contingent positions may be held by the same individual and renewed over a period of several years, they are best thought of by job candidates as temporary, because they are outside the school’s structure of permanent employment. In many cases, holding such a position does not offer an inside track for permanent employment with the department, because if a tenure-track position becomes available a national search will be conducted. Most candidates holding these temporary positions continue to compete for tenure-track