Similarly, the fact that Paige Spiranac has never been awarded a US Open title, despite having done far more to popularize the sport than 99.5% of title winners, is absurd. But in part this is due to the horrendous job market for US Open champions (the number of yearly winners is in the single digits), which is a product of the priorities of the sport, which has chosen to allocate this limited resource on the basis of a different metric.
Teaching and service are not the criteria on the basis of which tenure track hires are made. And if you think `they should be, that's what the students are showing up for' - well, attractiveness of the athletes in question might be what a lot of viewers are tuning in for.
Tenure track hiring is based on research. How good Devereaux is at outreach and popularization is just as irrelevant as cleavage is to chances of winning the US open.
Tenure track is nominally based on research, but all kinds of things from where you got your Ph.D. to how well you come across in an interview to (as already mentioned by several in this thread) whether your Ph.D. is new or stale are all factors. Seven published articles will not necessarily trump six, and in fact might not trump two or three if the 2-3 person has been anointed as promising for whatever reason, valid or invalid.
All the metrics you mention are proxies for research. Its a difficult thing to measure (even more difficult to estimate potential for), so people look at multiple proxies. Having a popular blog, however, is irrelevant. So is being a world of warcraft champion, or excellent tennis player.
I'm sensing a presumption "top people deserve an academia role"/"best off in academia role"/"good for society to have them in academia role".. can you tell me more?
I'm not familiar with the person/didn't read his article, but, been watching alternative media/public intellectual/non-academia research spaces, and there are certainly reasonable alternative models to funding intellectual work, so I'd like folks to clear at least some burden of proof when claiming "talented X no spot in academia wrong/bad".
In military history in particular, I'd imagine a lot of relevant work one can do is "publishing books"/"journalism/public commentary"/"consulting (military orgs)"/"research/consulting/policy analysis work for think tanks". Those sound to me like they don't have much to do with academia and should allow one to earn a living.
What is the differential contribution that can only be done inside academia and that is indeed important and deserves public funding?
Yeah, communicators are seriously undervalued. John McWhorter has sometimes speculated that he was given tenure because of his race, but I want to think that's absurd. In my opinion, he's the single best communicator that the field of linguistics has ever had. Admittedly, for some reason studying linguistics seems to be correlated with being a bad communicator, but he's just plain good, head and shoulders above everyone else. But maybe they didn't care about that, and only saw the color of his skin. **sigh**
Happy to chat about strategies. I see early career adjuncts get taken advantage of to an extreme extent, and it bothers me.
The best advice (not that you asked): try to lock down a TT position (or a position that is explicitly a try-out for a TT position) as soon as possible. The longer you stay in a weird interstitial space, the greater the prejudice is. It really sucks.
It also helps immensely to have an advocate — someone very senior, who is hooked into gossip in your field and who can suggest you put in an application here or there based on what they know about the search going on.
But academia is *so* broken that in most cases my advice would be: do it if it's fun, if you don't need to be saving lots of money, and if you like the lifestyle. But if it's not fun, if you need money, if you don't like the college prof lifestyle... run, quickly. Life goes by fast.
That's really good advice. I've seen friends put in years and years in the adjunct life, and it's not rewarding and there's no long term benefit. If it doesn't work for you in 3 years, think about what the next career will be, because teaching for scraps and maybe a job next semester is no way to live a life in the long run.
He's right. Get an adjunct the year before you expect to have the PhD "in hand". Use that year to apply and at least hopefully get some experience with the interviewing process. If after a couple of years you don't have the TT position, ask yourself if you would be content as an adjunct forever.
Hey thanks! I appreciate it! I am in a bit of a weird situation because I haven’t yet started a PhD: I’m applying this cycle. There was a huge shortfall in adjuncts in my field at a nearby university and I was able to pick up a 2/2with just my terminal master’s. So for now, until I am in a program, I am happy to adjunct (I am also working full time at an unrelated job that actually pays which makes me impossibly busy but not impoverished). As I head farther into the swamp, I’ll keep this advice in hand!
I didn't spend much time in academia but to add on to what others said, I think it can really help to demonstrate high productivity by doing as many publicly visible things in your field as you can. Being part of anything you can volunteer for, producing content as in writing (of any kind - pop sci articles, letters-to-the-editor on scientific subjects, etc) or other media such as being interviewed on podcasts or in documentaries (no matter how small). Lots of documentaries aren't really much more than a few professors, a two man film crew and some stock footage, and it may be easier than one would think to find a local filmmaker (or even a film student), rope in a few colleagues and make a short piece related in some way to your work. Left-field suggestion, maybe, but things of that nature put your face & name out there, even if it's only ever screened at a campus film festival. It makes you seem like "someone" and not just another "applicant."
Basically, try to have your name turn up as many Google results as possible, affiliated with media & organizations that are as "real" as possible. In hiring, they're of course looking at your academic output, but your role as an "ambassador" for your school is important as well - every time "according to Professor Wertion of XYZ University" appears in writing or on screen, that's a plug for the school. They want to know that you won't just be sitting in your office/lab doing what you're supposed to, they want to know that you'll be interacting with the wider world in a way that reflects well on the school.
After 12 years of being on hiring committees (etc) in a range of fields, I can say that we basically don't google applicants. We don't have the time, first of all, and it's not really relevant to the job.
There are lots of unfair aspects of academia (snobbery about PhD institution is probably #1), and lots of things that can hurt, but there is really only one positive thing you can do to help: publish lots of important and interesting research.
(A related strategy is "publish lots of research"... this doesn't really work, however; the effort required to publish five extra silly/trivial papers is not worth the payoff.)
I'm sure it's field-, school-, and committee-dependent, and I'm not saying to try to be some kind of influencer at the expense of research or publication. But there's another good reason to extend your tentacles in this way, which is the possibility of side compensation as an occasional commentator, consultant, analyst, or writer, especially in the event that you don't make whatever cut you were aiming at. Situations differ, but If someone has already been banging their head against a wall for a while, one can't really say that "just keep banging" is very useful advice. Even if it's true, everyone's already heard it.
Yes—this I agree with. If the goal is to have a few years to hang out and build a non-academic career, your advice is really good.
It is definitely the case that it’s a bad strategy for an academic career though. (I know someone who did this strategy… it was a huge success on the metrics of media attention, fame, etc, but they still ended up on the infinite postdoc chain.)
Probably the best advice is sort of Paul Graham like: just do your thing. Whatever it is. Don’t try to fit into what someone else says is the right path, if it clashes with fundamental inclinations.
If you want to do great research, in other words, go for it. Don’t do media/influencer things. If you want to dabble in research but secretly want a consulting gig, do that.
As a prof, I would very much prefer to only get people who truly wanted to do great research, of course!
I'm an academic and I can point out a few factual clarifications:
1. There's R1 (e.g., Ivy+, Stanford, MIT, ...) and not-R1 (typically liberal arts) institutions. Tenure-track professors at R1 institutions are hired to do research and the teaching is incidental. It's flipped at not-R1 institutions. I _believe_ tenure-track professors teaching at R1 institutions is mostly a historical accident that got cemented into every part of the tenure/promotion/grant process so it's basically impossible to change at this point.
2. There's also STEM/not-STEM. As a concrete example, the top-4 CS programs don't hire adjuncts in the way you think about them (e.g., Andrew Ng is adjunct at Stanford but this is just to keep him affiliated with the University). This dynamic is very different in non-STEM.
3. In STEM, the University puts in substantial resources to grow tenure-track faculty (startup packages go from $500k and way up).
4. Poaching does happen a decent amount. You just don't really hear about it much because tenured professors have it very nice and there's no need to complain about the processing.
I'm also happy to share some non-factual thoughts but those are speculative.
Agreed. Lots of R2 are basically just "like R1, but weaker - but not actually weak, with plenty of good people". And of course R1 covers a broad range. We should really be talking about R[0.5,e], say.
Agreed. And the first graph in the post ("Acceptance rate for tenure-track positions by how long it’s been since the candidate has gotten their PhD") is unlikely to generalize to many STEM fields. In biomedical fields, incoming faculty almost always have years of postdoctoral experience. And in those fields, universities take more of a venture-capital approach to hiring: junior faculty are provided with startup funds which will enable the faculty to win grants, from which the university takes a percentage.
In CS, I think more than half of our new hires are finishing their PhDs. (Interestingly, a lot of them choose to defer for a year to do a postdoc.) I'd say the majority of the remainder are postdocs, rounded out by a few people applying for associate or full professor positions.
But postdocs are very different to adjuncts. Postdocs are doing *research* - ie they are getting experience in the part of the job that is actually being hired for.
Yes. This. My god-daughter is in her second year of PhD study in a hot area bio-chem and she's already getting various offers/recruitments for both academic and commercial positions. She's already getting paid as a research assistant just below entry-TT faculty level. That was one reason she chose her school (and it's top 3 in her area). Even as a PhD candidate schools were essentially bidding for her.
$40K plus benefits (as well as free tuition, of course). The entire package is worth at least 6 figures. But if you mean ONLY salary, of course she isn't getting that. But my old MidLevel State U is paying new hires in LAS (I know that college better than the others) seems to be getting new TT profs for around $55K plus decent benefits.
I'm sure that new TT hires at her U may get paid 6 figures, but I doubt if that's the case outside of maybe the Top 50. Maybe even the Top 25.
And full-time adjuncts (there are fewer than 100 with more than 600 part-timers). Full-time teach 4-5 classes/semester but get full benefits, including 10% of salary in their 403b. Part-timers (3 classes or less) get around $3500/class, no benefits. FT adjuncts are basically in three classes, and get from $27K + bennies) to $45K + bennies. Some FT, like me, whose 'skills' are in demand get more. When I retired I was getting just above $70K. Most years I was the highest paid adjunct in the university.
In Computer Science, 40k is par for the course, at least in good programs. (We recently increased stipends to above 40 to stay competitive with our peers.)
And I can't imagine a tenure-track CS professor making under six figures. Most people I know starting recently (last few years) made around 125k over nine months, which you can extrapolate to 11 or 12 months depending on their start-up packages, funding, school policies, and other vagaries. According to the Taulbee survey, in 2021 the 10th percentile of CS professor made 96k over 9 months. The 50th and 75th percentile were 114 and 124.
I can offer another example of the same thing. My friend's daughter got her PhD in a very hot physics field, went immediately into postdoc at another institution, and then landed a tenure-track position at a top public university, getting tenure when still in her 30s. (She's 40 now, so you can timeline this.)
I don't think it's a coincidence that both the examples talked about here are female. Not so much in biological areas, but definitely in physics, women and men exist in very different job markets.
Well at least in the hard sciences there's two job markets:
1. One for men who are white, Asian, Indian, or some other unfashionable racial group, and
2. One for women and fashionable minorities
Universities wish to hire roughly equal numbers of people from the two categories, but 90% of the people entering the market are in the first category. This means that there's effectively two job markets -- a highly competitive one in which only the most brilliant candidates will get a position, and a much less competitive one in which you basically just need to be okay.
Hot Jupiters. I did say it was a hot topic, I just meant that in more than one sense. (It's astrophysics, not physics tout court, but it is a branch of physics.)
If you're still working as an adjunct at 40, most people will think of you as a failure, and this becomes self-fulfilling.
My first thought would be "Why are you still hitting your head against that wall? It's not coming down. Go do something else with your life, because this isn't it."
Of course switching streams at 40+ is more difficult...
Indeed, and I would say the same is true for research scientists. Although there isn't age discrimination in principle in faculty hiring, like you say, hiring committees start to wonder why you haven't already progressed by some point.
My experience is in the STEM space too, in an R1. I see it as a long road to get a tenure-track research position; with lots of off-ramps, but no on-ramps. First you have to go to grad school; then you have to have publications; then you have to do postdoc; then you have to get a tenure-track job. This is a road heading straight in the direction of leading a research team, and to move away from that is to be on a different journey. (Of course there are more granular steps there; with varying levels of prestige for each step to qualify for varyingly prestigious colleges/universities.)
When I hear that someone is an adjunct, I understand that they took an off-ramp; and assume that they know they took an off-ramp. They're no longer competing for the tenure-track positions, because they've moved away from research.
This is perhaps the same as Scott's hypothesis about superstars; a wonderkind isn't going to have the resources (space, equipment, etc) to show their skills if they ever get off this road.
You make it sound like adjuncts are choosing an off-ramp, but I think the claim is that people are forced off the ramp. It's not like you can control if you're chosen for a tenure-track position. You just do your best and if you haven't been chosen in a year or two to the off-ramp with you.
If you don't get a job at Google right out of college and take a job at a less prestigious company, you can reapply at Google 3 years later with no penalty. If you spend 3 years as an adjunct you have to overcome a large amount of prejudice to get a tenure track position.
I would contend that if you don't get a job at Google right out of college and take a job as taxi driver for 3 years, you will indeed have substantial barriers to re-entry. Your mistake is to think that `adjunct' is the same kind of job as `tenure track.' It is not. The kind of experience that an adjunct acquires is as relevant for the tenure track job as working as a taxi driver is for working at Google.
If you were doing a job that actually did provide experience relevant to a tenure track role (e.g. national lab researcher, or industry lab researcher), then there would not be significant barriers to getting hired onto tenure track.
Potential nitpick/clarification on #2: at least according to Devereaux pure math tends to fall on the liberal arts/non-STEM side of the divide here, despite falling under STEM by the literal definition.
Math is complicated in that we typically have postdocs. When we hire, we regularly have a fight between the statisticians who want someone fresh out of PhD and the pure mathematicians who want to see some years of research experience.
(as Humphrey Appleby correctly points out elsewhere in this discussion, adjuncting and other teaching experience is actually detrimental because it's time away from doing research)
Math is, in fact, extremely weird in this respect, because also most math postdocs (at least in the US) aren't really postdocs, in the sense that they typically are not research-only positions paid for by some grant, but rather they are positions where you teach and do research, and the college believes you're paid for your teaching but the department expects you to do research as well.
When I was a postdoc in the US, everybody in the department would call me a "postdoc", although my job title was officially "assistant professor" (listed in the department website as "postdoctoral assistant professor"; the job offer letter was very explicit that this was a temporary 3-year position without possibility of tenure). I had a nontrivial teaching load of 2-2, but was explicitly told upon arrival that, although I had to do the teaching and I should do it well, I also should not forget that I had been selected for the position because of my research, and the expectation was that I should keep doing good research. I don't know if this kind of thing happens in other disciplines, but my understanding is that it would be at least uncommon, whereas in math it seems to be the norm.
This isn't what R1 means. R1 institutions are literally any PhD granting institution that has a high degree of research activity. My undergraduate and PhD are both at R1 institutions that are not Ivy leagues, nor MIT.
Basically on the right track. But it isn't colleges who do the hiring; it's mostly departments. Colleges can veto departmental hiring decisions, but they don't pick the candidates. Departments obviously have slightly different incentives than colleges do (even more prestige-driven, significantly less budget-driven, less financially even very informed or aware).
In particular, departmental hiring committees (especially in the humanities) are often overwhelmed with an excess of good candidates and eager for to narrow the list on any pretext. "If they were so impressive, someone else would have hired them within a year or two of their PhD" is not a very fair heuristic, but it's reportedly widespread and understandable on Bayesian grounds.
Honestly I think the incentives of teh department are even more foreign than that.
Most departments are small insular groups that work closely together a lot of the time and end up serving as default social groups for their members; so someone who is easy to work with, fun to talk to, wouldn't mind having your kids play together, shares your values and goals and vision for the department and it's mission, etc. plays a really big role.
I'm very confused by your not mentioning post-docs (which are the norm in STEM). In effect, these are temporary positions with a moderate teaching load (or perhaps a pretty heavy teaching load, or, if you are lucky, no obligatory teaching load at all). I don't know what data your graph is based on, but it's rare now for people to get tenure-track positions (at research universities) without doing a postdoc at all.
In math/physics/computer science, it is common for a postdoc to have a teaching component - typically 1 course per semester (which is light, though it doesn't necessarily feel that way at that stage!). Even if you are not forced to teach, it's wise to teach a little, not just to make a bit of extra money, but, much more importantly, because you do need to be able to put something on your teaching statement.
There's also the bizarre thing about how some of the more prestigious postdocs get called "Great Founder of our Department Assistant Professorship"... and have a higher-than-average teaching load. Never understood that.
As in, officially, or also in practice? I once had a postdoc with no teaching, but doing a bit of teaching at another university in the same city was seen as expected. (I'm not in physics.)
Also in practice. There would in fact be significant obstructions to postdocs teaching. For example, if they are being paid from federal grants to do research full time (which is almost all postdocs), then grant rules would actually legally prohibit them from spending time teaching, the same way as they would be prohibited from taking a second job as a secretary. This refers to formal, classroom teaching. Mentoring research by graduate students is fine (and happens).
Hate to say this but: strongly disagree that teaching experience matters. If you can get by without it, go for it, particularly in STEM.
I had zero teaching experience at my first TT hire. It was basically assumed that "I was smart enough to teach", and I've never seen a good researcher downrated (even a little) for having zero teaching experience out of a postdoc.
Wish I agreed with you! Yes, my strongest students have got postdocs with little or no teaching - and it's not helping them; I've got feedback from committees where they were not put even on the long list precisely for that reason.
Very interesting. Just so I can help my own students... which field is this? And what were the target jobs where the teaching experience mattered? (R1, R2, SLAC...)
Curious to figure out why our experiences are so different. In my case, it's committees for R1s in physics, cog sci, psych, and econ.
I'd guess that postdocs also play an important role in "track switching" being rare. In my field, most assistant professors get hired right out of grad school, but postdocs, visiting positions, teaching-track, and adjunct jobs are all reasonably common.
If you're not quite where you need to be to get a tenure-track job at a research university, you probably have a good shot at a decent postdoc. Since postdocs have much lower teaching expectations than visiting, teaching-track, and adjunct jobs, they're a better choice for people who want to pursue an ambitious research agenda (though they're also lower-paying and generally shorter). So taking a teaching-track job means either that you weren't offered a postdoc or that you chose to teach instead of doing a postdoc. Both of those things mean that you're probably unlikely to be a very productive researcher, either because you're not as interested in research or because you're not very good at it.
My sense is that this is different in the humanities because there are fewer postdocs and fewer research-focused positions. And I know a number of people who got a tenure-track job after having had multiple visiting professor positions and other temporary, teaching-focused jobs.
Devereaux's original post (which is focused on the job market in the humanities) notes that there are postdocs, but there's some blurring of lines because in the humanities there's positions that look like postdocs but are (fellowships for the most prestigious potential future Einsteins that universities want to keep on hand) and positions that look like postdocs but aren't (stuff that's got a similar job title but is really just a rebranded adjunct position).
It's somewhat the same in physics/astronomy. There is a spectrum of postdoc prestige, from "working for a professor and getting paid from their grant" at the bottom, all the way up to prestigious prize fellowships.
In my experience, your trajectory post-grad school depends on the type of postdoc you get. If you get a prestigious fellowship out of grad school, you're a high flier who might spend 3-5 years on a couple of different postdoc fellowships before landing an R1 TT position. If you just get hired on someone's grant, it's more likely you'll spend longer bouncing between different lower-status postdocs before eventually finding something at an R2, non-TT, etc.
In some of the humanities areas, it takes longer to get a PhD (and involves writing a dissertation with a 4-digit number of pages) but it's fairly common I think to get a tenure-track position right out of the PhD program without going through the postdoc step. In other areas like math (my subject), almost everyone has to go through at least 1-2 postdoc positions first (and if you're me, spend most of a decade at postdoc appointments), with some exceptions that usually appear to be mostly teaching-focused with little or no research.
Almost every postdoc in math requires teaching, typically quite a lot of teaching, with exceptions only for those perceived to be research superstars. My impression is that there's slightly less demand for teaching even from non-math STEM disciplines, though.
There's even an exception to the exceptions - some of the top postdocs are the named "research assistant professorships" at Harvard/MIT/Princeton/Berkeley/Yale/etc., which do involve teaching (typically two semester-long undergraduate courses and one graduate course - teaching a graduate course at that stage is a privilege but also rather time consuming, unless you make it extremely specialized in what you know backwards and forwards already).
Postdocs with no teaching are a little bit less rare outside the US, though.
As for poaching, my impression is that it does happen a moderate amount, but usually only when the professor in question is upgrading to a more prestigious institution or wanted to move anyway. It is also common for professors to get an offer from an outside institution and then ask their current institution to match it, which they often will.
Many years ago I saw a prof try that with the Dept chair. She just looked at him (and he was pretty good in his area), and said, "Think they need two of us?" He stayed. And actually became Chair a few years after that.
Maybe I’m slow on the uptake, but why did he stay? It seems like the chair was admitting that the current dept was underpaying him and would continue to underpay him, therefore he decided not to move on? Confusing.
I don't know, but I'm guessing he was either faking the offer or faking the amount. I do know the story is accurate because it happened after I left and the Chair in question had become a friend and told me. In confidence, of course, but hat was over 25 years ago, and at least one of them is dead.
The Chair just knew the Dean would never approve the amount he was asking for. She advised him to take the job, BTW.
I would assume that after discussion with the family the conclusion was that the quality-of-life benefit of the raise is not guaranteed to be worth the hassle of moving to another (probably distant) city.
Adjuncts surprisingly shooting up several years into their career is a rare thing, not least because their teaching schedule (6+ courses a year not unusual) leaves them little time for serious research. (Of course, in lab-heavy fields, they face even stronger headwinds.) I think that's the main source of the vicious cycle you're talking about. Journal editors, AFAIK, don't usually gatekeep much; a non-famous tenured professor and an adjunct with an .edu address have about the same chances of getting their paper in all else being equal. (Really big names sometimes get the "even if it is unreadable, there must be wisdom in it" treatment.)
1. lots of people go on the tenure-track job market the year they get their PhD, so you get a big burst. Then are people who delay this for a year or two or three — it's a pain to put together a TT application, but postdocs and one-off teaching jobs are often offered with just a cover letter. So you have two distributions; a delta function at "same year", and then an exponential decay over the subsequent years — this is marking the time at which the applicant finally makes a first TT application.
Notice that this explains away the apparent "bias against experience", simply by virtue of the fact that people choose to go on the market at different points.
2. People who are out of the market longer are seen to have a hidden variable (not being as good) that is serving as a signal.
For TT people, in general, they do not move from university to university very much; the standard thing is get a good job when you start, and then negotiate when you are up for tenure by getting outside offers. It's rare to go on the market, and generally indicates someone who is at a low-ranked institution who wants to move up; those applications are less likely to be successful, since being at the low-ranked institution is itself a signal.
More generally, people would rather take someone who looks like Harvard would hire, than someone who (even if they look like someone Harvard would hire) definitely Harvard didn't actually in the end hire.
As to the question why do people hire from outside when they do take people with experience: my guess is that academia is ridiculous and snobby, and it's very hard to get someone to see an adjunct as a TT. They're excluded (for example) from certain meetings and decision-making, and have less ability to negotiate for what they need, and people use that as a signal of actual quality. But it's much easier to say ha, Berlin totally doesn't realize that their guy is super good, we can get him, let's do it.
An inside hire does occasionally happen (my institution is smart, and does this — it's a great way to test the waters with someone), but it's also quite clearly flagged as the plan ahead of time (we think this person is good, hire them as a VAP, but there's a job coming soon...)
On the "bias against experience" question, my first thought was that the seeming paradox is due to getting cause and effect backwards: rather than experience (as an adjunct) making you less hirable (as tenure-track), what we're seeing may instead by a that being less hirable (as tenure-track) leads to getting more experience (as an adjunct). Even if whether or not you're seen as a good candidate for a tenure track position is completely independent of adjunct experience, you could still see a graph like that because each year of experience sees more of the desirable candidates actually get hired for tenure-track, while most of those who remain adjuncts are those who are seen as less desirable.
One intuition pump for this is minor-league baseball players. I can't find stats with a quick googling, but I'm pretty confident that a similar curve obtains: the most talented prospects make it to the majors fairly quickly, while the more marginal prospects linger in the minors for longer, so past a certain point (roughly the average time for a highly talented player to develop the skills needed to be ready for the majors), each additional year in the minors predicts a lower rate of making the majors the following year.
A similar phenomenon happens in the non-FAANG computer programming world. Junior devs get hired at something like $60-$80k, then within about two years are worth double that. But the company that hired them will never promote that dev to a $140k salary because it would upset the apple cart of all the devs making $120k wondering why they don't get a 100% raise in two years, or anything close.
So the junior dev has to go elsewhere for that first big pay bump. Meanwhile the company hires an ex-junior dev to replace them, and happily pays them $140k. But no one leap-frogged anyone or got an out of place raise, so the apple cart remains placid.
I'm confused by your first paragraph - why *don't* the other devs get a 100% raise after two years? Is the claim that some devs are good and get the 100% raise, and others are mediocre and don't?
Because the company isn't going to pay $240k unless you're in upper management. Pay raises are based on time served + performance with some kind of natural upper limit. The raises get smaller %-wise as you approach that upper limit.
FAANG and FAANG-ish companies are a better example of paying principal devs what they're actually worth. Although from my casual observations, they also overpay/overhire.
I would guess that frictions are high enough (looking for jobs requires enough initiative and time), and information asymmetric enough (many people are not particularly plugged-in to industry networks) that companies can often extract more value by giving nominal raises and simply hoping that their employees don't notice.
Another factor is that if you realized this too late, already got your first job at your first-choice company, and enjoyed it, then your first job hop takes you by definition to a less desirable company.
Junior devs get 60-80, non-junior devs get 120-160.
After 2 years a junior becomes a non-junior. Someone hired as a non-junior doesn't get a big pay bump after 2 years because they're already on the non-junior payscale.
The problem is that because they don't have proper explicit ranks and job titles, they can't make it clear that they have just promoted someone from junior to non-junior and as a result people complain "why does he get 100% pay raise and I don't, even though I'm as good/better programmer than him?" and the answer "because he's just been promoted to the same grade as you and he's still being paid less than you are" doesn't work if you don't have a coherent grade structure.
That is a very interesting question to which I've never really got an answer beyond the fact that the lowest grade is "doesn't have any direct reports" - ie all grades are based on management responsibility.
“ Why don't they have a coherent grade structure?”
My non-FAANG employer has technical ‘ranks’ of T21-T26.
Engineers tend to get yearly raises within a pay grade, a larger raise when jumping pay grades, and the best ones also receive annual bonus packages (eg, RSUs).
Information asymmetry benefits the employers. The employer knows know much all his employees are paid, and two employers can agree to mutually share their information over a glass of wine.
On the other hand, many employees have no idea how much their colleagues make, what would it take for them to make more in given company, and how much other companies pay for the same job. (Even if you try to figure out on internet how much someone in your position would be paid in a different company, different companies use the same words for quite different positions.) If they just have a vague idea that working harder will be rewarded in future in some unspecified way... that seems quite convenient for the employers. It is difficult to negotiate when you don't have the data.
(There is a similar mechanism in other markets, too. For example, similar food is packaged in different sizes and shapes, to make it more difficult to compare the costs. This benefits the producers, and confuses the consumers.)
Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination -- as an employer, in a hypothetical ideal case, you want to pay each of your employees the minimum salary that will make them do the adequate job and not quit, not a cent more. If one guy is willing to work for N, and another is willing to do the same job for N/2, and both options are okay for you, you want to pay the former N and pay the latter N/2. A transparent salary structure would make the former guy quit (if less than N) or the latter ask for a raise (if N or more).
Basically junior devs make 60-80 non-junior 120-160 is true.
But let me try to explain the dynamic differently.
You hire 10 jr devs for 60k. They now have 2 years of experience so they could get 120k. You have two options. Pay all of them the market rate of 120k or pay them 80k and lose 2 jr devs. From a cost perspective it makes sense to do the latter which creates a huge incentive for jr devs to switch jobs, but many don't because they aren't familiar with the market, like their jobs, it's a pain the butt, etc...
This may depend on country and maybe I don't understand it, but this is my best guess:
There is an important difference between junior and senior programmers. The former can work on school-sized projects alone (100 - 10K lines of code written over a few days or weeks); the latter can work on industry-sized projects in a team (10K - 1M lines of code written over a few months or years). The difference is that the structure of the larger program doesn't fit in your working memory, so you either follow some system or the project collapses under its own weight: you don't remember what you put where and how you were supposed to use it; or you change your mind later, but you can't change the code accordingly because it is too large and everything is connected to everything. Plus there is the entire art of working in a team: communicating clearly, writing documentation, using source control, not writing idiosyncratic code that others wouldn't understand, following the group standards. People usually learn this in 1-3 years of working in a team. You want to have your juniors supervised by a senior, otherwise they will quickly write a code so complicated that they can't maintain or extend it anymore.
In my experience, the salaries for programmers are rather flat, except for two quite different numbers for juniors and seniors (almost 1:2). So you probably get a huge salary boost when you change your job for the first or the second time, i.e. the first time you interview as a senior programmer; and from then on it is a relatively slow crawl.
You salary greatly depends on: the country you live in, the city you live in, the company you work at, your negotiation skills. Your salary does *not* depend on: your programming skills (except insofar they may be insufficient to get the job). Or rather, the relation between your programming skills and salary is like: if you get 3x more productive, you could get a 20% salary raise; if you get 10x more productive, you could get a 50% raise, if you are lucky.
(And I am not saying this from a position "I am oh so great but underpaid". It's the opposite: I am quite mediocre; and I know people who are 10x as productive as me, and they get paid about as much as I do. That gives me a sad perspective on how much the market would reward me for further improving my skills. The skills that the market actually rewards are: networking, joining the latest bubble such as cryptocurrencies or machine learning, starting your own company.)
Okay, but *why* is this so? Just guessing:
* The chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Suppose you have Einstein-level programmers, but your sales department sucks. They develop a product that would replace Excel+Google+ChatGPT, but you fail to sell it. Obviously, you do not have funds to pay them the astronomical salaries they would hypothetically deserve. The better your programmers are, the more likely the actual bottleneck is something else; having better programmers does not improve the situation much.
In case of corruption, the bottleneck is how much money your government contacts can let you steal. For example, you get a €100M grant from EU to develop a project for government. The actual costs of development are €1M, you make a huge donation to the political party that gave you the contract, and put the rest in your pocket. As long as you make the product on time and it works, it's not like you could make more money by making it faster or better.
Or if you make a product for internal use in a corporation: If it is not sold outside the company, then the IT department is treated as a "cost center". Again, if the product is made on time and works reasonably well, there is no benefit in making it better (the managers who decide your budget are usually not the ones who actually use the program anyway).
* Programming is a teamwork, it is difficult to evaluate individual contributions. Especially if the people doing the evaluation are not programmers themselves. Various interventions of management can slow down the team productivity. (In one company, my productivity skyrocketed when the company forgot to assign me a manager for one month. I completed a project they expected would take three months. They gave me a bonus, and quickly fixed the mistake by assigning me a manager. My productivity returned to normal. A similar thing happened in different companies, too.)
* Many programmers are on the autistic spectrum. I suspect that many companies are trying to hit the jackpot by hiring a future genius who doesn't understand the value of money and/or sucks at negotiation, hoping that he will remain working at the same company for the same salary maybe adjusted for inflation (i.e. way below the market rate for his new skills). I knew a few people who were in my opinion leaving a lot of money on the table.
* The biggest employers probably have a cartel agreement on maximum salaries, which may be technically illegal, but you'd have to prove it first.
I don't know anything about coding, but this phenomenon exists in other sectors too - a bit of job swapping is often very helpful for getting promotions and salary increases in short time frames.
E.g. my wife is an accountant and managed to climb the ladder from part-time admin to CFO over the course the course of 3 years. Some of that was her being very good at her work, some of it was fortunate circumstances (i.e. a tight labour market), but some of it was shrewdness - she changed employers twice in that period (and almost did a third time, but got offered a big promotion to stay), when she sensed that her market value had grown substantially above what her current job was paying.
I think it's an entirely non rational psychological effect, the "prophet is not honoured in his home town" phenomenon. You hired this person as X, it's only been a year, you keep mentally categorising them as X. You don't recognise the way that their capabilities have grown, and you kind of assume you don't need to compete for the person you already have.
This is interesting to me because this is often how the nursing profession works also. When I was hired as a new grad RN, I made approx $30/hour (iirc). After I put in 2 years at this hospital, a former classmate was hired onto our team after working for two years elsewhere (an equivalent hospital in terms of prestige etc). She got hired on at $38/hr while I was making $31/hr. And this is a common scenario in nursing, in my experience. You have to leave your first job and get hired in somewhere else in order to get the pay bump that the market clearly deems warranted. But to get that same pay bump after years at the same hospital? Impossible. To be fair, this was mostly preCOVID/intraCOVID days. Ive heard from colleagues that this is possibly changing and hospitals are more aggressively raising nurses salary to improve retention (as thousands of RNs left their jobs during COVID for more lucrative work as travel nurses). And yes during COVID, I once worked alongside a former coworker who had quit and then been rehired as a travel nurse into the exact same position at more than double her previous pay. I left to go back to school shortly thereafter and that was one of the reasons.
Maybe your hospital is thinking, “Nurse Alice, by potentially taking a job with us, is demonstrating she’s willing to switch employers and cities in pursuit of higher pay. If we want to hire her, we’re clearly competing against many other employers and need to offer her higher wages. Nurse Bob, by looking for higher pay with us, is signaling he’s not willing to switch employers or cities, so we can pay him less because we face less competition for Bob.”
Haha, that might have been the case! Again, it seems that this strategy was poorly considered or, at least, had a limited shelf-life for being a good strategy, as evidenced by the mass exodus of RN's from lower-paying jobs to higher-paying jobs during COVID. I think the additional stress and frustration of COVID flipped a lot of RN's calculations from "I guess the familiarity of this current job is worth not leaving to make more money" to "fuck this place, for this level of misery I'd like to paid substantially more." Haha, or something to that effect?
I can't find a good link now, but there are many sayings of type "if you never [had a certain type of problem], you are [optimizing for avoiding the problem] too much." The idea is that perhaps having the problem once in a while is ultimately cheaper than the repeating cost of avoiding it at a too wide margin. If you never cross the line, you are probably too far behind the line.
(If you never missed the train, you are spending too much time waiting at the stations. If you never lost in a competition, you are competing in the wrong league. If you are the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room. If you successfully complete all your projects, you are choosing too easy projects. Etc.)
By the same logic, if you never had a mass exodus of underpaid employees (like, not even once in a century), you are probably paying them too much (speaking as a heartless cost-optimizer).
That makes sense! Thanks for the helpful framing. And yes, I think this shift in nursing sounds like what you've laid out: an unsurprising result of larger cost-optimizing motivations. However, even with my limited understanding of these kinds of trade-offs, I assume that in this case hospitals eventually determined this event did NOT represent a helpful facet of cost-optimization. Most hospitals suddenly found themselves paying double for a travel RN when all it would have taken to keep the original nurse at the job would have been a few dollars an hour pay increase (and hospitals adjusted hourly pay accordingly in order to improve retention, though this process took a long time to work because travel jobs continued to be widely available and extremely high-paying). I guess I wonder how a truly shrewd and nimble industry might have handled the situation differently? Or maybe not and this is exactly how the process should go? Or maybe COVID was just too anomalous to handle? I have no idea. Thanks again!
> I guess I wonder how a truly shrewd and nimble industry might have handled the situation differently? Or maybe not and this is exactly how the process should go?
Those are really great questions! Or at least I've been nerd sniped by them.
I think one of the costly prerequisites of a "truly shrewd and nimble industry" is that all of the participants have to be "truly shrewd and nimble". I think that _has_ to look like 'nurses being willing to switch employers' but, unfortunately, that runs into the same problem that everyone else (potentially) has, namely that switching employers can and often does have substantial transaction costs, e.g. job search, interviewing, moving, buying/selling homes, losing friends, changing kid's schools, etc.. Decreasing those costs is hard; somewhat impossible too. One advantage of living in a (big) city is kinda/actually being able to switch employers.
Also, one advantage of sticky nominal salaries/wages is that your pay doesn't typically decrease even if market rates do.
This is really interesting as a phenomenon, and there must be a lot written about it in the economics literature.
If someone's salary rises x2 after two years, the people there for four years will wonder why their trajectory appears to be "flattening out".
This has to introduce all sorts of inefficiencies into the market; when there are inefficiencies, there is usually someone benefitting. ("Where there's muck, there's brass") I wonder who it is?
(Presumably, it's the companies who have figured out a way to promote from within without this problem — e.g., by creating a confusing diversity of roles, hiding salary information in some fashion through benefits, or by having such a large company that people don't notice because the person is transferred to another unit.)
This is how the US corporate world works in general. Big companies tend to have strict rules about how much of a raise an employee can get each year. However, there can be long-term benefits to keeping your head down for years in the same spot. The COO of a Fortune 100 company might be someone who spent a decade as an engineer, a decade as a middle-manager and a decade as salesman. (Tho perhaps that is less true today, I don't know.)
Academia is filled with mediocrity & a lack of imagination
PhDs that are above average get quickly snapped up in tenure track while others have to cycle around various adjunct positions . Experience can only help so much if your initial base itself is low
I think academia is full of brilliant people, forced into unimaginative work by a set of incentives that reward unimaginative work.
You can't afford to take risks in academia, better to keep publishing a steady stream of papers on low-risk addenda to your existing work. I know people who have made entire careers out of redoing the same research over and over again with slight variations.
It goes at all levels too! Can you risk not writing the usual absurdly bogus claims about the possible applications in your paper that is 100% theoretical? Painful to see that a suggestion from a senior colleague (who is very pure-theory no-applied-experience) is both quite wrong in terms of reality and a good idea in terms of publishing.
It's definitely full of the process of mediocrity, even if many of even the senior people involved do try to preserve imagination — giving it a very tight time budget on this nowadays, though.
What gets measured gets done, and a common thread seems to be that having a term paper as your primary work product is counterproductive.
What else should they be judged by ? At Microsoft Research India, accolades are given based on research being spun out into an organization , like with CGNet Swara, Digital Green, Everwell Health (99 dots), Karya , etc
This seems like a harsh version of the parsimonious explanation, that a minority of academics add noticeable value over replacement and get special deals. Everyone else is basically a commodity academic, it’s fairly obvious who’s whom and experience/age doesn’t add anything.
Everything is like this (lawyers, plumbers, instant coffee): there’s a chunk of the market that competes on quality, and the bulk of the market competes on price.
Alternatively, if academics are the ones doing the hiring, it’s the difference between people you want to admit as peers and continue your institutional legacy (take into the partnership) and people you want to pay to do stuff for you. This predicts the changing universities side of it a little better - it’s much like how ex-rankers being commissioned in the army would never be commissioned in the same regiment they were enlisted in as it’d make command awkward and blur the officer-enlisted distinction.
In law, broadly yes (with non-zero, but similar or lower movement out than is seen in academia, albeit subject to massive variation by country). No idea about anything else.
Very interesting, in India I have seen the lawyers who compete on price standing outside courtrooms haggling for customers. While the ones competing on quality have their own office.
Very similar to academia in that respect I suppose
I've found the average consultant, banker, journalist, lawyer, chartered accountant, product manager/designer, etc to be of a higher cut than the average academic
Are you grading on a fair comparison though? A competent accountant doesn't fuck anything up, and performs a quasi-mechanistic function well, whilst a brilliant accountant turns your $500,000 tax bill into the government owing you money. A competent academic produces technically sound research that no-one outside and few people in their field will ever much care about, whilst a brilliant academic revolutionises mankind's understanding of the universe. If we expected brilliance from accountants, they'd mostly seem mediocre, and if we expected competence from academics we'd mostly find it.
Ok, for academia there are some fields where no-one knows what they're doing (social psychology a decade or so ago), which is worrying but probably more of an institutional rot than an individual one. There are also the "studies" fields, but even there you can just compare them to a competent versus extraordinary homeopath/shaman/activist etc.
"Those who can't do, teach" seems to be what Devansh Mehta is saying. A brilliant researcher clearly can revolutionize our understanding of the universe. But what does a "brilliant teacher" do? They won't get the credit, but they bring their students to higher levels, possibly inspiring them to become brilliant themselves. Stephen Hawking was a brilliant scientist in his own right, but did Dennis Sciama make him better?
My own accountant I definitely rate as mediocre at best. He does my taxes, which include taxes for a small business, but he certainly doesn't save me money, and makes decisions to avoid conflict, rather than to benefit me, such as applying a refund to future taxes, rather than having the IRS issue a check.
Indeed, we have all had those brilliant teachers in our life who revolutionized our personal understanding of the universe, even if they didn't have the aptitude for publishing.
I'm not sure tenure is appropriate for those teachers. Having a parallel track, like companies with a management & technical advancement route, seems a better way to go.
That's a great point, we do hold academics to a higher standard than other professions, including the nonprofit world. If you aren't able to meet those high standards, then you're left at the bottom (unlike say being a plumber where even being average is enough).
As should probably be the case, since tenure means you can't be fired. You wouldn't want to just go about giving that to anyone
Some things you need to include in your investigation:
1) In reality, a lot of the teaching is done by graduate students. Even when it is not explicitly, it is very common that professors will have a teaching assistant that will do most of the menial work of teaching (grading, conducting discussion sessions, etc.).
2) Connected with the first point: in high prestige institutions, they usually hire for the research potential (which includes ability to attract grants, which is arguably more important than how promising it is), with teaching as a not particularly close third place (second is DEI nowadays). Adjuncts and post-docs are never hired back because they are expected to be looking for a tenure-track anyway.
3) You are correct in assuming a career gets shut down if you are denied tenure. It is very rare one can recover from that, usually involves some level of nastiness that happened for tenure to be denied in the first place, something other institutions will look over. But in most cases it is an indication of lack of impact research-wise. And when it happens, why hire someone who is also tenured (thus, more expensive) or already flamed out elsewhere when you can hire a new student? It is similar to sports, you don't run it back with veterans when you failed, you draft the potential next big thing because it is cheaper and more likely to make an impact.
4) Which leads to the final point. There is a lot more graduate students than there are jobs. Like, by a mile. A majority might never even try (myself included). So you don't need to go for experienced teachers for adjunct jobs that are temporary. There are plenty of people jumping from a one-year appointment to another for a few years until they give up and go work somewhere else. There is no short supply at any point. And when people have no experience, you can pay them less.
Other countries tend to have it worse than the US, which is why you'll see a lot more Brits teaching at American universities than Americans teaching in British ones. Salaries in Britain are dismal (despite all the good universities being in very expensive towns), and from what I've heard even worse on the Continent.
A junior professor (W1) in Germany makes about €4500 a month. Stick around for long enough to become a full professor (W3) and you can make a whopping (drumroll please) €7500 a month.
Oxbridge is a tier on its own, but after that it varies a lot by subject: Imperial for physics or engineering, Manchester for CS, St Andrews and Durham for history, etc, etc.
UCL/KCL/LSE/Imperial (the top-tier London institutions) are all very highly rated for some subjects, and very average for others, the same as the other top universities (the Russell Group, which is 24 universities). While some are in very expensive places to live (Oxford, Cambridge, five in London, York, Edinburgh, Bristol, etc), others are much cheaper (Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds, Glasgow, Cardiff, Belfast, Warwick, Newcastle, etc). It depends a lot on your department - a university that's highly rated in one thing may be average in another, even if you'd think they are closely related departments.
Strongly disagree about London; the THES rankings puts ICL third in the UK (and tenth in the world!). UCL is fourth, KCL sixth and LSE eighth. The top two are of course Oxford and Cambridge, which are not as expensive as London but still way up there.
Fifth is Edinburgh which I understand is not that expensive, then after LSE we've got Manchester, Bristol, Glasgow, Warwick, Birmingham... so I take back my assertion that all the _good_ universities are in expensive places but I'll say all the _top_ universities (ie seven out of the top eight) are in expensive places.
I don't know about CS in particular. It seems to me that CS is an odd duck, the top universities for CS these days are the ones that invested in their CS departments back in the 80s and 90s, and a lot of the super high prestige universities missed that particular boat (pish posh, we're not a technical college, we're a university!)
Professors in Germany are civil servants. The salary of civil servants is lower because they pay 0 pension contributions, their pensions are entirely paid by the state. And as you're virtually guaranteed employment for life, mortgages will be offered at very reasonable rates. And there's a range of extra pay schemes, from performance bonuses to allowances for spouse and kids.
Now judges in Germany, those are really underpaid.
One advantage to only hiring outside of your own institution is that it enables you to select for ideological purity more easily. And academia is extremely ideological. If you make it possible for local academics to be hired for tenure, and a promising one is passed over, it leads to questions about why this person wasn’t picked. In many cases that may be because the academic wasn’t ideologically pure enough. If you make it the default to hire from other schools, then this doesn’t happen, as you can merely dismiss the non-ideological fits at other schools without needing to explain yourself, and only select the ones that do fit ideologically. Anonymity neuters outrage.
Except this seems to be the opposite of the explanation. In places like Italy, where academia puts a very strong value on conformity, most hiring is done in-house. But in the United States, where academia selects for heterodoxy, you get more outside hiring.
Those are not the most important heterodoxies one should look for in an academic department (which does not imply that orthodoxy in politics or religion is not a problem in itself). Methodological and thematic diversity is more important, particularly if your program also wants to have graduate students and have a good placement record.
In the United States graduate programs tend to be a lot more varied internally in their research approaches than in other countries. There are some niches and some preferences, but overall it is very different.
You really think that an academic with a diverse research approach, but happens to be a vocally religious republican, is seen as an attractive candidate? I think you are forgetting the fact that academics are not rational super agents, they’re just people - and often ones with very little real world experience dealing with others that think unlike them.
That seems uncharitable. The left has a bunch of beliefs that defy biology. For example:
1. There are 50+ genders.
2. Intelligence is entirely a function of nurture, and nature (such as genetics) plays no role.
3. People who are gay are born that way (i.e. it is genetic). Anyone can choose to be trans at any time (sex is not genetic).
None of these beliefs would disqualify a person from being a biology professor. They are all substantially more common, and more anti-biology, than any republican-coded example belief you gave.
It seems far more likely that academics simply discriminate against the red tribe.
That seems like a strawman for what's really going on. Do you really think that there are otherwise-qualified research biologists who are actual creationists? You're reducing 'right-wing' to an offensive stereotype.
I said nothing of the sorts. My point is that even if the professors in the programs are all democrats, and they often are indeed, their research is different, their methodological approaches are different, etc., in relative terms to other countries. And when Kenny and me say that "academia selects for heterodoxy" we are talking about research, not about political affiliation, religious preferences, or whatever else.
I'd still push back there. From what I have seen and experienced first hand, most US departments select for conformity. You don't get easily hired into a climate science department if you are a luke-warmer, all else being equal, for example. Most faculty judging you are looking for people with whom they agree and might want to coauthor papers with. There is a strong bias against people they see as "doing science wrong". In part for obvious reasons, but also simply because it is hard to respect people with whom you disagree on important points. This is why most schools' departments have a strong flavor, a brand of research they do.
In a world where 10% (or more given Gen Z and younger trends) of students going to your college will be LGBTQ, why would the university hire someone who will be inherently biased against them and create conflict/bad publicity/etc?
In a world where 50% of people are conservative, why should the university hire people who will be inherently biased against them? If you say "there are no conservatives in college, problem solved"--well, the same exclusionary logic can equally apply to LGBT.
I guess some departments consider themselve heterodox because they have a Marxist and an Anarchist. It's like the old joke "we have both kinds of music - country and western".
For what it’s worth, my personal mental impression is that this IS happening in other jobs. At least, the ones that also confer a lot of white collar status.
Anecdotally, I’ve heard people say a similar thing about lawyers (many more law firms hiring people as paralegals who they would have hired as lawyers; far fewer people being offered partner than in the past).
I don’t know how it is in medicine, but it certainly seems like, whenever I have a medical complaint, I can take my pick of a 100 RNs or PAs, but man, finding an actual MD with an opening anytime soon seems REALLY tough.
Here’s an interesting aside - writers and bit part actors are currently complaining as much about the job market as anyone. Supposedly, mega-star salary stays the same, but the people on the lower rungs - who in past times would have had a stable mid-paying tv writer job, or consistent living as a recurring guest star on a smaller sitcom - claim it’s becoming financially untenable to exist in these smaller jobs in huge industries.
Two immediate thoughts here: white collar jobs have prestige that people might be more willing to compete for.
In my experience, applicants to this jobs also are more likely to have wealthier parents who can help pay their way if they end up as adjuncts. Part of me wonders if plumbing would be able to get away with milking the “apprenticeship” period way more if they could get away with it. If the apprentices were more likely to be able to pay their own way for the first couple years, would salaries show the same pattern?
In other words: every industry WANTS to do this, most industries are currently doing this, but it’s manifesting extra hard in bit-part, adjunct-style jobs with high supply, high prestige, and an applicant pool that can actually afford to get paid barely-starvation wages. At least, now moreso than in the past.
The medical comparison sort of breaks down because no amount of experience turns an RN (I assume you maybe meant NP?) or PA into an MD (tl;dr they're all distinctly separate degrees). NPs and PAs are more common in family practice partly because that's one of the natural endpoints for those career paths whereas MDs have a lot more variety in options but also MDs are typically the center of a practice and they farm out most of their work to subordinate NP/PA positions (and thus they tend to have the luxury to only see as many patients as they want).
There's also an intentional bottleneck for MDs and DOs, in the form of medicare-funded residencies. Back in the 90s, a lot of health care policy analysts were worried that there were going to be too many trained doctors, which was somehow going to drive up health care prices, so they convinced Congress in 1997 to freeze the number of residency slots. That freeze is still mostly in effect.
It looks like there are a couple fronts of progress on this. One is that although the large majority of residency slots (about 85%) are funded through Medicare, there's an increasing number being funded by state governments and by private entities (mostly a mix of insurance companies and for-profit hospitals, I think), especially in the last several years. The other is that Congress very slightly increased the number of slots in 2021 and has considered but not yet acted on several recent proposals for much larger increases.
The rise of NPs and PAs is largely a side-effect of this, since mid-level practitioners have different residency systems that are funded separately and aren't subject the the MD/DO cap.
The law and acting analogies are interesting and suggest an overall pattern. This phenomenon happens in fields where there is a huge variation in quality/skill. Superstars are quickly identified and snapped up, pretty talented people may take a few years to get noticed and everyone else mires away in low level roles.
As an academic, I believe it is mostly the case of the superstar theory. There appears to be an extreme Pareto principle / power law at play, where the best researchers are monumentally more impactful than their only slightly less talented peers. Partly this is because of funding and publication dynamics, where a successful researcher gets exponentially more money/opportunities to continue being successful (see also Lotka's law on publication count). Given this, it makes sense to take a shot at getting the next big thing, more than having a wide pool of moderately successful mid-career researchers.
Colleges (at least R-1 in STEM fields, see diddly's comment) do not hire all low-commitment adjuncts as you suggest because the startup packages are substantial and they invest a lot in making sure new hires can be successful. But there is a similar process in the usually 7-year tenure review: professors are given 7 years to "prove" their research output before either being given permanent tenure or being fired. It tends to be a very stressful 7 years in a young faculty's career. So in some way there is a bit of a "free trial" for even tenure-track faculty that serves the same purpose as an adjunct pool would.
One reason for this is that the vast majority of research that is cranked out is in the form of “write only” papers — papers that will never be read by anyone. I read a stat a while back that in many fields, both the mode and the median number of non-self-citations was *zero*. Which makes total sense to me. The vast majority of “research” is being created because that is what universities expect, not because it is genuinely useful to the world. The “superstars” produce the rare papers that have genuine influence.
Maybe every academic is faking their data, you want to hire someone who is happy within the first year to start faking data because someone who is reluctant is dangerous.
And you want people to move around because otherwise fellow adjuncts will notice their not very brilliant has suddenly made great discoveries and the simplest explanation is fraud.
Probably overly cynical but I think it ties into a world where only 17% of authors provide data when it is requested.
If there were data faking going on in substantial amounts, it would have to start as a grad student, since that’s who is doing most of the data gathering and writing. At least, in the fields that are very data heavy.
I think that even if you haven’t worked with data yourself, you should see it as more plausible that people don’t provide data when requested because providing data is awkward and inconvenient and sometimes embarrassing for any of a million reasons that aren’t “faking” (more like, “this is the batch we deleted because one of the grad students spilled beer on it”).
This seems to assume that most data is not being processed through a computer at some point before publication. Every researcher should have data files on a hard drive somewhere, and they should be holding onto it. That they wouldn't have made digital copies is exceedingly unlikely, and that they are so sloppy with their data files that they can't reliably find the right one after publication is... well rather damning in itself.
"As an Editor-in-Chief of Molecular Brain, I have handled 180 manuscripts since early 2017 and have made 41 editorial decisions categorized as “Revise before review,” requesting that the authors provide raw data. Surprisingly, among those 41 manuscripts, 21 were withdrawn without providing raw data, indicating that requiring raw data drove away more than half of the manuscripts. I rejected 19 out of the remaining 20 manuscripts because of insufficient raw data. Thus, more than 97% of the 41 manuscripts did not present the raw data supporting their results when requested by an editor, suggesting a possibility that the raw data did not exist from the beginning, at least in some portions of these cases"
"the anaesthetist John Carlisle analysed 526 trials submitted to Anaesthesia and found that 73 (14%) had false data, and 43 (8%) he categorised as zombie. When he was able to examine individual patient data in 153 studies, 67 (44%) had untrustworthy data and 40 (26%) were zombie trials. Many of the trials came from the same countries (Egypt, China, India, Iran, Japan, South Korea, and Turkey), and when John Ioannidis, a professor at Stanford University, examined individual patient data from trials submitted from those countries to Anaesthesia during a year he found that many were false: 100% (7/7) in Egypt; 75% (3/ 4) in Iran; 54% (7/13) in India; 46% (22/48) in China; 40% (2/5) in Turkey; 25% (5/20) in South Korea; and 18% (2/11) in Japan. Most of the trials were zombies. Ioannidis concluded that there are hundreds of thousands of zombie trials published from those countries alone."
David Levy has done a lot of work on this with regards to economics as well. The excuses people provided for not having data for replication were often hilarious, if embarrassing. My favorite was regarding a paper less than 2 years from publication, that a grad student had done all the data work and so had all the files, but they couldn't remember his name to get ahold of him and ask for it. This in a field where data sets are often published as separate articles, no less! Really shows how serious they were about good data practices.
It occurs to me there might be a market opportunity in designing the most volatile and short lived data storage medium possible, just for academics. Like reel paper made from cotton candy, made brittle by heat treating, stored in moisture attracting cardboard boxes flavored with cheese, guaranteed to dissolve, rot, mildew or be consumed by vermin within 1 month of publication.
Judging by my experience trying to get discovery out of government agencies, it's already a widely available product. Near as I can tell, federal agencies mostly store their files in the dank, rat-infested holds of old sailing ships.
I spend an hour or so each day skimming through ArXiv titles to download any papers that look interesting, and maybe useful to a layman such as myself to skim in turn. (Often one can learn something from the intro, even if the rest of the paper is inpenetrable!)
I have noticed that for a lot of papers submitted supposedly with code, when one goes to github or wherever to check the code, there is none there, just a README file. At the risk of sounding racist, I have found this is nearly always the case for papers with solely Chinese authors, and rarely so with other authors.
The charitable view is that the authors are in a rush to publish, feeling that any delays may mean them being pipped to the post by some other group, and they genuinely intend to tidy and push their code to a public repo shortly thereafter. (It might be interesting to revisit some of these "missing code" papers from a year or two ago and see if the code has made a belated appearance!) But reading your post, I wonder if in many cases the code exists at all!
I guess another possibility, if the code never shows up, is that researchers in China are officially discouraged from releasing source code, as it might be pinched and adapted by western researchers, to gain a commercial advantage. Or maybe the researchers themselves think that. But if so then why say the code is available at all? There is no ArXiv rule that says code must be released, and plenty of papers do not release it.
If you take a global view of specifically biomedical research, then yes, it's clear that fraud is rampant.
But per your own source, it's also clear that there's substantial heterogeneity between countries (from ~100% in Egypt down to ~20% in Japan, and apparently no country in Western Europe, the Americas, or Oceania was worth mentioning).
There's also necessarily heterogeneity across fields. Fraud in mathematics is impossible; fraud in most physics is close to impossible. (The closest you can get is inventing an unfalsifiable theory as a jobs program to keep talented theoreticians on ice until you find something real for them to work on.) I'm not sure what it would mean for a philosophy paper to be fraudulent. On the other end of the spectrum, any field that's about dredging large datasets for small correlations with no expectation of coherence or consistency with prior results - biomed and social sciences, mostly - is going to be pretty easy to defraud.
So the observation that fraud is rampant in biomedical research in Asian and MENA countries does not work as an explanation for cross-disciplinary trends in the academic job market in North America.
I think physics is more honest than other fields, but it is easy to produce fraudulent results in physics as in any other field. It is easy to just create fake data from your telescope, detector etc or just copy someone else's and change a few data points.
You can make up data in physics, but you can't make up *interesting* data. If your results are at all unexpected, people are going to start asking questions. If they can't reproduce your findings and they can't find a methodological error to explain them, you're going to have a problem.
I suppose there could be a bunch of people making up data that aligns perfectly with our current model of the universe, but it's not really clear why anyone would invent boring results when they could just report their real boring results for the same effect at no risk.
That's qualitatively different from, say, education, where you can generate your title by Mad Libs and then make up some data to back it up and nobody will question you because everyone knows it's all bullshit and nobody's going to read past the title except for innumerate morons and con men like John Hattie.
Reporting real boring results requires expensive equipment and thousands of hours of work, copying and pasting data takes minutes. I suspect in China and to a smaller degree in the West future prospects and hiring depends on how many boring results you have produced.
In astrophysics, run of the mill results can be produced pretty cheaply. There is lots and lots of archival data sitting around and lots of open source tools for simulation and analysis. The bottleneck becomes writing the paper, i.e. justifying why you did what you did.
Telescopes are run by huge collaborations and you apply to get time on a certain telescope for a certain target and very often the raw data ends up becoming public (with some delay).
> I think it ties into a world where only 17% of authors provide data when it is requested.
The simple and only slightly cynical answer is:
1. Providing my raw data takes time and effort
2. If I provide you my raw data it's possible you'll find something you want to argue with me about. Worst case scenario you find a serious flaw in my published work which I'd rather not know about. But failing that, there's a high chance you'll come back with a "Hey shouldn't you have done a Blurf-Blurffson transformation on this data" and I'll have to argue about whether or not that would have been appropriate, possibly while not knowing what a Blurf-Blurffson transformation is.
Now, all of this is still not the behaviour of an idealised scientist committed to the unselfish pursuit of truth, but it's a lot less bad than faking data.
But the Blurf-Blurffson transformation doesn't provide additional data, merely a different viewpoint on it. Why can that person do that transformation themselves, and report the findings?
Theoretical discoveries are doubted by all but the scientist. Experimental data is believed by all but the guy that did the experiment.
This must be very field dependent. In physics and cs I don’t see faking data happening that much. Dishonesty in presenting results, maybe. But outright fake data is something I never saw.
Rats that discover an overturned grain truck will shine as beacons of egalitarianism and equitable treatment of one's fellow rat. At least for a while. A day will come, however, when generations that have never known the ordinary hardships of a life without grain trucks will find to their sorrow how cruel rats can be to one another.
The top research universities do compete against one another and do bid up salaries, bonuses (aka summer salary), and other perks for the top people. At the same time, there are norms against the ratio of top to bottom salaries within rank -- typically top tenured faculty will receive 3-4x the bottom in the same discipline and rank. Top academic salaries now run in excess of 400k for 9 months.
One of the things I have long espoused, in the sense of thinking it but literally never telling anyone, is that the United States Congress should establish a system of National Teaching Universities that do exclusively undergrad and non-degree training. Recruit early- and mid-career academics with modest conventional prospects by using "Moneyball"-style strategies on the assumption potentially great teachers are being underutilized. Recruit outright non-academics, such as senior enlisted military personnel, who have an extremely deep reservoir of meta-knowledge about how to train people that is underutilized in the white-collar world for the crasset possible class reasons. Completely exclude research from the main career path and consider imposing outright guild-like rules preventing your hires from even publishing research while they're employed with you, and perhaps for six months afterwards. Require everyone to go through extensive, demanding paid training from which many drop out, and make sure all the training materials and training apparatus is built from private-sector and military people uncontaminated by the schoolmarm-industrial complex and its fraudulent "education research."
Basically, the bargain here is just that if surplus academics are willing to compromise SOME of their self-regarding and comically left-wing "ideals," move to some underserved working-class community, and actually make themselves useful, while abstaining from the corrupt academic system somewhat in potentially controversial ways, right-wing taxpayers should and reasonably will open their wallets and hand out genuinely life-changing compensation. It would require legal cover because the academic bums have written their special privileges into the legal system itself in deep ways, but that's why you have a legislature. You can literally just change the law to fix things. Conservatives control the Supreme Court and it would be pretty perverse and surprising if they actually sabotaged a program like this by enforcing special rights for academic dweebs who want nonsense guild rules enforced as a matter of first-rank constitutional principle.
Nobody is going to do this because conservatives fundamentally do not believe it is possible to fix anything and do not care. Their idea is just simple-minded buffoonery involving a rotating cast of villains, always tied to modernity, diversity, and social change in some vague shifting yet obvious way, who are thought to be corrupting the otherwise pristine and workable system through secret collusion. So even though solutions like this are actually kind of obvious and plausible (defuse social tensions by paying surplus academics enormous amounts of money to educate people who could actually use an education to do something, as opposed to just to sustain the education system) you will never see a Republican legislator ever propose something like this. Because their social base is the rural grandees and local bigwigs who claim to speak on behalf of dispossessed working class folks while privately colluding to cheat them so they can send their kids to Harvard as they always have.
I think to do this you would have to have some idea of what it would mean to teach effectively, so that you could select for it. But no one has a sense of what the point of education actually is, other than throwing you in with a group of intellectually curious people and hoping you pick up some of the culture. The for-profit universities had an idea of what they were aiming to teach, but that’s because they were aiming low in ambition.
I don't agree with this at all. The evidence for direct instruction is overwhelming, but high schools and even elementary schools increasingly refuse to do it, mainly because it threatens the status of self-regarding and lazy schoolteachers, who are realistically just aspiring to greater professional status and pretending to think that whatever amounts to that = how education just mysteriously has to work.
The basic dynamic here is that university education historically was just a kind of veneer of sophistication for ruling-class people with a vague and self-serving moralist aspect to it, but then it was transformed in a kind of incomplete and obviously hypocritical way to some kind of tool for middle-class advancement, both through credentialism and legitimate human-capital attainment. But the "veneer of sophistication for arbitrary elites + hypocritical religious moralism" aspect never really went away, it was just sublimated, and people began to defend large elements of the system as somehow legitimate left-wing class politics in a transparently absurd way, except that they won the argument by sheer material force and now to be left-wing is to believe a bunch of ridiculous and corrupt nonsense about the purity of the university.
It is a filter that is compatible with our societal ideas of worth. In the same manner that being able to write a formal essay in a particular style on a topic selected from a predetermined corpus of Chinese Classic literature constituted a filter compatible with the societal ideas of worth of Imperial China.
There are some constraints on a workable system, but those constraints are rather loose.
Yep, the Chinese literati are an obvious example. And indeed you'll note if you follow the issue of Chinese influence that there has been considerable interpenetration of ours and their literati to the point where each is coming more to resemble the other. To a large extent, academia is kind of ruled by illiberal immigrant-labor-relations paradigms designed for achieving social peace between slightly different kinds of social conservative hard-man who in some strictly rational sense ought to be simply trying to dominate and kill each other, but are just being hypocritical about that aspect of their culture to get by in a liberal democracy and have a chance for their kids to go to college. But then you apply these to elite professional situations where they obviously don't make sense, and you end up with people quite literally holding up a PRC passport whose number starts with a "P" such that this is considered proof that they require special rights in an academic environment to protect them as oppressed victims, with literally no other rational discussion of the situation allowed, it's just stigmatized as "Cold War racism" or something.
This reminds me of the discussion around "narrow banking". Everyone in the existing banking process would be better served by the government promoting banks that just keep your money in a box and never invest it. But the government doesn't promote that (and sometimes actually fights it) because banks making loans has positive externalities for society.
I wonder if something similar is going on here - students (and teachers) might prefer narrow universities that just teach, but then no research would get done and the rest of society is worse off, so the government (correctly) forces everyone to have weird universities that obscure the boundaries between teaching and researching.
But the problem is just the non-competitive nature of the institution. You literally cannot get the entry-level credential for huge swathes of non-schoolmarm society without going through the schoolmarms. The whole point of a political assembly in a republic is just to break these kinds of logjams. It served some kind of a purpose in the postwar world where the thing was just to train up as many physicists as possible through the existing structures so the Soviets didn't take over the world. But what started as a crash program to serve the immediate needs of the postwar settlement has just become institutionalized in an unhealthy and somewhat corrupt way. What Fukuyama calls "political decay." We could deal with it if we chose to.
I think there’s been a huge amount of mission creep among what used to be called “normal schools,” i.e. small colleges for training teachers. But those colleges wanted more prestige, so they started expanding their offerings and becoming full-fledged universities, and while a lot of private colleges are shutting down, public universities usually have a lot of backers in the state legislature to prop them up.
where do you get the idea that students would prefer narrow universities that just teach? Students want broad universities who do a lot of prestigious things so that the degree they get has maximal brand value. But rather than go full Bryan Caplan on you let me point you to this piece of recent news: https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/05/us/dennis-barnes-college-decision-cornell-university/index.html here is a student who literally could go anywhere he wanted and wasn't constrained by financial considerations. What does he decide to do? He decides to go study computer science at the _ivy league_ university with the best engineering program (rather than MIT or Stanford or CMU who actually have the best CS programs), so that he can later apply to... law school. Does that sound to you like someone making a school choice based on where he will learn the most things useful in life? admittedly applying to a couple hundred colleges is already a sure sign of lack of maturity / being badly advised and this kid may not be representative, but he's pretty representative of how 18 year olds across the country think I believe.
But the narrow universities exist. Sometimes they are called community colleges. Other times, they are called undergraduate focused institutions (think Swarthmore, Amherst etc).
I think this is about path dependency. We came (until 1973) from the Gold standard. With a Gold standard, fractional reserve banking is very important, since it is the only way to increase the money supply other than getting more Gold.
So we have lots of banks that get deposits and make loans and are prone to bank runs.
Then we moved to Fiat money, the FED can print as much as they won't.
But narrow banking is a problem because the existence of a narrow bank would put all those banks at risk, since it would suck deposits from them, since it is more secure by default, since it is not prone to bank runs. So The FED doesn't allow it because it is a risk to existing banks.
If the bank is just going to keep my money in a box then they won't pay me interest for it. In fact, they should then CHARGE me for the service of safekeeping, and keep it safe. Otherwise, I should just keep it in my metaphorical mattress.
Teaching and research have similarities, but they need not be bound to each other. A top-notch researcher who teaches has an opportunity cost of research, and a competitive disadvantage of teaching. The reverse for excellent teachers. Is not teaching a separate skill set from research?
This may be my ignorance, but why must they be tied together, other than that was how the system developed?
It depends on what you teach and at what level. In some cases the point of teaching is to transfer a well defined skillset to people who will use the skills to do something. In some other cases the point of teaching is to form people who can question the foundations of the discipline and perhaps move it forward. If you are teaching calculus to an engineer so that they can later use it to build a machine or something you probably are looking at the first case. If you are teaching mathematical analysis to a physicist who will later argue that intuitionism is the key to explain the passing of time https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.02348 you are probably looking at the second case. Teaching at this level is more likely to require the sort of intimate knowledge of the subject matter and the kind of mindset that is fostered by doing research.
I also think that, at least in the sciences, having students work directly with professors doing research is an important part of a university education. Honestly, some of my best *teachers* were grad students and adjuncts; being a brilliant researcher does not necessarily correlate to being a great teacher. But being a great researcher does correlate really well with *showing students how to research*, and if that's part of what your education is meant to include you need to have lots of research labs on campus willing to take on undergrads for grunt labor and smaller projects.
"Acceptance rate for tenure-track positions by how long it’s been since the candidate has gotten their PhD."
The chart doesn't show the rate, it shows the number of hires. That's very different: It depends on the number of applicants, and five years from PhD is a very weird time to be applying for tenure track jobs (given that you're close to tenure, but probably not close enough to be hired with tenure.) And it's from the American Historical Society, which is not likely to be representative of academia as a whole.
Five years from phd usually doesn’t mean close to tenure - it means bounced around for several years adjuncting or teaching track and hasn’t started the tenure track (though there are of course some who have a two-body issue or just decided they can’t stand it in Alabama or whatever any more and want out before they’re locked in for life).
Good point. I was focused on those most likely to get hired if they applied to tenure track jobs, like the successful early career researcher who wants the hell out of Urbana-Champaign.
“Why don’t colleges hire everyone in some low-commitment capacity, maybe as adjuncts, wait to see who becomes superstars, then poach them?”
This does happen. First as post docs in many scientific disciplines. And then you are hired w/o tenure on a 2-4 yr contract, hopefully to get tenure at year 6-9 (varying on field and institution).
In my fields (math and CS) this does not happen. Postdocs are common, but they have a very slim chance to turn into faculty like this. There are tenure track positions, but those offer a high chance (often >80%) to turn into tenure.
The main point is that other offers are just unattractive. If the position comes with a 20% chance to get tenured, then I need to apply for other positions anyway, because I can't rely on a 20% chance. Even if someone get the 2-4 years contract w/o tenure, they will intensively search for a tenure track position during this time. So they won't stay until the end of the contract. Or if they stay, this means they have written dozens of applications, and not found a job elsewhere. Which means they haven't become superstars.
Experience isn't always good. Fresh faces bring enthusiasm, attention and a joy for life. If the numbers really matter, bring in the old hands. If it's more of a wishy-washy social thing, out with the old and in with the new.
Plus, in the 2-tiered system, do professors really want a similarly-experienced, worse version of themselves challenging their authority, angling for their job, or to feel sorry for?
Plus plus, and this is the big one, in the current system, students only see academic success stories and aspiring successes. Hiring old adjuncts is putting the losers of the process on display, (potentially) discouraging students from entering the meat grinder themselves.
“The value of the #1 brightest new PhD is that she has a 5% chance of becoming a future superstar ... Once you’ve been around for five years, colleges can see your track record, satisfy themselves you’re not the next Einstein, and lose interest.”
That’s a large part of it. So much hiring into the entry-level tenure track is based on buzz, and any university with pretensions is hoping they will lock in (even for a few years) the next superstar. They would rather take a chance on that than hire a solid performer 5 years out who would do a fine job but probably not become a household name. Some of this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; someone who starts their career teaching four courses a semester at a second-rate place with little or no support is trapped. Publishing your way out of that (no grant writers helping you, poor lab facilities, few good students or research-active colleagues, paltry travel funds) is like climbing Everest.
At the senior level there is poaching, but again, only for the creme de la creme. Otherwise I think there is (1) age discrimination, and (2) the fact that new PhDs are (relatively) cheap and senior faculty might not expect big bucks, but more than entry-level pay.
Most institutions have no hope of hiring “the next Einstein”. There are maybe five or ten institutions at most in any field that are aiming for that. The next few dozen are aiming for solid researchers, and then a few hundred that just want someone that will do some research and teaching and won’t leave, and a few hundred that aren’t even on the radar in most of these discussions.
No realistic hope, or no hope? I think there are very many lower-tier R1s and upper-tier SLACs who really do think they might hire the next John Hawthorne. Of course, a lot of this discussion will vary quite a bit by field. In a buyer’s market field like ours, committees can insist on “must be able to walk on water, then turn it into wine.” In fields with industry demand, it’s a different story.
Syracuse does get some prestige from having hired John Hawthorne and Brian Weatherson and others. But I think they are happier with the people they managed to keep for many years.
> Here’s another question that confuses me even more: Why don’t colleges hire everyone in some low-commitment capacity, maybe as adjuncts, wait to see who becomes superstars, then poach them?
There's another, more mechanistic explanation for why adjuncts who transition to tenure track faculty do so outside of their own university.
If you were to rank the university positions by prestige you might get a ranking which looks like
1) First Tier Tenure Track
2) Second Tier Tenure Track
3) First Tier Adjunct
4) Second Tier Adjunct
Adjuncts who get promoted one level up either get more prestigious adjunct positions or get tenure track at a lower ranked university. Getting tenure from the place you are adjuncting at is harder because it requires getting promoted two rungs up the ladder.
This seems right. I'm loosely affiliated with an R1 institution. I don't know of any faculty there that were previously adjuncts, but I have a friend who worked there as an adjunct and was offered a tenure-track position at a liberal arts college.
Same thing with graduate school. Practically every faculty member (in the sciences at least) at a top-25 institution got their PhD at a top-10 institution.
"Supply + demand" and "weird path dependence due to historical circumstances."
Maybe the most interesting book on the topic is Louis Menand’s *The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University* (my comments are at https://jakeseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-in-the-academy-louis-menands-the-marketplace-of-ideas-reform-and-resistance-in-the-american-university-2/). Basically, the academic job market worked reasonably well for would-be professors up until around 1975, when the number of undergrads fell (baby boomers worked their way through the system) but the number of PhD-granting institutions and programs continued to hum along. Since then, in most but not all fields, the number of PhDs has way outstripped the number of slots. When supply exceeds demand, strange things happen.
The most interesting question is why people keep starting PhD programs that are designed to produce all-but-dissertation "students" who can teach classes for very little money, and adjuncts. Granted, I was one of them, at one point.
Maybe academia is the brainiac's version of gambling in Vegas: likely to lead to losses, but fun in the moment.
Like gambling in Vegas, or starting a band, or selling art, or writing novels, or playing basketball, or any of a number of other fields with a superstar/lottery dynamic.
Assoc. Professor at major R1 "brand name" university here (~12 years experience). This is mostly right. A few things:
1. STEM is very different from non-STEM. Title is the same but there is little actual overlap in what the job is like day-to-day. I am in STEM and run a lab with 20 graduate students and post-docs. This just doesn't happen on the "other side of campus".
2. Superstar effect is a big explainer. People want Steph Curry, and are willing to fight over potential candidates that have that potential. Experience does not turn [insert middling player] into Steph Curry.
3. You shouldn't think of it like you are locking someone in to a career path at the first blush. They have gone through (often) 10-12 years of college/grad school/post-doc by the time they even try for TT. Like it or not, potential is seen as at least somewhat baked in by the time they finish their PhD or post-doc. Remember, they are often nearing 30 years old at that point. In other industries this would be like a promotion of your leading 30 year olds into a management or leadership track.
4. Teaching is a small part of my job. Not going to give an effort/time percentage, but in practice it is low. This is why there are effectively "two markets" for TT and adjunct.
5. Adjuncts are treated horribly. Thankfully we have very few here (remember, "name brand" university). It just kind of sucks, and is very similar to "winner take all" dynamics happening more broadly in the economy.
Here in Germany, 1) you have to change universities - "to avoid intellectual incest". You can not simply do your Master at Humboldt-Uni, then your PhD AND then get tenure at the same place. Some faculties solve this by close cooperation with one other department at another college/Universität - swapping their presumably best and brightest. 2) There are now some laws to stop colleges to give their cheaper teaching-staff just one 2-year-contract after another - now it's either end the co-operation or give them a long-term contract (not tenure, but quite secure).
I was never going for that rat-race (way too dumb for it, too). Still, in my early career I got some very fine&well paid teaching jobs at the DAAD (German academic exchange service), though still kinda inexperienced - but 5% of us turned out fine PhDs or even professors (id est: valuable alumnae). When at 40 it was obvious to them I just wanted to continue being a good teacher, they closed the door. Which is fine; grateful for 11+ years on German tax-euros.
Avoiding academic incest is the norm pretty much all over the place. What is exceptional about Germany is not really having a tenure track, at least not in certain key STEM fields - you can be a W1 (junior professor, *not* tenure track generally), you can be a W2 (tenured associate professor, or somewhere between associate and full), you can be a W3 (full), but there's a big gap between W1 and W2, in terms of requirements, typical age, conditions... No wonder Germany exports PhDs and postdocs. Sometimes people come back after getting tenure in other countries.
This intellectual incest is rampant in Sweden - it's supposed to be an open hiring process, but universities routinely design their "openings" so that only the one person they had in mind qualifies. Hence the best way to get a steady job is to rise through the same uni, sit still in the boat, and cultivate your contacts. Unsurprisingly, this does *not* result in a lot of independent thought.
I think that high-tier German universities avoid intellectual incest, while it is sadly quite common at runners-up. I suspect that this is also true for Sweden, so JohanL's comment probably applies to mediocre universities or departments, but not to the top ones. I have a Swedish colleague in my group who applied actively to get back to top universities in Sweden. He was outcompeted, but not by insiders as far as he can tell.
I believe that this is true for a lot of other European countries.
Here is another question, not addressed here. Universities rarely fire people. I know they cannot fire tenured people. But many of the people hired to just teach are really bad at the teaching part, but it is very uncommon (compared to the private sector) to let someone go. Whereas on the tenure track there is real accountability for grants and publications, off it there is almost no accountability for teaching quality.
You really have to mess up badly. At some point Toronto found that it was quite hard to fire a tenured professor who had tried to kill his wife with an axe (incompetently and wholly unsuccessfully). They had to put it down in writing that, in the future, tenured professors could be fired for committing serious crimes.
This seems very simple to me. You've worked for me for several years without getting tenure. You are likely to continue to do so. If I am going to offer someone tenure, it should be an individual I believe that I would not be able to entice without that offer.
For one thing, football and basketball teams are way more visible to way more people than all but the very best researchers, and frequently not even them. And you can't really 'watch' researchers, even excellent ones, do their research in competition with others.
And in my discipline (Political Science) about 98% of the research is just stone stupid. (I can say that. I'm retired.) Irreproducible, statistically incoherent, and generally of little practical consequence.
Having said that, I've had friends do good, solid work because they enjoy the topic, but the topic is not 'sexy' so it just disappears. I have worked on some very good stuff but even that has pitfalls if it doesn't adhere to whatever the current narrative is.
Anyway. I was a "late bloomer" and got a full-time adjunct position that paid very well and had great benefits. But I negotiated that first contract before being forced to join a union. So, on average I got paid about 3 times what my fellow union members got. (Thanks, AFT.) Also, I was qualified to teach courses that were in high demand. Very high compared to supply.
After about 5 years (I was then getting 3-year contracts) I found that I had too little time to do both good teaching and good research (I contributed causal modeling on the work of others) plus I got asked to do something I considered unethical, so I dropped the research and spent the rest of my career just teaching. When an appropriate tenure track positioned opened (3 times) in my department I was asked each time to apply, with some assurance that I would get the position. By then I liked what I was doing, so I refused. Why do relatively worthless research just to gain tenure? I had the equivalent by being very, very good at my job, and a lack of easy replacements.
Look. We really need a two-track tenure process. One for research, and one for teaching. I know more than a few good researchers who aren't that good in the classroom. Why not reward both more appropriately? I also know that that currently tenured loathe that idea.
Also, remember that I was at a second-tier state school. Maybe around #150. We were good at what we did when we concentrated on it. But we were NEVER going to get a #1-100 new PhD. Sometimes they would apply, but they just used the interviews to bounce to the next one at a school they liked.
So. Why did my school try to hire the same way? Because the top admins are just as socially conscious as the top at Top 25 schools. Plus, to the extent that they can hire adjuncts cheap, it looks like they save money. (I'm not convinced of that, but that's a whole nother story.
I do feel bad for those who take adjunct positions in the hopes of landing a tenure track job. But several of our ABD adjuncts have made that happen, and one full-time adjunct colleague landed a tenure track job at a decent private college. But it's kind or rare.
We also pump out new PhDs for lots of bad reasons, and at least in my discipline we've been told since at least the '70s that a "wave of retirements" was coming and there'd be lots of jobs. But we study politics, so you should expect lots of lies.
Also, many "intellectuals" seem to enjoy having lots of indentured servants around them. That's a psychological problem that I'm not competent to help with.
"Having said that, I've had friends do good, solid work because they enjoy the topic, but the topic is not 'sexy' so it just disappears. I have worked on some very good stuff but even that has pitfalls if it doesn't adhere to whatever the current narrative is."
The 1500 page biography seems like a bit much. Raises the possibility that if true, this person is an obsessive crank instead of a good researcher. But I don't find the overall story impossible. Not necessarily probable, but not impossible.
> We really need a two-track tenure process. One for research, and one for teaching. I know more than a few good researchers who aren't that good in the classroom. Why not reward both more appropriately?
I thought the rationalization behind tenure was to allow academics to research without significant outside pressure? What's the rationalization for giving tenure for teaching?
First, the mere possession of a PhD in now way automatically makes you a good researcher. Like most endeavors, maybe 10% (remember Sturgeon's Law) of researchers do the vast majority of good or even useful research. (For instance, if you want to see lots of crap research, check of works on nutrition.) Basing both tenure and promotion means rewarding a lot of research that isn't very good, nor useful. (My time teaching very intelligent grad students research methods convinced me [total anecdote here] that most grad students [90% or more] will simply never have a really good grasp of how to do geed research, let alone how to use appropriate stats. Granted, most of the work was on policy, where apparently comparative stats are all you need, still . . .) The stories I could tell. ;-)
Second, good, even great researchers aren't always good teachers, and what most undergrads need are good/great teachers. Too many newly hired TT have literally NO experience or training or mentoring in actual teaching. It should not really be, IMKO, a "learn-as-you-go" experiment using undergrad students as lab rats.
Finally, the "outside pressure" applies as much to teaching as it does to research, and has during my time as grad student and Lecturer. But there is little to no real reward for being a good/great teacher. Lots of ABDs/PhDs are simply terrible as teachers. Why inflict them on students when you could perhaps hire a great teacher who is not a very good researcher.
The purpose of tenure, overall, is protection against outside forces in general that might try to prevent a professor from doing the best possible job of teaching, research, or both.
I have had some profs and colleagues who are good at both. I have had some profs and colleagues who were good at neither, but once achieving they could give up on trying to be better at either. That is not what tenure is supposed to protect.
So, perhaps try to hire for both, but allow those with a strong preference or strong skills specialize where they will be most happy and students and the university will most benefit.
The analysis in part I is spot on. As for why they only hire inexperienced people, I would add that adjuncts have experience in the wrong job. They have experience teaching, but excellence in teaching is not what is being hired for. They don't have experience in research (because adjuncting does not provide the time or resources to seriously pursue research, in general cases). Plus, there is an inverse signalling problem. You see that someone is an adjunct and you conclude that they were not good enough at research to get a tenure track job. So experience as an adjunct has zero actual value, and negative signalling value. And the more time you have spent as an adjunct the more negative signalling value this has. (`Jones was so hopeless he couldn't get a tenure track job even after ten years of trying!). Although practically speaking, the negative signalling value of any time as an adjunct at all is so strong that spending accepting an adjunct appointment is basically a kiss of death to chances of landing on tenure track.
In my fairly limited experience, it's less the case that teaching-track faculty never get hired for tenure-track jobs at their own institutions than that they rarely get hired for tenure-track jobs at any comparable institutions.
Academia is very hierarchical, and pay, teaching workload, research resources, and prestige are all very different if you're at a top-20 institution, a top-100 institution, or a non-R-1 institution. In my field (economics), pay and teaching load for permanent teaching-track positions at top universities are not too different from pay and teaching load for tenure-track positions at lower-tier institutions.
When I was on the job market, I was considered for tenure-track jobs at some top-100 research universities and some liberal arts colleges. I was also considered for teaching positions at elite universities. If I'd taken one of the teaching positions, done really good work, and gone back on the job market, it would be reasonable to expect that the jobs I'd be competitive for would be in the same basic ballpark as the ones I was competitive for when I went on the market the first time. It would require a pretty dramatic change in my productivity and quality to go from someone that the 100th best institution in the country would consider to someone that the 10th best institution in the country would consider.
As for why academia is so hierarchical, I'd guess that it's a combination of the fact that the most skillful/productive academics like to work with other very skillful and productive academics, plus the fact that outsiders (i.e. the people funding the work through their tuition, donations, or grants) don't know as much as insiders about what constitutes good work, so rely on academics giving each other seals of approval to know who to trust and who to give money to.
As for why superstars are not so mobile - there is a key difference to sports stars, in that sports stars are typically single and in their twenties, whereas tenured professors are middle aged, typically with working spouses and kids, and this makes them significantly less open to geographic moves (and very seldom are there two really good universities in the same geographic area). Also, for experimentalists, moving means recreating a lab from scratch which is a multi year undertaking (in which time you are not doing any research and thus losing prestige), whereas even for theorists you have developed a system that works for you, which presumably involves some web of local collaborations and so forth, and moving means tearing that up. People do move certainly, just the friction is greater.
This may be a bigger effect in the US, where good schools are often geographically spread out - each city seems to have just the one school barring the few places like Boston.
My uni education is in Australia, specifically Melbourne, which has 2 out of the Group of Eight (kinda like Aussie Ivy League) and has many of the top ranked engineering schools in Australia. Within my discipline, poaching is rampant - pretty soon after I graduated, one of my favourite lecturers went to the UK (although I heard she was originally poached from somewhere else anyway), the department head was poached to a different uni in Melbourne and back when I worked in the lab, there seemed to be a bit of a merry-go-round of people starting post doc roles all over the city.
Since I moved cities (working in industry now), in fact, I was looking into an industry-academia venture and met someone from my final year lab. Wild!
One of the graduation requirements was to participate in a research project under a supervisor, which we got to pick out of a catalogue (subject to approval from the supervisor) and I think there was only one lecturer from memory who was absent from the catalogue (but there were plenty of academics who have never taught me or just don't teach period).
That being said, we were (might still be) one of the three schools in the entire Oceania region that even have that specific discipline, so it might be a discipline specific effect.
Any materials / metallurgy academics from somewhere else want to chime in?
There's also a second-order effect here: once grad students know that the odds of getting tenure-track positions are highest in the 12 months after they go on the job market, their incentive is to optimize all their work in progress to maximize the amount of publications, etc. that they have done as of when they go on the market. So they often have relatively little incremental publications that will occur after that 1st year, because they've focused on getting as big of a python lump of work out at once, rather than establishing a steady stream of incremental publications after that date.
As for your closing question: universities can and do engage in bidding wars, trying to outbid each other for superstars. However, there are a couple of factors constraining this (1) morale issues (plus pay transparency, which is the norm at universities) means you are somewhat constrained in how much variation in pay you can have (you can and do have factors of a few, just typically not orders of magnitude). (2) entering a bidding war and losing has reputational costs (university X tried to get Jones and failed, guess X sucks), which makes them reluctant to enter a bidding war unless they have reasonable costs of success. (This then gets compounded with principal-agent considerations. Whoever pushed to try and hire Jones personally loses a ton of political capital if Jones declines).
Why can't you get hired at the institution you got your PhD in ?
That's mostly to ensure that institutions at least try to hire good candidates rather than their own students. It also help with intellectual cross fertilisation - people from outside can bring in knowledge and methods that are not available in the department.
Why do they only hire inexperienced people ?
It seems like something particular to either the US or social sciences. In my field (maths) and my country (France) you typically only get a permanent position after a couple of postdoc positions (hiring committees get suspicious if you have not been hired after 5-7 years so being to experienced is not good either).
A lot of this agrees with stuff already said by others, but:
1. The pay difference between adjuncts and research/tenure-track faculty is largely about "research success is what drives prestige", as you say.
2. The "negative premia" for experience is basically just observing that people (mostly) go on the academic job market when they are completing their PhD, some succeed and get TT jobs (or in fields where postdocs are ubiquitous, good post docs that sometime after hopefully lead to TT jobs), others fail to and get adjunct roles / leave academia. For an adjunct after that point, there is a massive negative selection problem, plus as you say it's hard to do good research while teaching 6 classes a year.
3. "But then why do they only hire inexperienced people?" In fields where post-docs are ubiquitous, obviously people have more experience when applying for TT jobs (but if a post-doc counts as experience, why doesn't a PhD? Isn't the last few years of a PhD relevant job experience which people are judged on for TT hiring?) But ignoring post-docs, there's an initial clearing market of new PhD grads, some get TT job offers, others don't. (See 2). Beyond that, obviously they don't "only hire inexperienced people". If a TT professor is successful at lower-ranked university X, higher ranked university Y will poach them, but with a promotion to Associate or Full Professor. That people hired at Assistant Professor level tend to be inexperienced is just synonymous with the job title.
4. "Why only people from outside their own institution?" This is sold in part as being about avoiding nepotism. And in part its a "go into the wild word and prove yourself, and then if you are successful we will hire you back". In equilibrium it often works, especially seeing 99% of the time the school someone did their PhD at is higher ranked than their AP placement.
5. "Why don’t colleges hire everyone in some low-commitment capacity, maybe as adjuncts, wait to see who becomes superstars, then poach them?" You could say this is what post-docs are. You could sort of say this is what PhD students are. You could also say "yeah, but why do the top universities bother to have Assistant Professors at all, rather than waiting to see who becomes a star and then hiring them?" The latter is an interesting question (especially given that a large share of TT faculty at top schools don't get tenure). My guess is part of it is historical tradition, and part of it is that faculty will tend to show a decent amount of loyalty to their current employer, so you get an "unravelling equilibrium" in that the most promising candidates are poached early, because it's much harder to poach later on (who actually wants to upend their entire family life to move city for a modest pay bump at a slightly more prestigious university, especially if they are already successful. Just get current university to match the pay bump!). Part of it might also be that senior faculty like having productive junior faculty around. And another part might be that a lot of the most influential research is produced by faculty while they are fairly young, and the departments might care about this (even if it's too inside baseball for it to influence "prestige" in the public's mind).
There are some top departments that famously don’t hire assistant professors. Rutgers Philosophy is like this. I don’t know how much this works in other fields, where you need someone to set up a lab.
It is ranked #2 - NYU is the only department ranked above it, and Pitt, Princeton, and Michigan round out the top 5 (those three shift order from year to year). I think there might be some other highly ranked departments that are top-heavy, but Rutgers is the only one that has gone many years without an Assistant Professor hire.
Interesting... I don't know what to make of that. Is this the exception that proves the rule, or the example of why this approach does make sense and should happen more? Idk.
On 5 I will add that tenured hires are much more expensive than assistant professor hires. In physics a tenured hire comes with an expectation of a multiple million dollar startup. Assistant professor hires also require startup, but only maybe 20% as much. Harvard et al might be able to afford extensive hiring at the senior level but would still like to get their people ‘for cheap’ if they can.
This is a good point (lab costs etc)... for those fields. It won't apply in fields where salary is overwhelmingly the main financial cost of hiring someone - social sciences, math, humanities etc. Perhaps the fact that we see pretty much the same hiring practices across different fields with pretty different fundamentals within universities suggests "historical norms" + inertia has a substantial role.
That said, your comment and the counter-example Kenny gives above make sense together - philosophy is very much the other end of the "other costs" spectrum.
I think in modern academia the incentives are so misaligned that it's hard to really model it in normal economic terms.
Students are mainly there for signaling purposes, not to actually learn stuff. And the tuition is being paid for out of subsidized loans. But also, the institution is nominally a nonprofit, in many cases literally run by the state. But also, the departments are usually in charge of hiring. The main department stakeholders are the tenured faculty, not the people nominally in charge of the university as a whole.
IMO this makes academia really susceptible to fads and trends. There's not really any strong competitive pressure to impose discipline. I don't necessarily think there's any "rational" reason for it to work how it does. There are definitely *some* structural elements in play, like budget cuts. But the structural economic elements dont on their own determine all the specifics that develop in a relatively small and close-knit community.
Debatably the whole structure of modern academia is designed to basically immunize universities from having to worry very much about mundane economic concerns
I think there’s also a lot of irrationality in the market that arises from the mechanisms put in place to try to curb these structural features you mention. Departments aren’t allowed to do senior hires without a pre-approved line unless they can convince the Dean this person is important - and it’s easier to do that if the person is coming from Yale than from Pitt (because the Dean doesn’t know that in your field Pitt is more prestigious than Yale).
> IMO this makes academia really susceptible to fads and trends. There's not really any strong competitive pressure to impose discipline
There is a generalist political philosopher here in Canada named Joseph Heath who as far as I can tell is simply Mr. Political Philosophy in Canada. Unless this lecture (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMdzcAvFA_g) is deeply misleading in some unlikely way, it seems that he has noticed that very large elements of what purports to be political philosophy (such as environmental philosophy, in this case) are straightforwardly the result of pathological intellectual trends of this kind.
In essence, environmental philosophers over-emphasized a kind of question everything, flip-over-the-table-instead-of-playing-a-real-move intellectual culture as their sole model, such that it became an iterated game of taking the most absurd position possible, or at least the one most utterly removed from normal concerns. Then when you go back and analyze it, it turns out that the table-flipping maneuvers often don't really have a lot of intellectual substance to them, and are kind of simple-minded quasi-religious thought control, usually just based in simplistic intellectual games meant to win arguments among 19th-century labor organizers in an extreme and brutally violent economic and political culture that was ultimately largely wiped out by WW2 and the postwar settlement.
But there's nobody (but him, I guess) to come around at the end of the day and clean up after it. You have young people who are legitimately going to go out and be staffers in the Prime Minister's Office or some other high perch, and they are genuinely trying to find out what responsible intellectuals have to say about the ethics of climate change policy and how to make difficult tradeoffs, and they're opening a textbook and being told, like, you can't do cost-benefit analysis because it's racist against shrimp. While actually tremendously interesting and perhaps even important on some level, this is not a model of intellectual service to the public that can really be defended.
this is a huge topic but there's a few things that make easy analysis different.
1) as many have pointed out already, STEM is very different from non-STEM. I'd further subdivide things - fields have really different hiring patterns, adjunct use, etc. and that has a big impact on the way the market works. Comparing the market for a law professor to those for an English professor to an engineering professor to a chemistry professor is at least several kinds of apples, and probably a mixture of fruits and vegetables. Then there are multidisciplinary things (like public policy schools that hire economists, sociologists, political scientists, etc.) where things are even weirder b/c multiple strands come together in a weird mix.
2) schools differ a lot - someone has already noted the difference between R1 and others, but it is even more differentiated - the very top private schools behave very differently in hiring than do large state flagship schools even if both are R1s. There are whole separate "teaching institution" markets, the 2nd tier (which no one would admit to being in) research schools, community colleges, non-flagship state schools, liberal arts schools, and so on. Each submarket operates differently.
3) put those two things together and you have a large number of submarkets that operate very differently in hiring, use of adjuncts, etc.
Then we get in to allocating slots for TT faculty at a university. Some disciplines are going up in enrollment (Data Science); some teach huge "service" courses (English) rather than / in addition to large numbers of majors; some are going down (Classics). When a university hires a TT faculty member, that's a long term commitment to funding a slot. Some slots are cheap (English), some are really expensive (STEM). Administrators want flexibility in adjusting staff - which leads to more reliance on adjuncts and/or "APT" or "Academic Professional Track" professors, who generally don't write much and teach more, serve on committees. These folks get contracts from a year to longer. But they allow adjusting head counts. And most university central administrators know the demographic cliff is coming in terms of students for many places and want to keep flexibility to adapt if their institution's enrollment drops (as it will for many schools).
And then there's the need to bring in adjuncts to provide "real world" perspectives. Not much of a need in, say, English for that, but there is in law, business, politics (sometimes), etc.
There's more too - the academic job market is really a lot of submarkets which behave differently. Many of them are quirky at best, dysfunctional at worst. But you have to look at the institutional details of each to tease out why they behave the way they do (at least to some extent).
I agree with a lot of this. In my field, philosophy, there are more post docs than there used to be, but nowhere near what there is in the sciences. And enrollments are going down, so the competition for tenure-track jobs is terrifyingly bad, allowing hiring committees to insist on just about any ridiculously high standard they like. Also, there’s no meaningful industry competition, so the studliest bigshot in the entire discipline might make $300k, which is not much for law, medicine, or probably engineering faculty at major schools.
This definitely gets at a lot more of the important dynamics than Scott or Bret’s original posts. I still want more data about the number of adjuncts in each of these markets. People say adjunctification is as real at R1s as elsewhere but I suspect it’s driven by a few fields (particularly freshman writing).
If I'm reading that graph correctly then it absolutely does *not* reflect my field (astronomy). Almost no one gets a tenure-track job within one year of earning their PhD. Nearly everyone does a postdoc, which in the US usually lasts 3 years. I don't have data in hand but I would guess that the median tenure-track professor in astronomy is somewhere around 3-5 years after getting their PhD. I think physics is very similar. Is this really that unusual?
That graph is for History. My guess is that for each field there is an expected number of postdoc years and the graph will look similar if you count from there rather than from phd.
One advantage may be that Universities are both consumers and producers of new PHDs. If the only way to get into Tenure Track was to suffer through years of adjunct teaching, would the PHD > Tenure Track career route be as popular?
As an outsider it seems that people going for PHDs in the hopes of staying in Academia are playing the odds that they are the lucky few that get a first year Tenure track posting, and if not either leave Academia or are stuck as an Adjunct.
From the University's perspective, the value of not shifting senior adjuncts to tenure track is that the tenure carrot can stay open to as many hopefully PHD students as possible, many of whom will end up spending years on a PHD with no tenure track to show for it. At that point some have no better option than to teach under whatever terms they can get.
To the extent that adjuncting is suffering, nothing is gained by making the most promising researchers do it. Fields where the backlog has built up have created postdoc positions to cover that stage in career, where one still works as a researcher.
I'm a former theoretical physics postdoc in the UK. My wife is currently a postdoc in biosciences at a top UK University. Here is my two pence:
1) Einstein didn't work in a lab. I get the point, but I had to say it! Sorry.
2) In my experience universities don't usually differentiate their workforce like that. Rather, most experienced people get forced to teach, early career people not so much, and only the very few (maybe <10%) get to avoid it (usually not by negotiating with universities but rather by getting grants which bring money and prestige and happen to force them to spend their time not teaching). And usually the more experienced and well-paid you are the less time you get to spend doing research rather than writing grants, supervising, and teaching.
3) Having talked to people on the inside during hiring processes, I don't think it is accurate to describe hiring people out of their PhDs as trying to find the people with the highest chances of being the next superstar. People usually try to screen for some measure of quality, but typically if you meet some minimum requirements (like having published in decent journals and/or having graduated from decent institutions) then what they try to optimise for is complementarity of research interests. Basically, they care more about how your work will fit with the work of other people in their groups than about whether you are a bit more likely to be the next Einstein. If you would be a good collaborator, who has a track record in lines of investigation which don't overlap too much with the ones they have going but which have potential for interacting with them, then they'll want you. (Bonus points if your niche area of expertise happens to be hot at the moment, where "hotness" often lasts less than the average PhD.) Which makes sense. Why hope for Einstein when you can more reliably aim for a multiplicative impact now?
4) Even the people in the dream superstar jobs are usually earning not that much compared to industry - or even non-academic techy jobs in the public sector.
I was about to write point 2 myself. At least in my fields (math, CS) in Europe, established professors and even superstars teach at least as much as newcomers or lower performers. Exceptions are lecturer positions dedicated to teaching, which are less prestigious and are common in some countries (e.g., UK), but not in others (e.g., Germany).
For point 3, I think it depends on how good the department is. My department has a very good standing and definitely tries to find and attract superstars. For those, it does not matter a lot how complementary they fit into the department. But my former department was different: both lower-rank and more concerned about complementarity.
I don't have data on this, but there's a similar phenomenon in the publishing world. A debut author with a book that sounds exciting and topical will have a decent shot at a six-figure book deal, and those books frequently go to auction. But once you're published, if you're among the majority of authors whose books don't turn into juggernauts, your advances drop dramatically, with some previously well-paid authors grateful to get $20k or $30k for a new project.
This is a "shiny new thing" phenomenon - an exciting new author has enormous potential... until their book hits shelves and they don't hit bestseller lists. My initial guess is that hiring committees are susceptible to the appeal of the "shiny new thing" and get so excited by the boundless potential of all the newly-minted PhDs that the adjuncts who've been slogging for years now just don't stand a chance.
After a couple of disappointing books, an author will often change genre or age category, choose a pen name to publish under, and go to a new publisher to leave behind the stink of their sales record. This can be a way to reboot their career, re-invigorate the marketing department (who will have given up on them at their previous publisher), and try to capture some of that "shiny new thing" energy again. It's interesting you mentioned that successful teaching- or adjunct-track professors will go somewhere else for a tenure-track position when they make a breakthrough, and feels related to this.
A little concerning that an industry like publishing that acquires talent almost entirely on *vibes and sparkle* appears to have similar patterns to academia!
This is like venture capital - all of these are areas where there is a small number of instances that make the majority of the impact, but it’s hard to identify them in advance. Thus, when there’s a chance someone might be one of those stars, you’re happy to probably overpay for them in order to take that gamble.
If I have a choice between funding an unknown author with a new book or an author who has produced failures or only mild successes wouldn't it be rational to fund the unknown author.
You know, answering this question made me understand a new facet of this situation. Because historically (well, modern publishing isn't that old, but still...) the accepted wisdom in publishing was that editors sought out writers who had potential and helped and encouraged them, knowing that many would only "break out" after publishing several books. Writers tend to get better over time. And what's more, if they have three or ten books out before their "breakout", that's three or ten books a reader can buy after liking the bestselling one. A debut can only sell one book, but a veteran can release a new book, gain attention with it, and sell dozens of others at the same time.
But that's the old model and clearly the math has changed. I wonder if it's because the midlist has gone the way of the middle class, and publishers can make just *so* much money from a big hit that it's reasonable to focus on that instead of fostering talent. But I also wonder if part of it is that there are just *so* many books available to publish now. So many people are writing novels and a lot of them aren't bad. Why spend time and effort building up a writer when there are thousands more who can take their place?
I wonder if the same kind of thing is happening in academia. I feel like a lot of people want to enter academia these days, and also that academics can become superstars with media appearances and TED talks more than they used to? Maybe? Again, I don't have data on that. But it sounds like a lot of industries are strip-mining the population for "rockstars" these days.
As someone who's spent ages 15-41 in academia: you're *very* far from wrong, but it's also not as drastic as someone reading this might fear. Academia isn't sharply divided between "Einsteins" who teach only occasional upper-level seminars, and poorly-paid adjuncts who teach huge numbers of intro classes. There's also a large "middle class," e.g. all the non-Einstein tenure-track faculty, which both does research AND interacts regularly with undergrads, sometimes even at the same time (at least in CS, lots of undergrads get involved in research). Maybe that just helps confuse prospective students all the more! :-)
(Also, agree with the other commenters that postdocs are now a huge part of the story.)
Sports team analogy is probably even more apt here than Scott realizes, especially salary capped and contractually strict ones like the NBA. Just like in academia, in the NBA a rookie who has the chance to develop into the superstar is far more valuable than an established veteran who has proven themselves to be a reliable above-average player. This is true even if, on average, the rookies do not become above-average players. This is reflected on the trade market, where the #5 pick in the draft (which becomes a first-year player in the league once drafted) is valued more highly in a vacuum than solid rotation veterans, even if "solid rotation veteran" is actually probably the EV of what you get from the #5 pick.
There are additional wrinkles and dimensions to this, as rookies are also on a more affordable rookie scale contract, NBA players are locked up into defined contract lengths than is difficult for the player to exit early for other teams, etc. The limited free agency explains superstar inertia in professional sports - there are typically only a few defined windows in a player's career where they truly are pure free agents. But "superstar inertia" I don't think is very difficult to explain for most tenure-track academics. Unless you are in the true 1% of academia there's a lot of disruption to uprooting your life and your intellectual networks to go somewhere use and the upside needs to be very high to entice you to do so. Given the natural geographic distribution of academic employers it's not even like other working professionals job-hopping to go to the competitor firm down the street. And it seems to me that you do see the true top 1% of tenure track academia, celebrity public intellectuals etc., move around, though perhaps my perception is shaded by the fact that these moves are naturally going to be more newsworthy than random tenure track faculty moves.
Some of what's going on is historical, going back to about 1950, when the Feds started throwing money at universities to do research. The NSF was founded c. 1952 b/c everyone realized that science had won WW II thus needed serious funding. The question was HOW, and we got a bastard version of the German system and our old tradition of colleges being for educating elite youth. Remember that many of the important scientists of WW II were German. There, all universities were research universities--there was no UG education as such--and their goal was to produce research and prepare scholars/scientists. They were supported by the German state, and departments were given budgets they could spend as they chose (and there was, basically, just 1 fully tenured "Ordinary Professor" per department, and he ran it, often like a fief. That was what US scientists envisioned after the war--fund the best scientists directly to produce the best science. But this met howls of protest from most US colleges & universities who feared all the money would go to the usual suspects, Harvard, Yale, Illinois (go Illini!), etc. And it was unAmerican. States urged the money go to states for allocation to their schools. The scientists howled -- nobodies at places like the Southern University of North Dakota at Hoople would get, and waste, scientific research dollars. Bad Science would be done!! The compromise is what we have today is the result, anyone, even a nobody at SND@H, could submit a grant, and if it was, in fact Best Science, it would be funded. So, virtually every school in the US tries to be a research oriented school, not just for the prestige, but because of the sweet overhead money that comes in, helping fund student-attracting facilities like salt water pools and paying big money to sports coaches.
The adjunct vs. research professor divide reflects the old teaching-college vs. research institution divide in the US. If you read what the poor adjuncts write, they generally thought of themselves as teachers expanding and informing the minds of their students and did not want to be researchers. They suffer for pursuing their dream. Between that and high course loads, they don't do research and so can't transition to the main tenure track. They'd like to be paid well and have job security to do what they love, teach.
Top stars get hired (note rise in numbers for older faculty) when a university wants to set up a new field of study or some "center." Then they go for an established name who will attract bright and ambitious folks quickly.
I'm an odd duck in this case. I wanted to be an UG teacher back in 1974 (my mentor said, "I suspected that of you."), before the Federal money started streaming to my field, psychology. But there were no good jobs available then, so I took one at a comprehensive university that then got ambitious and shot up to R1 status remarkably quickly. So I had to get with the program and do research, and did get tenure, though I could not today, as I never got grants.
"colleges have decided they only need a certain amount of prestige before they stop caring and fill the other teaching positions with warm bodies" - No, it's more that they buy as much prestige as they can afford, but (in part because its hard to hire good research faculty while requiring them to do lots of teaching) that isn't enough in order to meet all their teaching obligations.
"Why don’t colleges hire everyone in some low-commitment capacity, maybe as adjuncts, wait to see who becomes superstars, then poach them?" - This is what the best universities do - they hire "tenure track" professors, but very rarely grant them tenure - instead, their tenured faculty are maximally prestigious people poached from elsewhere. This works for the best universities, because being tenure track at Harvard (with the expectation that you probably won't actually get tenure) is a very good deal for the very best new PhDs. It doesn't work at other universities because being tenure track at Podunk College, with the expectation that you won't even get tenure out of it, is not an attractive offer, and so good people don't accept offers at lesser schools if they expect it won't lead to tenure (assuming they have a better option elsewhere).
That's the impression I got - the next step after "tenure track" at a top university is getting poached by some less-prestigious university that will actually give you tenure. (And maybe then, after tenure and some research successes, getting poached again by a different top university.)
Note that Devereaux is writing about the *history* job market, not all of this applies to academia in general. Like, I've never heard of the whole "experience actually hurts" phenomenon in mathematics.
Also worth noting is that in math and various sciences, it's typical to do a few postdocs (which doesn't fit into any of Devereaux's categories; these are neither tenure track nor teaching track nor adjunct) before getting a tenure track position. Devereaux mentions this but *mostly* ignores it because he's mostly focusing on history.
So I don't know if the market is as broken as in other fields.
As for history, though -- I do think you may be making a mistake in assuming that people are necessarily doing things for good reasons rather than due to biases. Devereaux explains the "experience hurts" phenomenon via a bias for hiring from prestigious colleges; I think that answer is definitely worth considering.
The phenomenon being discussed is a strong preference in history departments for hiring directly out of PhD programs, with large dropoffs in hiring even a few years out. To the extent that people in mathematics do believe that claim -- which I don't think is so universal as to call it "generally believed", although it's certainly common -- I think the belief is generally in a *smaller* effect, one that becomes apparent over the *decades*; it wouldn't be enough to generate so large an effect.
Also, even if the same overall effect did occur due to that cause, the fact that it's a separate cause would mean that it wouldn't make sense to consider the two as a unified phenomenon. So, in short, your reply doesn't really bear on the point.
But I think it’s also true in math that someone who has done one postdoc is more hireable than someone who has done four. In fact, it would probably be rare to get that fourth postdoc, because anyone looking at your application would wonder why you hadn’t got a tenure track position yet.
While Devereux puts it as “experience hurts”, I think it’s better understood that this isn’t experience so much as probationary employment where you are meant to prove yourself, and a long enough time where you haven’t done that is a bad sign.
Sure, that's more relevant; but the apparent strength of the effect in history suggests something else is going on. If you do two postdocs, which is pretty common, that's likely four years all by itself!
I think it’s basically that in every academic field there’s an assumption about how much training you need before you are ready for a tenure track job. In some fields, the assumption is that the PhD is enough, in others it’s one postdoc, in some it’s two or three. But if you’re taking longer than the normative time, then that’s a bad sign.
(I think fields with few postdocs tend to have longer PhDs - it’s not uncommon for a history or English PhD to take 8 years.)
OK, but that's not entirely analogous, because apparently in history people do adjuncts where in math they'd do postdocs. So penalizing someone for being an adjunct in history is less like penalizing someone for being an adjunct in mathematics and more like penalizing someone for being a postdoc in mathematics.
This is not true. An adjunct history position is analogous in every relevant respect to an adjunct math position, not a math postdoc. Some new math PhDs become adjuncts, just like some new history PhDs - but virtually no one with a decent postdoc offer would choose to be an adjunct instead.
I mean, obviously the analogy is not perfect, and what you say above is correct. But I gather it's analogous in the sense of "What is the 'default' non-tenure-track position in each field?" In math it's a postdoc, and if you take an adjunct position instead, yeah, that's a pretty bad signal. In history, going according to what Devereaux writes, postdocs are pretty much nonexistent, so adjuncts are the default; this makes it hard for it to serve as as strongly negative a signal as it would in mathematics.
I think academia and performing arts have a lot more in common than you'd think. A record label and an academic department both want to sign someone that will HIT. But you have no actual idea what prospects will do it. For recording artists, you can give a thousand advances and if even one hits it will pay for the rest. But you can't do that for academic departments. So you make choices based on what you can actually observe (a degree from a top 10 program) and hope that will give you a better chance at a hit.
Why do departments only hire people with no experience? The same reason that there are no 35-year-old breakout pop stars. Labels and departments buy based on POTENTIAL. Someone with experience has no upside.
> What process carves off 30% of professors to get good pay and benefits, but passes over the rest?
You're neglecting the influence of unions and worker activism. The institution, like most employers, is coordinated and can apply power effectively with ease. It has most of the power. Workers can only exert pressure by leaving (and going to another institution that is likely similar) or striking (difficult to coordinate, pisses people off, risky, etc.).
Often, the low-paid teaching staff are contractors, have little clout in the union if they're in it at all, and may well be gone in a year or two. The union is incentivized to do the most for its long-term, prestigious members, and so it uses its power mostly for them.
You end up with a scenario where the uni would like to pay everyone crap, the workers would like everyone paid well, and the way the power imbalance/application of political capital shakes out is that some small amount of workers are paid well and the rest are paid crap.
How many institutions have unions that cover tenure track faculty? I believe the recent strike at Rutgers involved a union that covered tenure track faculty, but I believe that at the UC system, the union only covers postdocs and grad students and maybe some other non-tenure-track people, and at most private schools there is no union. (This of course may all be quite different outside the US.)
I don't think your explanation about trying to trick students about who is teaching them works, or at least it's not complete. Disclaimer that this is based on my anecdotal experience in astronomy.
Teaching professors are a relatively new phenomenon but colleges have existed and have been teaching students with something like the current model in the US for decades. Why would they only now start trying to offload teaching responsibilities onto a different class of professor behind students' backs? Also, the teaching professors that I'm familiar actually have the title "teaching professor" right there on the department webpage, so if they are trying to hide this from students they are doing a poor job.
Also, in my field, adjuncts are people who have a primary appointment elsewhere but who then get a secondary affiliation with some college or university, usually so they can directly advise grad students, and sometimes as a way of funneling research funding through the university. They aren't paid positions and don't come with any teaching or department service responsibilities. I think one needs to be careful about differentiating between very different positions with the same or similar titles when doing this type of analysis.
One element you might be missing is the nepotism angle. My partner was a an academic who recently left academia, and one thing they claim is an open secret in academia is that most new tenure track hires have parents who were tenure track hires before them. There could be reasons other than direct nepotism that account for this (the children of tenure track people are more likely to go into the field and be suited for it, and also they know the most common pitfalls to navigate), but however you parse it, it makes sense to me that in a system that has a nepotism component, you see a lot of people being snatched for high-prestige jobs the moment they become eligible for those jobs, not the moment they have a proven track record (because nepotism generally works counter to meritocracy).
It would be interesting to do a deep comparison of the academic and entertainment industries, because entertainment is a famously nepotistic industry where lots of people toil in competition for low-paying, shitty gigs and a few people rise to the top, and those people are often related to other people in the industry.
I suppose you have to balance efficiency and fairness then. Because its true, if you have a limited number of slots to fill, you might be able to fill them more quickly by focusing your search to the children of people who were previously qualified, but you are going to be discriminating against some potentially qualified candidates who were not so fortunate. So nepotism has that against it as well (although you certainly can't tell me that "every" child who happens to survive in his parents field was qualifed).
I would be surprised to learn that *most* new tenure track hires have tenure track parents. I think most new tenure track hires have parents who got more than a bachelors degree, and people with professor parents are far over-represented - but very often the parent is an academic in a different field. I think the biggest feature here is just that academia is weird, and if you don’t know people who were in it, you’re much less likely to go into it, and much more likely to make some mistake about things that come second nature to people who grew up in the system.
I met Pete Buttigieg once, and was very impressed by him, but I think a big part of that is just that he grew up in an academic household and knows how to talk to academics, even though his parents were in different fields than me.
I want to correct and say I don't actually have evidence for the claim "most new tenure track professors have parents who were tenure track before them" because that was something that was told to me casually, not something I verified. But it might be worth looking into, because if it were even partly true it might explain some of this phenomenon.
I don't know about nepotism, but I think he doesn't discuss the network issue enough. I mean, if you are the successful student of a hotshot professor, it is likely that you are known in the relatively small world that academia is, and that once you graduate, the system is likely to arrange a job for you. Whereas the longer you've been outside of the orbit of your well known supervisor, the more likely it is that you are forgotten.
I'd be inclined to lean heavily on the angle of "they know what they're getting into". There's a romantic ideal of the Academy that a lot of us from outside start with, and in the normal course of events we'd slowly learn the ugly truth and become disillusioned. But there's a huge advantage to, not only having someone willing to sit you down and talk straight with you, but also simply seeing what the day-to-day life of an academic *is*. I don't find it hard at all to believe that this knowledge could give children of academic parents a huge leg up in the beginning. As well as having a large sorting effect, by weeding out all the academic children who would be incapable of or unwilling to run[ning] the gauntlet, thus meaning that the ones who do choose academia are much more suited than average.
>There's a romantic ideal of the Academy that a lot of us from outside start with, and in the normal course of events we'd slowly learn the ugly truth and become disillusioned
tell me more about this - I'm writing something on the topic and one question that seems important is:
are there indeed any miscalibrated expectations? (if yes this would mean unnecessary suffering but also something potentially fixable) and if so why? (and to what extent this is same/different across academia areas that are largely populated by US nationals vs those mostly staffed by immigrants)
you seem to imply that yes, expectations are miscalibrated. any comments as to why? do you think they are miscalibrated more or less than in comparable fields?
like, for classical superstar careers like sports or acting the situation is similar in many respects yet people are generally presumed to "know what they are signing up for"? sure, as everywhere on average people would be overoptimistic.. but, like, is academia the same level of overoptimism and you just hear more b*tching coz the b*tches are better at writing or is it actually worse?
I'm a number of years out, so I'm probably not a good person to ask. But my impression was that yes, expectations were miscalibrated. No one thought it would be easy, but they didn't realize how hard it would be and how unlikely success would be, and how much of the success would be due to luck and academic politics and cold numbers. And what's worse, the entire system seemed designed to encourage these miscalibrations, because it required a larger supply of graduate students, postdocs, and adjunct professors, than would be possible if they only accepted enough graduate students for all the tenure-track positions available. (This is assuming that every grad student wants to end up as a tenured professor, which is not the case, but I think the point still stands.) (This doesn't apply to tenure-track professors; as far as I'm aware, aside from some weirdness at elite universities, anyone accepted into a tenure-track position is expected to get tenure and then become a full professor.)
As for what causes the miscalibrations in broader society, I think it's mostly the stories we tell ourselves. Maybe older stories from a less competitive time, or "romantic" stories that talk about the idealism of "searching for truth" and "contributing to the sum of all human knowledge".
The sports analogy seems good, but I don't even know anyone with actual experience there, so I shouldn't comment. :-)
yeah I'm pretty sold on yes to "miscalibrated?", for both the "cultural adjustment too slow" reasons you kinda allude to in 2nd to last paragraph, as well as "academia cult indoctrinates younger members so expectations are very inflexible and out of whack" that you also allude to and that me and others expanded on elsewhere in these comments.
this is actually great news, as points to much lower hanging fruit solutions than some drastic academia reforms. expectations need to adjust faster! matter of collecting and then spreading the information, advocacy, outreach.
anecdotally, these methods seem to work pretty well: I'm quite involved in various rat adjacent communities, and there seems to be quite a number of PhD dropouts among people who got exposed to the information and alternative points of view early enough, and I myself been part of some "decide to drop out" success stories, both there and thru my reddit career advising.
Now I want to find out who if any are the influential academia voices telling people to get real and move on as that would seem like the obvious way to have a lot of positive impact.
> But there's a huge advantage to, not only having someone willing to sit you down and talk straight with you, but also simply seeing what the day-to-day life of an academic *is*
"Why only people from outside their own institution?"
There's a strong social tradition of avoiding 'academic inbreeding.' Hiring your own graduates is seen as both an obvious form of nepotism and a recipe for intellectual stagnation. Not that it doesn't happen, when a favored student can't find a job.
Usually those are temporary “instructor” positions that are glorified adjuncts. The case where a university hires its own for a tenure track job is usually because they’re convinced they have a star and they’re outbidding other places.
Adjuncts are de facto on another planet, and tt assistant professors are by design junior, i.e. you typically hire them immediately after their PhD or a few years of postdoc. In many countries, only associate and full professors are public servants like judges and diplomats, i.e. not on a contract.
Teaching is incidental, and can easily be done by graduate students or postdocs. What matters is research, grant funding, and prestige. In my experience, poaching exists but up to a point, especially in Europe where there is less room for negotiation.
Hypothetically, a person doing a job doesn't look like they can do more challenging work, at least if management is sufficiently unimaginative. So they prefer shiny new people.
This seems to import the assumption that "Einstein/superstar" researchers are a thing outside of STEM. I don't know if this is true -- I'm STEM myself -- but it strikes me as counterintuitive in a field like ancient history (Bret's field) where research is driven more by laborious study than clever ideas. What is an Einstein-equivalent in history or English literature *doing* to be so valuable?
Laborious study and the cleverness to come up with a new angle to apply that laborious study to are common to all fields. I don’t know history or English particularly as fields, but my guess is that someone who first came up with a way to use Egyptian diaries to understand how life for Jewish women in Egyptian cities changed throughout the dynasties is likely going to be more of a star than someone else who then applies that method to the next few similar cases, even though both use the same laborious research. Similarly for the first person to think to attach a gold nanoparticle to a piece of DNA to track it, rather than the many others who go through the laborious work of applying that.
I certainly agree that creativity has value everywhere, but it strikes me as much more bounded in history (we discover new Egyptian dairies very slowly, then someone has to do the work of translating them in a way that makes them available to other researchers, and so on before the clever application becomes relevant) than is the case for, say, new algorithm development, where the sequence is creativity -> new algorithm -> profit/published without limiting externalities.
I would have thought that this makes cleverness all the more important in a field where you don’t get new sources of evidence! You have to convince people that you found a new way to look at something interesting, which takes more cleverness than just looking at something no one has looked at before.
Whereas I would argue that most of the essential work in that type of field is _doing_ the work of making the evidence available (e.g. scholarly translation), because that produces new resources to mine, whereas the mining produces steadily diminishing returns. But maybe this maps to the social sciences, where there's more prestige in finding interesting tidbits in existing large databases than in building new, better large databases with which to do research.
I don't know much about this subject, so I don't know what makes a potential hire attractive for universities, but there are a lot of humanities academics who are household names. I don't know if the next Harold Bloom, Camille Paglia, Foucault or Judith Butler is what universities want but there seems to be quite a lot of value there (negative or positive). And is academic work in literature about laborious study or about having new ideas about literature (and being a good writer)? What about philosophy?
A couple or a few years ago a Biblical scholar called Idan Dershowitz claimed a 19th century forgery (of an ancient Biblical manuscript) called the Shapira scroll was actually authentic. That was widely reported in the popular press. It was probably a false claim, but if it wasn't, it was a clever idea that would have certainly made him very valuable. And that is in an obscure field that I would have thought has had all the juice squeezed out already.
If you allow me to be generous and count prehistory as part of history, Svante Pääbo is a superstar who has revolutionized the field in a way that it's not even clear whether it should still be counted as an arts or a science field.
Before him, the field was just an ordinary field like most of history, minus the texts: digging up artifacts and making sense of them. That is also what Pääbo did, but he was just much much better in the "making sense of it" part.
How do you discover someone is a good researcher while 1) soaking up their time teaching and 2) not giving them any significant field-appropriate resources for researching?
I think the explanation mostly is institutional capture of the hiring methods and standards by the tenure-track profs. They were hired into the prestigious TT in this manner, and they do the hiring/control the hiring of TT positions, and if the methods or standards are questioned that would question their entitlement to the prestigious TT jobs they have.
1) They can explain anything. Why don't colleges make every new hire eat a frog? If they did, this kind of explanation could explain it.
2) It doesn't explain how the tradition got started.
3) Colleges are pretty big and smart and if there were a better way to do things you'd expect they'd switch to it over time. I think the original existence of adjuncts was like this - originally they didn't have this role, then some of them realized it was free money, and then they all transitioned to it.
1) Fair enough but it's harder to make eating frogs sound like the rational way to assign prestige positions than to make the current system sound rational.
2) The tradition has a rational basis and had that at the start.
3) I am not sure I understand this objection. I agree they are big and smart, and they do a lot of things super well. I just think that this method is pretty much the perfect way to do what they actually want to do; gatekeep the TT to the recent grads from the most-prestigious program they can get, so as to retain/increase program prestige.
I should have said that my perspective is from an admittedly weird and less academic of the academic disciplines, law. And , I wasn't even trying to answer the "why isn't there more superstar poaching" question, I was just thinking about the "why does experience hurt" question.
And a large fraction of them specifically are that - a tenured professor gets a research grant to spent a year in North Carolina, and you need someone to teach their classes for one year, but they will come back the following year, so you hire an adjunct.
This is where I want to know more detailed numbers. What is the distribution of adjuncts, in terms of type of university and discipline? How many of them are actually teaching a class in any given semester? I hear a lot about their numbers increasing, but I've never been a part of a department that had more than one or two at a time, almost always specifically in this sort of substitute role.
I would not be surprised if, at major research universities, the vast majority that aren't of this form are in things like freshman writing and calculus, which you need to teach large numbers of in a relatively introductory way, and things like foreign language and musical instruments, where you need a large number of people for something specialized that isn't the core mission of the university.
But maybe I'm missing large numbers somewhere else!
Scott: Your question "Why don’t colleges hire everyone in some low-commitment capacity, maybe as adjuncts, wait to see who becomes superstars, then poach them?" has an easy answer.
Once you're hired as an adjunct you really have no hope (except in the most unusual non-STEM circumstances) of getting a good TT job. You have to start producing amazing research/scholarship almost immediately, and the adjunct grind just makes this impossible.
I am a non-tenure track research professor (meaning I don't teach classes) at an R1 institution and have been an adjunct professor at a different college. I can share some insights into hiring decisions.
There is a bias toward hiring young people for tenure track positions for several reasons:
1. They are trying to hire people who will be making a name for themselves at that institution. Hiring committees do look at a persons career trajectory in addition to accomplishments.
2. Faculty want to make sure their department is in on whatever the current trend is in order to appeal to grad students and postdocs. Naturally, the best way to buy in to such trends is to hire young people.
3. There is an extreme level of concern about diversity. Since diversity is increasing, the most diverse subset of candidates is the youngest group. This leads to a strong bias toward hiring younger people to faculty positions. (This is probably one of the most important factors and I have known cases where it was explicitly stated that no white men would be hired. That clearly ruled out a lot of the more established candidates.)
Some of this post also assumes some popular stereotypes that are not true. One is that research and teaching are incompatible. Almost all the time a person who is good at research is also an excellent teacher. Besides which, students like having a professor who is active in their field. Researchers generally like teaching, in spite of the stereotype that researchers wish they could avoid teaching so they could focus on their research.
Universities hire adjuncts because they're cheap labor, not because they're expert teachers. Don't read too much into it. Teaching at the college level is really not difficult for someone who understands the subject. I think Scott has a post somewhere showing that most innovations in education are just showing selection effects. Faculty know this, even if they do not usually admit it. So, there is not much value to be gained from having people who are hired for teaching abilities.
A mildly snarky take on not offering TT to adjuncts in-house:
As a successful academic on the hiring committee you've successfully jumped through a large number of hoops, starting in high school. If you've hired someone as an adjunct already, your department's process has confirmed this person as a 2nd tier researcher. Giving them a TT position would imply a flaw in your hiring process (if they're good enough to be TT, why would they take an adjunct position in the first place?), the same hiring process which has confirmed you as a successful academic & we can't just go around calling that into question, now can we?
You don’t have to have the cynical read that there’s an urge to resist acknowledging the mistake you now realize you made the first time - more likely, in most cases, whatever process led to a mistaken evaluation the first time stays in place and you never recognize that the person has what it takes for a TT job.
As with dating, it seems the only way to move out of adjunct-hood is to get an offer from somewhere else, and then use that as leverage at the current institution. If for some reason you still want to stay.
I'm a department chair at a state university (with unionized faculty), and have experience with both tenure-line and adjunct hiring.
When we hire a new adjunct, the pool is generally limited to people who are already in the area and open to more employment. Usually, in an adjunct's first semester, we can only offer them part time work. This is partly because the collective bargaining agreement requires that we offer classes to any qualified current adjuncts before hiring someone new. For example, if someone retires, gets sick, or goes on sabbatical, I have to offer their courses to any qualified current part-timers who would like to increase their teaching load. There might be a course or two left over for a new adjunct to start part-time. It's essentially impossible to offer a full-time position for a new adjunct.
In this situation, we can't cast a wide net for candidates. We aren't offering a level of compensation or security worth relocating for, and in many cases the need arises last-minute. So, we hire the most qualified person we can find locally, among people with the right credentials who neither got a tenure-track nor took a full-time job in industry. It's often difficult to find anyone.
For a tenure-track hire, by contrast, we get a large number of applications from across the country and internationally. If one of our current adjuncts is in the pool, they will get the same consideration as everyone else. But the odds that they will happen to be the best fit out of that large pool are very low.
An important point to consider is that in many fields (e.g. economics) adjuncts typically do not have PhDs, only masters degrees. As such they cannot move into tenure track or teaching track jobs. This is often raised as a point of contention, that adjuncts are not considered for such jobs, but they are also explicitly unqualified for the job. Adjuncts in these fields are in effect below even PhD candidates, as they are not even working on their dissertations, and more like regular grad students.
That isn't to say anything bad about adjuncts, just that simply going by job titles isn't putting like with like.
I should also point out that when I was in the job market it was common advice when applying for a "normal" tenure track economics position to not even admit that you like teaching. I use admit intentionally there, as it was seen as an admission that you were not serious about research. This is important, as most schools wanted researchers and offered extremely low teaching loads (something like 1 course a semester, maybe 2), one even promising TA support such that "you don't even have to interact with students, ever." Accreditation is easier if you have more courses taught by PhDs, however, so depending on how it is counted (number of courses taught by PhDs vs percent of faculty with a PhD) teaching track roles are becoming more valuable to counter balance the number of research only faculty.
I have a couple of other thoughts here that have been mentioned before, so I won't belabor them, but one that seems to be left out: networking.
My professors have explicitely told me that at some level, whether I can land a post-doc is a luck of the draw for how many of their friends have recently taken post-docs. From undergrad I moved to a grad school in large part through my mentor's contacts, and the assumption is that from grad school I would move to a post-doc largely through my advisor's contacts. This is a pretty common story in math, which seems to be a particularly small and close-knit community as opposed to many other STEM fields. While I am in graduate school, and for a year or two out, my advisors will be concerned with my success, as it reflects on them. After a few years, they will have other students to go to bat for, and I imagine that they would reasonably focus their efforts on landing their current students' jobs. The longer I'm out, the less contact I have with my advisors, and thus the harder I expect it will be for me to land a job.
DISCLAIMER: I think a lot of merit goes into getting grad school/post docs/tenure track jobs. I just also think that there's a lot of networking in there too; you sort of need both, or overwhelming amounts of merit.
I think Scott's basic explanation is correct. I'll just add tweak that I thinks clarifies the matter further.
As Scott notes, there are two distinct functions: research and teaching. In a model of perfect competition, salary (Y) would form a power law when plotted against the ratio of research-to-teaching (X), with the long tail extending toward 100% teaching. However, there is not perfect competition, because bureaucracy. For budgetary reasons, hiring and salary must be legible to administrators, so they segment the curve into distinct roles: tenure-track, teaching, and adjunct, resulting in the present system.
The power law in competition for researchers is also congruent with the preference for superstar researchers and the disfavoring of older adjuncts. But it's the bureaucratic dimension that prevents this from being rationalized into a system of free agents.
My experience is in the humanities, and it's also about 30 years out of date now. I had a tenure-track job right after I finished my dissertation. My husband was a lecturer for two years before getting a tenure-track gig at a different school. (There's another distinction for you -- lecturers make a real salary and get bennies, but they're one-year renewable hires. So better than adjuncts, but worse than TT faculty).
My observation is that all the universities assume that the best candidates will get snatched up right after they graduate. If they didn't get snatched up, well, then I guess they weren't the best candidates, right? Almost anyone you ask in academia in a one-on-one conversation will agree this is stupid and incorrect, but in committee meetings it's kind of the default assumption.
I'm female, and I also felt like there was a similarity between fresh, virginal candidates/fresh, virginal young women and slightly used, been-around-the-block candidates/been-around-the-block less-young women. Do I have any social science to back this up? Nope. It was just a feeling I had.
I eventually left academia so that I could live in the same state as my husband (who also left academia), and we both got higher-paid, lower-status jobs (lawyer and IT manager). In the same town! Mirabile dictu.
I guess I should also mention that humanities folks don't usually do post-docs, though there are exceptions.
A tangential question re. "I also felt like there was a similarity between fresh, virginal candidates/fresh, virginal young women and slightly used, been-around-the-block candidates/been-around-the-block less-young women." For those who date women: Would you prefer a fresh, virginal young woman, or a slightly used woman? My impression is that men today are more-likely to avoid virgins than to seek them out. Today that would be a fetish.
Yes, I'm sympathetic to your point, but there certainly are still such men (though probably not commenting on this blog). I know two guys who believe in "first kiss is at the altar". Those guys do not comment on rationalist blogs. Christian blogs maybe, but not rat ones.
I've gotten that dating-market vibe too. It's very Jane Austen-y: at some point you age out of the marriage market. And the assumption becomes that if no one took a chance on you before now, there must be something wrong with you, so no one else will take a chance in the future.
I think you should question your approach of asking why colleges don't do the thing that would be more fair, rather than asking why any organization ever does the fair thing. No explanation is needed for colleges behaving unfairly. An explanation /is/ needed when one sees an organization behaving fairly.
As Adam Smith said, What needs explaining is not why so many nations are poor, but why some are rich.
Colleges aren't for-profit corporations, and my experience with organizations of all types has been that organizations that aren't run for profit, don't incentivize their people to be fair, or to do their jobs well in any respect. The only exception I've encountered are religious organizations, volunteer organizations, and Dept. of Defense front-line organizations, which all attract only people who are already incentivized to do the mission they're signing up for.
(You might think that the non-random behavior of colleges shows they're incentivized in some way. That's correct; but when white-collar workers aren't incentivized to do their job correctly, their personal preferences take over. These are highly correlated between different people in the same job, even in different organizations; so the behavior across organizations has a similar distribution.)
Substack tells me this comment is too long, so I will be splitting it up into two; the second half is in the reply. (Edited to remove some potentially identifying info and to soften some things I think I was too harsh on at first.
I was recently on the CS academic job market and successfully got a job. A few thoughts -- this is mostly focused on the top 30 CS departments in the US. Once you get out of there I don't know how much this holds anymore.
1. First of all, your caption on the graph doesn't actually match the chart. Assuming the chart label is right, that's not acceptance rate of people being hired, that's the *number* of people being hired at each rank. (Yes, these numbers are low, which matches my expectations for a specific field. See the annual Taubee survey for CS hiring stats in the US and Canada -- it's typical to hire about 200-400 professors in the US per year: https://cra.org/resources/taulbee-survey/ (last available for year 2021). I would be shocked if the acceptance rate for recent PhDs is 90 and the acceptance rate for people 1 year out (including postdocs, people who did a year of research prof, etc) was so much lower -- but the graph is just raw numbers as far as I can tell. The fact that the "Within Previous Year" bar is so high does not indicate that the acceptance rate for recent PhDs is higher. It just indicates that more of them were hired, which is not surprising considering it's by far the most common time to go on the job market.
2. Speaking about top R1 schools (let's say the top 30 computer science departments -- and everything I say here counts double for the top 10): The reason it becomes much harder to get a tenure-track job after becoming a teaching-focused professor (either teaching-track or adjunct) is that the application for tenure-track jobs is almost exclusively focused on your research. Aside from the allure of the "full package," I'm not sure why the charade is maintained that research is just one of three equally-weighted considerations in a tenure-track job (research, teaching, service). In reality it seems to be about 95% research, and as long as you don't stab a student or something you'll probably keep your job. (I will say: some places, including the place I ended up going, did actually have one teaching faculty interview me as a tenure-track faculty. This is rare and a good sign that this institution/department actually treats its teaching faculty well. But I think aside from that, I got asked exactly zero questions about teaching at R1 interviews. Yes, I had to provide a teaching statement that described my teaching philosophy. Did anyone actually read it? I have no idea, but I know they read my research statement, because I got questions about that.)
And if you are a PhD student or a postdoc, your full-time job is research. Most PhD students and postdocs don't work a day job, have only minor teaching responsibilities, and have collaborators and peers who are also doing research. Plus they (theoretically) have guidance on which well-scoped problems to work on from their advisors. So, PhD students and postdocs are basically in the best state to spend the 5+ years of run-up to a tenure track application. Doing research as a PhD is way easier than doing it on your own time as a hobby, if only because your university will pay to get you access to all the electronic library resources you could want, lab space, equipment, administrators, conference travel, seminars to watch, administrators, etc, plus you don't have to hold down another job while doing that. This is the biggest pool of people who want to become tenure-track professors, so this is everyone else is competing against.
Teaching as a teaching-track professor or adjunct is a full-time job. My understanding is that a typical teaching-track load is 2-3 classes per semester. The advice I've been given is that it takes 4-8 out-of-lecture hours to prepare materials (lecture, homework, "fun" activities, etc) per every hour of lecture -- not even including grading, office hours, helping students who want to chat, dealing with students who decided they hate you, dealing with cheating, paperwork, interfacing with the rest of the department, etc. As far as I can tell, it is one of the hardest jobs ever, and it doesn't pay nearly as well or have the prestige of being a research professor. But, if you want to be tenure-track faculty, you will be evaluated on very little of this, and realistically if you're teaching 2-3 classes per semester you will not have time to conduct the kind of research agenda that will help you compete with tenure-track candidates. The competition is the PhD students and postdocs (and maybe research professors) who *have* been spending full-time jobs on research, so even if you do a great job in the <25% of your day remaining to you after teaching, that's a *really* uphill battle. I've spoken with several teaching faculty and asked why they did that, and I got two reasons. Almost all of them: they love teaching! Which is great! One person said he liked academia and was thinking about the tenure-track life, but didn't want to be busy with the 20 jobs of being a tenure-track professor, so he went with a teaching job so he could be overloaded with only 10 jobs instead. I didn't talk to any adjuncts because I don't know any, which probably says something about how much they are overlooked in academia in general.
Maybe a more charitable way to look at this is: Research, most commonly done during a PhD/postdoc, *is* the experience they're looking for. Everything else, including teaching, is a "distraction." (I don't honestly know if it would be better if everyone gave up on the charade and had tenure-track faculty just stop teaching. More on that in another post later, perhaps.) And people who do research-focused jobs, especially in research-oriented academic roles (see next), or occasionally from particularly paper-publishing-focused industry labs, do occasionally switch into tenure track.
3. A better question is: Why are tenure-track faculty and research-track faculty different things? For the uninitiated: tenure-track faculty have three supposedly-equally-weighted buckets of jobs they do: research, teaching, and service (being on committees and getting the things that have to happen in the department done even though they don't benefit you personally), and are paid by salary. Research professors (sometimes they have different titles -- research scientist, staff researcher, etc) pay themselves out of grant money that they get themselves, but they don't have to """waste time""" doing teaching or service. (Sometimes they still advise PhD or MS students, sometimes not, depends on the department). Teaching-track faculty are salaried and only do the teaching bucket. It is rare for them to do research, and the ones I know who do do research do research in CS education (as in how to teach people better), and publish once every couple years (compared to the 3-10 papers/year expected of tenure-track and research-track profs). Tenure-track faculty get to vote in faculty meetings. In some departments/institutions, research or teaching-track professors can vote, but in most they can't and the tenure-track folks run the show. I've never heard of adjuncts getting a vote at faculty meetings. (To some extent I guess this makes sense, because they're not considered long-term employees of the department... but it seems like a raw deal to me.)
Anyway, "research professor" might be something more like the kind of "low-commitment capacity" you're thinking of -- but it's about research, not teaching. Research professors (and sometimes they have a slightly different title -- they're somewhere between research-only professors and super-postdocs) are not salaried, they have to get grants and pay themselves out of those grants, so they're a great way for the university to hire someone they think *might* be good without spending a whole salary line on them. And people do shift between research-track and tenure-track positions. I interviewed at institutions where about half the tenured faculty were former research professors at the same institution (or, less frequently, at another institution).
I've heard of exactly one person who went from a teaching-track job to a research-track job and later to a tenure-track job, and it was kind of a miracle as far as I can tell. But once again, that person needed to do a bunch of fancy research -- which they didn't have time for while teaching -- before applying to tenure-track.
But also like I said, this only applies to the top ~20 places in CS. I have no idea what a rank 65 school sociology department does for tenure/research/teaching.
5. Final thought: This touches on my least favorite thing about academia, which is that if you take a break (until you get tenure), you're done. You can't just go try another job for two years, decide you don't like it, and come back to academia, because unless you've been publishing full time those two years then you'll look like a terrible applicant compared to the recent PhDs and postdocs who haven't taken a break in 5-7 years. There are maybe one or two industry research jobs focused on publication that would not be a death sentence for a top academic position, but aside from that, you kind of have to -- unless you can maintain that strong publication record while holding down another job. I do know someone who did that, so I know it's not impossible, but I mean, if you're going to be miserable and busy doing a full-time job, you may as well do it *as* your full-time job, and get the legibility/credential/credit, right?
Re. "1. First of all, your caption on the graph doesn't actually match the chart. Assuming the chart label is right, that's not acceptance rate of people being hired, that's the *number* of people being hired at each rank." -- That's a great point, explains the data that seemed so strange when read with Scott's interpretation, and I didn't even notice it. Thanks.
On the point of not hiring from your own institution I have seen one senior professor in economics claim they would do this specifically for purposes of diversity in intellectual thought. They argued that on principle their doctoral students should get experience somewhere else and that they should try and get people from elsewhere so that the intellectual climate didn't get stale. No idea if this if this value system is strong enough to override more base incentives, seems unlikely to me, but could be part of an explanation.
As a STEM PhD, in a very qualitative way I feel like I can tell who will be hired and who won’t pretty easily. The truth is you have to be exceptional to be hired in my field (not bio) and it’s easy to tell which phd grads will be chosen based on how many papers they published and who they worked with in graduate school. They are the real go getters and they are zealous.
Hi Scott and thanks for this post. I'm an associate professor at a European R1-like university and I think there are relatively straightforward economic explanations as follows (with tounge partly in cheek).
As an academic in a research position, my main job is not to do good research, nor to teach classes. It is to bring home research grants. Overheads from these grants keep the lights on for everyone else. Therefore, the university needs to try to give tenured research positions only to people that can be expected with high confidence to earn more than they cost.
Next part of the explanation: a successful grantmaking career is a trajectory that needs to start almost immediately after getting a PhD. I am not sure whether it is rational for funders to allocate funds in this manner, but it is broadly perceived that this is how it works: more money comes to those that already have it, and if you don't get on the escalator from the start, it quickly gets much more difficult to climb up.
You ask why universities do not hire lots of people in a low-commitment position. But in a sense this is what the tenure track is. The salary is not high and you get kicked out after a few years if you haven't established a track record of external funding. Low risk with high upside for the university.
You also ask why colleges aren't more like sports teams, trying to buy each other's stars. This does happen to an extent. But a closer analogy might be to senior partners in law firms or management consultancies. If conditions are better elsewhere they may leave, but transaction costs are high, and most of the money anyway comes from what they bring in on their own.
Thus, I think the economics of a dependency on external grants goes a long way towards explaining the phenomena you describe.
I'd point out that the incentives at top institutions to care about superstar researchers run deeper than prestige. Top-tier profs pull in grant money, in many cases millions of dollars for departments (indirect costs on grants, i.e., the percentage of a total research grant that a uni takes in for its own operations rather than a prof's research is around 50%). The difference between A tier and B/C tier profs in this ability to pull in grant money is likely substantial in many fields that are heavily dependent on research funding given the many biases present in professor brand name recognition, exponential growth dynamics in citation counts, and knowing how to work the grant system, let alone differences in actual talent (which from my observations are substantial).
"But why aren’t colleges more like un-salary-capped sports teams, trying to outbid one another for their rivals’ superstars?"
Institutions do this (we always heard that many top-tier Stanford profs were paid in the low to mid six-figures). However, departmental research budgets are finite with high potential upside but definitely not startup go-to-the-moon upside (how much grant money can one prof pull in? How can you predict who will win a Nobel just from a track record early in someone's career? patent potential is rarer) Switching universities is a huge move and as always, you have reputational risks if you e.g. move around too frequently and lose research productivity. What motivates academics is mostly not money, but freedom to do research. This means freedom from teaching/departmental responsibilities as well as the ability to collaborate closely with other leaders in your field (different schools have different specialties and you may not be able to find similar collaboration opportunities at peer institutions no matter what they pay you). Academics (in the hard sciences/engineering fields at least) could generally get paid way more out in private industry.
There's only so much grant money to win. It could be an interesting question whether unis are optimized for winning grant money based on faculty counts (whether they're over or under hiring)
Some hires appear to simply be political appointments, like Noam Chomsky at University of Arizona. I know they never replaced Ed Abbey. But he was the eco terrorists' darling. Really? Noam Chomsky for Ed Abbey? I don't get it.
Chomsky merely mumbles his way through his monologues; Abbey had a goal in socializing, you might say.
Apart from his political side, Chomsky also basically founded the entire field of modern linguistics.
(I hadn't actually put together that this was the same person, until I found out from the linguistics department that he'd come to campus one weekend to give a few speeches. I missed the one on linguistics on Saturday, so I decided to go to the one on Sunday. I was quite surprised when it turned out to be a strident political speech.)
So far as I know, Abbey wasn't political about his role. I went back to UA in the 1980s, when I was in my 40s, to finish a degree, and Abbey was rather known for enjoying the company of female undergrads. His rustic and secret gravesite is regarded a shrine to devoted Abbeyites.
Sorry to be blunt, but discarding Chomsky as a scientist is utter nonsense. It doesn't matter whether you like him or not, or whether you find him overrated or not. He *is* a scientific superstar. He was the most-cited scientist in arts and humanities in the 1980s, and is still one of the most cited scientists until today. He is also a superstar by any other scientific metric, even if you restrict to fields like CS where his contributions are not political at all.
Yitang Zhang is a fascinating case: he failed to get a tenure-track job because his early work had no real successes, he bounced around as a lecturer (and even fell out of academia for a while), and then he produced a monumental advance on the twin primes conjecture and was instantly given tenure at his university (and naturally, he was poached the next year). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yitang_Zhang
I’m a tenure track faculty member at an Ivy. From my experience, I think this analysis gets almost everything right, except:
1) take Scott’s observation that every hour spent in the classroom is an hour not spent doing research together with the observation that the greatest research contributions tend to come earlier in people’s careers, and it’s no big mystery why universities don’t hire everyone as adjuncts and wait for the superstar researchers to rise to the top — if everyone had to teach a moderate amount, those future superstars wouldn’t have enough time to do the research that would make them superstars and everyone would be less productive as a whole.
2) I don’t think students are really clamoring for famous thought leaders to teach them. With maybe a few exceptions at the very top (eg. Steve Pinker), few undergrads have any idea who the field-famous research stars at their university are and almost none of them know when they are being taught by a research star and when they’re being taught by an adjunct who isn’t doing much research at all. That might leave us without an explanation for why the titles are so confusingly similar, but I’m not sure that needs much special explanation. All titles are pretty confusing to outsiders. How many people know the difference between the Dean of the College and the Dean of Student Affairs? I’m not sure they’re less confusing outside of academia, either. Is the difference between a Software Architect and a Software Enginneer really less opaque?
Regarding 2, in my outdated experience, undergraduates rapidly learn that teaching ability is uncorrelated or negatively-correlated with research superstardom, and that most of the direct benefits to working with a research superstar only apply at the graduate level. But for an undergraduate who is focusing on a major and planning on grad school, they'll absolutely learn what the state of the field is, and taking courses with research superstars can be useful if you can impress one enough that they're willing to put in a word to help get you into a good graduate program.
I should clarify: I think most undergrads have no idea that any faculty do research at all. From inside academia, research is obviously a huge part of the job, but it’s easy to forget what insider knowledge that is. I can’t count how many times undergrads, even seniors, have asked what I’m doing with my summer “off” or just asked what I do when I’m not teaching. Those undergrads who do get involved in research mostly phone in a bit of work on a project and leave. Only sometimes they get interested in the field as a whole enough to learn a little about who the star researchers are, but I’d estimate that this is no more than 10% of the total undergrad population at an Ivy+, and less than that in less research-focused institutions
This looks like a multi-armed bandit solution. If the variance in outcomes among inexperienced hires is greater than the variance in outcomes among experienced hires, and you are trying to maximize your likelihood of making a great hire, you're going to make a substantial number of offers to untested but possibly great new hires. If they don't turn out to be great, you can decline tenure later.
I don't think it's a mystery why the job market (in humanities) penalises experience. It's a bit like the dating market, desirable candidates get snapped up quickly, and if you're single for five years straight there's probably something wrong with you.
It's only slightly different in the sciences, where there's an expectation that you need to be a postdoc for a few years. This really just means the clock starts a few years later.
Universities hire based mostly on prestige rather than ability. Whether that's because prestige is an easy-to-measure proxy for ability or whether they genuinely want prestige more than ability, that depends on how cynical you are. But you don't become more prestigious just by sitting around on the shelf. There's a chance you might, in that extra year, do something that makes you extra-prestigious, but it will need to be something pretty special.
> But why aren’t colleges more like un-salary-capped sports teams, trying to outbid one another for their rivals’ superstars?
Because there's not enough benefit to doing so which would offset the huge cost of a bidding war. The fifth best basketball team can become the best basketball team by hiring the best player in the world, but no single hire or handful of hires is going to loft U Chicago above Harvard. Bidding wars cost a lot of money, and they also piss off your existing staff who are annoyed that Professor Big Shot down the hall is suddenly earning four times more than them without doing anything meaningfully better.
“ no single hire or handful of hires is going to loft U Chicago above Harvard.”
Interesting example. In almost all cases, you’re correct of course, but you’re clearly not thinking of MBA programs. U Chicago spends an incredible amount of money to do just that at the Booth School.
This is what I’ve been told: universities like to hire young PhDs for tenure-track because they want to make sure you can be productive for as many years as possible into the future. If you’ve had a PhD for 6 years already, the university fears that’s 6 less years of productive output and once you get tenured, the university is basically stuck with you. That’s what I’ve been told by profs who are / have been on hiring committees.
acoup is generally on point about the structure of the academic profession. Basically, much of teaching is done by specialized teaching faculty who get little money and are looked down upon by "research" faculty.
With that said, we have major disagreements.
First, I don’t think universities can easily save a lot of money. Universities spend huge sums on administration not due to incompetence but because all stakeholders are demanding more IT support, more support for student mental health, more support for finding jobs, etc. There is spending I see as clearly wasteful, but is generally spending that pays for itself – fancy buildings requested by donors, luxury dorms that attract out of state rich kids who pay the bills, conditional government grants, etc.
Second, it isn’t clear to me that spending more on adjuncts is the most compelling priority for any money that can be freed up. Adjuncts are highly educated adults repeatedly choosing to take crappy wages in exchange for a nominally cool job and a chance of a better job. Compare that to, for example, undergraduate students who are often literally children when they commit to spending in the low six-figures on a college education that is now a barrier to entry for a middle-classhood. I'm not sure I'd spend extra money on the adjuncts over just reducing tuition.
Full disclosure – highly remunerated tenure track faculty at R1.
Answering specific asks, at least for my discipline:
-> But then why do they only hire inexperienced people?
If you hire experienced researchers you generally have to offer tenure. Offering tenure is incredibly risky because one bad apple can spoil the department.
That is a severe issue because it is very hard to move established professors. The people who want to move are (generally) unhappy with their current department and so are disproportionately likely to be a bad apple.
-> Why only people from outside their own institution?
It's hard to move professors but it's very easy to move adjuncts. Adjunct jobs suck and so adjuncts at R1s are likely constantly applying to and being rejected for TT positions at any reasonable school. It's very hard to improve your profile so much that you move from being not good enough for a tenure track job at any reasonable school to being good enough for a tenure track job at an R1. More likely, you'd move from an adjunct job to a low ranked tenure track job.
1) Grants. An Einstein doesn't just bring in prestige, they bring in millions of dollars of funding, which can then be used to hire more people. As a result, there's pressure to find people who have markers of future grant success. But grant funders are cautious, they want to make sure that their millions of dollars are going to be put to good use (which is exactly the kind of strategy that en masse makes research worse, as moonshots almost never get funded), so another vicious cycle develops where they preferentially fund people who have already had grant success, or certainly look like they will. This then interacts with....
2) Hyperspecialisation and illegibility. Grant decisions are often made by non experts. Job searches often feature someone from management or outside the department. Even within departments it can be hard to assess the quality of someone's work if it's not your exact area. As a result other markers (E.g. outputs in ranked journals) become the lowest common denominator. So if youre a few years post PhD and don't have these markers, it makes you look much less likely to have future success compared with the newly minted PhD who already has a few but hasn't had much opportunity to fail yet either
3) Relatedly, the pressures for more presige, publications, and funds point towards 'collaboration' and interdisciplinarity - it's easier to tell a future grant success story if you can say you've teamed up with Einstein at another university, and universities that work together can feed off each other's prestige, and if you add your name to their paper while they add theirs to yours you can get more outputs. So new hires who have connections with other instutitions, or whose supervisor was Einstein, can be a genuine asset, and have an advantage over someone local who only knows everyone you know.
4) It's also important to remember that the Adjunct market isn't normal. Departments preferentially give jobs to their current grad students so they get the experience. As you finish your PhD, there's a new batch of grad students needing work, so it gets harder and harder to justify giving the job to you even if you are more qualified. This means that as you get further out adjuncts often have to find non-academic work which makes it difficult to research and get those other markers.
Point 1 is made often - that low probability high upside research rarely gets funded. But examples are rarely given. What do you have mind? Good ideas are genuinely hard to come by.
Regarding why there's some poaching but not a huge amount: the people are involved are all quite intelligent, and can recognize Moloch traps, even if they're not entirely immune.
Overall, the academic job market is like all the worst parts of asymmetric dating markets. I think literally you can just pick the worst dynamics from dating markets, and there'll be an academic equivalent, and vice versa.
On that note, maybe one of the reasons it hasn't gotten fixed is that you just don't talk about it. The impression I get is that it's airing dirty laundry in public, and erodes trust in the Academy at large. I've been in a discussion with some academic friends about Bret Devereaux's blog, and they were distinctly unenthusiastic, and I think one part of it was the dirty laundry aspect.
Writing something on the topic - one of my big Qs is whether there are indeed any miscalibrated expectations, and if so why (nothing is "bad" about having "bad" adjunct positions, we're talking upper-middle class people with plenty of external options here, but if expectations are off then sure that causes unnecessary suffering and presumably should be not that hard to correct)?
like, for other superstar careers (sports, acting etc) people generally presume that "strivers" with tiny odds of success know what they are signing up for, and have reasonable expectations of their odds of success (past basic human overoptimism bias)?
is that not the case for academia, and if so why?
is that not the case for adjuncts specifically? (which is at the minimum much more of a "superstar" market segment than others, and at maximum as other commenters here pointed out effectively a notice that all realistic chance of tenure track for you is gone)
I agree that there's nothing inherently bad about having adjunct positions, same as there's nothing bad about having janitors. And to be clear, I'm speaking in broad generalities about something with which I have no personal experience, although I've seen a number of friends go through it with varying degrees of success.
The problem is that the adjunct positions (and postdocs and grad student positions) are currently filled by playing on the hopes and dreams of people who will never succeed. There's an old joke with a lot of variants, about a guy who describes his awful job at the theatre (stage performances, not movies); one variant is scrubbing up the rotten fruit that people throw, and who describes how it pays so little that he has to sleep under the stage and wear worn-out costumes as clothes. And when asked why he doesn't get a better-paying job elsewhere, he says, "What, and leave the theatre? Impossible!"
One of my favorite comparisons is with Jane Austen novels: how the lower-upper-class women there are often under pressure to marry a gentleman with an independent income. It's presented as a necessity. There are other options, but since they're unthinkable, the women aren't prepared for them. How would they keep house by themselves, if they marry a tradesman? Not to mention what would happen if they dropped lower and had to work outside their own house.
For an example from several opposite ends of the dating spectrum, being an adjunct is like being "friend-zoned" by the Academy. They'll be strung along and exploited, but never given what they really want. The only healthy solution is to leave, and figure out who they are when they're not part of the Academy, and find some other field of human endeavor that will give them satisfaction.
It's brutal to get the feedback that you're just not good enough to go as far as you want in the field that you love. Or to come to the realization that what the field needs from you is not something that you're prepared to give. Don't ask me how to give that nicely, because I don't know. All I know is that it's necessary.
think very much jibes with your last reply/espcly second paragraph.
think we agree the expectations need to be adjusted, though I focus on doing that earlier in the pipeline in the note (I guess I kinda do advocacy of the kind I talk about/helping people update expectations and snap out of it, with PhDs that reach my orbit/walk into my reddit career advice trap.. kinda inspired to explore the space and see who's doing what and whether I might want to do more there now).
believe there are maybe not even too hard cultural improvements possible once we acknowledge/popularize the notion that academia is a bit cult-like, and either get profs take a bit more responsibility over their guiding people to academia, or at least make students more aware of the cult-like nature of the academia recruitment and indoctrination
“ The problem is that the adjunct positions (and postdocs and grad student positions) are currently filled by playing on the hopes and dreams of people who will never succeed”
This is common in many fields. College athletes who dream of the pros, where the chances are minuscule, entrepreneurs and startups who dream of success but mostly fail, novelists, politicians, musicians, and on and on. Do we blame the system for their unrealistic expectations? If anything, academics should have a better understanding of their statistical likelihood to land a tenure-track job than these less-educated fields.
For most of what you list, it's simply a matter of success or failure or the area in between. You try, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, probably there's degrees of success and failure. You dream of being world-class, but probably you won't be. You won't know unless you go all in, and you shouldn't go all in unless the attempt is its own reward, unless that's just who you are. That's the nature of life.
Academia is different in that the educational system requires a large number of human teachers. Since they keep the circles of tenure tight (which is another topic), there aren't enough tenure-track teachers (in the broadest sense, including grad students who have a good chance of tenure), and so they have to find a way to get more. This puts a finger on the scale, and encourages people who would otherwise find something healthier to do, to sacrifice themselves on the altar of Academia. This is, in my opinion, a corrupting influence.
Ah, here's a parallel. It's like movie producers telling young actresses that they have a chance at being a star, but only if they show that they're "willing to do what it takes", which means the "casting couch".
I don't get why my nice tenure-track job exists. I teach political science in a largely undergraduate program (no PhD students, sort-of-related Masters program) in an institution that excels in STEM. Nobody is expecting truly great research out of *anybody* in my liberal arts college. Anybody in it who does do great research moves on to a more prestigious university (especially for social science) in no time. So, why even have 30% of the faculty in my department (and college) on this much more expensive tenure track. The university's overall reputation is made by scientists and engineers. I think there's a lot of path dependence and a lot of prestige to publishing research even if almost all of it published in my college is... fine.
My wife is tenure track research faculty. Based on her experience, I would say the elephant in the room is grant funding.
Essentially, research faculty are as valuable as the grant money they can bring into the university. Universities get an additional 30-50% of the value of the grant paid directly to them for overhead costs (and there is little accountability for how the university chooses to spend that money). Also, research faculty are expected to fund a portion of their own salary from their grants. The percentage varies, but my wife funds 50% of her salary from her own grants, so as long as she has grants then the university only pays half. If you are research faculty with funds you are an asset. If you are research faculty without funds you are a burden. Anyone the university considers making tenured faculty needs to prove they will not be a long term burden.
The best NIH grant you can get is an R01. If a researcher has that, then your lab is funded securely for the next five years. Once you show you can write an R01 grant and get it, universities are willing to make you tenure track. If you write and get an R01 as part of your post-doc work, then you can apply to tenure track positions immediately and are likely to get one. Then all you have to do for tenure is get a second R01. However, if you finish your post-doc without an R01 then you need to find a non-tenured position and scrape by until you get a big grant.
In short, there are no superstars. There are professors with a track record of bringing money into their university and professors without that track record. From the university point of view, if your people keep getting grants it means they are probably rising to the top of their field. Or maybe a university could poach a superstar, but the actual value added is the money they bring with them. A 'superstar' that has no active grants is no longer one for the purpose if hireability.
That may be true for STEM, but not true for the humanities, arts, and social sciences, where grant funding is both rare and far less money (occasional exceptions like Templeton).
Academia is basically one of the "dream careers", in that there are tons of people who dream of doing research and/or teaching at the college level, and so you have a huge field of folks fighting over limited space. It doesn't help that by the time they're looking for tenure track jobs, your professor folk have spent virtually all of their adult life (and a big fraction of their overall life) inside academia with its peculiar ways.
I've been asking in comments above re whether there are actually any miscalibrated expectations and why that might be: ultimately nothing intrinsically wrong with having "bad" adjunct jobs, we're talking about well-educated upper-middle class people who very much do have options who keep taking up those deals, given voluntary dealing/no coercion/external options availability imo it's hard to make the case that "harm" is somehow being done by simply offering those jobs and willing adults taking them up.
Your comment actually does answer my question: it implies yes, for many participants expectations are miscalibrated, due to cult-like culture of the domain and inculcation in the membership of a range of anti-rational beliefs (there is no life outside academia, given that one has to abandon realistic cost-benefit analysis and pursue one's only chance at salvation aka research job/tenure however low the odds might be, despite being pretty much shown the door by getting nothing better than adjunct offers etc).
The comment also presents a much more reasonable model of where the harm is being done: professors inculcating their talented undergrads/PhD students in the cult dogma above do set them up via this "neural programming" to suffer through many postdocs or adjunctorships until the maladaptive beliefs are corrected. Think this neatly resolves the (in my mind) apparent contradiction between "feels like harm is being done" and "free agents making free deals in their own self-interest can't be value distractive" econ101 sense - econ101 is limited, introducing psychologically and anthropologically plausible "limited rationality via persistent beliefs" model above resolves the issue.
"Maybe colleges really do want “superstars”, not just moderately good researchers. The value of the #1 brightest new PhD is that she has a 5% chance of becoming a future superstar; the value of the #100 brightest new PhD is that she has a 1% chance of becoming a future superstar. Once you’ve been around for five years, colleges can see your track record, satisfy themselves you’re not the next Einstein, and lose interest."
Others have said this for specific other fields above, but my main reaction to this was just: that graph of decaying chances to get into good jobs looks *right*. It looks like the way the world should be if it's functioning properly. These are all PhDs, which means that the academic world has already kicked the tyres of these people and determined which ones are roadworthy. On the first pass, most of the good ones should get swept up into the good jobs. On the second and third passes, there are fewer good ones who escaped notice first time round, so there are few hires into the good jobs.
There are presumably lots of ways in which academia is messed up, but I don't see how that graph can be one of them.
My experience is that academia is not a closed system. It's competing with private industry. And industry will always have more openings and bigger budgets.
I did my master's at a research university. Not tier 1, but well regarded in a few specific fields. My lab was swarming with tech and defense companies looking for specialists. Tenured professors would consult with or at least exchange interns with these companies. For a fresh PhD, then, the BATNA wasn't settling for a different track or a lesser university. It's getting a six-figure job offer in Huntsville and leaving academia entirely.
If industry and academia have similar demand for fresh PhDs, but industry's demand grows faster with experience, I would expect industry to win. That could generate the weird curve that Bret showed.
a) a lot of the most groundbreaking research in an academic's career happens when they are relatively young. Since you mention Einstein, it's worth going to take a look at how long he lived vs. his age when his most famous theories were elaborated. So this means that, to paraphrase Pulp Fiction, academic's minds don't age like fine wine like they think, but instead slowly turn to vinegar. Hence older academics who haven't become famous are not very valuable.
b) Tenure committees are probably incapable in most cases of distinguishing between candidates based on objective quality criteria (the few true megastars everyone knows about and get hired quickly, leaving a bunch of grinders who are more than capable of doing job but don't quite have the "it" factor). In that context as you say hiring the young guy who less proven either way provides more upside, but conversely if people have been on job market for years without getting tenure anywhere that also becomes an easy way for the committee to ding them. Sort of like a house that for whatever reason sits too long on the market, you start wondering what's wrong with it even if you can't see any obvious issues.
c) am skeptical it's politically acceptable to start paying professors in a differentiated and market-reflective way. If professors with similar job titles make vastly different amounts of money that's going to create tons of jealousy/infighting, and if they get truly paid free agent type money the marxist types all too common among student body are going to be picketing the president's office to fire them (like they regularly do to try to cap pay for the finance people who manage the university's giant endowment programs). Happy to be enlightened otherwise, but would be very surprised that universities compete on individual-specific pay packages in a meaningful enough way that professors would be tempted to regularly jump ship.
> So this means that, to paraphrase Pulp Fiction, academic's minds don't age like fine wine like they think, but instead slowly turn to vinegar. Hence older academics who haven't become famous are not very valuable.
The most useful older academics that I've known are no longer doing great thinking, but they're great managers of research groups. If you can bring in smart young grad students and postdocs (using your prestige), get grants (using your prestige), think up reasonable projects for them to work on (using your decades of experience and knowledge and big network of collaborators) and basically be a good manager who allows their group to be productive, then you don't need to be all that brilliant on your own any more.
Many (most?) professors don't ever make this transition properly, and the ability to manage a large research group isn't the thing that gets hired for, nor is it something that gets actively taught.
it's the same problem in most fields. Peter principle etc. Senior positions tend to require skills around sales, people management and internal politics that have little to do with those required at entry level. But despite this being a very well known problem organizations still hire / promote based on performance at second set of tasks rather than projected ability at the first, because doing otherwise would trigger a revolt (you would confine people doing a great job under a glass ceiling because they can't hack it at next level, while you promote people to manage them who were doing a worse job at lower levels, etc.)
I’m a professor… some additional clarifications. 1) Adjuncts are sometimes Ph.D.s (particularly in the humanities), but in other fields are frequently simply people who know a lot about the field (practitioners). Practitioners don’t do research, therefore they are not candidates for tenure track positions. Adjuncts with Ph.D.s are almost always out of the research game almost entirely. 2) Teaching faculty don’t have much time to do research. A full course load in many schools is 4 courses a semester, at others it’s 3. Grading, teaching, dealing with student issues, etc. all take up a great deal of time. Research is not a side-activity — it takes an incredible amount of time as well. Anyone on the teaching track is likely to not have much time for research. 3) In fields supported by grants / labs / access to technical equipment, universities frequently must fund the up-front costs in the hope that the professor will obtain grants to cover future costs. In Engineering, a startup package for a new tenure track faculty member might be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, for example.
Overall, however, the analysis that universities have a “prestige” track and a teaching track; that the teaching track has a surfeit of people willing to go into it, and that it is deliberately obfuscatory so that the “advertising” can be about prestige is spot on. To speculate a bit, I think that one of the reasons that teaching is easily undervalued (not just at the university level), is that it is so difficult to measure teaching quality. Clearly some teachers are better than others at getting students to learn the material. However, our instruments for measuring teaching quality are really terrible. By contrast, everyone can count papers, citations, and grant dollars and can assess the quality of journal that the paper is in (but assessing actual impact is very hard as well, which is why that also isn’t a big evaluative component).
Once you are on the teaching track or an adjunct you spend way more time prepping new teaching materials and applying for jobs the next year so you don’t get research time. Changing universities or being given new teaching to do every year has an enormous marginal cost compared to teaching your same courses year on year when you are TT. In some professions the journals are corrupt and they will publish the work of people who already have good prestige signals so when you get a little prestige it compounds very quickly
Working on the research side... I think it's even more dysfunctional.
There's research and academic staff. Research staff typically have to chase their sallary from grants.
Academic staff typically get a steady paycheck and don't need to chase their salary and have more teaching duties.
Many research staff enjoy research and want a quiet life but almost universaly hate the constant grind and uncertainty of chasing grants.
Many research staff at prestigious universities will at some point move into an academic post in a less prestigious university for more money and more stability.
Almost any particular field is a small world where everyone knows everyone and networks, collaborations and connections have their own value.
I was one of those PhD students who graduated with a much better teaching CV than research CV, so I was considering applying for university teaching positions when I graduated. (I ended up at an tech start-up instead.) I think I had very different impressions of the market.
(Context: American R1 institution, graduated a couple of years ago, in engineering.)
My impression was that the academic job market was primarily for research, and if you mostly wanted to teach, you were basically looking in a different job market. Traditionally, some of those people would be job-titled lecturers, and there was some grumbling among teaching-focused faculty about being treated as second-class citizens. But there was some optimism about change, as some institutions came round to treating teaching more seriously. Some departments in some research universities had started hiring for tenure-track teaching faculty positions—"with voting rights", one of my professors explained to me—with it explicit in the job title, say, "Assistant Professor (Teaching)". It wasn't super common, but those departments would've wanted to build very strong undergraduate foundational programs. Or, you could go for teaching-focused colleges, like liberal arts colleges, or engineering colleges like Harvey Mudd or Olin. But this was still functionally a different, and smaller, market to the "real" academic job market.
In the real job market, people seemed to think that hiring committees claimed to care about teaching, but didn't _really_ care. And as a student, every faculty member I knew was research-focused (and possibly loved teaching, but it wasn't their primary role), or if they were teaching-focused you knew it from their job title. So I never really felt that there was any attempt to obscure the distinction between teaching and research roles, more just that teaching roles… weren't that big a thing.
That said, I admit I can't really provide any insight into how the adjunct thing works, other than to say I didn't think it was about teaching.
The question Scott asks is an excellent one (Why Is The Academic Job Market So Weird?). I've often wondered this, and it's weird in so many different ways that answering it touches on almost every aspect of academia and higher education. It's perhaps pointless to write when there are already 300 comments (!), many of which are excellent (esp. noting the existence of postdocs in STEM), but here are a few notes from the perspective of a tenured faculty member in a natural science (Physics) at a large U.S. public university. These comments here are fairly minor; perhaps at some point I'll attempt an actual answer to the question, which I think involves (i) the existence of multiple competing, incompatible, and often cryptic goals and (ii) the mismatch between these goals and where money comes from.
1 Poaching. As many have noted, in the sciences it is essentially hopeless to go from an adjunct to a tenure track position, mainly because the former is (usually) based on teaching, and the hiring the latter is based largely on research. A more puzzling question is why there isn't much more poaching of tenured professors, since these people have *demonstrated* that they can succeed, and postdocs newly on the job market have not. I think the answers are (1) a somewhat irrational desire for young blood and (2) the higher cost of more senior faculty, especially in terms of lab startup funds (in most STEM). Also, the lack of immediate incentive for tenured people to move leads to attempted senior hire processes dragging on forever (> 1 year) and often being unsuccessful.
2 Research income. "Colleges want two things from their professors." Actually three, the third being grant funding, from which the university takes a cut (at least 30%). This also relates to the "superstar" part of the essay -- grant success isn't uniformly distributed, and superstars can bring in a lot of money.
3 "colleges will enter a bidding war to get you" -- there is remarkably little variation in salaries, and often a lot of institutional constraints on this. There are, however, bidding wars in terms of STEM startup costs. In Physics, Chemistry, and Biology, these are often ~$1M.
4 Postdocs. As others have noted, postdocs exist, which is in some sense a trial period pre tenure-track. However, schools generally don't hire their own postdocs, and this makes sense: that postdoc's research area is probably already represented by the lab he/she is in, and hiring the postdoc as faculty would create questions of nepotism, independence, etc.
Devereaux's post is also excellent, though I do think he underestimates the role of the willingness of people to take terrible jobs in encouraging the existence of terrible jobs.
It's honestly very difficult not to read Devereaux's post as mostly being an argumentum ex butthurtum over not having the tenure-track job he admits he wants. I don't think there's any real mystery about why there are many adjuncts and few tenured professors: adjuncts are cheaper and they don't have tenure so you can fire them. And as you suggest, the fact that they're teaching (a necessary evil) instead of doing research (what academics actually want) means they can be pretty crap – and since they don't have tenure, you can fire them if they're *too* crap.
And Devereaux not having a tenure-track job also seems like just a good decision by his admins, since he's rampantly ideological to the point it hurts his academics – for example, he freely admitted that he wrote his terrible "exposé" of alleged Spartan incompetence pretty much because he hates laconophilia and the ideology of those moderns who admire them, but flat out admitting it doesn't make it any better. Academia may be grossly ideologically skewed, but "being wrong on purpose to own the cons" probably still isn't what even very liberal faculty want in a researcher.
> "being wrong on purpose to own the cons" probaby still isn't what even very liberal faculty want in a researcher
I do believe you're overestimating the intellectual honesty of faculty members.
Bear in mind that Devereaux, as a specialist in European military history (a subject consisting almost entirely of the exploits of white males!), is already considered pretty ideologically suspect by the woke types.
I never really got any strong ideological tone from anything Devereaux wrote. Highly improbable that he e.g. voted for Trump, but I never saw any of his work come across as far-left.
My impression is that on today's linear scale he's center-left, but what that conceals is that he's actually coming from a somewhat Marxist school of historical analysis. Not that there's anything wrong with that.* So while he does take issue with the far-identitarian-left, it's coming from a different side of the left, rather than the right.
* If I were a Patreon subscriber of his, one thing I'd love to see him write about is different schools of historical analysis. Where they came from, what they're useful for, what their blind spots are, and how he ended up where he is.
This may be a long discussion, but what is factually "wrong" on his Sparta series, as you see it? I agree that he wore his distaste for various pro-Sparta voices openly, but I saw most of his critiques as factually correct.
Personally, I don't know of anything wrong with that particular series (aside from the political axe-grinding), but I wouldn't expect to. He knows **so much more** than me, that if he does mislead, I don't think I would be able to see it. It'd be in selective omission of facts, de-emphasis of certain lines of research, prematurely ending chains of analysis when they reach a point where they support his thesis, that sort of thing. If I tried hard, without doing research of my own, I could catch where he makes conclusions that are more sweeping than the data he presents would allow for, but how would I know that the supporting data weren't simply omitted due to space? (He does, after all, have a problem with series getting longer and longer and longer...)
And if I did by some miracle come up with something real, he would almost certainly be able to point to several sources that would back him up, and I'd have a hard time finding and reading them, much less rebutting them. You'd need a real historian for that, someone who's already read most of the important sources, and knows something about the rest, and knows the reputations of all the authors involved, and that sort of thing.
Me, I just like reading Herodotus and Thucydides and Xenophon, and occasionally some relevant historical analyses that put them into perspective.
I read them years ago, so don't expect me to recall minute details, but a few brief representative sketches:
He basically doesn't even engage with why, if the Spartans were as shit as he wants us to believe, *all their Greek contemporaries* basically thought of them as fucking invincible until Leuctra, or where the laconophilia came from *in their own time, among their enemies*. IIRC he attributes it to some sort of vague propaganda effort, something which the Spartans were notoriously contemptuous of, and washes his hands of it. I may misremember this last part, but the point is, normally, if you know that someone's contemporaries had an opinion of him which doesn't seem to match the evidence that you have, thousands of years later, you would reasonably conclude that there are gaps in the evidence and that the people who were right there may have known something you didn't.
Relatedly, I recall a long bit where he tries to axe the Spartans' reputation as the best soldiers by dealing with modern misconceptions of ignorant people, misconceptions that you probably haven't suffered from any more than me, like that the hoplite phalanx was unique to them. Again, though, this totally fails to engage with the fact that their reputation doesn't originate with jocks who saw the film 300! *Other contemporary Greeks* like Xenophon presumably knew that they were themselves hoplites and participated in phalanxes! And they still held the Spartans in high regard as the best soldiers! In fact, the modern myths are irrelevant for obvious causal reasons, except as an illustration of the longevity of their reputation! This does not seem to trouble Devereaux.
He writes a bunch of contemptuous stuff about their terrible logistics in the Peloponnesian War and doesn't really engage with the fact that this was nevertheless a war which they *unambiguously won*, including according to the Athenians who would have strong motives of their own for denying this.
He also has a huge screed about how it's stupid how people historically praised the Spartan system for its egalitarianism, even though in his position he *has to know* that what a 2nd century BC or 18th century AD aristocrat thought of as equality isn't the same thing that a 21st century Marxist consumed by envy denotes by that word.
Finally, I fully endorse Moon Moth's post. The whole benefit Devereaux has of his learning is knowing how to elide things so that laymen can't tell he did it.
yeah, adjuncts are obvious win-win for institutions filling a tricky staffing need for cheap and applicants getting the whatever "dream is still alive" fix they are craving.
the real question is why the adjuncts do it to themselves (we're talking upper-middle class adults with, objectively, plenty of options, not some hanging by the string black single working moms here).. see my one of my other comments here on what I think is a pretty compelling explanation
I think there are two equilibrium tenure cultures: a strong presumption of tenure, and a strong presumption against tenure. Anything in between leads to too much politicization and infighting. In legal academia (where I work) there is a strong presumption that a tenure-track professor will get tenure. Tenure denials are rare and traumatizing events for law faculties. One consequence of this is that there is much more pressure on the entry-level market hiring decision, because you are basically hiring this person for life unless they are good enough to lateral somewhere better.
These days hiring in law is mainly focused on how exciting/interesting/productive you are as a scholar (and secondarily on diversity and course offering considerations). In prior generations there was less of a focus on scholarship, and the model was just to hire the smartest recent law graduates (many of them supreme court clerks). But now there is basically an expectation that you will have a PhD and two or more full published articles. Adjuncts in law faculties are on an entirely different track - they are either explicitly time-limited fellowships of one or two years (with the idea that you will go on the market for a tenure track job), or they are longer-term teaching position with 0 expectation that you will ever move to the tenure track (e.g. legal writing, clinical professors, etc.).
The emphasis on scholarship for tenure-track hiring (as opposed to teaching) is, I think, a product of institutional culture rather than incentives. Faculties are self-governing and (at least at most law schools) concerned with producing interesting/important ideas. I'm not sure how much the law students themselves care about how good their professors are as scholars (I suspect very little), and the new US News rankings basically don't weight faculty scholarship at all.
Within my immediate circle of current and former colleagues there has been pro-athlete style poaching of researchers by universities and non-university academia. At t=1, t=3, through t=25 years from completion. Within Engineering, Physics, and CS.
My advisor was poached from R2 to R1, months before I joined his newly forming group. 50-ish guy then. My sister’s advisor had the same - her first advisor had been recently poached from a DOE lab to R1 university. Both cases were university corporate donors who committed to funding specific research expansion, then deans etc headhunted - not existing grantors coming along with professors/researchers deciding to go looks for greener pastures. Full disclosure: I quit mine, my little sis quit hers.
Within CS there are 10+ professors or PhD’d researchers I know personally who have been approached by approached by at least one university dean/board member/prestigious alum with an offer of “come join us, we want you, and have funding lined up + new space for you + (perks)”.
But since it’s CS, and decently talented folks with recognized achievements start at $1m-$2m base salary + $xM I’m stock at any one of hundreds of tech companies, universities have to compete to play for that talent.
As an academic drop-out I do want to mention that in my experience the tenure track profs are sometimes Einsteins, and often just people who know how to play the funding/publication game.
My advisor was a "meeting post" type. He published a paper in the 80s that sparked a bunch of futurist speculation in the media. The research itself did not end up being seminal in the field, but it happened to catch the public's imagination at the time.
He leveraged that fame/prestige into setting up a self-reinforcing cycle. He has access to a lot of funding, so he attracts a lot of smart people into his lab. A small subset of those students end up doing interesting work. He takes those students and parades them through conferences and such, which secures him more funding.
So cynically, universities mostly compete for prestige. And prestige has little to do with meaningful contributions to human knowledge, at least in my experience.
In terms of colleges being good at predicting research success, and virtuous/vicious cycles, this is what things look like from my perspective as a math postdoc.
There are 50-100 top universities that hire full research professors. When I talk about tenured positions I will be talking about these research positions, despite the fact that many other positions are also tenured with some level of teaching. You can determine if a professor is a research professor or not by looking at their teaching load. It varies by field, in math the lowest teaching load at top universities is typically 1,2 which means you teach 1 class one semester, and 2 classes the other. A position with 1,2 teaching load is a research position. A 2,2 teaching load is mainly a research position as well. 3,3 is a teaching position with maybe a little research on the side, and anything more like 4,4 is entirely teaching. This is just a fact of life because there are only so many hours in the day and time spent teaching is time spent not doing research. (these numbers are for math. For chemistry/physics and other sciences the teaching loads are lower, say 0,1 or 1,1 for research positions. This seems to be because everyone takes math classes in college, but many students never take a chem or physics class so less teachers are needed, also likely because other sciences bring in big grants for labs and universities like this. Math is a bit weird in being a STEM field which requires next to no funding or grants to do good research.)
Research professors are hired entirely based on their research prospects and teaching is essentially irrelevant. Tenured Research positions tend to be very comfortable, and have many more good applicants than there are positions. You can tell how impacted/competitive a field is by looking at how many years people with recent tenure track offers spent in postdocs (short term research positions that are not tenure track) before they got that offer. In math people typically do ~3 years of postdocs. In theoretical physics I hear it is more like ~6 years. In econ I hear it is often ~0 years so many people are hired right out of grad school. There are people who get tenure track offers in math right out of PhD but these people are exceptional even among people who make tenure track and were successful enough in their PhD research that they were at basically no risk of not getting tenure somewhere if they did a few years of postdoc.
I see 3 reasons for the empirical fact that if someone does not get a tenure track research position after the standard number of years in their field plus one or two years, they are likely to never get one. (So if you have been a math postdoc and not gotten a tenure track research offer after 4-5 years you likely won’t get one.)
First: People have different levels of aptitude in research. Some people are strong on some combination of intelligence/hard-work/choosing good research problems/having a personality well suited to research. People who are sufficiently good at this are usually apparent by the end of PhD or a few years after. People get tenure track offers when it becomes obvious they have this, so if you haven’t gotten an offer after doing a PhD and a few years of postdoc, then you have spent a lot of years doing research without displaying this. Universities want someone who has a chance to do crazy good research. After you have spent 6 to 8 years doing research in PhD and after, the chance of you suddenly getting a bunch of way better results is not that high. Skill caps are very real in math research and the top end is extremely high. I was pretty successful in PhD and have a Postdoc at a top 20 school, but I knew several grad students who made me look like a lazy idiot. Think 5 times as many papers as me and their best papers are orders of magnitude better than mine.
Second: The more promising you appear as a researcher, the more likely you are to find postdocs with no teaching load or very little teaching load. This means you have more time to focus on research than the people who looked a bit less promising, and the gap widens.
Third: If you have done obviously good research in the past then people are more likely to reach out to you about exciting questions in the field because they know you might be able to help solve them, and people are more receptive to working with you on projects you are excited about. This means if you have better research than someone else at the end of your PhD, then you will likely collaborate with better researchers in the following years and have more/better research problems to choose from.
Another fourth thing that is not very relevant in math but is relevant in experimental sciences is lab funding. Someone with more promising research gets a postdoc at a top 5 lab with a bunch of cutting edge equipment, and their friend with less promising research goes to a top 50 lab with decent equipment. There are more opportunities to do exciting research with better lab equipment. I work in math so I don’t know how big an effect this has.
Getting a tenure track research position many years later than usual does occasionally happen but it is quite rare. Examples of this look something like Yitang Zhang, who spent 22 years after finishing his PhD in several positions including lecturer and accountant, then surprised everyone by proving an extremely impressive result related to the twin prime conjecture. He won a bunch of prestigious prizes for this and got a tenured position at UCSB 2 years later. This is an extreme case, but the general idea is colleges want research professors who get results that are so good they attract people to the college. For people early in their career, universities speculate a bit based on the quality of your previous research. If you want to get a tenure track position more than a few years later than usual, you probably need to get a result that big before you get that position. That late in your career colleges will not speculate on you.
Maybe graduate students are the missing link in all of this? Prestige doesn't just come from top-level professors, it also comes from students which find immediate success upon leaving the school. Job guarantees are a big recruitment tactic, after all. So, tenure track positions are given to recent graduates, in order to pad the school's success rate. But, hiring too many of your own students is suspicious, so colleges dance around this restriction by hiring externally, weaving a sort of web of academic interdependence. This probably wouldn't be feasible in a different industry, but with all of the collaborative research and critique going on, I'd wager that tenured professors from a broad range of colleges are fairly well connected.
This is barking up the wrong tree. There is a strong prejudice *against* hiring your own students. And in any case, most graduate students will not get a tenure track job, even at the most prestigious universities.
Maybe I wasn't clear? The prejudice against hiring your own students explains why so many universities hire externally. Even if most students don't get a tenure track position, the majority of the ones that do receive it immediately following the receipt of their PhD.
In order to maintain the prestige gained from students which immediately find success, universities mutually give tenure track positions to external, inexperienced workers.
I'm just working off of the graph that I was given. Check the post, it clearly shows that the majority of Assistant Professors are hired within a year of getting their PhD, with significant drop off for every year after that.
When asking the question "What process carves off 30% of professors to get good pay and benefits, but passes over the rest?" it's very important to note that the process is not in equilibrium. Tenure track roles used to be a much higher proportion, but that proportion fell in the past few decades and is seemingly continuing to fall.
You have to think of the "superstars" thing a bit like venture capitalists with Unicorns. They're gambling on "potential", but the potential they're hoping for is even more rarely realized than you're thinking: literal Einstein (or at minimum Weinberg, who according to legend demanded to be paid more than the football coach). Everybody else, they're trying to find a really big story really early. So what you get is kind of the same dynamic where people invested in Theranos rather than a comparable startup that wasn't run by a charismatic Stanford dropout. (It's also like Theranos because of the reputation cascades: the top people like this person, so they must have potential, so we bid them up, etc.)
Now, does that mean they're unhappy with superstars they hire who are not literal Einstein? No, because everyone else (grant agencies, philanthropists, heck on a "what is worth covering" level science journalists) is trying to make the same gamble. So as long as a sub-Einstein/Weinberg superstar can keep seeming like they could end up as Einstein/Weinberg later, people will keep throwing money and status at them, and the university won't need to spend much in the way of resources to keep them around.
(Disclaimer: I'm saying this from the perspective of a (sub-)field that in general does not do the adjunct thing. I know zero people in my field who became adjuncts, and a lot more who left to do data science or machine learning or finance.)
I'm a professor at a "teaching college" in Europe. I don't mean that research doesn't happen here, but (1) it's not supposed to be a priority and (2) what research does happen is applied research, i.e., industry projects.
Even so, research sounds so sexy to the school administration. I am a teaching professor, and always have been. A few years ago they put in the requirement for me to...publish? At first, I cheated by publishing pop-sci articles. Now, with only a couple of years to retirement, forget it. By the time they notice my paper deficit, I will be gone.
What I find hard to understand is this: Educating our young people is a hugely important task. Why does the school administration not understand that? Why are they suddenly trying to compete with research university that have different staff, nationally funded laboratories, etc, etc? We cannot compete in that space, and wasting effort to do so distracts from what we are supposed to be doing.
Finally, allow me to offend a lot of academics: There are too many low quality PhD students, and low quality universities awarding them degrees. Almost every university has a bunch of PhD programs, which they want to fill, because PhD students make for cheap labor as TAs and even teachers. Most of those PhD students don't do useful research, but they serve their purpose for a few years and get their doctorate as a reward. Then they join the ranks of adjuncts, driving the pay even lower.
"There are too many low quality PhD students, and low quality universities awarding them degrees."
This appears to be a problem throughout humanist academia, not just on the PhD tier. Far too many bad BA students getting places on bad courses who then get bad degrees from bad colleges. And on the other end of the scale, bad professors of bogus subjects like queer theory and whatever the hell happened to ethnology.
> But why aren’t colleges more like un-salary-capped sports teams, trying to outbid one another for their rivals’ superstars?
There are three big pieces missing in this analysis:
a) The "superstars" have their own ambitions about what kind of places they want to work in. Adjuncts who become "superstars" move to more prestigious places, but they can be offered better positions where they currently are too. See e.g. Yitang Zhang, who solved a big maths problem and then, quoting wikipedia: "He served as lecturer at UNH from 1999 until around January 2014, when UNH appointed him to a full professorship as a result of his breakthrough on prime numbers. Zhang stayed for a semester at The Institute For Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, in 2014, and he joined the University of California, Santa Barbara in fall 2015."
b) It's not so much about money - working in a "top tier" place with "top tier" people and better research funding (often from external grants) seems to be more motivating than getting more money yourself. The people who want to make money are already pre-selected against, or they make money from side-hustles.
c) Such poaching *does* happen, but is usually more subtle. See e.g. KAUST, a Saudi university which pays enormous amounts of money for researchers to be affiliated with them (and sometimes also work there). It's working moderately well.
The idea is that deficient guidance leads to sticky unrealistic expectations causing adjuncts (and to a lesser extent other "trying to break into academia" players) to engage in what to outsiders seems like self-harmful and irrational behavior
I cannot claim I read all 351 comments carefully, but one thing I have barely seen mentioned, which is the big thing, is that most of these tenure track jobs are held by people who have been in their job for years and likely decades. As they retire, many of these tenure track lines are simply abolished instead of being filled by someone else. The 30 percent mentioned by Devereaux is likely to shrink a lot further, and many subfields are basically dead as tenure-track already. Tenure as it was once known is likely to vanish in our lifetimes. (And this is completely separate from any political attacks on the concept. DeSantis et al. are simply trying to hasten the inevitable.)
Lawyers are traditionally elite jobs, but there's just too many credentialed professionals to admit them all into the elite, and on the other hand too much demand for their work to limit the number of jobs available to them, and on the third hand there's little incentive for the current elite to forego their own professions' elite status. So the elite status remains available, but only for a select few - some actual superstars, but mostly the current elites' progeny and proteges. The rest remain commoners with elite job titles.
I think this is right. It’s all about money but also about who controls the money. University’s make money from three ways: student income, research grants and philanthropy. They are all proportional to prestige which is proportional to research metrics of top researchers more or less so hiring them brings in more student dollars. Once students are committed the teaching just needs to be at a certain level and you’re good so no need to compete on teaching just hire bare basic there and cut it to the bone and use the rest of the money to subsidize research so you can max out support for top researchers. And I agree make the titles confusing so everyone thinks they’re being taught by the top researchers. Prestigious researchers also bring in more research money as they can put in more competitive grant apps because they have the metrics and the money for a big team who are all providing them with data and help writing grant apps. Those people can then make demands about how they want things to be as otherwise they’ll go and take the money with them. Also it’s the prestigious researchers and their friends who all decide who gets the funding as they are the ones who review grants and who funding agencies and journal editors seek advice from. So they structure the system to benefit themselves. This is natural and unsurprising. You might think it’s ok if the system were actually good at picking excellent researchers but really it’s not, it’s good at picking people who can play the game well. Which means making friends with the right people to get good reviews getting invites to the right conference etc. These tend to be very outgoing people who are socially very skilled but often scientifically pretty mediocre. Also they tend to be a lot older as relationships tend to accrue. Same reason the leadership got real old
In the Soviet Union. Like it takes forever to get high up in academia to a position where you can actually influence things as you have to be a senior researchers which means old. Like it’s almost structurally impossible to lead anything in academia unless it’s in a field where you can bring in large amounts of money from a rapidly growing new industry. Like in comparison to the age of ceos of breakthrough companies it is kind of silly how old academic leadership tends to be.
I haven't managed to look at all the comments, so sorry if this repeats someone. I've spent time as a part-time teaching lecturer (in the UK, may be a bit different), and one thing is that you spend your time preparing and teaching – there isn't much time to do the research/publishing stuff you need in order to appeal to a TT job recruiter. Perhaps a fresh PHD is [a] current in all the required new stuff a university needs (both academic and cultural – i.e. progressive, whatever, doctrine), [b] fresh and ready to do research as that's what they have just been doing. [c], possibly, young and malleable to be moulded for the politics of the institution. (No, I'm being frivolous...)
The usual path for research STEM faculty is to get a PhD and then do a postdoc, after which the best researchers have had time to develop and often have stronger records than people with much more experience. Some people are late bloomers and do a second or third postdoc and succeed after that, but being hired as a teaching adjunct usually means failure to get a good additional postdoc.
I was hired as tenure track at MIT after being a postdoc at MIT and doing a PhD that involved working with MIT professors. If a college really wants you, they'll be happy to higher you for tenure track even if you were already there. If you perform above expectations along the tenure track, other colleges will try to higher you away and offer large salaries. If you perform below expectations you might be denied tenure.
I haven’t read all the comments, so apologies if this point has been made.
I think a hypothesis has been skipped. Departments (who do the vetting of tenure-track candidates) have a pretty good idea of who can be a thought leader based upon their graduate level research and pedigree. A candidate who attends a top tier institution and has a thought leader as an advisor has a better chance of becoming one of the prestigious research professors of the future. So, the promising candidates get hired out of grad school and are retained by the institution that hired them. Of course there are surprise outliers, adjuncts who publish important work while maintaining a heavy teaching load, but this is uncommon.
There are also errors in the other direction, hires who get to tenure then rest on their laurels, but this is also uncommon.
I’m not defending the system, but noting that the data can indicate a type of market efficiency.
> But then why do they only hire inexperienced people? Why only people from outside their own institution? Here I’m even more confused, but a few guesses:
Surely some degree of this is the woke purity tests?
A young person is likely better at being for all the required beliefs, like supporting newly trans rapists being legally considered women, have a shorter history on social media and head just has exploded at the rapid swapping of beliefs where they confuse the politics situation of 6 months ago as the current beliefs, maybe they don't remember bird flu at all so when corona happens they are a blank slate for whatever medical claims are acceptable this month(masks dont work, we lied about masks for front line workers, masks outside 50 feet away from anyone are saving lives) or that obama bombed civilians and so can believe that if a black man was in the white house Americas forien policy would be magic.
A far away institution probably has less knowledge of what someone has said in private.
It’s making me very glad I ignored the advice to just take out debt to go to a phd program. Got lots of advice to do that, now work less and make more than my peers who did.
My PhD was funded by a national research council (pretty standard over here, at least for STEM), and I don't regret it: it probably reduced my total lifetime earnings, but I think having "Doctor" in front of my name helps me get more interesting jobs. I *do* regret my postdoc, which destroyed my mental health.
What subject were you considering taking out debt for a PhD in? In the sciences no one ever takes out debt to do a PhD at a credible program. Your study is either funded by an NSF fellowship or other fellowship if you're lucky or it's fuded by a teaching assistantship/research assistantship. My advisor told me it's not considered acceptable in the field to admit a student to a PhD program without any kind of funding.
I'll echo what others have said about this post, and the relevant source, not generalizing well to STEM, confusion as to why postdocs were not mentioned at all.
To Scott's final confusion: Why not hire everyone in some low level capacity?
I can only speak for STEM fields, but my impression was that this is what Assistant profs used to be. There were many openings and it wasn't too competitive, but getting tenure was quite hard. This is essentially placing low-stakes bets on many people, and seeing who becomes a superstar. Now it is flipped in that it is very hard to get a faculty job at anywhere doing high quality research: my department recently went through ~400 applications for a position and made no offer... but tenure (although not guaranteed) is much easier. I've heard that MIT and other places are still "old-fashioned" in this regard.
The confusion is then stated as: why did things change? I don't have a great answer. Perhaps it is related to funding structures. I'm not convinced that Scott's idea would be any better than what we have now, because most people don't end up becoming superstars.
Another subtlety: faculty in some of the sciences can be divided into two categories:
1) Research faculty: these people win grants (from which the Uni takes a cut), advise many students, and teach ~a course per semester. Typically these would be more applied fields like quantum information, biological physics, condensed matter be they theorist or experimentalists
2) "Liberal arts faculty": Profs who can't win grants because they work on fields no one funds (String theory, quantum fundamentals), but the uni takes them on because of the "prestige" of having them. They aren't making the uni any money, and many of their students (if they have any) are supported by external fellowships. Dominantly theorists, and they all teach; most of their courses are hard! (A friend of mine took a course from a string theorist who handed out the final, said "I'm sorry" and left the room)
There are vanishingly few of 2), if any, in the biomedical sciences, a few in Evolutionary bio, and a bit more (but still few) in Physics/Math. Many don't properly separate these and get further confused when trying to understand why the responsibilities and hiring for some faculty can be so varied. The vast majority of real liberal arts faculty follow a model like this where support comes almost entirely from the university.
Does anyone understand the first "plot"? I've only known one STEM grad to get a faculty job directly after their PhD (and they were told it would be better to do a postdoc first!); most postdoc gigs are 2--4 years. Among Social sciences / Humanities I've known a few, -- but my impression is that there are far fewer openings per year in these fields. I'm very confused....perhaps only the ones who know they can get a job apply their first year out, and the applicant pool is just much larger in the 2-4 year range?
Article brings some interesting points, despite it has been deeply discussed in media and with professionals and organizations in the field.
As I am involved, I’d like to put here my perspective here more impartial possible.
So, at first, and been absolutely partial only in that subject, I don’t think everybody who was taking to this job, actually was looking for fame and money. Primarily, I dislike generalizations once they never will represent the whole, soon even if it is the minority, this shouldn’t be desmoralize or not listen because of the main majority.
FACTS:
Actually, particularly in this situation, the individual who was recruited and he/she didn’t look for or apply for the job.
He/she capability of production has to be measure by the amount of tasks, challenges and daily work and homework, which, maybe you doesn’t have this known, but the program is established in a progressive school, where students are launched. While the tests requires a great deal of memorization, (it’s all about “mind games”), it can be told it is not purely educational. It is about stressing in the maximum level students to make them learn focus and learning in the worst scenarios. In that way, they can learn how to unblock and access contain they even know it was there.
The main factor that some scientists disagree is about not to teach and develop the necessary skills before start the training. The program consist in make the student self-learning. Detail: it is require lots of technical skills.
Considering less than six months, I consider the improvement and increase of the individual very impressive.
But, to be honest and impartial, I will let the own scientists give you the results:
All these theories assume that departments are acting in their own rational best interest, so I'd like to propose a totally different explanation: the failure of decision by committee.
An adjunct who has worked in the department for 6 months to a couple years is known to the people on the hiring committee; their work, their attitude, their skill set. Some of the people on the hiring committee will like them and want to bring them on, but others will be looking for someone else (more research focused, less research focused, more interested in teaching a particular class, better at teaching certain classes, particular personality differences, etc etc etc). A new applicant is unknown, and everyone can convince themselves that "maybe this person is what I'm hoping for", and so gets more general support (or at least, less severe no votes).
I think I can answer Scott's questions but warning: this comment is long. I did my Ph.D in the natural and physical sciences at a top 10 institution and now have a tenure track job at a small liberal arts college where I teach several classes per semester and do some research. Some background first.
About teaching: Teaching is particularly time and attention consuming. When I'm teaching, especially large undergraduate classes, the top thought in my brain is usually about that. Research is also time and attention consuming, so even for talented people it's hard to do both. If I take on research that's too ambitious I'm likely to fall behind the rest of the field or get scooped entirely because I work more slowly since my attention is split with teaching. Research also moves fast, with new techniques being adopted over a period of a few years. Being out of a research area for several years, or just being slow to keep up because of a heavy teaching load, means you have a lot of learning to do if you want to try to ramp up your research productivity, on top of the time and difficulty of the research itself. Most people who try to be good at both solve this by working on problems that aren't very interesting to anyone else where it doesn't matter if they go slow. Or, they work at prestigious liberal arts colleges with lower teaching loads and more resources for research. Ruthless time management is also important, but not enough on its own.
About grants: Productive researchers don't just add to a college's prestige, they also contribute financially. They are expected to bring in millions of dollars in grants of which 40-50% goes to "overhead", where the college takes the money and uses it for whatever they want, and the grantee doesn't see any of that. Grant funds are also used to pay graduate student "tuition." This is another transfer from grant funds to college since on paper graduate tuition is as much as or more than undergraduate tuition even though for most of their Ph.D the student isnt taking any real classes, just doing research full time. The student never pays a bill, it just comes out of their advisor's grant funds.
About networking: Getting grants is partly about actually having good ideas and results, and partly about convincing reviewers that you have good ideas and good results. For research that is good but not outstanding it's a subjective decision who to fund and who not to. Since reviewers are other researchers in your subfield, there are high returns to networking and selling your work. People preoccupied with teaching don't have time to do this at all, while prestigious researchers spend a huge amount of time on it in the form of giving talks and going to conferences - my former advisor was often away for weeks or months at a time. Top 10 graduate schools are also full of networking opportunities, eg. the college pays for students to take visiting professors in their subfield out to lunch.
Ok, now to answer the questions:
1. In the natural and physical sciences colleges can't hire everyone into a low commitment job because just to get started requires a huge commitment, usually a startup package in the hundreds of thousands or millions. Colleges put this up because they expect to make it back later in graduate tuition and overhead from future grants. They can't do this for everyone because if the new hire flames out, they wasted a bunch of money on stuff that will be hard for others to re use like salaries for graduate students and postdocs, consumables, and specialized equipment or instruments that may not be useful to anyone else.
2. Colleges mostly hire new Ph.Ds or recent postdocs because they are current in their field and haven't fallen behind by spending all their time on teaching. If they are politically savvy they have also been networking with others in their subfield during their graduate and postdoc years which makes them more competitive both for grants and for getting the job in the first place. Colleges do sometimes hire experienced superstars by poaching them from other colleges, but usually you need to offer an established superstar a very sweet deal to get them to move, like their own building. Superstars bring in more grant funds but not that much more, so the decision usually only makes sense if you think trading money for prestige is a good deal, which it only is at top 10 institutions.
3. I'm not certain why departments have a cultural norm of preferring to hire from other institutions. My former advisor told me it's because they dislike the appearance of neopotism. Maybe, but I suspect it's also because cross hiring is good for networking. If your entire department was trained at your institution and mostly knows each other you'll be at a disadvantage when applying for grants or looking for collaborators.
These weird confusing things happen less in fields where research is cheap, like math, or where cushy highly paid industry jobs are readily available, like CS. In math Yitang Zhang went from adjunct to superstar by solving a huge open problem. This worked because he didn't need specialized equipment, worked on it slowly for literally decades, and the problem was so hard he wasn't in much danger of being scooped. In CS it's more common for senior people to transition back and forth between academia and industry.
Thanks for that explanation. I remember there used to be something called a "teaching college", which I always took to mean a college where faculty had significant teaching loads every semester, but did little new research. Does this track no longer exist? Or not in some fields? Or did I always misunderstand the concept?
There are many "primarily undergraduate institutions" that are what you describe, including small liberal arts colleges and large primarily teaching focused institutions that don't grant Ph.Ds. Usually at these there is some research expectation, but notably smaller than top 10 or big state universities, with more focus on training undergraduates as researchers over doing top-tier research. Faculty at these get tenure and have reasonable (not amazing) pay and benefits, probably somewhere between teaching professor and tenure track at a large school.
1.) You really, really can't do good research and have a heavy teaching load at the same time. Your proposed idea of "hire adjuncts and see who turns out to be superstars" doesn't make sense. The adjuncts will not have the time (or, in lab science, the grant funding) to demonstrate that they are superstar researchers.
2.) As many other people have said, poaching absolutely happens.
3.) Maybe this has changed recently and my experience is pretty math-specific, but traditionally my impression is that academics fundamentally trust Academia's ability to recognize a researcher's quality, and trust that department rankings accurately reflect department quality.
The model is, "good people get jobs at top institutions right out of grad school; those who don't are probably not good."
Sure, there's general acknowledgment that there are more qualified people than there are tenure-track positions, so good people get rejected all the time, and there's an element of luck in career advancement. Everyone knows this. Everyone also knows that there are "who you know not what you know" elements and you're more likely to get hired/promoted if you have personal relationships with people influential in the department.
Somehow this doesn't seem to translate to an equally firm belief that there are underrated people who "got unlucky" on the job market but would be as valuable to the department as their luckier peers, or a desire to "scoop up" underrated applicants.
Losing, it seems, brands you as a loser...even though *everyone knows* that many excellent people must lose every year through bad luck alone, by virtue of too many people chasing too few jobs!
While a lot of the incentives here make sense, having spent most of my life being raised by/married to college professors who have been part of or run the hiring process for their departments, this doesn't match the process on the ground as I've heard about it.
I think it mostly fails by imagining 'the school' to be a unified entity with coherent goals and plans, rather than a conglomerate institution with a a bunch of heavily divided and often openly antagonistic factions.
To whit: my impression is mostly that colleges and universities have pretty strong unions for professors, which want to have 100% high-paid tenure-track positions. Who are in a constant state of cold war with the very powerful and goal-oriented administrators, who want 100% cheap adjunct positions.
(Or, if they're trying to be a top-tier prestigious institution, maybe want 10% tenure track all-stars and 90% cheap adjuncts. But if you're looking at national statistics rather than anecdotes from the ivy leagues, those few prestigious schools will get swamped by the thousands of community colleges and 'average' local colleges that make up the bulk of the numbers)
What I've seen is basically a slow shift in the power balance, with administrators ratcheting in few more adjunct positions every time there's a lean year of budget-tightening, and giving handouts to the old tenured professors who are about to leave anyway to molify the unions, while never actually adding more tenure positions back in when things are good again.
As for why there's a preferences for newer professors in tenure-track positions, I think there are three main factors I have seen in action:
1. Being an adjunct for 8 years and applying for a tenured position is sort of like being unemployed or working as a Walmart greeter for 5 years and then trying to get hired as a program lead on a large software project. Everyone knows that being an adjunct sucks, and there's an assumption that if you haven't been able to get a better job than that for many years on end, there's probably a reason why. It's taken as strong evidence against your quality as candidate.
2. Professors always want their department to tech exciting new ideas and use exciting new techniques that the field has developed sine the last time they were is school, but they almost never want to take the time (or have the resources) to learn enough about them to teach them themselves. Hiring the freshest graduate means getting the newest techniques and ideas and feeling a little bit less behind the times and a little more useful to your students.
3. Because the administration keeps shrinking the number of tenured jobs, the remaining tenured faculty form sort of a 'core' that serves as the heart and soul of the department, and ensures its values and character get preserved into the future. This is probably tacitly the #1 thing that existing tenured professors care about when they interview for tenure track positions, they are basically hiring the new pillars that will have to fight with them in the trenches and continue fighting after they're gone to keep the department healthy and independent, and they'd much rather get a new pillar that is young and will be there for 40 years than one that is experienced and will be there for 20 years. (And of course, the less experience they have, the more you can impose your own values and priorities to teh new hires who will have to carry them after you retire)
“Colleges want to pretend to students that the same people are doing both these jobs, because students like the idea of being taught by prestigious thought leaders.”
I get the 2nd half of this in the most basic sense, but outside of the most elite schools, I'm wondering what anyone's thoughts are on the percent of college students (or their parents) who even know that some professors do both those jobs, what the tenure system is, or what a research university is and whether or not they attend one, especially the further you get from the hard sciences. I was a philosophy major in the early oughts and don’t think I had a clue. I'm currently doing a PhD at a public R1 and would put the percentage very low in the classes I've taught in human development/ed psych- both undergrad and master’s level.
The worst part, is that industry professionals aren't in the mix.
Let's face it, for STEM degrees, the student is really earning a ticket to apply for a vocation. Let's give them a step from university to industry.
Who are the most impressive vocational instructors? Those who have spent ten years in the industry, not the bloke who couldn't really cut it in industry. What do graduating students really need? Internships, industry contacts ... the very things that vocational instructors who rotated out of industry can provide.
Most of even our high school teachers should be drafted out of industry for a year of teaching, then return. In my senior year, I saw the least motivated students say 'I'll just take the BA and become a high school teacher.' Oh right, that person is going to be a great motivator. [last sentence was sarcastic tone]
What do you mean industry professional aren't in the mix? If you're talking STEM (which you explicitly are) then there absolutely is lateral movement between the tenure track faculty and industry research lab systems. Also between TT faculty and national labs.
Suprisingly few mentions of the fact that this isn't a steady-state situation. It's adjunct*ification* that he's talking about.
The process is optimised for hiding problems more than anything else. It's easier to quietly shift more people to the 2nd class track than to make the experience of members of either track (especially the 1st class one) worse.
Honestly this would be an interesting situation to throw a marxist lens at. The preference for choosing the tenure-track ἐκλεκτοί as soon as possible in their career separates those who will make the decisions from those who will bear the brunt of them.
I'm reading B. Devereaux and thinking; this is just like the moral mazes (by Zvi), (middle management capture of the 'ropes of power' of the institution.) It's a piece of Moloch. What to do? Maybe teaching colleges and research universities. With only a smaller percentage (of students) going onto research. There would still be research at the teaching college, but the focus would be the students and not some new result... though 'new' stuff happens every where, all the time.
Oh and cut out the middle management, Profs have to run the place.
I'm in computer science, and think maybe what I say below is somewhat true of close disciplines like math or engineering, not sure about other fields though.
> Or it could be a vicious cycle - if hiring committees dismiss you, then grantmakers and journal editors will also dismiss you, and you won’t have the resources you need to do great work.
> Here’s another question that confuses me even more: Why don’t colleges hire everyone in some low-commitment capacity, maybe as adjuncts, wait to see who becomes superstars, then poach them?
The vicious cycle is more like this (and explains why the second strategy won't work): It is almost impossible to do good research without a job that grants you significant time to do research. Yes, Einstein was a patent clerk, but guess what... he's Einstein. The rest of us need much more time to think and devote to research if we want to get anything done.
Adjuncts have high teaching loads and little time for research, so it's rare for them to improve their research record while working that job.
To counter your claim about preferring newly-minted PhDs... actually more experience DOES help you get a tenure-track job. I was a postdoc for 6 years and got a WAY better job than I could have straight out of my PhD. With a few exceptions, most people we've hired in my department since I got there have several years of postdoc experience (or were tenure-track faculty at another institution).
Postdocs are somewhat similar to adjuncts in being lower status and having no job security. (In fact, their job is guaranteed to end after 1-5 years, whereas an adjunct can in principle stay indefinitely.)
But the key difference: since a postdoc's job is almost exclusively research (or say for math postdocs, have a low teaching load, so still lots of time for research) they can improve their research record in a way that's much more difficult for an adjunct teaching 2-3 courses per term. No one is as *single-handedly* productive in research as a postdoc: they have the research skills of a professor coupled with the free time of a PhD student. (Professors with lots of papers every year typically have lots of PhD students and postdocs working for them, but if they were on their own they'd publish less than a typical postdoc due to their extra job duties.)
I've never seen anyone on a hiring committee ding someone just because they are an adjunct. I've just never seen an adjunct with a strong research record apply in our department. Obviously there will be a counter-example someday, and likely there are counter-examples now, and I'm not making a claim about any individual adjunct. But the law of large numbers kicks in at some point to make the *average* postdoc much more research-productive than the *average* adjunct.
No, they aren't. Lots of poaching happens, as discussed by the other commenters.
But you really have to be a SUPERstar. If you're merely doing well, then that's typically not enough to get hired by a place even at the same rank as your current university, and certainly not enough to move UP. In general, it's much more difficult to get hired as an Associate Professor (the rank just after you get tenure) at a university than it is to be granted tenure (i.e., to be promoted from tenure track Assistant Professor to tenured Associate Professor) at that same university.
Here's my guess: Once someone has been an adjunct patiently for five years, you figure they'll probably still stay on even if you don't give them tenure.
Or roughly the same thing from another perspective, maybe people who care about money will leave academia within five years unless offered a tenure or tenure-track job. The rest can be taken advantage of.
"Now you may ask why anyone would take a job like that with poor pay (for a job that requires a PhD!), no job security and no benefits. And of course the answer is ‘because they have no other choice;’ leaving academia, even temporarily for a non-academic job is generally a career death sentence"
This is my question, and the answer is provided, though I consider it unsatisfactory. Someone with a PhD should be able to be hired into some useful, PhD-related position, unless the degree is in something purely academic, like history. One should, therefore, if one aspires to a career involving a university and cannot get on the tenure track, then one should hope to come to the university as a "professor of practice".
Anyone who can earn a PhD ought, by definition, to be intelligent. I still don't understand how the majority of adjunct professors would maintain that position and fruitless hope for a tenured position under those conditions for more than two years.
I have recently started as an Assistant Professor at an R1 institution, in biology/life sciences. I think the reason places try to avoid hiring internally is twofold: the first as Scott identifies is that there would otherwise be pressure to keep everyone, including more marginal hires, since you know them. But there is a second stronger force - R1 institutions are trying to hire faculty that will become the next superstars. And it is a LOT harder to become a superstar, with your own independent brand, if you stay at the institution where your previous mentors are located. Initially most people in the field at large will assume the ideas came from the mentors and you just executed them. There are exceptions of course - post-docs and trainees who are so good that they already have a lot of their own recognition in the field, and often these are the very few people who are recruited and retained internally.
The stated reasoning of many places that don't hire internally for tenure-track professorships is to intellectually diversify - bring in others from outside the institution to give them a chance to impress you and showcase their ideas, which are presumably more distinct from those of people you've trained internally, who are necessarily shaped by whomever is already at the institution. I think there is probably truth and value to this perspective as well.
Academic in mid-tier university in the United Kingdom here. I want to explain concretely how the graph makes sense (which others have done fairly well), but also to provide some context about the financial incentives to the university that may be UK-specific.
For academic teaching & research jobs (which may have a greater or lesser research focus depending on the university and department), one of the main factors considered by the hiring panel will be the applicant's publication record. What we are specifically looking for is high-quality publications in the last few years, rather than 20 spam papers. (High-quality usually means prestigious journal/conference, as it's not like we have time to read the papers ourselves.)
If you have just completed your PhD or postdoc, you will almost certainly have some good publications co-authored with your PhD supervisor or PI. We're prepared to take the punt that you'll be able to produce more, or kick you out after 2-6 years (depends on which university) if you don't.
If you've been working as some kind of adjunct (which for us, usually means fixed-term contract full-time teaching-only staff, although can be part-time in other universities) or as a permanent teaching-only lecturer, you probably won't have been publishing recently. So your number of publications will be the same as someone finishing a PhD or doing a post-doc, your publications per year will be lower, and you've probably already been rejected for teaching & research jobs when you applied for them with the same research record when you were younger.
I think that's sufficient to explain the graph in the post. But why do we care so much about publication record?
Scott is partly right when he says it's because of prestige. There's a specific mechanism by which that operates in the United Kingdom. About every 5 years, the government runs an assessment called the REF (Research Excellence Framework). This is unpopular, but is meant to hold universities to account for the quality of their research. Details vary from cycle to cycle, but each department has to submit around 3 papers per research academic (teaching-only staff don't count) to a panel of external academics in the same subject, who score the papers on a scale from 1-4. The score of the department is published and feeds into highly publicised university league tables, as well as affecting the amount of government funding the universities receive.
So it is about prestige, but also about money. Hiring low-quality researchers lowers your department's average, sending it down in the league tables and losing you government funding.
Of course, there's a more direct mechanism that makes hiring active researchers financially important. If you have a good publication record, you are more likely to be taken seriously when writing grant proposals to the government-funded research councils. Some of this goes directly on hiring new post-doc researchers or buying equipment, but maybe half goes towards the general running costs of the university. As ever, it varies by university, but in the top research universities, most of the income comes from research grants, not student tuition fees. (In Oxford/Cambridge, the university loses money on home undergraduate students.)
Once again you admit to basically being clueless about how an institution functions, only to then speculate brazenly. You don't have to endorse the structures, but if you really want to add something of value to the conversation you should ask a lot more questions before attempting to spread a bunch of guesswork.
Many very smart people have put a lot of thought into centuries-old norms such as tenure and non-incestual hiring. Such practices are fundamental to the mission of higher education, but are easily ridiculed with the help of facile libertarian assumptions emerging from a basic lack of interest in that mission. (Preferring to weigh the efficiencies of markets, status implications, etc, may be more in your wheelhouse, but without investigating how/why the structure was built it amounts to just idle disruption.)
Of course there's a ton to be fixed in academia, but it's like democracy: if your heart's not in it, you're contributing to its failure. Yet you settle for a cartoonish version of colleges writ large, personified as a businessman who "prefers" a game of pretense with his customers, while most colleges have in fact been wrestling tirelessly to retain many core, long-held values during this period of late-capitalism, where popular opinion treats them as if they were just glorified trade schools.
There are other institutions with this same two track system, for example officers and enlisted in the army or partner-track and non-partner-track jobs in a law firm or consulting company. So whatever is causing this structure probably isn't driven explicitly by academia, but rather some property of academia that it shares with both the army and legal partnerships.
There are processes for non-tenure track researchers to become tenure track. But the non-tenure track researchers are postdocs, or national lab researchers, or industry lab researchers. Adjuncts are not in the same field at all. Adjuncts being locked out of tenure track is like bartenders being locked out of officer track in the army.
"Second, they need them to do good research, raise the college’s reputation, and look prestigious."
The obvious problem being that there are entire fields where "good research" is literally impossible, because those fields draw no distinction between fact, taste, and opinion. Most of the original academic disciplines fall into this category (I'm looking at you Queen of the Sciences.) Nikole Hannah-Jones was insta-tenured, yes in order to give Howard prestige (among the right sort of people) but you're going to need a particular sort of metaphysics and a lot of hope to think she's going to increase the amount of knowledge in the world.
When a college wants to hire for a research position it's in their interest to consider all possible interested applicants and have no incentive to favor internal canidates.
Ok, so in that system how often would an internal canidate get promoted to a research position? Well, only when the college had an opening for a research position at the same time as an adjunct at that university had put together a publication record good enough to warrant hiring there but not so good as to let them secure a better job and hadn't yet been hired elsewhere...and the fates smiled on their application (lots of randomness in who gets hired).
Given that most academics on the market apply for multiple dozens of jobs the chances of this happening are just going to be really low.
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Yes it does suggest that there isn't that much of a premium on staying put (academics prefer a TT job at Harvard than a TT job at no name uni even if it means moving) but that seems mostly correct.
Ohh and the difference with sports teams just mostly comes down to the fact that there is a greater variability in what different universities want. Universities often want to complement existing research teams or have views about what kind of research is valuable.
This makes the system much more like a matching market (eg medical residencies...but more so) than bidding on a commodity.
I think this post is misleading for a few reasons. Someone else probably already mentioned the points I'll make, but in case they haven't:
1. The chart in the post is based on data about historians, not all academics. Your post doesn't make that clear.
2. The bar chart depicts the *number* of historians hired N years after completing their PhD. Even if there was no preference for less-experienced applicants at all, the chart could look the same. Clearly, people are more likely to look for a job right after they get their degree than several years afterwards. There will be fewer history professor job applicants with 3 years of experience after getting their PhDs than with 0, because a lot of people with 3 years of experience are already in a TT position and will not apply for jobs. The chart doesn't correct for that.
I'm not denying that there's a preference for less-experienced applicants; I think there likely is, but that chart in particular doesn't really show this.
3. In a lot of STEM fields, it is vanishingly rare to be hired for a TT position straight out of a PhD; you need a postdoc first. Bret Devereaux mentioned this in his post, but your post makes it seem like getting a TT job right out of grad school is the expected career path in all academic fields.
Perhaps it's an instance of efficiency wages? According to efficiency wage theory, overpaying some employees can be profitable because it raises loyalty, morale, and productivity. https://www.investopedia.com/efficiency-wages-5206757
Tenured professor at a mediocre public university in the US here. I think a lot of what you say here about the separation between research and teaching, and why people fresh out of grad school are likely to get jobs, is probably right. But I think you also need to factor into the equation just how *bad* universities (and everyone else) are at predicting who's going to be the next Einstein. Including the case of Einstein himself, who in my limited understanding was not respected in his field at all until after he revolutionized it. So I don't think it's true that there is competition over the top few PhDs, because I don't think universities will have enough of a coherent set of criteria to even converge on the top few; once you get into the class of 'wrote a competent dissertation at a respected PhD program', within that class of people you're pretty much throwing darts at a dartboard. And it's definitely not the case, at least in my field, that there is a shortage of such people: there are far too many promising recent PhDs to fill the small number of tenure-track positions that come up each year. That said, I think 'able to secure large external grants' might be more predictable than 'will do amazing research in the future'. But I have no data to back that up; it's just a hunch.
A few mechanisms I've seen in play that I haven't seen mentioned in the comments I read:
- For impressive profs you don't want large research accumulation, you want evidence of ability to identify and lead important research. You can estimate pretty well from PhD (plus maybe post-doc years) whether people are doing important work per year.
- There's a huge pool of applicants you need to filter. Having been on the job market for many years is strong evidence that nobody else wanted to hire you. A cheap heuristic for filtering is therefore that lots of time on the job market indicates a candidate who is unlikely to succeed in your hiring/isn't valued by other hiring committees etc.
- Perhaps an uncomfortable point, but teaching university students and leading research are very different activities, and experience in one is not necessarily even helpful for doing the other (past a point). "Experience manifestly hurts applicants" seems very misleading, because they are experience in different jobs. Insofar as there is a problem here, it is with unrealistic expectations about a path from teaching-focused posts into research-focused posts (which might be encouraged unfairly by research institutions who want high supply of teaching).
Few thoughts. First of all, this is not just true of colleges. It’s also true of funded startups. I’d think of it like this: there are probably two Nash equilibria when it comes to getting talent at “low risk”. (A Nash equilibrium is a situation where no one can improve their results by deviating to another strategy.) One is let another institution shoulder the initial risk of fielding a farm team and seeing who shines and who washes out, then poach the winners. This probably seems less risky than fielding your own farm team because if true 1% stars are one in a thousand but your local farm team can only be 100-deep, odds that the true superstar will come from your own back bench are low. My guess is that this is priced in when poaching superstars, so you’re probably overpaying substantially for someone else to incubate them.
The second Nash equilibrium is probably “moneyball” where you take the pain up front and invest in becoming better predictors of talent so you raise the odds of somebody in your own incubator being a break out star. Because this requires patience and up-front sacrifice, we’d expect it to be less prevalent than the first Nash equilibrium, especially in a niche known more for playing the game than questioning the game, until the price of free agents is literally outrageous.
If my theory about the second Nash equilibrium is correct, though, it’s what somebody at one of Scott’s Bay Area house parties would call “ripe for disruption”.
If superstars are generally underpaid (to prevent e.g. "upsetting the apple cart" of other employees' expectations of no one making waaaay more than them for doing "the same job"), then they are from a hiring perspective much more lucrative and their allure to institutions totally makes sense. If they were paid what they are worth, there'd be no incentive to hire them over others. The perverse incentives created by underpaying stars hurts others rather than just the stars.
Similarly, the fact that Paige Spiranac has never been awarded a US Open title, despite having done far more to popularize the sport than 99.5% of title winners, is absurd. But in part this is due to the horrendous job market for US Open champions (the number of yearly winners is in the single digits), which is a product of the priorities of the sport, which has chosen to allocate this limited resource on the basis of a different metric.
Teaching and service are not the criteria on the basis of which tenure track hires are made. And if you think `they should be, that's what the students are showing up for' - well, attractiveness of the athletes in question might be what a lot of viewers are tuning in for.
This is silly, as winning the U.S. Open is based on objective measures and obtaining a tenure-track job is not.
Tenure track hiring is based on research. How good Devereaux is at outreach and popularization is just as irrelevant as cleavage is to chances of winning the US open.
Tenure track is nominally based on research, but all kinds of things from where you got your Ph.D. to how well you come across in an interview to (as already mentioned by several in this thread) whether your Ph.D. is new or stale are all factors. Seven published articles will not necessarily trump six, and in fact might not trump two or three if the 2-3 person has been anointed as promising for whatever reason, valid or invalid.
All the metrics you mention are proxies for research. Its a difficult thing to measure (even more difficult to estimate potential for), so people look at multiple proxies. Having a popular blog, however, is irrelevant. So is being a world of warcraft champion, or excellent tennis player.
OK, I guess that is a fair way to put it. But is a strange system for institutions that originally came to existence to teach students.
>absurd
I'm sensing a presumption "top people deserve an academia role"/"best off in academia role"/"good for society to have them in academia role".. can you tell me more?
I'm not familiar with the person/didn't read his article, but, been watching alternative media/public intellectual/non-academia research spaces, and there are certainly reasonable alternative models to funding intellectual work, so I'd like folks to clear at least some burden of proof when claiming "talented X no spot in academia wrong/bad".
In military history in particular, I'd imagine a lot of relevant work one can do is "publishing books"/"journalism/public commentary"/"consulting (military orgs)"/"research/consulting/policy analysis work for think tanks". Those sound to me like they don't have much to do with academia and should allow one to earn a living.
What is the differential contribution that can only be done inside academia and that is indeed important and deserves public funding?
Yeah, communicators are seriously undervalued. John McWhorter has sometimes speculated that he was given tenure because of his race, but I want to think that's absurd. In my opinion, he's the single best communicator that the field of linguistics has ever had. Admittedly, for some reason studying linguistics seems to be correlated with being a bad communicator, but he's just plain good, head and shoulders above everyone else. But maybe they didn't care about that, and only saw the color of his skin. **sigh**
As an early career adjunct. I would also like to get an answer to this.
Happy to chat about strategies. I see early career adjuncts get taken advantage of to an extreme extent, and it bothers me.
The best advice (not that you asked): try to lock down a TT position (or a position that is explicitly a try-out for a TT position) as soon as possible. The longer you stay in a weird interstitial space, the greater the prejudice is. It really sucks.
It also helps immensely to have an advocate — someone very senior, who is hooked into gossip in your field and who can suggest you put in an application here or there based on what they know about the search going on.
But academia is *so* broken that in most cases my advice would be: do it if it's fun, if you don't need to be saving lots of money, and if you like the lifestyle. But if it's not fun, if you need money, if you don't like the college prof lifestyle... run, quickly. Life goes by fast.
That's really good advice. I've seen friends put in years and years in the adjunct life, and it's not rewarding and there's no long term benefit. If it doesn't work for you in 3 years, think about what the next career will be, because teaching for scraps and maybe a job next semester is no way to live a life in the long run.
My case is/was weird, and I know of no other like it. (Seem my post.) Adjuncting can be very hard on you in many ways.
He's right. Get an adjunct the year before you expect to have the PhD "in hand". Use that year to apply and at least hopefully get some experience with the interviewing process. If after a couple of years you don't have the TT position, ask yourself if you would be content as an adjunct forever.
Good luck.
Hey thanks! I appreciate it! I am in a bit of a weird situation because I haven’t yet started a PhD: I’m applying this cycle. There was a huge shortfall in adjuncts in my field at a nearby university and I was able to pick up a 2/2with just my terminal master’s. So for now, until I am in a program, I am happy to adjunct (I am also working full time at an unrelated job that actually pays which makes me impossibly busy but not impoverished). As I head farther into the swamp, I’ll keep this advice in hand!
you read the piece and you still want to start a PHD? Why?
In my field things are much worse than this piece suggests.
If you mean more oversupply, that's a pretty terrible reason to go for a PhD.
Yeah I probably should not apply, but I’ve gone down with the sunk cost at this point.
I didn't spend much time in academia but to add on to what others said, I think it can really help to demonstrate high productivity by doing as many publicly visible things in your field as you can. Being part of anything you can volunteer for, producing content as in writing (of any kind - pop sci articles, letters-to-the-editor on scientific subjects, etc) or other media such as being interviewed on podcasts or in documentaries (no matter how small). Lots of documentaries aren't really much more than a few professors, a two man film crew and some stock footage, and it may be easier than one would think to find a local filmmaker (or even a film student), rope in a few colleagues and make a short piece related in some way to your work. Left-field suggestion, maybe, but things of that nature put your face & name out there, even if it's only ever screened at a campus film festival. It makes you seem like "someone" and not just another "applicant."
Basically, try to have your name turn up as many Google results as possible, affiliated with media & organizations that are as "real" as possible. In hiring, they're of course looking at your academic output, but your role as an "ambassador" for your school is important as well - every time "according to Professor Wertion of XYZ University" appears in writing or on screen, that's a plug for the school. They want to know that you won't just be sitting in your office/lab doing what you're supposed to, they want to know that you'll be interacting with the wider world in a way that reflects well on the school.
Sorry, but this is very bad advice.
After 12 years of being on hiring committees (etc) in a range of fields, I can say that we basically don't google applicants. We don't have the time, first of all, and it's not really relevant to the job.
There are lots of unfair aspects of academia (snobbery about PhD institution is probably #1), and lots of things that can hurt, but there is really only one positive thing you can do to help: publish lots of important and interesting research.
(A related strategy is "publish lots of research"... this doesn't really work, however; the effort required to publish five extra silly/trivial papers is not worth the payoff.)
I'm sure it's field-, school-, and committee-dependent, and I'm not saying to try to be some kind of influencer at the expense of research or publication. But there's another good reason to extend your tentacles in this way, which is the possibility of side compensation as an occasional commentator, consultant, analyst, or writer, especially in the event that you don't make whatever cut you were aiming at. Situations differ, but If someone has already been banging their head against a wall for a while, one can't really say that "just keep banging" is very useful advice. Even if it's true, everyone's already heard it.
Yes—this I agree with. If the goal is to have a few years to hang out and build a non-academic career, your advice is really good.
It is definitely the case that it’s a bad strategy for an academic career though. (I know someone who did this strategy… it was a huge success on the metrics of media attention, fame, etc, but they still ended up on the infinite postdoc chain.)
Probably the best advice is sort of Paul Graham like: just do your thing. Whatever it is. Don’t try to fit into what someone else says is the right path, if it clashes with fundamental inclinations.
If you want to do great research, in other words, go for it. Don’t do media/influencer things. If you want to dabble in research but secretly want a consulting gig, do that.
As a prof, I would very much prefer to only get people who truly wanted to do great research, of course!
I'm an academic and I can point out a few factual clarifications:
1. There's R1 (e.g., Ivy+, Stanford, MIT, ...) and not-R1 (typically liberal arts) institutions. Tenure-track professors at R1 institutions are hired to do research and the teaching is incidental. It's flipped at not-R1 institutions. I _believe_ tenure-track professors teaching at R1 institutions is mostly a historical accident that got cemented into every part of the tenure/promotion/grant process so it's basically impossible to change at this point.
2. There's also STEM/not-STEM. As a concrete example, the top-4 CS programs don't hire adjuncts in the way you think about them (e.g., Andrew Ng is adjunct at Stanford but this is just to keep him affiliated with the University). This dynamic is very different in non-STEM.
3. In STEM, the University puts in substantial resources to grow tenure-track faculty (startup packages go from $500k and way up).
4. Poaching does happen a decent amount. You just don't really hear about it much because tenured professors have it very nice and there's no need to complain about the processing.
I'm also happy to share some non-factual thoughts but those are speculative.
Agreed. Lots of R2 are basically just "like R1, but weaker - but not actually weak, with plenty of good people". And of course R1 covers a broad range. We should really be talking about R[0.5,e], say.
Agreed. And the first graph in the post ("Acceptance rate for tenure-track positions by how long it’s been since the candidate has gotten their PhD") is unlikely to generalize to many STEM fields. In biomedical fields, incoming faculty almost always have years of postdoctoral experience. And in those fields, universities take more of a venture-capital approach to hiring: junior faculty are provided with startup funds which will enable the faculty to win grants, from which the university takes a percentage.
In CS, I think more than half of our new hires are finishing their PhDs. (Interestingly, a lot of them choose to defer for a year to do a postdoc.) I'd say the majority of the remainder are postdocs, rounded out by a few people applying for associate or full professor positions.
Yeah, CS is a different academic job market entirely, owing to the fact that all candidates can at any time walk into a better-paid job in industry.
But postdocs are very different to adjuncts. Postdocs are doing *research* - ie they are getting experience in the part of the job that is actually being hired for.
Yes. This. My god-daughter is in her second year of PhD study in a hot area bio-chem and she's already getting various offers/recruitments for both academic and commercial positions. She's already getting paid as a research assistant just below entry-TT faculty level. That was one reason she chose her school (and it's top 3 in her area). Even as a PhD candidate schools were essentially bidding for her.
Jorg, can you give an (approximate) number for what she's getting paid?
I've heard of students being paid well, I've never heard of any making six figures.
$40K plus benefits (as well as free tuition, of course). The entire package is worth at least 6 figures. But if you mean ONLY salary, of course she isn't getting that. But my old MidLevel State U is paying new hires in LAS (I know that college better than the others) seems to be getting new TT profs for around $55K plus decent benefits.
I'm sure that new TT hires at her U may get paid 6 figures, but I doubt if that's the case outside of maybe the Top 50. Maybe even the Top 25.
And full-time adjuncts (there are fewer than 100 with more than 600 part-timers). Full-time teach 4-5 classes/semester but get full benefits, including 10% of salary in their 403b. Part-timers (3 classes or less) get around $3500/class, no benefits. FT adjuncts are basically in three classes, and get from $27K + bennies) to $45K + bennies. Some FT, like me, whose 'skills' are in demand get more. When I retired I was getting just above $70K. Most years I was the highest paid adjunct in the university.
In Computer Science, 40k is par for the course, at least in good programs. (We recently increased stipends to above 40 to stay competitive with our peers.)
And I can't imagine a tenure-track CS professor making under six figures. Most people I know starting recently (last few years) made around 125k over nine months, which you can extrapolate to 11 or 12 months depending on their start-up packages, funding, school policies, and other vagaries. According to the Taulbee survey, in 2021 the 10th percentile of CS professor made 96k over 9 months. The 50th and 75th percentile were 114 and 124.
I can offer another example of the same thing. My friend's daughter got her PhD in a very hot physics field, went immediately into postdoc at another institution, and then landed a tenure-track position at a top public university, getting tenure when still in her 30s. (She's 40 now, so you can timeline this.)
I don't think it's a coincidence that both the examples talked about here are female. Not so much in biological areas, but definitely in physics, women and men exist in very different job markets.
Would you mind explaining more about the different job markets?
Well at least in the hard sciences there's two job markets:
1. One for men who are white, Asian, Indian, or some other unfashionable racial group, and
2. One for women and fashionable minorities
Universities wish to hire roughly equal numbers of people from the two categories, but 90% of the people entering the market are in the first category. This means that there's effectively two job markets -- a highly competitive one in which only the most brilliant candidates will get a position, and a much less competitive one in which you basically just need to be okay.
Gravitational waves?
I'm guessing graphene.
Maybe 15 years ago.
Hot Jupiters. I did say it was a hot topic, I just meant that in more than one sense. (It's astrophysics, not physics tout court, but it is a branch of physics.)
I got tenure at 35 in a top-25 STEM department. I might have been a little fast, but I think the majority (if not almost all) get it by 40.
If you're still working as an adjunct at 40, most people will think of you as a failure, and this becomes self-fulfilling.
My first thought would be "Why are you still hitting your head against that wall? It's not coming down. Go do something else with your life, because this isn't it."
Of course switching streams at 40+ is more difficult...
Indeed, and I would say the same is true for research scientists. Although there isn't age discrimination in principle in faculty hiring, like you say, hiring committees start to wonder why you haven't already progressed by some point.
My experience is in the STEM space too, in an R1. I see it as a long road to get a tenure-track research position; with lots of off-ramps, but no on-ramps. First you have to go to grad school; then you have to have publications; then you have to do postdoc; then you have to get a tenure-track job. This is a road heading straight in the direction of leading a research team, and to move away from that is to be on a different journey. (Of course there are more granular steps there; with varying levels of prestige for each step to qualify for varyingly prestigious colleges/universities.)
When I hear that someone is an adjunct, I understand that they took an off-ramp; and assume that they know they took an off-ramp. They're no longer competing for the tenure-track positions, because they've moved away from research.
This is perhaps the same as Scott's hypothesis about superstars; a wonderkind isn't going to have the resources (space, equipment, etc) to show their skills if they ever get off this road.
You make it sound like adjuncts are choosing an off-ramp, but I think the claim is that people are forced off the ramp. It's not like you can control if you're chosen for a tenure-track position. You just do your best and if you haven't been chosen in a year or two to the off-ramp with you.
Yes, and? How is this different from any other profession? If you don't get a job, to the off ramp with you.
If you don't get a job at Google right out of college and take a job at a less prestigious company, you can reapply at Google 3 years later with no penalty. If you spend 3 years as an adjunct you have to overcome a large amount of prejudice to get a tenure track position.
I would contend that if you don't get a job at Google right out of college and take a job as taxi driver for 3 years, you will indeed have substantial barriers to re-entry. Your mistake is to think that `adjunct' is the same kind of job as `tenure track.' It is not. The kind of experience that an adjunct acquires is as relevant for the tenure track job as working as a taxi driver is for working at Google.
If you were doing a job that actually did provide experience relevant to a tenure track role (e.g. national lab researcher, or industry lab researcher), then there would not be significant barriers to getting hired onto tenure track.
That's a great, and enlightening comment, diddly. Thanks.
All accurate
Potential nitpick/clarification on #2: at least according to Devereaux pure math tends to fall on the liberal arts/non-STEM side of the divide here, despite falling under STEM by the literal definition.
Math is complicated in that we typically have postdocs. When we hire, we regularly have a fight between the statisticians who want someone fresh out of PhD and the pure mathematicians who want to see some years of research experience.
(as Humphrey Appleby correctly points out elsewhere in this discussion, adjuncting and other teaching experience is actually detrimental because it's time away from doing research)
Math is, in fact, extremely weird in this respect, because also most math postdocs (at least in the US) aren't really postdocs, in the sense that they typically are not research-only positions paid for by some grant, but rather they are positions where you teach and do research, and the college believes you're paid for your teaching but the department expects you to do research as well.
When I was a postdoc in the US, everybody in the department would call me a "postdoc", although my job title was officially "assistant professor" (listed in the department website as "postdoctoral assistant professor"; the job offer letter was very explicit that this was a temporary 3-year position without possibility of tenure). I had a nontrivial teaching load of 2-2, but was explicitly told upon arrival that, although I had to do the teaching and I should do it well, I also should not forget that I had been selected for the position because of my research, and the expectation was that I should keep doing good research. I don't know if this kind of thing happens in other disciplines, but my understanding is that it would be at least uncommon, whereas in math it seems to be the norm.
This isn't what R1 means. R1 institutions are literally any PhD granting institution that has a high degree of research activity. My undergraduate and PhD are both at R1 institutions that are not Ivy leagues, nor MIT.
Basically on the right track. But it isn't colleges who do the hiring; it's mostly departments. Colleges can veto departmental hiring decisions, but they don't pick the candidates. Departments obviously have slightly different incentives than colleges do (even more prestige-driven, significantly less budget-driven, less financially even very informed or aware).
In particular, departmental hiring committees (especially in the humanities) are often overwhelmed with an excess of good candidates and eager for to narrow the list on any pretext. "If they were so impressive, someone else would have hired them within a year or two of their PhD" is not a very fair heuristic, but it's reportedly widespread and understandable on Bayesian grounds.
Honestly I think the incentives of teh department are even more foreign than that.
Most departments are small insular groups that work closely together a lot of the time and end up serving as default social groups for their members; so someone who is easy to work with, fun to talk to, wouldn't mind having your kids play together, shares your values and goals and vision for the department and it's mission, etc. plays a really big role.
I'm very confused by your not mentioning post-docs (which are the norm in STEM). In effect, these are temporary positions with a moderate teaching load (or perhaps a pretty heavy teaching load, or, if you are lucky, no obligatory teaching load at all). I don't know what data your graph is based on, but it's rare now for people to get tenure-track positions (at research universities) without doing a postdoc at all.
In math/physics/computer science, it is common for a postdoc to have a teaching component - typically 1 course per semester (which is light, though it doesn't necessarily feel that way at that stage!). Even if you are not forced to teach, it's wise to teach a little, not just to make a bit of extra money, but, much more importantly, because you do need to be able to put something on your teaching statement.
There's also the bizarre thing about how some of the more prestigious postdocs get called "Great Founder of our Department Assistant Professorship"... and have a higher-than-average teaching load. Never understood that.
^^^ This.
In physics postdocs generally have zero teaching component.
Same for astronomy.
Same for Chemistry.
As in, officially, or also in practice? I once had a postdoc with no teaching, but doing a bit of teaching at another university in the same city was seen as expected. (I'm not in physics.)
Also in practice. There would in fact be significant obstructions to postdocs teaching. For example, if they are being paid from federal grants to do research full time (which is almost all postdocs), then grant rules would actually legally prohibit them from spending time teaching, the same way as they would be prohibited from taking a second job as a secretary. This refers to formal, classroom teaching. Mentoring research by graduate students is fine (and happens).
Hate to say this but: strongly disagree that teaching experience matters. If you can get by without it, go for it, particularly in STEM.
I had zero teaching experience at my first TT hire. It was basically assumed that "I was smart enough to teach", and I've never seen a good researcher downrated (even a little) for having zero teaching experience out of a postdoc.
Wish I agreed with you! Yes, my strongest students have got postdocs with little or no teaching - and it's not helping them; I've got feedback from committees where they were not put even on the long list precisely for that reason.
(What is probably optimal is just *a little* teaching, as in one semester-long undergraduate course per year.)
Very interesting. Just so I can help my own students... which field is this? And what were the target jobs where the teaching experience mattered? (R1, R2, SLAC...)
Curious to figure out why our experiences are so different. In my case, it's committees for R1s in physics, cog sci, psych, and econ.
Math, R1 (not just in North America).
I'd guess that postdocs also play an important role in "track switching" being rare. In my field, most assistant professors get hired right out of grad school, but postdocs, visiting positions, teaching-track, and adjunct jobs are all reasonably common.
If you're not quite where you need to be to get a tenure-track job at a research university, you probably have a good shot at a decent postdoc. Since postdocs have much lower teaching expectations than visiting, teaching-track, and adjunct jobs, they're a better choice for people who want to pursue an ambitious research agenda (though they're also lower-paying and generally shorter). So taking a teaching-track job means either that you weren't offered a postdoc or that you chose to teach instead of doing a postdoc. Both of those things mean that you're probably unlikely to be a very productive researcher, either because you're not as interested in research or because you're not very good at it.
My sense is that this is different in the humanities because there are fewer postdocs and fewer research-focused positions. And I know a number of people who got a tenure-track job after having had multiple visiting professor positions and other temporary, teaching-focused jobs.
Devereaux's original post (which is focused on the job market in the humanities) notes that there are postdocs, but there's some blurring of lines because in the humanities there's positions that look like postdocs but are (fellowships for the most prestigious potential future Einsteins that universities want to keep on hand) and positions that look like postdocs but aren't (stuff that's got a similar job title but is really just a rebranded adjunct position).
It's somewhat the same in physics/astronomy. There is a spectrum of postdoc prestige, from "working for a professor and getting paid from their grant" at the bottom, all the way up to prestigious prize fellowships.
In my experience, your trajectory post-grad school depends on the type of postdoc you get. If you get a prestigious fellowship out of grad school, you're a high flier who might spend 3-5 years on a couple of different postdoc fellowships before landing an R1 TT position. If you just get hired on someone's grant, it's more likely you'll spend longer bouncing between different lower-status postdocs before eventually finding something at an R2, non-TT, etc.
In some of the humanities areas, it takes longer to get a PhD (and involves writing a dissertation with a 4-digit number of pages) but it's fairly common I think to get a tenure-track position right out of the PhD program without going through the postdoc step. In other areas like math (my subject), almost everyone has to go through at least 1-2 postdoc positions first (and if you're me, spend most of a decade at postdoc appointments), with some exceptions that usually appear to be mostly teaching-focused with little or no research.
Almost every postdoc in math requires teaching, typically quite a lot of teaching, with exceptions only for those perceived to be research superstars. My impression is that there's slightly less demand for teaching even from non-math STEM disciplines, though.
There's even an exception to the exceptions - some of the top postdocs are the named "research assistant professorships" at Harvard/MIT/Princeton/Berkeley/Yale/etc., which do involve teaching (typically two semester-long undergraduate courses and one graduate course - teaching a graduate course at that stage is a privilege but also rather time consuming, unless you make it extremely specialized in what you know backwards and forwards already).
Postdocs with no teaching are a little bit less rare outside the US, though.
As for poaching, my impression is that it does happen a moderate amount, but usually only when the professor in question is upgrading to a more prestigious institution or wanted to move anyway. It is also common for professors to get an offer from an outside institution and then ask their current institution to match it, which they often will.
yup
Many years ago I saw a prof try that with the Dept chair. She just looked at him (and he was pretty good in his area), and said, "Think they need two of us?" He stayed. And actually became Chair a few years after that.
Maybe I’m slow on the uptake, but why did he stay? It seems like the chair was admitting that the current dept was underpaying him and would continue to underpay him, therefore he decided not to move on? Confusing.
The only reading that makes sense to me is that the Departmental Chair was also interviewing for the same external job.
I don't know, but I'm guessing he was either faking the offer or faking the amount. I do know the story is accurate because it happened after I left and the Chair in question had become a friend and told me. In confidence, of course, but hat was over 25 years ago, and at least one of them is dead.
The Chair just knew the Dean would never approve the amount he was asking for. She advised him to take the job, BTW.
I would assume that after discussion with the family the conclusion was that the quality-of-life benefit of the raise is not guaranteed to be worth the hassle of moving to another (probably distant) city.
Adjuncts surprisingly shooting up several years into their career is a rare thing, not least because their teaching schedule (6+ courses a year not unusual) leaves them little time for serious research. (Of course, in lab-heavy fields, they face even stronger headwinds.) I think that's the main source of the vicious cycle you're talking about. Journal editors, AFAIK, don't usually gatekeep much; a non-famous tenured professor and an adjunct with an .edu address have about the same chances of getting their paper in all else being equal. (Really big names sometimes get the "even if it is unreadable, there must be wisdom in it" treatment.)
Being an adjunct also has very strong negative signalling value.
There seem to be two obvious reasons why:
1. lots of people go on the tenure-track job market the year they get their PhD, so you get a big burst. Then are people who delay this for a year or two or three — it's a pain to put together a TT application, but postdocs and one-off teaching jobs are often offered with just a cover letter. So you have two distributions; a delta function at "same year", and then an exponential decay over the subsequent years — this is marking the time at which the applicant finally makes a first TT application.
Notice that this explains away the apparent "bias against experience", simply by virtue of the fact that people choose to go on the market at different points.
2. People who are out of the market longer are seen to have a hidden variable (not being as good) that is serving as a signal.
For TT people, in general, they do not move from university to university very much; the standard thing is get a good job when you start, and then negotiate when you are up for tenure by getting outside offers. It's rare to go on the market, and generally indicates someone who is at a low-ranked institution who wants to move up; those applications are less likely to be successful, since being at the low-ranked institution is itself a signal.
More generally, people would rather take someone who looks like Harvard would hire, than someone who (even if they look like someone Harvard would hire) definitely Harvard didn't actually in the end hire.
As to the question why do people hire from outside when they do take people with experience: my guess is that academia is ridiculous and snobby, and it's very hard to get someone to see an adjunct as a TT. They're excluded (for example) from certain meetings and decision-making, and have less ability to negotiate for what they need, and people use that as a signal of actual quality. But it's much easier to say ha, Berlin totally doesn't realize that their guy is super good, we can get him, let's do it.
An inside hire does occasionally happen (my institution is smart, and does this — it's a great way to test the waters with someone), but it's also quite clearly flagged as the plan ahead of time (we think this person is good, hire them as a VAP, but there's a job coming soon...)
There definitely seems to be a social superiority component to the situation.
On the "bias against experience" question, my first thought was that the seeming paradox is due to getting cause and effect backwards: rather than experience (as an adjunct) making you less hirable (as tenure-track), what we're seeing may instead by a that being less hirable (as tenure-track) leads to getting more experience (as an adjunct). Even if whether or not you're seen as a good candidate for a tenure track position is completely independent of adjunct experience, you could still see a graph like that because each year of experience sees more of the desirable candidates actually get hired for tenure-track, while most of those who remain adjuncts are those who are seen as less desirable.
One intuition pump for this is minor-league baseball players. I can't find stats with a quick googling, but I'm pretty confident that a similar curve obtains: the most talented prospects make it to the majors fairly quickly, while the more marginal prospects linger in the minors for longer, so past a certain point (roughly the average time for a highly talented player to develop the skills needed to be ready for the majors), each additional year in the minors predicts a lower rate of making the majors the following year.
Seems right. You're describing a form of adverse selection. I think this should also make the list of explanations, bringing it to:
- Big burst of applicants immediately, and then this declines (Simon's #1)
- Adverse selection where the best candidates are hired first so later applicant rounds are made of worse candidates on average (what you said)
- Hiring committees are aware that the best candidates were hired earlier, so they hire even fewer older applicants (Simon's #2)
This is directionally similar to my hypothesis
A similar phenomenon happens in the non-FAANG computer programming world. Junior devs get hired at something like $60-$80k, then within about two years are worth double that. But the company that hired them will never promote that dev to a $140k salary because it would upset the apple cart of all the devs making $120k wondering why they don't get a 100% raise in two years, or anything close.
So the junior dev has to go elsewhere for that first big pay bump. Meanwhile the company hires an ex-junior dev to replace them, and happily pays them $140k. But no one leap-frogged anyone or got an out of place raise, so the apple cart remains placid.
I'm confused by your first paragraph - why *don't* the other devs get a 100% raise after two years? Is the claim that some devs are good and get the 100% raise, and others are mediocre and don't?
Because the company isn't going to pay $240k unless you're in upper management. Pay raises are based on time served + performance with some kind of natural upper limit. The raises get smaller %-wise as you approach that upper limit.
FAANG and FAANG-ish companies are a better example of paying principal devs what they're actually worth. Although from my casual observations, they also overpay/overhire.
I would guess that frictions are high enough (looking for jobs requires enough initiative and time), and information asymmetric enough (many people are not particularly plugged-in to industry networks) that companies can often extract more value by giving nominal raises and simply hoping that their employees don't notice.
Another factor is that if you realized this too late, already got your first job at your first-choice company, and enjoyed it, then your first job hop takes you by definition to a less desirable company.
This does suggest an interesting strategy… I wonder how common it is to take a less-desired job as the first step.
Junior devs get 60-80, non-junior devs get 120-160.
After 2 years a junior becomes a non-junior. Someone hired as a non-junior doesn't get a big pay bump after 2 years because they're already on the non-junior payscale.
The problem is that because they don't have proper explicit ranks and job titles, they can't make it clear that they have just promoted someone from junior to non-junior and as a result people complain "why does he get 100% pay raise and I don't, even though I'm as good/better programmer than him?" and the answer "because he's just been promoted to the same grade as you and he's still being paid less than you are" doesn't work if you don't have a coherent grade structure.
Why don't they have a coherent grade structure?
That is a very interesting question to which I've never really got an answer beyond the fact that the lowest grade is "doesn't have any direct reports" - ie all grades are based on management responsibility.
“ Why don't they have a coherent grade structure?”
My non-FAANG employer has technical ‘ranks’ of T21-T26.
Engineers tend to get yearly raises within a pay grade, a larger raise when jumping pay grades, and the best ones also receive annual bonus packages (eg, RSUs).
Information asymmetry benefits the employers. The employer knows know much all his employees are paid, and two employers can agree to mutually share their information over a glass of wine.
On the other hand, many employees have no idea how much their colleagues make, what would it take for them to make more in given company, and how much other companies pay for the same job. (Even if you try to figure out on internet how much someone in your position would be paid in a different company, different companies use the same words for quite different positions.) If they just have a vague idea that working harder will be rewarded in future in some unspecified way... that seems quite convenient for the employers. It is difficult to negotiate when you don't have the data.
(There is a similar mechanism in other markets, too. For example, similar food is packaged in different sizes and shapes, to make it more difficult to compare the costs. This benefits the producers, and confuses the consumers.)
Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination -- as an employer, in a hypothetical ideal case, you want to pay each of your employees the minimum salary that will make them do the adequate job and not quit, not a cent more. If one guy is willing to work for N, and another is willing to do the same job for N/2, and both options are okay for you, you want to pay the former N and pay the latter N/2. A transparent salary structure would make the former guy quit (if less than N) or the latter ask for a raise (if N or more).
Basically junior devs make 60-80 non-junior 120-160 is true.
But let me try to explain the dynamic differently.
You hire 10 jr devs for 60k. They now have 2 years of experience so they could get 120k. You have two options. Pay all of them the market rate of 120k or pay them 80k and lose 2 jr devs. From a cost perspective it makes sense to do the latter which creates a huge incentive for jr devs to switch jobs, but many don't because they aren't familiar with the market, like their jobs, it's a pain the butt, etc...
This may depend on country and maybe I don't understand it, but this is my best guess:
There is an important difference between junior and senior programmers. The former can work on school-sized projects alone (100 - 10K lines of code written over a few days or weeks); the latter can work on industry-sized projects in a team (10K - 1M lines of code written over a few months or years). The difference is that the structure of the larger program doesn't fit in your working memory, so you either follow some system or the project collapses under its own weight: you don't remember what you put where and how you were supposed to use it; or you change your mind later, but you can't change the code accordingly because it is too large and everything is connected to everything. Plus there is the entire art of working in a team: communicating clearly, writing documentation, using source control, not writing idiosyncratic code that others wouldn't understand, following the group standards. People usually learn this in 1-3 years of working in a team. You want to have your juniors supervised by a senior, otherwise they will quickly write a code so complicated that they can't maintain or extend it anymore.
In my experience, the salaries for programmers are rather flat, except for two quite different numbers for juniors and seniors (almost 1:2). So you probably get a huge salary boost when you change your job for the first or the second time, i.e. the first time you interview as a senior programmer; and from then on it is a relatively slow crawl.
You salary greatly depends on: the country you live in, the city you live in, the company you work at, your negotiation skills. Your salary does *not* depend on: your programming skills (except insofar they may be insufficient to get the job). Or rather, the relation between your programming skills and salary is like: if you get 3x more productive, you could get a 20% salary raise; if you get 10x more productive, you could get a 50% raise, if you are lucky.
(And I am not saying this from a position "I am oh so great but underpaid". It's the opposite: I am quite mediocre; and I know people who are 10x as productive as me, and they get paid about as much as I do. That gives me a sad perspective on how much the market would reward me for further improving my skills. The skills that the market actually rewards are: networking, joining the latest bubble such as cryptocurrencies or machine learning, starting your own company.)
Okay, but *why* is this so? Just guessing:
* The chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Suppose you have Einstein-level programmers, but your sales department sucks. They develop a product that would replace Excel+Google+ChatGPT, but you fail to sell it. Obviously, you do not have funds to pay them the astronomical salaries they would hypothetically deserve. The better your programmers are, the more likely the actual bottleneck is something else; having better programmers does not improve the situation much.
In case of corruption, the bottleneck is how much money your government contacts can let you steal. For example, you get a €100M grant from EU to develop a project for government. The actual costs of development are €1M, you make a huge donation to the political party that gave you the contract, and put the rest in your pocket. As long as you make the product on time and it works, it's not like you could make more money by making it faster or better.
Or if you make a product for internal use in a corporation: If it is not sold outside the company, then the IT department is treated as a "cost center". Again, if the product is made on time and works reasonably well, there is no benefit in making it better (the managers who decide your budget are usually not the ones who actually use the program anyway).
* Programming is a teamwork, it is difficult to evaluate individual contributions. Especially if the people doing the evaluation are not programmers themselves. Various interventions of management can slow down the team productivity. (In one company, my productivity skyrocketed when the company forgot to assign me a manager for one month. I completed a project they expected would take three months. They gave me a bonus, and quickly fixed the mistake by assigning me a manager. My productivity returned to normal. A similar thing happened in different companies, too.)
* Many programmers are on the autistic spectrum. I suspect that many companies are trying to hit the jackpot by hiring a future genius who doesn't understand the value of money and/or sucks at negotiation, hoping that he will remain working at the same company for the same salary maybe adjusted for inflation (i.e. way below the market rate for his new skills). I knew a few people who were in my opinion leaving a lot of money on the table.
* The biggest employers probably have a cartel agreement on maximum salaries, which may be technically illegal, but you'd have to prove it first.
This matches my own model very closely.
I don't know anything about coding, but this phenomenon exists in other sectors too - a bit of job swapping is often very helpful for getting promotions and salary increases in short time frames.
E.g. my wife is an accountant and managed to climb the ladder from part-time admin to CFO over the course the course of 3 years. Some of that was her being very good at her work, some of it was fortunate circumstances (i.e. a tight labour market), but some of it was shrewdness - she changed employers twice in that period (and almost did a third time, but got offered a big promotion to stay), when she sensed that her market value had grown substantially above what her current job was paying.
I think it's an entirely non rational psychological effect, the "prophet is not honoured in his home town" phenomenon. You hired this person as X, it's only been a year, you keep mentally categorising them as X. You don't recognise the way that their capabilities have grown, and you kind of assume you don't need to compete for the person you already have.
There seems to be a kind of social/psychological stickiness – among both employers and employees.
This is interesting to me because this is often how the nursing profession works also. When I was hired as a new grad RN, I made approx $30/hour (iirc). After I put in 2 years at this hospital, a former classmate was hired onto our team after working for two years elsewhere (an equivalent hospital in terms of prestige etc). She got hired on at $38/hr while I was making $31/hr. And this is a common scenario in nursing, in my experience. You have to leave your first job and get hired in somewhere else in order to get the pay bump that the market clearly deems warranted. But to get that same pay bump after years at the same hospital? Impossible. To be fair, this was mostly preCOVID/intraCOVID days. Ive heard from colleagues that this is possibly changing and hospitals are more aggressively raising nurses salary to improve retention (as thousands of RNs left their jobs during COVID for more lucrative work as travel nurses). And yes during COVID, I once worked alongside a former coworker who had quit and then been rehired as a travel nurse into the exact same position at more than double her previous pay. I left to go back to school shortly thereafter and that was one of the reasons.
Maybe your hospital is thinking, “Nurse Alice, by potentially taking a job with us, is demonstrating she’s willing to switch employers and cities in pursuit of higher pay. If we want to hire her, we’re clearly competing against many other employers and need to offer her higher wages. Nurse Bob, by looking for higher pay with us, is signaling he’s not willing to switch employers or cities, so we can pay him less because we face less competition for Bob.”
Haha, that might have been the case! Again, it seems that this strategy was poorly considered or, at least, had a limited shelf-life for being a good strategy, as evidenced by the mass exodus of RN's from lower-paying jobs to higher-paying jobs during COVID. I think the additional stress and frustration of COVID flipped a lot of RN's calculations from "I guess the familiarity of this current job is worth not leaving to make more money" to "fuck this place, for this level of misery I'd like to paid substantially more." Haha, or something to that effect?
I can't find a good link now, but there are many sayings of type "if you never [had a certain type of problem], you are [optimizing for avoiding the problem] too much." The idea is that perhaps having the problem once in a while is ultimately cheaper than the repeating cost of avoiding it at a too wide margin. If you never cross the line, you are probably too far behind the line.
(If you never missed the train, you are spending too much time waiting at the stations. If you never lost in a competition, you are competing in the wrong league. If you are the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room. If you successfully complete all your projects, you are choosing too easy projects. Etc.)
By the same logic, if you never had a mass exodus of underpaid employees (like, not even once in a century), you are probably paying them too much (speaking as a heartless cost-optimizer).
That makes sense! Thanks for the helpful framing. And yes, I think this shift in nursing sounds like what you've laid out: an unsurprising result of larger cost-optimizing motivations. However, even with my limited understanding of these kinds of trade-offs, I assume that in this case hospitals eventually determined this event did NOT represent a helpful facet of cost-optimization. Most hospitals suddenly found themselves paying double for a travel RN when all it would have taken to keep the original nurse at the job would have been a few dollars an hour pay increase (and hospitals adjusted hourly pay accordingly in order to improve retention, though this process took a long time to work because travel jobs continued to be widely available and extremely high-paying). I guess I wonder how a truly shrewd and nimble industry might have handled the situation differently? Or maybe not and this is exactly how the process should go? Or maybe COVID was just too anomalous to handle? I have no idea. Thanks again!
> I guess I wonder how a truly shrewd and nimble industry might have handled the situation differently? Or maybe not and this is exactly how the process should go?
Those are really great questions! Or at least I've been nerd sniped by them.
I think one of the costly prerequisites of a "truly shrewd and nimble industry" is that all of the participants have to be "truly shrewd and nimble". I think that _has_ to look like 'nurses being willing to switch employers' but, unfortunately, that runs into the same problem that everyone else (potentially) has, namely that switching employers can and often does have substantial transaction costs, e.g. job search, interviewing, moving, buying/selling homes, losing friends, changing kid's schools, etc.. Decreasing those costs is hard; somewhat impossible too. One advantage of living in a (big) city is kinda/actually being able to switch employers.
Also, one advantage of sticky nominal salaries/wages is that your pay doesn't typically decrease even if market rates do.
This is really interesting as a phenomenon, and there must be a lot written about it in the economics literature.
If someone's salary rises x2 after two years, the people there for four years will wonder why their trajectory appears to be "flattening out".
This has to introduce all sorts of inefficiencies into the market; when there are inefficiencies, there is usually someone benefitting. ("Where there's muck, there's brass") I wonder who it is?
(Presumably, it's the companies who have figured out a way to promote from within without this problem — e.g., by creating a confusing diversity of roles, hiding salary information in some fashion through benefits, or by having such a large company that people don't notice because the person is transferred to another unit.)
Excellent comment and followup.
This is how the US corporate world works in general. Big companies tend to have strict rules about how much of a raise an employee can get each year. However, there can be long-term benefits to keeping your head down for years in the same spot. The COO of a Fortune 100 company might be someone who spent a decade as an engineer, a decade as a middle-manager and a decade as salesman. (Tho perhaps that is less true today, I don't know.)
Academia is filled with mediocrity & a lack of imagination
PhDs that are above average get quickly snapped up in tenure track while others have to cycle around various adjunct positions . Experience can only help so much if your initial base itself is low
I think academia is full of brilliant people, forced into unimaginative work by a set of incentives that reward unimaginative work.
You can't afford to take risks in academia, better to keep publishing a steady stream of papers on low-risk addenda to your existing work. I know people who have made entire careers out of redoing the same research over and over again with slight variations.
You can only do so much pretending before you become the thing you're pretending to be
It goes at all levels too! Can you risk not writing the usual absurdly bogus claims about the possible applications in your paper that is 100% theoretical? Painful to see that a suggestion from a senior colleague (who is very pure-theory no-applied-experience) is both quite wrong in terms of reality and a good idea in terms of publishing.
It's definitely full of the process of mediocrity, even if many of even the senior people involved do try to preserve imagination — giving it a very tight time budget on this nowadays, though.
What gets measured gets done, and a common thread seems to be that having a term paper as your primary work product is counterproductive.
What else should they be judged by ? At Microsoft Research India, accolades are given based on research being spun out into an organization , like with CGNet Swara, Digital Green, Everwell Health (99 dots), Karya , etc
This seems like a harsh version of the parsimonious explanation, that a minority of academics add noticeable value over replacement and get special deals. Everyone else is basically a commodity academic, it’s fairly obvious who’s whom and experience/age doesn’t add anything.
Everything is like this (lawyers, plumbers, instant coffee): there’s a chunk of the market that competes on quality, and the bulk of the market competes on price.
Alternatively, if academics are the ones doing the hiring, it’s the difference between people you want to admit as peers and continue your institutional legacy (take into the partnership) and people you want to pay to do stuff for you. This predicts the changing universities side of it a little better - it’s much like how ex-rankers being commissioned in the army would never be commissioned in the same regiment they were enlisted in as it’d make command awkward and blur the officer-enlisted distinction.
That would imply academia is more hierarchical & rigid than a traditional workplace, where offices routinely promote internally
Nice train of thought, tenure track compete on quality while adjuncts compete on price.
Is it true for other professions too that there's little mobility once you get slotted into the price or quality categories ?
In law, broadly yes (with non-zero, but similar or lower movement out than is seen in academia, albeit subject to massive variation by country). No idea about anything else.
Very interesting, in India I have seen the lawyers who compete on price standing outside courtrooms haggling for customers. While the ones competing on quality have their own office.
Very similar to academia in that respect I suppose
"Academia is filled with mediocrity & a lack of imagination"
So is every other field. And every field has its geniuses.
I've found the average consultant, banker, journalist, lawyer, chartered accountant, product manager/designer, etc to be of a higher cut than the average academic
Are you grading on a fair comparison though? A competent accountant doesn't fuck anything up, and performs a quasi-mechanistic function well, whilst a brilliant accountant turns your $500,000 tax bill into the government owing you money. A competent academic produces technically sound research that no-one outside and few people in their field will ever much care about, whilst a brilliant academic revolutionises mankind's understanding of the universe. If we expected brilliance from accountants, they'd mostly seem mediocre, and if we expected competence from academics we'd mostly find it.
Ok, for academia there are some fields where no-one knows what they're doing (social psychology a decade or so ago), which is worrying but probably more of an institutional rot than an individual one. There are also the "studies" fields, but even there you can just compare them to a competent versus extraordinary homeopath/shaman/activist etc.
"Those who can't do, teach" seems to be what Devansh Mehta is saying. A brilliant researcher clearly can revolutionize our understanding of the universe. But what does a "brilliant teacher" do? They won't get the credit, but they bring their students to higher levels, possibly inspiring them to become brilliant themselves. Stephen Hawking was a brilliant scientist in his own right, but did Dennis Sciama make him better?
My own accountant I definitely rate as mediocre at best. He does my taxes, which include taxes for a small business, but he certainly doesn't save me money, and makes decisions to avoid conflict, rather than to benefit me, such as applying a refund to future taxes, rather than having the IRS issue a check.
Indeed, we have all had those brilliant teachers in our life who revolutionized our personal understanding of the universe, even if they didn't have the aptitude for publishing.
I'm not sure tenure is appropriate for those teachers. Having a parallel track, like companies with a management & technical advancement route, seems a better way to go.
That's a great point, we do hold academics to a higher standard than other professions, including the nonprofit world. If you aren't able to meet those high standards, then you're left at the bottom (unlike say being a plumber where even being average is enough).
As should probably be the case, since tenure means you can't be fired. You wouldn't want to just go about giving that to anyone
Some things you need to include in your investigation:
1) In reality, a lot of the teaching is done by graduate students. Even when it is not explicitly, it is very common that professors will have a teaching assistant that will do most of the menial work of teaching (grading, conducting discussion sessions, etc.).
2) Connected with the first point: in high prestige institutions, they usually hire for the research potential (which includes ability to attract grants, which is arguably more important than how promising it is), with teaching as a not particularly close third place (second is DEI nowadays). Adjuncts and post-docs are never hired back because they are expected to be looking for a tenure-track anyway.
3) You are correct in assuming a career gets shut down if you are denied tenure. It is very rare one can recover from that, usually involves some level of nastiness that happened for tenure to be denied in the first place, something other institutions will look over. But in most cases it is an indication of lack of impact research-wise. And when it happens, why hire someone who is also tenured (thus, more expensive) or already flamed out elsewhere when you can hire a new student? It is similar to sports, you don't run it back with veterans when you failed, you draft the potential next big thing because it is cheaper and more likely to make an impact.
4) Which leads to the final point. There is a lot more graduate students than there are jobs. Like, by a mile. A majority might never even try (myself included). So you don't need to go for experienced teachers for adjunct jobs that are temporary. There are plenty of people jumping from a one-year appointment to another for a few years until they give up and go work somewhere else. There is no short supply at any point. And when people have no experience, you can pay them less.
Other countries are available.
https://theprofessorisin.com/2017/05/26/academia-as-identity-a-ukus-comparison/
Other countries tend to have it worse than the US, which is why you'll see a lot more Brits teaching at American universities than Americans teaching in British ones. Salaries in Britain are dismal (despite all the good universities being in very expensive towns), and from what I've heard even worse on the Continent.
A junior professor (W1) in Germany makes about €4500 a month. Stick around for long enough to become a full professor (W3) and you can make a whopping (drumroll please) €7500 a month.
>Other countries tend to have it worse than the US,
Whilst simultaneously having it better, because it's easier to enter the private sector, etc
>despite all the good universities being in very expensive towns),
No, the London universities aren't top ranked...the Manchester ones are very well regarded for CS, but Manchester isn't expensive ..etc.
Oxbridge is a tier on its own, but after that it varies a lot by subject: Imperial for physics or engineering, Manchester for CS, St Andrews and Durham for history, etc, etc.
UCL/KCL/LSE/Imperial (the top-tier London institutions) are all very highly rated for some subjects, and very average for others, the same as the other top universities (the Russell Group, which is 24 universities). While some are in very expensive places to live (Oxford, Cambridge, five in London, York, Edinburgh, Bristol, etc), others are much cheaper (Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds, Glasgow, Cardiff, Belfast, Warwick, Newcastle, etc). It depends a lot on your department - a university that's highly rated in one thing may be average in another, even if you'd think they are closely related departments.
Strongly disagree about London; the THES rankings puts ICL third in the UK (and tenth in the world!). UCL is fourth, KCL sixth and LSE eighth. The top two are of course Oxford and Cambridge, which are not as expensive as London but still way up there.
Fifth is Edinburgh which I understand is not that expensive, then after LSE we've got Manchester, Bristol, Glasgow, Warwick, Birmingham... so I take back my assertion that all the _good_ universities are in expensive places but I'll say all the _top_ universities (ie seven out of the top eight) are in expensive places.
I don't know about CS in particular. It seems to me that CS is an odd duck, the top universities for CS these days are the ones that invested in their CS departments back in the 80s and 90s, and a lot of the super high prestige universities missed that particular boat (pish posh, we're not a technical college, we're a university!)
How pricey are ther nice bits of Brum, Manchester etc. compared to a so-so bit of the South-East?
Professors in Germany are civil servants. The salary of civil servants is lower because they pay 0 pension contributions, their pensions are entirely paid by the state. And as you're virtually guaranteed employment for life, mortgages will be offered at very reasonable rates. And there's a range of extra pay schemes, from performance bonuses to allowances for spouse and kids.
Now judges in Germany, those are really underpaid.
One advantage to only hiring outside of your own institution is that it enables you to select for ideological purity more easily. And academia is extremely ideological. If you make it possible for local academics to be hired for tenure, and a promising one is passed over, it leads to questions about why this person wasn’t picked. In many cases that may be because the academic wasn’t ideologically pure enough. If you make it the default to hire from other schools, then this doesn’t happen, as you can merely dismiss the non-ideological fits at other schools without needing to explain yourself, and only select the ones that do fit ideologically. Anonymity neuters outrage.
Except this seems to be the opposite of the explanation. In places like Italy, where academia puts a very strong value on conformity, most hiring is done in-house. But in the United States, where academia selects for heterodoxy, you get more outside hiring.
Academia certainly doesn’t select for heterodoxy. Look up political affiliations or religious affiliations of academics sometime.
Those are not the most important heterodoxies one should look for in an academic department (which does not imply that orthodoxy in politics or religion is not a problem in itself). Methodological and thematic diversity is more important, particularly if your program also wants to have graduate students and have a good placement record.
In the United States graduate programs tend to be a lot more varied internally in their research approaches than in other countries. There are some niches and some preferences, but overall it is very different.
You really think that an academic with a diverse research approach, but happens to be a vocally religious republican, is seen as an attractive candidate? I think you are forgetting the fact that academics are not rational super agents, they’re just people - and often ones with very little real world experience dealing with others that think unlike them.
That seems uncharitable. The left has a bunch of beliefs that defy biology. For example:
1. There are 50+ genders.
2. Intelligence is entirely a function of nurture, and nature (such as genetics) plays no role.
3. People who are gay are born that way (i.e. it is genetic). Anyone can choose to be trans at any time (sex is not genetic).
None of these beliefs would disqualify a person from being a biology professor. They are all substantially more common, and more anti-biology, than any republican-coded example belief you gave.
It seems far more likely that academics simply discriminate against the red tribe.
That seems like a strawman for what's really going on. Do you really think that there are otherwise-qualified research biologists who are actual creationists? You're reducing 'right-wing' to an offensive stereotype.
I said nothing of the sorts. My point is that even if the professors in the programs are all democrats, and they often are indeed, their research is different, their methodological approaches are different, etc., in relative terms to other countries. And when Kenny and me say that "academia selects for heterodoxy" we are talking about research, not about political affiliation, religious preferences, or whatever else.
I'd still push back there. From what I have seen and experienced first hand, most US departments select for conformity. You don't get easily hired into a climate science department if you are a luke-warmer, all else being equal, for example. Most faculty judging you are looking for people with whom they agree and might want to coauthor papers with. There is a strong bias against people they see as "doing science wrong". In part for obvious reasons, but also simply because it is hard to respect people with whom you disagree on important points. This is why most schools' departments have a strong flavor, a brand of research they do.
In a world where 10% (or more given Gen Z and younger trends) of students going to your college will be LGBTQ, why would the university hire someone who will be inherently biased against them and create conflict/bad publicity/etc?
In a world where 50% of people are conservative, why should the university hire people who will be inherently biased against them? If you say "there are no conservatives in college, problem solved"--well, the same exclusionary logic can equally apply to LGBT.
I guess some departments consider themselve heterodox because they have a Marxist and an Anarchist. It's like the old joke "we have both kinds of music - country and western".
For what it’s worth, my personal mental impression is that this IS happening in other jobs. At least, the ones that also confer a lot of white collar status.
Anecdotally, I’ve heard people say a similar thing about lawyers (many more law firms hiring people as paralegals who they would have hired as lawyers; far fewer people being offered partner than in the past).
I don’t know how it is in medicine, but it certainly seems like, whenever I have a medical complaint, I can take my pick of a 100 RNs or PAs, but man, finding an actual MD with an opening anytime soon seems REALLY tough.
Here’s an interesting aside - writers and bit part actors are currently complaining as much about the job market as anyone. Supposedly, mega-star salary stays the same, but the people on the lower rungs - who in past times would have had a stable mid-paying tv writer job, or consistent living as a recurring guest star on a smaller sitcom - claim it’s becoming financially untenable to exist in these smaller jobs in huge industries.
Two immediate thoughts here: white collar jobs have prestige that people might be more willing to compete for.
In my experience, applicants to this jobs also are more likely to have wealthier parents who can help pay their way if they end up as adjuncts. Part of me wonders if plumbing would be able to get away with milking the “apprenticeship” period way more if they could get away with it. If the apprentices were more likely to be able to pay their own way for the first couple years, would salaries show the same pattern?
In other words: every industry WANTS to do this, most industries are currently doing this, but it’s manifesting extra hard in bit-part, adjunct-style jobs with high supply, high prestige, and an applicant pool that can actually afford to get paid barely-starvation wages. At least, now moreso than in the past.
*most industries are currently doing this to some extent, but it’s manifesting most visibly in industries with those three qualities
The medical comparison sort of breaks down because no amount of experience turns an RN (I assume you maybe meant NP?) or PA into an MD (tl;dr they're all distinctly separate degrees). NPs and PAs are more common in family practice partly because that's one of the natural endpoints for those career paths whereas MDs have a lot more variety in options but also MDs are typically the center of a practice and they farm out most of their work to subordinate NP/PA positions (and thus they tend to have the luxury to only see as many patients as they want).
There's also an intentional bottleneck for MDs and DOs, in the form of medicare-funded residencies. Back in the 90s, a lot of health care policy analysts were worried that there were going to be too many trained doctors, which was somehow going to drive up health care prices, so they convinced Congress in 1997 to freeze the number of residency slots. That freeze is still mostly in effect.
It looks like there are a couple fronts of progress on this. One is that although the large majority of residency slots (about 85%) are funded through Medicare, there's an increasing number being funded by state governments and by private entities (mostly a mix of insurance companies and for-profit hospitals, I think), especially in the last several years. The other is that Congress very slightly increased the number of slots in 2021 and has considered but not yet acted on several recent proposals for much larger increases.
The rise of NPs and PAs is largely a side-effect of this, since mid-level practitioners have different residency systems that are funded separately and aren't subject the the MD/DO cap.
The law and acting analogies are interesting and suggest an overall pattern. This phenomenon happens in fields where there is a huge variation in quality/skill. Superstars are quickly identified and snapped up, pretty talented people may take a few years to get noticed and everyone else mires away in low level roles.
As an academic, I believe it is mostly the case of the superstar theory. There appears to be an extreme Pareto principle / power law at play, where the best researchers are monumentally more impactful than their only slightly less talented peers. Partly this is because of funding and publication dynamics, where a successful researcher gets exponentially more money/opportunities to continue being successful (see also Lotka's law on publication count). Given this, it makes sense to take a shot at getting the next big thing, more than having a wide pool of moderately successful mid-career researchers.
Colleges (at least R-1 in STEM fields, see diddly's comment) do not hire all low-commitment adjuncts as you suggest because the startup packages are substantial and they invest a lot in making sure new hires can be successful. But there is a similar process in the usually 7-year tenure review: professors are given 7 years to "prove" their research output before either being given permanent tenure or being fired. It tends to be a very stressful 7 years in a young faculty's career. So in some way there is a bit of a "free trial" for even tenure-track faculty that serves the same purpose as an adjunct pool would.
One reason for this is that the vast majority of research that is cranked out is in the form of “write only” papers — papers that will never be read by anyone. I read a stat a while back that in many fields, both the mode and the median number of non-self-citations was *zero*. Which makes total sense to me. The vast majority of “research” is being created because that is what universities expect, not because it is genuinely useful to the world. The “superstars” produce the rare papers that have genuine influence.
Maybe every academic is faking their data, you want to hire someone who is happy within the first year to start faking data because someone who is reluctant is dangerous.
And you want people to move around because otherwise fellow adjuncts will notice their not very brilliant has suddenly made great discoveries and the simplest explanation is fraud.
Probably overly cynical but I think it ties into a world where only 17% of authors provide data when it is requested.
If there were data faking going on in substantial amounts, it would have to start as a grad student, since that’s who is doing most of the data gathering and writing. At least, in the fields that are very data heavy.
I think that even if you haven’t worked with data yourself, you should see it as more plausible that people don’t provide data when requested because providing data is awkward and inconvenient and sometimes embarrassing for any of a million reasons that aren’t “faking” (more like, “this is the batch we deleted because one of the grad students spilled beer on it”).
And why do you think this is at all acceptable?
This seems to assume that most data is not being processed through a computer at some point before publication. Every researcher should have data files on a hard drive somewhere, and they should be holding onto it. That they wouldn't have made digital copies is exceedingly unlikely, and that they are so sloppy with their data files that they can't reliably find the right one after publication is... well rather damning in itself.
"As an Editor-in-Chief of Molecular Brain, I have handled 180 manuscripts since early 2017 and have made 41 editorial decisions categorized as “Revise before review,” requesting that the authors provide raw data. Surprisingly, among those 41 manuscripts, 21 were withdrawn without providing raw data, indicating that requiring raw data drove away more than half of the manuscripts. I rejected 19 out of the remaining 20 manuscripts because of insufficient raw data. Thus, more than 97% of the 41 manuscripts did not present the raw data supporting their results when requested by an editor, suggesting a possibility that the raw data did not exist from the beginning, at least in some portions of these cases"
"the anaesthetist John Carlisle analysed 526 trials submitted to Anaesthesia and found that 73 (14%) had false data, and 43 (8%) he categorised as zombie. When he was able to examine individual patient data in 153 studies, 67 (44%) had untrustworthy data and 40 (26%) were zombie trials. Many of the trials came from the same countries (Egypt, China, India, Iran, Japan, South Korea, and Turkey), and when John Ioannidis, a professor at Stanford University, examined individual patient data from trials submitted from those countries to Anaesthesia during a year he found that many were false: 100% (7/7) in Egypt; 75% (3/ 4) in Iran; 54% (7/13) in India; 46% (22/48) in China; 40% (2/5) in Turkey; 25% (5/20) in South Korea; and 18% (2/11) in Japan. Most of the trials were zombies. Ioannidis concluded that there are hundreds of thousands of zombie trials published from those countries alone."
https://molecularbrain.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13041-020-0552-2
https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/07/05/time-to-assume-that-health-research-is-fraudulent-until-proved-otherwise/
While it might not be the main issue, the idea that fraud isn't common isn't credible.
David Levy has done a lot of work on this with regards to economics as well. The excuses people provided for not having data for replication were often hilarious, if embarrassing. My favorite was regarding a paper less than 2 years from publication, that a grad student had done all the data work and so had all the files, but they couldn't remember his name to get ahold of him and ask for it. This in a field where data sets are often published as separate articles, no less! Really shows how serious they were about good data practices.
At some point after they blame floods or holding the data on VHS tapes etc you have to think there is a possibility of fraud.
It occurs to me there might be a market opportunity in designing the most volatile and short lived data storage medium possible, just for academics. Like reel paper made from cotton candy, made brittle by heat treating, stored in moisture attracting cardboard boxes flavored with cheese, guaranteed to dissolve, rot, mildew or be consumed by vermin within 1 month of publication.
Call it "Data-B-Gone" or "Plausible Datability"
This might be a more viable idea than the classic "business communication via rap lyrics to avoid prosecution for white collar crime."
Willing to provide venture capital for Plausible Datability. Will also market to politicians.
Judging by my experience trying to get discovery out of government agencies, it's already a widely available product. Near as I can tell, federal agencies mostly store their files in the dank, rat-infested holds of old sailing ships.
I spend an hour or so each day skimming through ArXiv titles to download any papers that look interesting, and maybe useful to a layman such as myself to skim in turn. (Often one can learn something from the intro, even if the rest of the paper is inpenetrable!)
I have noticed that for a lot of papers submitted supposedly with code, when one goes to github or wherever to check the code, there is none there, just a README file. At the risk of sounding racist, I have found this is nearly always the case for papers with solely Chinese authors, and rarely so with other authors.
The charitable view is that the authors are in a rush to publish, feeling that any delays may mean them being pipped to the post by some other group, and they genuinely intend to tidy and push their code to a public repo shortly thereafter. (It might be interesting to revisit some of these "missing code" papers from a year or two ago and see if the code has made a belated appearance!) But reading your post, I wonder if in many cases the code exists at all!
I guess another possibility, if the code never shows up, is that researchers in China are officially discouraged from releasing source code, as it might be pinched and adapted by western researchers, to gain a commercial advantage. Or maybe the researchers themselves think that. But if so then why say the code is available at all? There is no ArXiv rule that says code must be released, and plenty of papers do not release it.
If you take a global view of specifically biomedical research, then yes, it's clear that fraud is rampant.
But per your own source, it's also clear that there's substantial heterogeneity between countries (from ~100% in Egypt down to ~20% in Japan, and apparently no country in Western Europe, the Americas, or Oceania was worth mentioning).
There's also necessarily heterogeneity across fields. Fraud in mathematics is impossible; fraud in most physics is close to impossible. (The closest you can get is inventing an unfalsifiable theory as a jobs program to keep talented theoreticians on ice until you find something real for them to work on.) I'm not sure what it would mean for a philosophy paper to be fraudulent. On the other end of the spectrum, any field that's about dredging large datasets for small correlations with no expectation of coherence or consistency with prior results - biomed and social sciences, mostly - is going to be pretty easy to defraud.
So the observation that fraud is rampant in biomedical research in Asian and MENA countries does not work as an explanation for cross-disciplinary trends in the academic job market in North America.
I think physics is more honest than other fields, but it is easy to produce fraudulent results in physics as in any other field. It is easy to just create fake data from your telescope, detector etc or just copy someone else's and change a few data points.
You can make up data in physics, but you can't make up *interesting* data. If your results are at all unexpected, people are going to start asking questions. If they can't reproduce your findings and they can't find a methodological error to explain them, you're going to have a problem.
I suppose there could be a bunch of people making up data that aligns perfectly with our current model of the universe, but it's not really clear why anyone would invent boring results when they could just report their real boring results for the same effect at no risk.
That's qualitatively different from, say, education, where you can generate your title by Mad Libs and then make up some data to back it up and nobody will question you because everyone knows it's all bullshit and nobody's going to read past the title except for innumerate morons and con men like John Hattie.
Reporting real boring results requires expensive equipment and thousands of hours of work, copying and pasting data takes minutes. I suspect in China and to a smaller degree in the West future prospects and hiring depends on how many boring results you have produced.
In astrophysics, run of the mill results can be produced pretty cheaply. There is lots and lots of archival data sitting around and lots of open source tools for simulation and analysis. The bottleneck becomes writing the paper, i.e. justifying why you did what you did.
Telescopes are run by huge collaborations and you apply to get time on a certain telescope for a certain target and very often the raw data ends up becoming public (with some delay).
> I think it ties into a world where only 17% of authors provide data when it is requested.
The simple and only slightly cynical answer is:
1. Providing my raw data takes time and effort
2. If I provide you my raw data it's possible you'll find something you want to argue with me about. Worst case scenario you find a serious flaw in my published work which I'd rather not know about. But failing that, there's a high chance you'll come back with a "Hey shouldn't you have done a Blurf-Blurffson transformation on this data" and I'll have to argue about whether or not that would have been appropriate, possibly while not knowing what a Blurf-Blurffson transformation is.
Now, all of this is still not the behaviour of an idealised scientist committed to the unselfish pursuit of truth, but it's a lot less bad than faking data.
I am sure most of it isn't fraud, but people are really committed to systems and ways if doing things that make it very hard to investigate fraud.
But the Blurf-Blurffson transformation doesn't provide additional data, merely a different viewpoint on it. Why can that person do that transformation themselves, and report the findings?
Theoretical discoveries are doubted by all but the scientist. Experimental data is believed by all but the guy that did the experiment.
This must be very field dependent. In physics and cs I don’t see faking data happening that much. Dishonesty in presenting results, maybe. But outright fake data is something I never saw.
The peak oil folks would say that this is just a normal symptom of increasing hierarchical behavior under conditions of declining real resources.
tell me more
Rats that discover an overturned grain truck will shine as beacons of egalitarianism and equitable treatment of one's fellow rat. At least for a while. A day will come, however, when generations that have never known the ordinary hardships of a life without grain trucks will find to their sorrow how cruel rats can be to one another.
The top research universities do compete against one another and do bid up salaries, bonuses (aka summer salary), and other perks for the top people. At the same time, there are norms against the ratio of top to bottom salaries within rank -- typically top tenured faculty will receive 3-4x the bottom in the same discipline and rank. Top academic salaries now run in excess of 400k for 9 months.
> bonuses (aka summer salary)
In which field? In the sciences, you are expected to pay your own summer salary from grants.
Thank you for stating the obvious.
One of the things I have long espoused, in the sense of thinking it but literally never telling anyone, is that the United States Congress should establish a system of National Teaching Universities that do exclusively undergrad and non-degree training. Recruit early- and mid-career academics with modest conventional prospects by using "Moneyball"-style strategies on the assumption potentially great teachers are being underutilized. Recruit outright non-academics, such as senior enlisted military personnel, who have an extremely deep reservoir of meta-knowledge about how to train people that is underutilized in the white-collar world for the crasset possible class reasons. Completely exclude research from the main career path and consider imposing outright guild-like rules preventing your hires from even publishing research while they're employed with you, and perhaps for six months afterwards. Require everyone to go through extensive, demanding paid training from which many drop out, and make sure all the training materials and training apparatus is built from private-sector and military people uncontaminated by the schoolmarm-industrial complex and its fraudulent "education research."
Basically, the bargain here is just that if surplus academics are willing to compromise SOME of their self-regarding and comically left-wing "ideals," move to some underserved working-class community, and actually make themselves useful, while abstaining from the corrupt academic system somewhat in potentially controversial ways, right-wing taxpayers should and reasonably will open their wallets and hand out genuinely life-changing compensation. It would require legal cover because the academic bums have written their special privileges into the legal system itself in deep ways, but that's why you have a legislature. You can literally just change the law to fix things. Conservatives control the Supreme Court and it would be pretty perverse and surprising if they actually sabotaged a program like this by enforcing special rights for academic dweebs who want nonsense guild rules enforced as a matter of first-rank constitutional principle.
Nobody is going to do this because conservatives fundamentally do not believe it is possible to fix anything and do not care. Their idea is just simple-minded buffoonery involving a rotating cast of villains, always tied to modernity, diversity, and social change in some vague shifting yet obvious way, who are thought to be corrupting the otherwise pristine and workable system through secret collusion. So even though solutions like this are actually kind of obvious and plausible (defuse social tensions by paying surplus academics enormous amounts of money to educate people who could actually use an education to do something, as opposed to just to sustain the education system) you will never see a Republican legislator ever propose something like this. Because their social base is the rural grandees and local bigwigs who claim to speak on behalf of dispossessed working class folks while privately colluding to cheat them so they can send their kids to Harvard as they always have.
I think to do this you would have to have some idea of what it would mean to teach effectively, so that you could select for it. But no one has a sense of what the point of education actually is, other than throwing you in with a group of intellectually curious people and hoping you pick up some of the culture. The for-profit universities had an idea of what they were aiming to teach, but that’s because they were aiming low in ambition.
I don't agree with this at all. The evidence for direct instruction is overwhelming, but high schools and even elementary schools increasingly refuse to do it, mainly because it threatens the status of self-regarding and lazy schoolteachers, who are realistically just aspiring to greater professional status and pretending to think that whatever amounts to that = how education just mysteriously has to work.
The basic dynamic here is that university education historically was just a kind of veneer of sophistication for ruling-class people with a vague and self-serving moralist aspect to it, but then it was transformed in a kind of incomplete and obviously hypocritical way to some kind of tool for middle-class advancement, both through credentialism and legitimate human-capital attainment. But the "veneer of sophistication for arbitrary elites + hypocritical religious moralism" aspect never really went away, it was just sublimated, and people began to defend large elements of the system as somehow legitimate left-wing class politics in a transparently absurd way, except that they won the argument by sheer material force and now to be left-wing is to believe a bunch of ridiculous and corrupt nonsense about the purity of the university.
It is a filter that is compatible with our societal ideas of worth. In the same manner that being able to write a formal essay in a particular style on a topic selected from a predetermined corpus of Chinese Classic literature constituted a filter compatible with the societal ideas of worth of Imperial China.
There are some constraints on a workable system, but those constraints are rather loose.
Yep, the Chinese literati are an obvious example. And indeed you'll note if you follow the issue of Chinese influence that there has been considerable interpenetration of ours and their literati to the point where each is coming more to resemble the other. To a large extent, academia is kind of ruled by illiberal immigrant-labor-relations paradigms designed for achieving social peace between slightly different kinds of social conservative hard-man who in some strictly rational sense ought to be simply trying to dominate and kill each other, but are just being hypocritical about that aspect of their culture to get by in a liberal democracy and have a chance for their kids to go to college. But then you apply these to elite professional situations where they obviously don't make sense, and you end up with people quite literally holding up a PRC passport whose number starts with a "P" such that this is considered proof that they require special rights in an academic environment to protect them as oppressed victims, with literally no other rational discussion of the situation allowed, it's just stigmatized as "Cold War racism" or something.
This reminds me of the discussion around "narrow banking". Everyone in the existing banking process would be better served by the government promoting banks that just keep your money in a box and never invest it. But the government doesn't promote that (and sometimes actually fights it) because banks making loans has positive externalities for society.
I wonder if something similar is going on here - students (and teachers) might prefer narrow universities that just teach, but then no research would get done and the rest of society is worse off, so the government (correctly) forces everyone to have weird universities that obscure the boundaries between teaching and researching.
But the problem is just the non-competitive nature of the institution. You literally cannot get the entry-level credential for huge swathes of non-schoolmarm society without going through the schoolmarms. The whole point of a political assembly in a republic is just to break these kinds of logjams. It served some kind of a purpose in the postwar world where the thing was just to train up as many physicists as possible through the existing structures so the Soviets didn't take over the world. But what started as a crash program to serve the immediate needs of the postwar settlement has just become institutionalized in an unhealthy and somewhat corrupt way. What Fukuyama calls "political decay." We could deal with it if we chose to.
“… students (and teachers) might prefer narrow universities that just teach…”
Don’t we call those institutions SLACs (Small Liberal Arts Colleges)?
I think there’s been a huge amount of mission creep among what used to be called “normal schools,” i.e. small colleges for training teachers. But those colleges wanted more prestige, so they started expanding their offerings and becoming full-fledged universities, and while a lot of private colleges are shutting down, public universities usually have a lot of backers in the state legislature to prop them up.
I work in one of those. Tenure is granted/denied based almost exclusively on research.
Now I have a sadz :-(
where do you get the idea that students would prefer narrow universities that just teach? Students want broad universities who do a lot of prestigious things so that the degree they get has maximal brand value. But rather than go full Bryan Caplan on you let me point you to this piece of recent news: https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/05/us/dennis-barnes-college-decision-cornell-university/index.html here is a student who literally could go anywhere he wanted and wasn't constrained by financial considerations. What does he decide to do? He decides to go study computer science at the _ivy league_ university with the best engineering program (rather than MIT or Stanford or CMU who actually have the best CS programs), so that he can later apply to... law school. Does that sound to you like someone making a school choice based on where he will learn the most things useful in life? admittedly applying to a couple hundred colleges is already a sure sign of lack of maturity / being badly advised and this kid may not be representative, but he's pretty representative of how 18 year olds across the country think I believe.
But the narrow universities exist. Sometimes they are called community colleges. Other times, they are called undergraduate focused institutions (think Swarthmore, Amherst etc).
About narrow banking:
I think this is about path dependency. We came (until 1973) from the Gold standard. With a Gold standard, fractional reserve banking is very important, since it is the only way to increase the money supply other than getting more Gold.
So we have lots of banks that get deposits and make loans and are prone to bank runs.
Then we moved to Fiat money, the FED can print as much as they won't.
But narrow banking is a problem because the existence of a narrow bank would put all those banks at risk, since it would suck deposits from them, since it is more secure by default, since it is not prone to bank runs. So The FED doesn't allow it because it is a risk to existing banks.
If the bank is just going to keep my money in a box then they won't pay me interest for it. In fact, they should then CHARGE me for the service of safekeeping, and keep it safe. Otherwise, I should just keep it in my metaphorical mattress.
they don't keep it in a box, they put ot in a banking account in the FED, that pays interest.
Well, no, they don't. I thought that was about narrow banking: "banks that just keep your money in a box and never invest it".
If the bank is going to lend out my money when I'm not using it, then I definitely want a cut.
ni, narrow bankig was about putting it in the fed, which has infinite money, so it is safe.
Teaching and research have similarities, but they need not be bound to each other. A top-notch researcher who teaches has an opportunity cost of research, and a competitive disadvantage of teaching. The reverse for excellent teachers. Is not teaching a separate skill set from research?
This may be my ignorance, but why must they be tied together, other than that was how the system developed?
It depends on what you teach and at what level. In some cases the point of teaching is to transfer a well defined skillset to people who will use the skills to do something. In some other cases the point of teaching is to form people who can question the foundations of the discipline and perhaps move it forward. If you are teaching calculus to an engineer so that they can later use it to build a machine or something you probably are looking at the first case. If you are teaching mathematical analysis to a physicist who will later argue that intuitionism is the key to explain the passing of time https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.02348 you are probably looking at the second case. Teaching at this level is more likely to require the sort of intimate knowledge of the subject matter and the kind of mindset that is fostered by doing research.
I also think that, at least in the sciences, having students work directly with professors doing research is an important part of a university education. Honestly, some of my best *teachers* were grad students and adjuncts; being a brilliant researcher does not necessarily correlate to being a great teacher. But being a great researcher does correlate really well with *showing students how to research*, and if that's part of what your education is meant to include you need to have lots of research labs on campus willing to take on undergrads for grunt labor and smaller projects.
This all seems right on. Particularly as regards obscuring who is doing the actual teaching.
I think the first graph's caption is wrong?
"Acceptance rate for tenure-track positions by how long it’s been since the candidate has gotten their PhD."
The chart doesn't show the rate, it shows the number of hires. That's very different: It depends on the number of applicants, and five years from PhD is a very weird time to be applying for tenure track jobs (given that you're close to tenure, but probably not close enough to be hired with tenure.) And it's from the American Historical Society, which is not likely to be representative of academia as a whole.
Five years from phd usually doesn’t mean close to tenure - it means bounced around for several years adjuncting or teaching track and hasn’t started the tenure track (though there are of course some who have a two-body issue or just decided they can’t stand it in Alabama or whatever any more and want out before they’re locked in for life).
Good point. I was focused on those most likely to get hired if they applied to tenure track jobs, like the successful early career researcher who wants the hell out of Urbana-Champaign.
“Why don’t colleges hire everyone in some low-commitment capacity, maybe as adjuncts, wait to see who becomes superstars, then poach them?”
This does happen. First as post docs in many scientific disciplines. And then you are hired w/o tenure on a 2-4 yr contract, hopefully to get tenure at year 6-9 (varying on field and institution).
In my fields (math and CS) this does not happen. Postdocs are common, but they have a very slim chance to turn into faculty like this. There are tenure track positions, but those offer a high chance (often >80%) to turn into tenure.
The main point is that other offers are just unattractive. If the position comes with a 20% chance to get tenured, then I need to apply for other positions anyway, because I can't rely on a 20% chance. Even if someone get the 2-4 years contract w/o tenure, they will intensively search for a tenure track position during this time. So they won't stay until the end of the contract. Or if they stay, this means they have written dozens of applications, and not found a job elsewhere. Which means they haven't become superstars.
Experience isn't always good. Fresh faces bring enthusiasm, attention and a joy for life. If the numbers really matter, bring in the old hands. If it's more of a wishy-washy social thing, out with the old and in with the new.
Plus, in the 2-tiered system, do professors really want a similarly-experienced, worse version of themselves challenging their authority, angling for their job, or to feel sorry for?
Plus plus, and this is the big one, in the current system, students only see academic success stories and aspiring successes. Hiring old adjuncts is putting the losers of the process on display, (potentially) discouraging students from entering the meat grinder themselves.
“The value of the #1 brightest new PhD is that she has a 5% chance of becoming a future superstar ... Once you’ve been around for five years, colleges can see your track record, satisfy themselves you’re not the next Einstein, and lose interest.”
That’s a large part of it. So much hiring into the entry-level tenure track is based on buzz, and any university with pretensions is hoping they will lock in (even for a few years) the next superstar. They would rather take a chance on that than hire a solid performer 5 years out who would do a fine job but probably not become a household name. Some of this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; someone who starts their career teaching four courses a semester at a second-rate place with little or no support is trapped. Publishing your way out of that (no grant writers helping you, poor lab facilities, few good students or research-active colleagues, paltry travel funds) is like climbing Everest.
At the senior level there is poaching, but again, only for the creme de la creme. Otherwise I think there is (1) age discrimination, and (2) the fact that new PhDs are (relatively) cheap and senior faculty might not expect big bucks, but more than entry-level pay.
Most institutions have no hope of hiring “the next Einstein”. There are maybe five or ten institutions at most in any field that are aiming for that. The next few dozen are aiming for solid researchers, and then a few hundred that just want someone that will do some research and teaching and won’t leave, and a few hundred that aren’t even on the radar in most of these discussions.
No realistic hope, or no hope? I think there are very many lower-tier R1s and upper-tier SLACs who really do think they might hire the next John Hawthorne. Of course, a lot of this discussion will vary quite a bit by field. In a buyer’s market field like ours, committees can insist on “must be able to walk on water, then turn it into wine.” In fields with industry demand, it’s a different story.
Syracuse does get some prestige from having hired John Hawthorne and Brian Weatherson and others. But I think they are happier with the people they managed to keep for many years.
> Here’s another question that confuses me even more: Why don’t colleges hire everyone in some low-commitment capacity, maybe as adjuncts, wait to see who becomes superstars, then poach them?
That's what grad school is for.
There's another, more mechanistic explanation for why adjuncts who transition to tenure track faculty do so outside of their own university.
If you were to rank the university positions by prestige you might get a ranking which looks like
1) First Tier Tenure Track
2) Second Tier Tenure Track
3) First Tier Adjunct
4) Second Tier Adjunct
Adjuncts who get promoted one level up either get more prestigious adjunct positions or get tenure track at a lower ranked university. Getting tenure from the place you are adjuncting at is harder because it requires getting promoted two rungs up the ladder.
This seems like a huge part of the explanation that Devereux just misses.
This seems right. I'm loosely affiliated with an R1 institution. I don't know of any faculty there that were previously adjuncts, but I have a friend who worked there as an adjunct and was offered a tenure-track position at a liberal arts college.
Same thing with graduate school. Practically every faculty member (in the sciences at least) at a top-25 institution got their PhD at a top-10 institution.
"Supply + demand" and "weird path dependence due to historical circumstances."
Maybe the most interesting book on the topic is Louis Menand’s *The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University* (my comments are at https://jakeseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-in-the-academy-louis-menands-the-marketplace-of-ideas-reform-and-resistance-in-the-american-university-2/). Basically, the academic job market worked reasonably well for would-be professors up until around 1975, when the number of undergrads fell (baby boomers worked their way through the system) but the number of PhD-granting institutions and programs continued to hum along. Since then, in most but not all fields, the number of PhDs has way outstripped the number of slots. When supply exceeds demand, strange things happen.
Tenure is the "weird path dependence due to historical circumstances" thing. Probably no one would set up the system the way it is today if one were starting from scratch. Tenure worked somewhat okay when lifespans were shorter and mandatory retirement hadn't been struck down the Supreme Court (one old article: https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/15/us/new-law-against-age-bias-on-campus-clogs-academic-pipeline-critics-say.html).
Schools, like many employers, will change when they're forced to change (https://jakeseliger.com/2016/02/25/universities-treat-adjuncts-like-they-do-because-they-can/), but they tend to have a surfeit of applicants relative to jobs in most fields that aren't things like computer science and electrical engineering.
The most interesting question is why people keep starting PhD programs that are designed to produce all-but-dissertation "students" who can teach classes for very little money, and adjuncts. Granted, I was one of them, at one point.
Maybe academia is the brainiac's version of gambling in Vegas: likely to lead to losses, but fun in the moment.
Like gambling in Vegas, or starting a band, or selling art, or writing novels, or playing basketball, or any of a number of other fields with a superstar/lottery dynamic.
Assoc. Professor at major R1 "brand name" university here (~12 years experience). This is mostly right. A few things:
1. STEM is very different from non-STEM. Title is the same but there is little actual overlap in what the job is like day-to-day. I am in STEM and run a lab with 20 graduate students and post-docs. This just doesn't happen on the "other side of campus".
2. Superstar effect is a big explainer. People want Steph Curry, and are willing to fight over potential candidates that have that potential. Experience does not turn [insert middling player] into Steph Curry.
3. You shouldn't think of it like you are locking someone in to a career path at the first blush. They have gone through (often) 10-12 years of college/grad school/post-doc by the time they even try for TT. Like it or not, potential is seen as at least somewhat baked in by the time they finish their PhD or post-doc. Remember, they are often nearing 30 years old at that point. In other industries this would be like a promotion of your leading 30 year olds into a management or leadership track.
4. Teaching is a small part of my job. Not going to give an effort/time percentage, but in practice it is low. This is why there are effectively "two markets" for TT and adjunct.
5. Adjuncts are treated horribly. Thankfully we have very few here (remember, "name brand" university). It just kind of sucks, and is very similar to "winner take all" dynamics happening more broadly in the economy.
Here in Germany, 1) you have to change universities - "to avoid intellectual incest". You can not simply do your Master at Humboldt-Uni, then your PhD AND then get tenure at the same place. Some faculties solve this by close cooperation with one other department at another college/Universität - swapping their presumably best and brightest. 2) There are now some laws to stop colleges to give their cheaper teaching-staff just one 2-year-contract after another - now it's either end the co-operation or give them a long-term contract (not tenure, but quite secure).
I was never going for that rat-race (way too dumb for it, too). Still, in my early career I got some very fine&well paid teaching jobs at the DAAD (German academic exchange service), though still kinda inexperienced - but 5% of us turned out fine PhDs or even professors (id est: valuable alumnae). When at 40 it was obvious to them I just wanted to continue being a good teacher, they closed the door. Which is fine; grateful for 11+ years on German tax-euros.
Avoiding academic incest is the norm pretty much all over the place. What is exceptional about Germany is not really having a tenure track, at least not in certain key STEM fields - you can be a W1 (junior professor, *not* tenure track generally), you can be a W2 (tenured associate professor, or somewhere between associate and full), you can be a W3 (full), but there's a big gap between W1 and W2, in terms of requirements, typical age, conditions... No wonder Germany exports PhDs and postdocs. Sometimes people come back after getting tenure in other countries.
This intellectual incest is rampant in Sweden - it's supposed to be an open hiring process, but universities routinely design their "openings" so that only the one person they had in mind qualifies. Hence the best way to get a steady job is to rise through the same uni, sit still in the boat, and cultivate your contacts. Unsurprisingly, this does *not* result in a lot of independent thought.
I think that high-tier German universities avoid intellectual incest, while it is sadly quite common at runners-up. I suspect that this is also true for Sweden, so JohanL's comment probably applies to mediocre universities or departments, but not to the top ones. I have a Swedish colleague in my group who applied actively to get back to top universities in Sweden. He was outcompeted, but not by insiders as far as he can tell.
I believe that this is true for a lot of other European countries.
Here is another question, not addressed here. Universities rarely fire people. I know they cannot fire tenured people. But many of the people hired to just teach are really bad at the teaching part, but it is very uncommon (compared to the private sector) to let someone go. Whereas on the tenure track there is real accountability for grants and publications, off it there is almost no accountability for teaching quality.
Common misconception. Tenure means that you can only be fired for cause. But you can be fired.
You really have to mess up badly. At some point Toronto found that it was quite hard to fire a tenured professor who had tried to kill his wife with an axe (incompetently and wholly unsuccessfully). They had to put it down in writing that, in the future, tenured professors could be fired for committing serious crimes.
Sometimes universities do try to make an example out of somebody for a more minor fault, but then the case gets talked about plenty. I thought about the following case, but apparently he was just a lecturer: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1991/05/11/stanford-lecturer-who-boasted-of-drug-use-fired/60130187-1536-4e58-b863-14be709b15ad/
This seems very simple to me. You've worked for me for several years without getting tenure. You are likely to continue to do so. If I am going to offer someone tenure, it should be an individual I believe that I would not be able to entice without that offer.
For one thing, football and basketball teams are way more visible to way more people than all but the very best researchers, and frequently not even them. And you can't really 'watch' researchers, even excellent ones, do their research in competition with others.
And in my discipline (Political Science) about 98% of the research is just stone stupid. (I can say that. I'm retired.) Irreproducible, statistically incoherent, and generally of little practical consequence.
Having said that, I've had friends do good, solid work because they enjoy the topic, but the topic is not 'sexy' so it just disappears. I have worked on some very good stuff but even that has pitfalls if it doesn't adhere to whatever the current narrative is.
Anyway. I was a "late bloomer" and got a full-time adjunct position that paid very well and had great benefits. But I negotiated that first contract before being forced to join a union. So, on average I got paid about 3 times what my fellow union members got. (Thanks, AFT.) Also, I was qualified to teach courses that were in high demand. Very high compared to supply.
After about 5 years (I was then getting 3-year contracts) I found that I had too little time to do both good teaching and good research (I contributed causal modeling on the work of others) plus I got asked to do something I considered unethical, so I dropped the research and spent the rest of my career just teaching. When an appropriate tenure track positioned opened (3 times) in my department I was asked each time to apply, with some assurance that I would get the position. By then I liked what I was doing, so I refused. Why do relatively worthless research just to gain tenure? I had the equivalent by being very, very good at my job, and a lack of easy replacements.
Look. We really need a two-track tenure process. One for research, and one for teaching. I know more than a few good researchers who aren't that good in the classroom. Why not reward both more appropriately? I also know that that currently tenured loathe that idea.
Also, remember that I was at a second-tier state school. Maybe around #150. We were good at what we did when we concentrated on it. But we were NEVER going to get a #1-100 new PhD. Sometimes they would apply, but they just used the interviews to bounce to the next one at a school they liked.
So. Why did my school try to hire the same way? Because the top admins are just as socially conscious as the top at Top 25 schools. Plus, to the extent that they can hire adjuncts cheap, it looks like they save money. (I'm not convinced of that, but that's a whole nother story.
I do feel bad for those who take adjunct positions in the hopes of landing a tenure track job. But several of our ABD adjuncts have made that happen, and one full-time adjunct colleague landed a tenure track job at a decent private college. But it's kind or rare.
We also pump out new PhDs for lots of bad reasons, and at least in my discipline we've been told since at least the '70s that a "wave of retirements" was coming and there'd be lots of jobs. But we study politics, so you should expect lots of lies.
Also, many "intellectuals" seem to enjoy having lots of indentured servants around them. That's a psychological problem that I'm not competent to help with.
"Having said that, I've had friends do good, solid work because they enjoy the topic, but the topic is not 'sexy' so it just disappears. I have worked on some very good stuff but even that has pitfalls if it doesn't adhere to whatever the current narrative is."
Brings to mind that famous Greentext about the guy who did a PhD in Husserl and ended up working at a fast food joint with no family aged 36 https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/184797736/
I read some of that. I truly tope it's trolling.
The 1500 page biography seems like a bit much. Raises the possibility that if true, this person is an obsessive crank instead of a good researcher. But I don't find the overall story impossible. Not necessarily probable, but not impossible.
> We really need a two-track tenure process. One for research, and one for teaching. I know more than a few good researchers who aren't that good in the classroom. Why not reward both more appropriately?
I thought the rationalization behind tenure was to allow academics to research without significant outside pressure? What's the rationalization for giving tenure for teaching?
First, the mere possession of a PhD in now way automatically makes you a good researcher. Like most endeavors, maybe 10% (remember Sturgeon's Law) of researchers do the vast majority of good or even useful research. (For instance, if you want to see lots of crap research, check of works on nutrition.) Basing both tenure and promotion means rewarding a lot of research that isn't very good, nor useful. (My time teaching very intelligent grad students research methods convinced me [total anecdote here] that most grad students [90% or more] will simply never have a really good grasp of how to do geed research, let alone how to use appropriate stats. Granted, most of the work was on policy, where apparently comparative stats are all you need, still . . .) The stories I could tell. ;-)
Second, good, even great researchers aren't always good teachers, and what most undergrads need are good/great teachers. Too many newly hired TT have literally NO experience or training or mentoring in actual teaching. It should not really be, IMKO, a "learn-as-you-go" experiment using undergrad students as lab rats.
Finally, the "outside pressure" applies as much to teaching as it does to research, and has during my time as grad student and Lecturer. But there is little to no real reward for being a good/great teacher. Lots of ABDs/PhDs are simply terrible as teachers. Why inflict them on students when you could perhaps hire a great teacher who is not a very good researcher.
The purpose of tenure, overall, is protection against outside forces in general that might try to prevent a professor from doing the best possible job of teaching, research, or both.
I have had some profs and colleagues who are good at both. I have had some profs and colleagues who were good at neither, but once achieving they could give up on trying to be better at either. That is not what tenure is supposed to protect.
So, perhaps try to hire for both, but allow those with a strong preference or strong skills specialize where they will be most happy and students and the university will most benefit.
The analysis in part I is spot on. As for why they only hire inexperienced people, I would add that adjuncts have experience in the wrong job. They have experience teaching, but excellence in teaching is not what is being hired for. They don't have experience in research (because adjuncting does not provide the time or resources to seriously pursue research, in general cases). Plus, there is an inverse signalling problem. You see that someone is an adjunct and you conclude that they were not good enough at research to get a tenure track job. So experience as an adjunct has zero actual value, and negative signalling value. And the more time you have spent as an adjunct the more negative signalling value this has. (`Jones was so hopeless he couldn't get a tenure track job even after ten years of trying!). Although practically speaking, the negative signalling value of any time as an adjunct at all is so strong that spending accepting an adjunct appointment is basically a kiss of death to chances of landing on tenure track.
In my fairly limited experience, it's less the case that teaching-track faculty never get hired for tenure-track jobs at their own institutions than that they rarely get hired for tenure-track jobs at any comparable institutions.
Academia is very hierarchical, and pay, teaching workload, research resources, and prestige are all very different if you're at a top-20 institution, a top-100 institution, or a non-R-1 institution. In my field (economics), pay and teaching load for permanent teaching-track positions at top universities are not too different from pay and teaching load for tenure-track positions at lower-tier institutions.
When I was on the job market, I was considered for tenure-track jobs at some top-100 research universities and some liberal arts colleges. I was also considered for teaching positions at elite universities. If I'd taken one of the teaching positions, done really good work, and gone back on the job market, it would be reasonable to expect that the jobs I'd be competitive for would be in the same basic ballpark as the ones I was competitive for when I went on the market the first time. It would require a pretty dramatic change in my productivity and quality to go from someone that the 100th best institution in the country would consider to someone that the 10th best institution in the country would consider.
As for why academia is so hierarchical, I'd guess that it's a combination of the fact that the most skillful/productive academics like to work with other very skillful and productive academics, plus the fact that outsiders (i.e. the people funding the work through their tuition, donations, or grants) don't know as much as insiders about what constitutes good work, so rely on academics giving each other seals of approval to know who to trust and who to give money to.
As for why superstars are not so mobile - there is a key difference to sports stars, in that sports stars are typically single and in their twenties, whereas tenured professors are middle aged, typically with working spouses and kids, and this makes them significantly less open to geographic moves (and very seldom are there two really good universities in the same geographic area). Also, for experimentalists, moving means recreating a lab from scratch which is a multi year undertaking (in which time you are not doing any research and thus losing prestige), whereas even for theorists you have developed a system that works for you, which presumably involves some web of local collaborations and so forth, and moving means tearing that up. People do move certainly, just the friction is greater.
This may be a bigger effect in the US, where good schools are often geographically spread out - each city seems to have just the one school barring the few places like Boston.
My uni education is in Australia, specifically Melbourne, which has 2 out of the Group of Eight (kinda like Aussie Ivy League) and has many of the top ranked engineering schools in Australia. Within my discipline, poaching is rampant - pretty soon after I graduated, one of my favourite lecturers went to the UK (although I heard she was originally poached from somewhere else anyway), the department head was poached to a different uni in Melbourne and back when I worked in the lab, there seemed to be a bit of a merry-go-round of people starting post doc roles all over the city.
Since I moved cities (working in industry now), in fact, I was looking into an industry-academia venture and met someone from my final year lab. Wild!
One of the graduation requirements was to participate in a research project under a supervisor, which we got to pick out of a catalogue (subject to approval from the supervisor) and I think there was only one lecturer from memory who was absent from the catalogue (but there were plenty of academics who have never taught me or just don't teach period).
That being said, we were (might still be) one of the three schools in the entire Oceania region that even have that specific discipline, so it might be a discipline specific effect.
Any materials / metallurgy academics from somewhere else want to chime in?
There's also a second-order effect here: once grad students know that the odds of getting tenure-track positions are highest in the 12 months after they go on the job market, their incentive is to optimize all their work in progress to maximize the amount of publications, etc. that they have done as of when they go on the market. So they often have relatively little incremental publications that will occur after that 1st year, because they've focused on getting as big of a python lump of work out at once, rather than establishing a steady stream of incremental publications after that date.
As for your closing question: universities can and do engage in bidding wars, trying to outbid each other for superstars. However, there are a couple of factors constraining this (1) morale issues (plus pay transparency, which is the norm at universities) means you are somewhat constrained in how much variation in pay you can have (you can and do have factors of a few, just typically not orders of magnitude). (2) entering a bidding war and losing has reputational costs (university X tried to get Jones and failed, guess X sucks), which makes them reluctant to enter a bidding war unless they have reasonable costs of success. (This then gets compounded with principal-agent considerations. Whoever pushed to try and hire Jones personally loses a ton of political capital if Jones declines).
Why can't you get hired at the institution you got your PhD in ?
That's mostly to ensure that institutions at least try to hire good candidates rather than their own students. It also help with intellectual cross fertilisation - people from outside can bring in knowledge and methods that are not available in the department.
Why do they only hire inexperienced people ?
It seems like something particular to either the US or social sciences. In my field (maths) and my country (France) you typically only get a permanent position after a couple of postdoc positions (hiring committees get suspicious if you have not been hired after 5-7 years so being to experienced is not good either).
A lot of this agrees with stuff already said by others, but:
1. The pay difference between adjuncts and research/tenure-track faculty is largely about "research success is what drives prestige", as you say.
2. The "negative premia" for experience is basically just observing that people (mostly) go on the academic job market when they are completing their PhD, some succeed and get TT jobs (or in fields where postdocs are ubiquitous, good post docs that sometime after hopefully lead to TT jobs), others fail to and get adjunct roles / leave academia. For an adjunct after that point, there is a massive negative selection problem, plus as you say it's hard to do good research while teaching 6 classes a year.
3. "But then why do they only hire inexperienced people?" In fields where post-docs are ubiquitous, obviously people have more experience when applying for TT jobs (but if a post-doc counts as experience, why doesn't a PhD? Isn't the last few years of a PhD relevant job experience which people are judged on for TT hiring?) But ignoring post-docs, there's an initial clearing market of new PhD grads, some get TT job offers, others don't. (See 2). Beyond that, obviously they don't "only hire inexperienced people". If a TT professor is successful at lower-ranked university X, higher ranked university Y will poach them, but with a promotion to Associate or Full Professor. That people hired at Assistant Professor level tend to be inexperienced is just synonymous with the job title.
4. "Why only people from outside their own institution?" This is sold in part as being about avoiding nepotism. And in part its a "go into the wild word and prove yourself, and then if you are successful we will hire you back". In equilibrium it often works, especially seeing 99% of the time the school someone did their PhD at is higher ranked than their AP placement.
5. "Why don’t colleges hire everyone in some low-commitment capacity, maybe as adjuncts, wait to see who becomes superstars, then poach them?" You could say this is what post-docs are. You could sort of say this is what PhD students are. You could also say "yeah, but why do the top universities bother to have Assistant Professors at all, rather than waiting to see who becomes a star and then hiring them?" The latter is an interesting question (especially given that a large share of TT faculty at top schools don't get tenure). My guess is part of it is historical tradition, and part of it is that faculty will tend to show a decent amount of loyalty to their current employer, so you get an "unravelling equilibrium" in that the most promising candidates are poached early, because it's much harder to poach later on (who actually wants to upend their entire family life to move city for a modest pay bump at a slightly more prestigious university, especially if they are already successful. Just get current university to match the pay bump!). Part of it might also be that senior faculty like having productive junior faculty around. And another part might be that a lot of the most influential research is produced by faculty while they are fairly young, and the departments might care about this (even if it's too inside baseball for it to influence "prestige" in the public's mind).
There are some top departments that famously don’t hire assistant professors. Rutgers Philosophy is like this. I don’t know how much this works in other fields, where you need someone to set up a lab.
Ah interesting. What is Rutgers ranked in philosophy (ballpark)?
It is ranked #2 - NYU is the only department ranked above it, and Pitt, Princeton, and Michigan round out the top 5 (those three shift order from year to year). I think there might be some other highly ranked departments that are top-heavy, but Rutgers is the only one that has gone many years without an Assistant Professor hire.
Interesting... I don't know what to make of that. Is this the exception that proves the rule, or the example of why this approach does make sense and should happen more? Idk.
On 5 I will add that tenured hires are much more expensive than assistant professor hires. In physics a tenured hire comes with an expectation of a multiple million dollar startup. Assistant professor hires also require startup, but only maybe 20% as much. Harvard et al might be able to afford extensive hiring at the senior level but would still like to get their people ‘for cheap’ if they can.
This is a good point (lab costs etc)... for those fields. It won't apply in fields where salary is overwhelmingly the main financial cost of hiring someone - social sciences, math, humanities etc. Perhaps the fact that we see pretty much the same hiring practices across different fields with pretty different fundamentals within universities suggests "historical norms" + inertia has a substantial role.
That said, your comment and the counter-example Kenny gives above make sense together - philosophy is very much the other end of the "other costs" spectrum.
I think in modern academia the incentives are so misaligned that it's hard to really model it in normal economic terms.
Students are mainly there for signaling purposes, not to actually learn stuff. And the tuition is being paid for out of subsidized loans. But also, the institution is nominally a nonprofit, in many cases literally run by the state. But also, the departments are usually in charge of hiring. The main department stakeholders are the tenured faculty, not the people nominally in charge of the university as a whole.
IMO this makes academia really susceptible to fads and trends. There's not really any strong competitive pressure to impose discipline. I don't necessarily think there's any "rational" reason for it to work how it does. There are definitely *some* structural elements in play, like budget cuts. But the structural economic elements dont on their own determine all the specifics that develop in a relatively small and close-knit community.
Debatably the whole structure of modern academia is designed to basically immunize universities from having to worry very much about mundane economic concerns
I think there’s also a lot of irrationality in the market that arises from the mechanisms put in place to try to curb these structural features you mention. Departments aren’t allowed to do senior hires without a pre-approved line unless they can convince the Dean this person is important - and it’s easier to do that if the person is coming from Yale than from Pitt (because the Dean doesn’t know that in your field Pitt is more prestigious than Yale).
> IMO this makes academia really susceptible to fads and trends. There's not really any strong competitive pressure to impose discipline
There is a generalist political philosopher here in Canada named Joseph Heath who as far as I can tell is simply Mr. Political Philosophy in Canada. Unless this lecture (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMdzcAvFA_g) is deeply misleading in some unlikely way, it seems that he has noticed that very large elements of what purports to be political philosophy (such as environmental philosophy, in this case) are straightforwardly the result of pathological intellectual trends of this kind.
In essence, environmental philosophers over-emphasized a kind of question everything, flip-over-the-table-instead-of-playing-a-real-move intellectual culture as their sole model, such that it became an iterated game of taking the most absurd position possible, or at least the one most utterly removed from normal concerns. Then when you go back and analyze it, it turns out that the table-flipping maneuvers often don't really have a lot of intellectual substance to them, and are kind of simple-minded quasi-religious thought control, usually just based in simplistic intellectual games meant to win arguments among 19th-century labor organizers in an extreme and brutally violent economic and political culture that was ultimately largely wiped out by WW2 and the postwar settlement.
But there's nobody (but him, I guess) to come around at the end of the day and clean up after it. You have young people who are legitimately going to go out and be staffers in the Prime Minister's Office or some other high perch, and they are genuinely trying to find out what responsible intellectuals have to say about the ethics of climate change policy and how to make difficult tradeoffs, and they're opening a textbook and being told, like, you can't do cost-benefit analysis because it's racist against shrimp. While actually tremendously interesting and perhaps even important on some level, this is not a model of intellectual service to the public that can really be defended.
this is a huge topic but there's a few things that make easy analysis different.
1) as many have pointed out already, STEM is very different from non-STEM. I'd further subdivide things - fields have really different hiring patterns, adjunct use, etc. and that has a big impact on the way the market works. Comparing the market for a law professor to those for an English professor to an engineering professor to a chemistry professor is at least several kinds of apples, and probably a mixture of fruits and vegetables. Then there are multidisciplinary things (like public policy schools that hire economists, sociologists, political scientists, etc.) where things are even weirder b/c multiple strands come together in a weird mix.
2) schools differ a lot - someone has already noted the difference between R1 and others, but it is even more differentiated - the very top private schools behave very differently in hiring than do large state flagship schools even if both are R1s. There are whole separate "teaching institution" markets, the 2nd tier (which no one would admit to being in) research schools, community colleges, non-flagship state schools, liberal arts schools, and so on. Each submarket operates differently.
3) put those two things together and you have a large number of submarkets that operate very differently in hiring, use of adjuncts, etc.
Then we get in to allocating slots for TT faculty at a university. Some disciplines are going up in enrollment (Data Science); some teach huge "service" courses (English) rather than / in addition to large numbers of majors; some are going down (Classics). When a university hires a TT faculty member, that's a long term commitment to funding a slot. Some slots are cheap (English), some are really expensive (STEM). Administrators want flexibility in adjusting staff - which leads to more reliance on adjuncts and/or "APT" or "Academic Professional Track" professors, who generally don't write much and teach more, serve on committees. These folks get contracts from a year to longer. But they allow adjusting head counts. And most university central administrators know the demographic cliff is coming in terms of students for many places and want to keep flexibility to adapt if their institution's enrollment drops (as it will for many schools).
And then there's the need to bring in adjuncts to provide "real world" perspectives. Not much of a need in, say, English for that, but there is in law, business, politics (sometimes), etc.
There's more too - the academic job market is really a lot of submarkets which behave differently. Many of them are quirky at best, dysfunctional at worst. But you have to look at the institutional details of each to tease out why they behave the way they do (at least to some extent).
I agree with a lot of this. In my field, philosophy, there are more post docs than there used to be, but nowhere near what there is in the sciences. And enrollments are going down, so the competition for tenure-track jobs is terrifyingly bad, allowing hiring committees to insist on just about any ridiculously high standard they like. Also, there’s no meaningful industry competition, so the studliest bigshot in the entire discipline might make $300k, which is not much for law, medicine, or probably engineering faculty at major schools.
This definitely gets at a lot more of the important dynamics than Scott or Bret’s original posts. I still want more data about the number of adjuncts in each of these markets. People say adjunctification is as real at R1s as elsewhere but I suspect it’s driven by a few fields (particularly freshman writing).
Very much agreed.
If I'm reading that graph correctly then it absolutely does *not* reflect my field (astronomy). Almost no one gets a tenure-track job within one year of earning their PhD. Nearly everyone does a postdoc, which in the US usually lasts 3 years. I don't have data in hand but I would guess that the median tenure-track professor in astronomy is somewhere around 3-5 years after getting their PhD. I think physics is very similar. Is this really that unusual?
That graph is for History. My guess is that for each field there is an expected number of postdoc years and the graph will look similar if you count from there rather than from phd.
One advantage may be that Universities are both consumers and producers of new PHDs. If the only way to get into Tenure Track was to suffer through years of adjunct teaching, would the PHD > Tenure Track career route be as popular?
As an outsider it seems that people going for PHDs in the hopes of staying in Academia are playing the odds that they are the lucky few that get a first year Tenure track posting, and if not either leave Academia or are stuck as an Adjunct.
From the University's perspective, the value of not shifting senior adjuncts to tenure track is that the tenure carrot can stay open to as many hopefully PHD students as possible, many of whom will end up spending years on a PHD with no tenure track to show for it. At that point some have no better option than to teach under whatever terms they can get.
To the extent that adjuncting is suffering, nothing is gained by making the most promising researchers do it. Fields where the backlog has built up have created postdoc positions to cover that stage in career, where one still works as a researcher.
I'm a former theoretical physics postdoc in the UK. My wife is currently a postdoc in biosciences at a top UK University. Here is my two pence:
1) Einstein didn't work in a lab. I get the point, but I had to say it! Sorry.
2) In my experience universities don't usually differentiate their workforce like that. Rather, most experienced people get forced to teach, early career people not so much, and only the very few (maybe <10%) get to avoid it (usually not by negotiating with universities but rather by getting grants which bring money and prestige and happen to force them to spend their time not teaching). And usually the more experienced and well-paid you are the less time you get to spend doing research rather than writing grants, supervising, and teaching.
3) Having talked to people on the inside during hiring processes, I don't think it is accurate to describe hiring people out of their PhDs as trying to find the people with the highest chances of being the next superstar. People usually try to screen for some measure of quality, but typically if you meet some minimum requirements (like having published in decent journals and/or having graduated from decent institutions) then what they try to optimise for is complementarity of research interests. Basically, they care more about how your work will fit with the work of other people in their groups than about whether you are a bit more likely to be the next Einstein. If you would be a good collaborator, who has a track record in lines of investigation which don't overlap too much with the ones they have going but which have potential for interacting with them, then they'll want you. (Bonus points if your niche area of expertise happens to be hot at the moment, where "hotness" often lasts less than the average PhD.) Which makes sense. Why hope for Einstein when you can more reliably aim for a multiplicative impact now?
4) Even the people in the dream superstar jobs are usually earning not that much compared to industry - or even non-academic techy jobs in the public sector.
I was about to write point 2 myself. At least in my fields (math, CS) in Europe, established professors and even superstars teach at least as much as newcomers or lower performers. Exceptions are lecturer positions dedicated to teaching, which are less prestigious and are common in some countries (e.g., UK), but not in others (e.g., Germany).
For point 3, I think it depends on how good the department is. My department has a very good standing and definitely tries to find and attract superstars. For those, it does not matter a lot how complementary they fit into the department. But my former department was different: both lower-rank and more concerned about complementarity.
I don't have data on this, but there's a similar phenomenon in the publishing world. A debut author with a book that sounds exciting and topical will have a decent shot at a six-figure book deal, and those books frequently go to auction. But once you're published, if you're among the majority of authors whose books don't turn into juggernauts, your advances drop dramatically, with some previously well-paid authors grateful to get $20k or $30k for a new project.
This is a "shiny new thing" phenomenon - an exciting new author has enormous potential... until their book hits shelves and they don't hit bestseller lists. My initial guess is that hiring committees are susceptible to the appeal of the "shiny new thing" and get so excited by the boundless potential of all the newly-minted PhDs that the adjuncts who've been slogging for years now just don't stand a chance.
After a couple of disappointing books, an author will often change genre or age category, choose a pen name to publish under, and go to a new publisher to leave behind the stink of their sales record. This can be a way to reboot their career, re-invigorate the marketing department (who will have given up on them at their previous publisher), and try to capture some of that "shiny new thing" energy again. It's interesting you mentioned that successful teaching- or adjunct-track professors will go somewhere else for a tenure-track position when they make a breakthrough, and feels related to this.
A little concerning that an industry like publishing that acquires talent almost entirely on *vibes and sparkle* appears to have similar patterns to academia!
This is like venture capital - all of these are areas where there is a small number of instances that make the majority of the impact, but it’s hard to identify them in advance. Thus, when there’s a chance someone might be one of those stars, you’re happy to probably overpay for them in order to take that gamble.
If I have a choice between funding an unknown author with a new book or an author who has produced failures or only mild successes wouldn't it be rational to fund the unknown author.
You know, answering this question made me understand a new facet of this situation. Because historically (well, modern publishing isn't that old, but still...) the accepted wisdom in publishing was that editors sought out writers who had potential and helped and encouraged them, knowing that many would only "break out" after publishing several books. Writers tend to get better over time. And what's more, if they have three or ten books out before their "breakout", that's three or ten books a reader can buy after liking the bestselling one. A debut can only sell one book, but a veteran can release a new book, gain attention with it, and sell dozens of others at the same time.
But that's the old model and clearly the math has changed. I wonder if it's because the midlist has gone the way of the middle class, and publishers can make just *so* much money from a big hit that it's reasonable to focus on that instead of fostering talent. But I also wonder if part of it is that there are just *so* many books available to publish now. So many people are writing novels and a lot of them aren't bad. Why spend time and effort building up a writer when there are thousands more who can take their place?
I wonder if the same kind of thing is happening in academia. I feel like a lot of people want to enter academia these days, and also that academics can become superstars with media appearances and TED talks more than they used to? Maybe? Again, I don't have data on that. But it sounds like a lot of industries are strip-mining the population for "rockstars" these days.
As someone who's spent ages 15-41 in academia: you're *very* far from wrong, but it's also not as drastic as someone reading this might fear. Academia isn't sharply divided between "Einsteins" who teach only occasional upper-level seminars, and poorly-paid adjuncts who teach huge numbers of intro classes. There's also a large "middle class," e.g. all the non-Einstein tenure-track faculty, which both does research AND interacts regularly with undergrads, sometimes even at the same time (at least in CS, lots of undergrads get involved in research). Maybe that just helps confuse prospective students all the more! :-)
(Also, agree with the other commenters that postdocs are now a huge part of the story.)
Sports team analogy is probably even more apt here than Scott realizes, especially salary capped and contractually strict ones like the NBA. Just like in academia, in the NBA a rookie who has the chance to develop into the superstar is far more valuable than an established veteran who has proven themselves to be a reliable above-average player. This is true even if, on average, the rookies do not become above-average players. This is reflected on the trade market, where the #5 pick in the draft (which becomes a first-year player in the league once drafted) is valued more highly in a vacuum than solid rotation veterans, even if "solid rotation veteran" is actually probably the EV of what you get from the #5 pick.
There are additional wrinkles and dimensions to this, as rookies are also on a more affordable rookie scale contract, NBA players are locked up into defined contract lengths than is difficult for the player to exit early for other teams, etc. The limited free agency explains superstar inertia in professional sports - there are typically only a few defined windows in a player's career where they truly are pure free agents. But "superstar inertia" I don't think is very difficult to explain for most tenure-track academics. Unless you are in the true 1% of academia there's a lot of disruption to uprooting your life and your intellectual networks to go somewhere use and the upside needs to be very high to entice you to do so. Given the natural geographic distribution of academic employers it's not even like other working professionals job-hopping to go to the competitor firm down the street. And it seems to me that you do see the true top 1% of tenure track academia, celebrity public intellectuals etc., move around, though perhaps my perception is shaded by the fact that these moves are naturally going to be more newsworthy than random tenure track faculty moves.
Some of what's going on is historical, going back to about 1950, when the Feds started throwing money at universities to do research. The NSF was founded c. 1952 b/c everyone realized that science had won WW II thus needed serious funding. The question was HOW, and we got a bastard version of the German system and our old tradition of colleges being for educating elite youth. Remember that many of the important scientists of WW II were German. There, all universities were research universities--there was no UG education as such--and their goal was to produce research and prepare scholars/scientists. They were supported by the German state, and departments were given budgets they could spend as they chose (and there was, basically, just 1 fully tenured "Ordinary Professor" per department, and he ran it, often like a fief. That was what US scientists envisioned after the war--fund the best scientists directly to produce the best science. But this met howls of protest from most US colleges & universities who feared all the money would go to the usual suspects, Harvard, Yale, Illinois (go Illini!), etc. And it was unAmerican. States urged the money go to states for allocation to their schools. The scientists howled -- nobodies at places like the Southern University of North Dakota at Hoople would get, and waste, scientific research dollars. Bad Science would be done!! The compromise is what we have today is the result, anyone, even a nobody at SND@H, could submit a grant, and if it was, in fact Best Science, it would be funded. So, virtually every school in the US tries to be a research oriented school, not just for the prestige, but because of the sweet overhead money that comes in, helping fund student-attracting facilities like salt water pools and paying big money to sports coaches.
The adjunct vs. research professor divide reflects the old teaching-college vs. research institution divide in the US. If you read what the poor adjuncts write, they generally thought of themselves as teachers expanding and informing the minds of their students and did not want to be researchers. They suffer for pursuing their dream. Between that and high course loads, they don't do research and so can't transition to the main tenure track. They'd like to be paid well and have job security to do what they love, teach.
Top stars get hired (note rise in numbers for older faculty) when a university wants to set up a new field of study or some "center." Then they go for an established name who will attract bright and ambitious folks quickly.
I'm an odd duck in this case. I wanted to be an UG teacher back in 1974 (my mentor said, "I suspected that of you."), before the Federal money started streaming to my field, psychology. But there were no good jobs available then, so I took one at a comprehensive university that then got ambitious and shot up to R1 status remarkably quickly. So I had to get with the program and do research, and did get tenure, though I could not today, as I never got grants.
+2 points for the PDQ Bach reference.
"colleges have decided they only need a certain amount of prestige before they stop caring and fill the other teaching positions with warm bodies" - No, it's more that they buy as much prestige as they can afford, but (in part because its hard to hire good research faculty while requiring them to do lots of teaching) that isn't enough in order to meet all their teaching obligations.
"Why don’t colleges hire everyone in some low-commitment capacity, maybe as adjuncts, wait to see who becomes superstars, then poach them?" - This is what the best universities do - they hire "tenure track" professors, but very rarely grant them tenure - instead, their tenured faculty are maximally prestigious people poached from elsewhere. This works for the best universities, because being tenure track at Harvard (with the expectation that you probably won't actually get tenure) is a very good deal for the very best new PhDs. It doesn't work at other universities because being tenure track at Podunk College, with the expectation that you won't even get tenure out of it, is not an attractive offer, and so good people don't accept offers at lesser schools if they expect it won't lead to tenure (assuming they have a better option elsewhere).
That's the impression I got - the next step after "tenure track" at a top university is getting poached by some less-prestigious university that will actually give you tenure. (And maybe then, after tenure and some research successes, getting poached again by a different top university.)
Note that Devereaux is writing about the *history* job market, not all of this applies to academia in general. Like, I've never heard of the whole "experience actually hurts" phenomenon in mathematics.
Also worth noting is that in math and various sciences, it's typical to do a few postdocs (which doesn't fit into any of Devereaux's categories; these are neither tenure track nor teaching track nor adjunct) before getting a tenure track position. Devereaux mentions this but *mostly* ignores it because he's mostly focusing on history.
So I don't know if the market is as broken as in other fields.
As for history, though -- I do think you may be making a mistake in assuming that people are necessarily doing things for good reasons rather than due to biases. Devereaux explains the "experience hurts" phenomenon via a bias for hiring from prestigious colleges; I think that answer is definitely worth considering.
That's not the claim/phenomeon being discussed.
The phenomenon being discussed is a strong preference in history departments for hiring directly out of PhD programs, with large dropoffs in hiring even a few years out. To the extent that people in mathematics do believe that claim -- which I don't think is so universal as to call it "generally believed", although it's certainly common -- I think the belief is generally in a *smaller* effect, one that becomes apparent over the *decades*; it wouldn't be enough to generate so large an effect.
Also, even if the same overall effect did occur due to that cause, the fact that it's a separate cause would mean that it wouldn't make sense to consider the two as a unified phenomenon. So, in short, your reply doesn't really bear on the point.
But I think it’s also true in math that someone who has done one postdoc is more hireable than someone who has done four. In fact, it would probably be rare to get that fourth postdoc, because anyone looking at your application would wonder why you hadn’t got a tenure track position yet.
While Devereux puts it as “experience hurts”, I think it’s better understood that this isn’t experience so much as probationary employment where you are meant to prove yourself, and a long enough time where you haven’t done that is a bad sign.
Sure, that's more relevant; but the apparent strength of the effect in history suggests something else is going on. If you do two postdocs, which is pretty common, that's likely four years all by itself!
I think it’s basically that in every academic field there’s an assumption about how much training you need before you are ready for a tenure track job. In some fields, the assumption is that the PhD is enough, in others it’s one postdoc, in some it’s two or three. But if you’re taking longer than the normative time, then that’s a bad sign.
(I think fields with few postdocs tend to have longer PhDs - it’s not uncommon for a history or English PhD to take 8 years.)
It is absolutely the case that lengthy experience as teaching faculty or adjunct hurts in mathematics.
OK, but that's not entirely analogous, because apparently in history people do adjuncts where in math they'd do postdocs. So penalizing someone for being an adjunct in history is less like penalizing someone for being an adjunct in mathematics and more like penalizing someone for being a postdoc in mathematics.
This is not true. An adjunct history position is analogous in every relevant respect to an adjunct math position, not a math postdoc. Some new math PhDs become adjuncts, just like some new history PhDs - but virtually no one with a decent postdoc offer would choose to be an adjunct instead.
I mean, obviously the analogy is not perfect, and what you say above is correct. But I gather it's analogous in the sense of "What is the 'default' non-tenure-track position in each field?" In math it's a postdoc, and if you take an adjunct position instead, yeah, that's a pretty bad signal. In history, going according to what Devereaux writes, postdocs are pretty much nonexistent, so adjuncts are the default; this makes it hard for it to serve as as strongly negative a signal as it would in mathematics.
I think academia and performing arts have a lot more in common than you'd think. A record label and an academic department both want to sign someone that will HIT. But you have no actual idea what prospects will do it. For recording artists, you can give a thousand advances and if even one hits it will pay for the rest. But you can't do that for academic departments. So you make choices based on what you can actually observe (a degree from a top 10 program) and hope that will give you a better chance at a hit.
Why do departments only hire people with no experience? The same reason that there are no 35-year-old breakout pop stars. Labels and departments buy based on POTENTIAL. Someone with experience has no upside.
> What process carves off 30% of professors to get good pay and benefits, but passes over the rest?
You're neglecting the influence of unions and worker activism. The institution, like most employers, is coordinated and can apply power effectively with ease. It has most of the power. Workers can only exert pressure by leaving (and going to another institution that is likely similar) or striking (difficult to coordinate, pisses people off, risky, etc.).
Often, the low-paid teaching staff are contractors, have little clout in the union if they're in it at all, and may well be gone in a year or two. The union is incentivized to do the most for its long-term, prestigious members, and so it uses its power mostly for them.
You end up with a scenario where the uni would like to pay everyone crap, the workers would like everyone paid well, and the way the power imbalance/application of political capital shakes out is that some small amount of workers are paid well and the rest are paid crap.
How many institutions have unions that cover tenure track faculty? I believe the recent strike at Rutgers involved a union that covered tenure track faculty, but I believe that at the UC system, the union only covers postdocs and grad students and maybe some other non-tenure-track people, and at most private schools there is no union. (This of course may all be quite different outside the US.)
Yes, this is from a Canadian perspective, where the answer is I believe all of them.
I don't think your explanation about trying to trick students about who is teaching them works, or at least it's not complete. Disclaimer that this is based on my anecdotal experience in astronomy.
Teaching professors are a relatively new phenomenon but colleges have existed and have been teaching students with something like the current model in the US for decades. Why would they only now start trying to offload teaching responsibilities onto a different class of professor behind students' backs? Also, the teaching professors that I'm familiar actually have the title "teaching professor" right there on the department webpage, so if they are trying to hide this from students they are doing a poor job.
Also, in my field, adjuncts are people who have a primary appointment elsewhere but who then get a secondary affiliation with some college or university, usually so they can directly advise grad students, and sometimes as a way of funneling research funding through the university. They aren't paid positions and don't come with any teaching or department service responsibilities. I think one needs to be careful about differentiating between very different positions with the same or similar titles when doing this type of analysis.
One element you might be missing is the nepotism angle. My partner was a an academic who recently left academia, and one thing they claim is an open secret in academia is that most new tenure track hires have parents who were tenure track hires before them. There could be reasons other than direct nepotism that account for this (the children of tenure track people are more likely to go into the field and be suited for it, and also they know the most common pitfalls to navigate), but however you parse it, it makes sense to me that in a system that has a nepotism component, you see a lot of people being snatched for high-prestige jobs the moment they become eligible for those jobs, not the moment they have a proven track record (because nepotism generally works counter to meritocracy).
It would be interesting to do a deep comparison of the academic and entertainment industries, because entertainment is a famously nepotistic industry where lots of people toil in competition for low-paying, shitty gigs and a few people rise to the top, and those people are often related to other people in the industry.
I suppose you have to balance efficiency and fairness then. Because its true, if you have a limited number of slots to fill, you might be able to fill them more quickly by focusing your search to the children of people who were previously qualified, but you are going to be discriminating against some potentially qualified candidates who were not so fortunate. So nepotism has that against it as well (although you certainly can't tell me that "every" child who happens to survive in his parents field was qualifed).
I would be surprised to learn that *most* new tenure track hires have tenure track parents. I think most new tenure track hires have parents who got more than a bachelors degree, and people with professor parents are far over-represented - but very often the parent is an academic in a different field. I think the biggest feature here is just that academia is weird, and if you don’t know people who were in it, you’re much less likely to go into it, and much more likely to make some mistake about things that come second nature to people who grew up in the system.
I met Pete Buttigieg once, and was very impressed by him, but I think a big part of that is just that he grew up in an academic household and knows how to talk to academics, even though his parents were in different fields than me.
I want to correct and say I don't actually have evidence for the claim "most new tenure track professors have parents who were tenure track before them" because that was something that was told to me casually, not something I verified. But it might be worth looking into, because if it were even partly true it might explain some of this phenomenon.
Who does the nepotism? Are they being hired by their parents' universities?
I don't know about nepotism, but I think he doesn't discuss the network issue enough. I mean, if you are the successful student of a hotshot professor, it is likely that you are known in the relatively small world that academia is, and that once you graduate, the system is likely to arrange a job for you. Whereas the longer you've been outside of the orbit of your well known supervisor, the more likely it is that you are forgotten.
I'd be inclined to lean heavily on the angle of "they know what they're getting into". There's a romantic ideal of the Academy that a lot of us from outside start with, and in the normal course of events we'd slowly learn the ugly truth and become disillusioned. But there's a huge advantage to, not only having someone willing to sit you down and talk straight with you, but also simply seeing what the day-to-day life of an academic *is*. I don't find it hard at all to believe that this knowledge could give children of academic parents a huge leg up in the beginning. As well as having a large sorting effect, by weeding out all the academic children who would be incapable of or unwilling to run[ning] the gauntlet, thus meaning that the ones who do choose academia are much more suited than average.
>There's a romantic ideal of the Academy that a lot of us from outside start with, and in the normal course of events we'd slowly learn the ugly truth and become disillusioned
tell me more about this - I'm writing something on the topic and one question that seems important is:
are there indeed any miscalibrated expectations? (if yes this would mean unnecessary suffering but also something potentially fixable) and if so why? (and to what extent this is same/different across academia areas that are largely populated by US nationals vs those mostly staffed by immigrants)
you seem to imply that yes, expectations are miscalibrated. any comments as to why? do you think they are miscalibrated more or less than in comparable fields?
like, for classical superstar careers like sports or acting the situation is similar in many respects yet people are generally presumed to "know what they are signing up for"? sure, as everywhere on average people would be overoptimistic.. but, like, is academia the same level of overoptimism and you just hear more b*tching coz the b*tches are better at writing or is it actually worse?
I'm a number of years out, so I'm probably not a good person to ask. But my impression was that yes, expectations were miscalibrated. No one thought it would be easy, but they didn't realize how hard it would be and how unlikely success would be, and how much of the success would be due to luck and academic politics and cold numbers. And what's worse, the entire system seemed designed to encourage these miscalibrations, because it required a larger supply of graduate students, postdocs, and adjunct professors, than would be possible if they only accepted enough graduate students for all the tenure-track positions available. (This is assuming that every grad student wants to end up as a tenured professor, which is not the case, but I think the point still stands.) (This doesn't apply to tenure-track professors; as far as I'm aware, aside from some weirdness at elite universities, anyone accepted into a tenure-track position is expected to get tenure and then become a full professor.)
As for what causes the miscalibrations in broader society, I think it's mostly the stories we tell ourselves. Maybe older stories from a less competitive time, or "romantic" stories that talk about the idealism of "searching for truth" and "contributing to the sum of all human knowledge".
The sports analogy seems good, but I don't even know anyone with actual experience there, so I shouldn't comment. :-)
yeah I'm pretty sold on yes to "miscalibrated?", for both the "cultural adjustment too slow" reasons you kinda allude to in 2nd to last paragraph, as well as "academia cult indoctrinates younger members so expectations are very inflexible and out of whack" that you also allude to and that me and others expanded on elsewhere in these comments.
this is actually great news, as points to much lower hanging fruit solutions than some drastic academia reforms. expectations need to adjust faster! matter of collecting and then spreading the information, advocacy, outreach.
anecdotally, these methods seem to work pretty well: I'm quite involved in various rat adjacent communities, and there seems to be quite a number of PhD dropouts among people who got exposed to the information and alternative points of view early enough, and I myself been part of some "decide to drop out" success stories, both there and thru my reddit career advising.
Now I want to find out who if any are the influential academia voices telling people to get real and move on as that would seem like the obvious way to have a lot of positive impact.
> But there's a huge advantage to, not only having someone willing to sit you down and talk straight with you, but also simply seeing what the day-to-day life of an academic *is*
This is why I'm in industry instead.
"Why only people from outside their own institution?"
There's a strong social tradition of avoiding 'academic inbreeding.' Hiring your own graduates is seen as both an obvious form of nepotism and a recipe for intellectual stagnation. Not that it doesn't happen, when a favored student can't find a job.
Usually those are temporary “instructor” positions that are glorified adjuncts. The case where a university hires its own for a tenure track job is usually because they’re convinced they have a star and they’re outbidding other places.
I'm tenured at an R-1 equivalent uni in Europe.
Adjuncts are de facto on another planet, and tt assistant professors are by design junior, i.e. you typically hire them immediately after their PhD or a few years of postdoc. In many countries, only associate and full professors are public servants like judges and diplomats, i.e. not on a contract.
Teaching is incidental, and can easily be done by graduate students or postdocs. What matters is research, grant funding, and prestige. In my experience, poaching exists but up to a point, especially in Europe where there is less room for negotiation.
I don't know about teaching-focused institutions.
Hypothetically, a person doing a job doesn't look like they can do more challenging work, at least if management is sufficiently unimaginative. So they prefer shiny new people.
This seems to import the assumption that "Einstein/superstar" researchers are a thing outside of STEM. I don't know if this is true -- I'm STEM myself -- but it strikes me as counterintuitive in a field like ancient history (Bret's field) where research is driven more by laborious study than clever ideas. What is an Einstein-equivalent in history or English literature *doing* to be so valuable?
Laborious study and the cleverness to come up with a new angle to apply that laborious study to are common to all fields. I don’t know history or English particularly as fields, but my guess is that someone who first came up with a way to use Egyptian diaries to understand how life for Jewish women in Egyptian cities changed throughout the dynasties is likely going to be more of a star than someone else who then applies that method to the next few similar cases, even though both use the same laborious research. Similarly for the first person to think to attach a gold nanoparticle to a piece of DNA to track it, rather than the many others who go through the laborious work of applying that.
I certainly agree that creativity has value everywhere, but it strikes me as much more bounded in history (we discover new Egyptian dairies very slowly, then someone has to do the work of translating them in a way that makes them available to other researchers, and so on before the clever application becomes relevant) than is the case for, say, new algorithm development, where the sequence is creativity -> new algorithm -> profit/published without limiting externalities.
I would have thought that this makes cleverness all the more important in a field where you don’t get new sources of evidence! You have to convince people that you found a new way to look at something interesting, which takes more cleverness than just looking at something no one has looked at before.
Whereas I would argue that most of the essential work in that type of field is _doing_ the work of making the evidence available (e.g. scholarly translation), because that produces new resources to mine, whereas the mining produces steadily diminishing returns. But maybe this maps to the social sciences, where there's more prestige in finding interesting tidbits in existing large databases than in building new, better large databases with which to do research.
I don't know much about this subject, so I don't know what makes a potential hire attractive for universities, but there are a lot of humanities academics who are household names. I don't know if the next Harold Bloom, Camille Paglia, Foucault or Judith Butler is what universities want but there seems to be quite a lot of value there (negative or positive). And is academic work in literature about laborious study or about having new ideas about literature (and being a good writer)? What about philosophy?
A couple or a few years ago a Biblical scholar called Idan Dershowitz claimed a 19th century forgery (of an ancient Biblical manuscript) called the Shapira scroll was actually authentic. That was widely reported in the popular press. It was probably a false claim, but if it wasn't, it was a clever idea that would have certainly made him very valuable. And that is in an obscure field that I would have thought has had all the juice squeezed out already.
If you allow me to be generous and count prehistory as part of history, Svante Pääbo is a superstar who has revolutionized the field in a way that it's not even clear whether it should still be counted as an arts or a science field.
Before him, the field was just an ordinary field like most of history, minus the texts: digging up artifacts and making sense of them. That is also what Pääbo did, but he was just much much better in the "making sense of it" part.
How do you discover someone is a good researcher while 1) soaking up their time teaching and 2) not giving them any significant field-appropriate resources for researching?
I think the explanation mostly is institutional capture of the hiring methods and standards by the tenure-track profs. They were hired into the prestigious TT in this manner, and they do the hiring/control the hiring of TT positions, and if the methods or standards are questioned that would question their entitlement to the prestigious TT jobs they have.
I'm wary of these kinds of explanations because:
1) They can explain anything. Why don't colleges make every new hire eat a frog? If they did, this kind of explanation could explain it.
2) It doesn't explain how the tradition got started.
3) Colleges are pretty big and smart and if there were a better way to do things you'd expect they'd switch to it over time. I think the original existence of adjuncts was like this - originally they didn't have this role, then some of them realized it was free money, and then they all transitioned to it.
1) Fair enough but it's harder to make eating frogs sound like the rational way to assign prestige positions than to make the current system sound rational.
2) The tradition has a rational basis and had that at the start.
3) I am not sure I understand this objection. I agree they are big and smart, and they do a lot of things super well. I just think that this method is pretty much the perfect way to do what they actually want to do; gatekeep the TT to the recent grads from the most-prestigious program they can get, so as to retain/increase program prestige.
I should have said that my perspective is from an admittedly weird and less academic of the academic disciplines, law. And , I wasn't even trying to answer the "why isn't there more superstar poaching" question, I was just thinking about the "why does experience hurt" question.
Just think of 'adjunct professor' as 'substitute teacher' and all shall be clear.
And a large fraction of them specifically are that - a tenured professor gets a research grant to spent a year in North Carolina, and you need someone to teach their classes for one year, but they will come back the following year, so you hire an adjunct.
They're supposed to be that (and similar) but Bret's complaint is that all the schools are suddenly 30% subsitute teachers
This is where I want to know more detailed numbers. What is the distribution of adjuncts, in terms of type of university and discipline? How many of them are actually teaching a class in any given semester? I hear a lot about their numbers increasing, but I've never been a part of a department that had more than one or two at a time, almost always specifically in this sort of substitute role.
I would not be surprised if, at major research universities, the vast majority that aren't of this form are in things like freshman writing and calculus, which you need to teach large numbers of in a relatively introductory way, and things like foreign language and musical instruments, where you need a large number of people for something specialized that isn't the core mission of the university.
But maybe I'm missing large numbers somewhere else!
Scott: Your question "Why don’t colleges hire everyone in some low-commitment capacity, maybe as adjuncts, wait to see who becomes superstars, then poach them?" has an easy answer.
Once you're hired as an adjunct you really have no hope (except in the most unusual non-STEM circumstances) of getting a good TT job. You have to start producing amazing research/scholarship almost immediately, and the adjunct grind just makes this impossible.
I am a non-tenure track research professor (meaning I don't teach classes) at an R1 institution and have been an adjunct professor at a different college. I can share some insights into hiring decisions.
There is a bias toward hiring young people for tenure track positions for several reasons:
1. They are trying to hire people who will be making a name for themselves at that institution. Hiring committees do look at a persons career trajectory in addition to accomplishments.
2. Faculty want to make sure their department is in on whatever the current trend is in order to appeal to grad students and postdocs. Naturally, the best way to buy in to such trends is to hire young people.
3. There is an extreme level of concern about diversity. Since diversity is increasing, the most diverse subset of candidates is the youngest group. This leads to a strong bias toward hiring younger people to faculty positions. (This is probably one of the most important factors and I have known cases where it was explicitly stated that no white men would be hired. That clearly ruled out a lot of the more established candidates.)
Some of this post also assumes some popular stereotypes that are not true. One is that research and teaching are incompatible. Almost all the time a person who is good at research is also an excellent teacher. Besides which, students like having a professor who is active in their field. Researchers generally like teaching, in spite of the stereotype that researchers wish they could avoid teaching so they could focus on their research.
Universities hire adjuncts because they're cheap labor, not because they're expert teachers. Don't read too much into it. Teaching at the college level is really not difficult for someone who understands the subject. I think Scott has a post somewhere showing that most innovations in education are just showing selection effects. Faculty know this, even if they do not usually admit it. So, there is not much value to be gained from having people who are hired for teaching abilities.
A mildly snarky take on not offering TT to adjuncts in-house:
As a successful academic on the hiring committee you've successfully jumped through a large number of hoops, starting in high school. If you've hired someone as an adjunct already, your department's process has confirmed this person as a 2nd tier researcher. Giving them a TT position would imply a flaw in your hiring process (if they're good enough to be TT, why would they take an adjunct position in the first place?), the same hiring process which has confirmed you as a successful academic & we can't just go around calling that into question, now can we?
You don’t have to have the cynical read that there’s an urge to resist acknowledging the mistake you now realize you made the first time - more likely, in most cases, whatever process led to a mistaken evaluation the first time stays in place and you never recognize that the person has what it takes for a TT job.
As with dating, it seems the only way to move out of adjunct-hood is to get an offer from somewhere else, and then use that as leverage at the current institution. If for some reason you still want to stay.
I'm a department chair at a state university (with unionized faculty), and have experience with both tenure-line and adjunct hiring.
When we hire a new adjunct, the pool is generally limited to people who are already in the area and open to more employment. Usually, in an adjunct's first semester, we can only offer them part time work. This is partly because the collective bargaining agreement requires that we offer classes to any qualified current adjuncts before hiring someone new. For example, if someone retires, gets sick, or goes on sabbatical, I have to offer their courses to any qualified current part-timers who would like to increase their teaching load. There might be a course or two left over for a new adjunct to start part-time. It's essentially impossible to offer a full-time position for a new adjunct.
In this situation, we can't cast a wide net for candidates. We aren't offering a level of compensation or security worth relocating for, and in many cases the need arises last-minute. So, we hire the most qualified person we can find locally, among people with the right credentials who neither got a tenure-track nor took a full-time job in industry. It's often difficult to find anyone.
For a tenure-track hire, by contrast, we get a large number of applications from across the country and internationally. If one of our current adjuncts is in the pool, they will get the same consideration as everyone else. But the odds that they will happen to be the best fit out of that large pool are very low.
An important point to consider is that in many fields (e.g. economics) adjuncts typically do not have PhDs, only masters degrees. As such they cannot move into tenure track or teaching track jobs. This is often raised as a point of contention, that adjuncts are not considered for such jobs, but they are also explicitly unqualified for the job. Adjuncts in these fields are in effect below even PhD candidates, as they are not even working on their dissertations, and more like regular grad students.
That isn't to say anything bad about adjuncts, just that simply going by job titles isn't putting like with like.
I should also point out that when I was in the job market it was common advice when applying for a "normal" tenure track economics position to not even admit that you like teaching. I use admit intentionally there, as it was seen as an admission that you were not serious about research. This is important, as most schools wanted researchers and offered extremely low teaching loads (something like 1 course a semester, maybe 2), one even promising TA support such that "you don't even have to interact with students, ever." Accreditation is easier if you have more courses taught by PhDs, however, so depending on how it is counted (number of courses taught by PhDs vs percent of faculty with a PhD) teaching track roles are becoming more valuable to counter balance the number of research only faculty.
I have a couple of other thoughts here that have been mentioned before, so I won't belabor them, but one that seems to be left out: networking.
My professors have explicitely told me that at some level, whether I can land a post-doc is a luck of the draw for how many of their friends have recently taken post-docs. From undergrad I moved to a grad school in large part through my mentor's contacts, and the assumption is that from grad school I would move to a post-doc largely through my advisor's contacts. This is a pretty common story in math, which seems to be a particularly small and close-knit community as opposed to many other STEM fields. While I am in graduate school, and for a year or two out, my advisors will be concerned with my success, as it reflects on them. After a few years, they will have other students to go to bat for, and I imagine that they would reasonably focus their efforts on landing their current students' jobs. The longer I'm out, the less contact I have with my advisors, and thus the harder I expect it will be for me to land a job.
DISCLAIMER: I think a lot of merit goes into getting grad school/post docs/tenure track jobs. I just also think that there's a lot of networking in there too; you sort of need both, or overwhelming amounts of merit.
I think Scott's basic explanation is correct. I'll just add tweak that I thinks clarifies the matter further.
As Scott notes, there are two distinct functions: research and teaching. In a model of perfect competition, salary (Y) would form a power law when plotted against the ratio of research-to-teaching (X), with the long tail extending toward 100% teaching. However, there is not perfect competition, because bureaucracy. For budgetary reasons, hiring and salary must be legible to administrators, so they segment the curve into distinct roles: tenure-track, teaching, and adjunct, resulting in the present system.
The power law in competition for researchers is also congruent with the preference for superstar researchers and the disfavoring of older adjuncts. But it's the bureaucratic dimension that prevents this from being rationalized into a system of free agents.
My experience is in the humanities, and it's also about 30 years out of date now. I had a tenure-track job right after I finished my dissertation. My husband was a lecturer for two years before getting a tenure-track gig at a different school. (There's another distinction for you -- lecturers make a real salary and get bennies, but they're one-year renewable hires. So better than adjuncts, but worse than TT faculty).
My observation is that all the universities assume that the best candidates will get snatched up right after they graduate. If they didn't get snatched up, well, then I guess they weren't the best candidates, right? Almost anyone you ask in academia in a one-on-one conversation will agree this is stupid and incorrect, but in committee meetings it's kind of the default assumption.
I'm female, and I also felt like there was a similarity between fresh, virginal candidates/fresh, virginal young women and slightly used, been-around-the-block candidates/been-around-the-block less-young women. Do I have any social science to back this up? Nope. It was just a feeling I had.
I eventually left academia so that I could live in the same state as my husband (who also left academia), and we both got higher-paid, lower-status jobs (lawyer and IT manager). In the same town! Mirabile dictu.
I guess I should also mention that humanities folks don't usually do post-docs, though there are exceptions.
A tangential question re. "I also felt like there was a similarity between fresh, virginal candidates/fresh, virginal young women and slightly used, been-around-the-block candidates/been-around-the-block less-young women." For those who date women: Would you prefer a fresh, virginal young woman, or a slightly used woman? My impression is that men today are more-likely to avoid virgins than to seek them out. Today that would be a fetish.
Yes, I'm sympathetic to your point, but there certainly are still such men (though probably not commenting on this blog). I know two guys who believe in "first kiss is at the altar". Those guys do not comment on rationalist blogs. Christian blogs maybe, but not rat ones.
I've gotten that dating-market vibe too. It's very Jane Austen-y: at some point you age out of the marriage market. And the assumption becomes that if no one took a chance on you before now, there must be something wrong with you, so no one else will take a chance in the future.
Don't forget the annual conference interviews that at one time often took place literally in a bedroom.
I think you should question your approach of asking why colleges don't do the thing that would be more fair, rather than asking why any organization ever does the fair thing. No explanation is needed for colleges behaving unfairly. An explanation /is/ needed when one sees an organization behaving fairly.
As Adam Smith said, What needs explaining is not why so many nations are poor, but why some are rich.
Colleges aren't for-profit corporations, and my experience with organizations of all types has been that organizations that aren't run for profit, don't incentivize their people to be fair, or to do their jobs well in any respect. The only exception I've encountered are religious organizations, volunteer organizations, and Dept. of Defense front-line organizations, which all attract only people who are already incentivized to do the mission they're signing up for.
(You might think that the non-random behavior of colleges shows they're incentivized in some way. That's correct; but when white-collar workers aren't incentivized to do their job correctly, their personal preferences take over. These are highly correlated between different people in the same job, even in different organizations; so the behavior across organizations has a similar distribution.)
Substack tells me this comment is too long, so I will be splitting it up into two; the second half is in the reply. (Edited to remove some potentially identifying info and to soften some things I think I was too harsh on at first.
I was recently on the CS academic job market and successfully got a job. A few thoughts -- this is mostly focused on the top 30 CS departments in the US. Once you get out of there I don't know how much this holds anymore.
1. First of all, your caption on the graph doesn't actually match the chart. Assuming the chart label is right, that's not acceptance rate of people being hired, that's the *number* of people being hired at each rank. (Yes, these numbers are low, which matches my expectations for a specific field. See the annual Taubee survey for CS hiring stats in the US and Canada -- it's typical to hire about 200-400 professors in the US per year: https://cra.org/resources/taulbee-survey/ (last available for year 2021). I would be shocked if the acceptance rate for recent PhDs is 90 and the acceptance rate for people 1 year out (including postdocs, people who did a year of research prof, etc) was so much lower -- but the graph is just raw numbers as far as I can tell. The fact that the "Within Previous Year" bar is so high does not indicate that the acceptance rate for recent PhDs is higher. It just indicates that more of them were hired, which is not surprising considering it's by far the most common time to go on the job market.
2. Speaking about top R1 schools (let's say the top 30 computer science departments -- and everything I say here counts double for the top 10): The reason it becomes much harder to get a tenure-track job after becoming a teaching-focused professor (either teaching-track or adjunct) is that the application for tenure-track jobs is almost exclusively focused on your research. Aside from the allure of the "full package," I'm not sure why the charade is maintained that research is just one of three equally-weighted considerations in a tenure-track job (research, teaching, service). In reality it seems to be about 95% research, and as long as you don't stab a student or something you'll probably keep your job. (I will say: some places, including the place I ended up going, did actually have one teaching faculty interview me as a tenure-track faculty. This is rare and a good sign that this institution/department actually treats its teaching faculty well. But I think aside from that, I got asked exactly zero questions about teaching at R1 interviews. Yes, I had to provide a teaching statement that described my teaching philosophy. Did anyone actually read it? I have no idea, but I know they read my research statement, because I got questions about that.)
And if you are a PhD student or a postdoc, your full-time job is research. Most PhD students and postdocs don't work a day job, have only minor teaching responsibilities, and have collaborators and peers who are also doing research. Plus they (theoretically) have guidance on which well-scoped problems to work on from their advisors. So, PhD students and postdocs are basically in the best state to spend the 5+ years of run-up to a tenure track application. Doing research as a PhD is way easier than doing it on your own time as a hobby, if only because your university will pay to get you access to all the electronic library resources you could want, lab space, equipment, administrators, conference travel, seminars to watch, administrators, etc, plus you don't have to hold down another job while doing that. This is the biggest pool of people who want to become tenure-track professors, so this is everyone else is competing against.
Teaching as a teaching-track professor or adjunct is a full-time job. My understanding is that a typical teaching-track load is 2-3 classes per semester. The advice I've been given is that it takes 4-8 out-of-lecture hours to prepare materials (lecture, homework, "fun" activities, etc) per every hour of lecture -- not even including grading, office hours, helping students who want to chat, dealing with students who decided they hate you, dealing with cheating, paperwork, interfacing with the rest of the department, etc. As far as I can tell, it is one of the hardest jobs ever, and it doesn't pay nearly as well or have the prestige of being a research professor. But, if you want to be tenure-track faculty, you will be evaluated on very little of this, and realistically if you're teaching 2-3 classes per semester you will not have time to conduct the kind of research agenda that will help you compete with tenure-track candidates. The competition is the PhD students and postdocs (and maybe research professors) who *have* been spending full-time jobs on research, so even if you do a great job in the <25% of your day remaining to you after teaching, that's a *really* uphill battle. I've spoken with several teaching faculty and asked why they did that, and I got two reasons. Almost all of them: they love teaching! Which is great! One person said he liked academia and was thinking about the tenure-track life, but didn't want to be busy with the 20 jobs of being a tenure-track professor, so he went with a teaching job so he could be overloaded with only 10 jobs instead. I didn't talk to any adjuncts because I don't know any, which probably says something about how much they are overlooked in academia in general.
Maybe a more charitable way to look at this is: Research, most commonly done during a PhD/postdoc, *is* the experience they're looking for. Everything else, including teaching, is a "distraction." (I don't honestly know if it would be better if everyone gave up on the charade and had tenure-track faculty just stop teaching. More on that in another post later, perhaps.) And people who do research-focused jobs, especially in research-oriented academic roles (see next), or occasionally from particularly paper-publishing-focused industry labs, do occasionally switch into tenure track.
3. A better question is: Why are tenure-track faculty and research-track faculty different things? For the uninitiated: tenure-track faculty have three supposedly-equally-weighted buckets of jobs they do: research, teaching, and service (being on committees and getting the things that have to happen in the department done even though they don't benefit you personally), and are paid by salary. Research professors (sometimes they have different titles -- research scientist, staff researcher, etc) pay themselves out of grant money that they get themselves, but they don't have to """waste time""" doing teaching or service. (Sometimes they still advise PhD or MS students, sometimes not, depends on the department). Teaching-track faculty are salaried and only do the teaching bucket. It is rare for them to do research, and the ones I know who do do research do research in CS education (as in how to teach people better), and publish once every couple years (compared to the 3-10 papers/year expected of tenure-track and research-track profs). Tenure-track faculty get to vote in faculty meetings. In some departments/institutions, research or teaching-track professors can vote, but in most they can't and the tenure-track folks run the show. I've never heard of adjuncts getting a vote at faculty meetings. (To some extent I guess this makes sense, because they're not considered long-term employees of the department... but it seems like a raw deal to me.)
Anyway, "research professor" might be something more like the kind of "low-commitment capacity" you're thinking of -- but it's about research, not teaching. Research professors (and sometimes they have a slightly different title -- they're somewhere between research-only professors and super-postdocs) are not salaried, they have to get grants and pay themselves out of those grants, so they're a great way for the university to hire someone they think *might* be good without spending a whole salary line on them. And people do shift between research-track and tenure-track positions. I interviewed at institutions where about half the tenured faculty were former research professors at the same institution (or, less frequently, at another institution).
I've heard of exactly one person who went from a teaching-track job to a research-track job and later to a tenure-track job, and it was kind of a miracle as far as I can tell. But once again, that person needed to do a bunch of fancy research -- which they didn't have time for while teaching -- before applying to tenure-track.
But also like I said, this only applies to the top ~20 places in CS. I have no idea what a rank 65 school sociology department does for tenure/research/teaching.
5. Final thought: This touches on my least favorite thing about academia, which is that if you take a break (until you get tenure), you're done. You can't just go try another job for two years, decide you don't like it, and come back to academia, because unless you've been publishing full time those two years then you'll look like a terrible applicant compared to the recent PhDs and postdocs who haven't taken a break in 5-7 years. There are maybe one or two industry research jobs focused on publication that would not be a death sentence for a top academic position, but aside from that, you kind of have to -- unless you can maintain that strong publication record while holding down another job. I do know someone who did that, so I know it's not impossible, but I mean, if you're going to be miserable and busy doing a full-time job, you may as well do it *as* your full-time job, and get the legibility/credential/credit, right?
Re. "1. First of all, your caption on the graph doesn't actually match the chart. Assuming the chart label is right, that's not acceptance rate of people being hired, that's the *number* of people being hired at each rank." -- That's a great point, explains the data that seemed so strange when read with Scott's interpretation, and I didn't even notice it. Thanks.
On the point of not hiring from your own institution I have seen one senior professor in economics claim they would do this specifically for purposes of diversity in intellectual thought. They argued that on principle their doctoral students should get experience somewhere else and that they should try and get people from elsewhere so that the intellectual climate didn't get stale. No idea if this if this value system is strong enough to override more base incentives, seems unlikely to me, but could be part of an explanation.
As a STEM PhD, in a very qualitative way I feel like I can tell who will be hired and who won’t pretty easily. The truth is you have to be exceptional to be hired in my field (not bio) and it’s easy to tell which phd grads will be chosen based on how many papers they published and who they worked with in graduate school. They are the real go getters and they are zealous.
Related to this, much of the hiring is based on network effects and prestige of the PhD institution. See here: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1400005
Hi Scott and thanks for this post. I'm an associate professor at a European R1-like university and I think there are relatively straightforward economic explanations as follows (with tounge partly in cheek).
As an academic in a research position, my main job is not to do good research, nor to teach classes. It is to bring home research grants. Overheads from these grants keep the lights on for everyone else. Therefore, the university needs to try to give tenured research positions only to people that can be expected with high confidence to earn more than they cost.
Next part of the explanation: a successful grantmaking career is a trajectory that needs to start almost immediately after getting a PhD. I am not sure whether it is rational for funders to allocate funds in this manner, but it is broadly perceived that this is how it works: more money comes to those that already have it, and if you don't get on the escalator from the start, it quickly gets much more difficult to climb up.
You ask why universities do not hire lots of people in a low-commitment position. But in a sense this is what the tenure track is. The salary is not high and you get kicked out after a few years if you haven't established a track record of external funding. Low risk with high upside for the university.
You also ask why colleges aren't more like sports teams, trying to buy each other's stars. This does happen to an extent. But a closer analogy might be to senior partners in law firms or management consultancies. If conditions are better elsewhere they may leave, but transaction costs are high, and most of the money anyway comes from what they bring in on their own.
Thus, I think the economics of a dependency on external grants goes a long way towards explaining the phenomena you describe.
I'd point out that the incentives at top institutions to care about superstar researchers run deeper than prestige. Top-tier profs pull in grant money, in many cases millions of dollars for departments (indirect costs on grants, i.e., the percentage of a total research grant that a uni takes in for its own operations rather than a prof's research is around 50%). The difference between A tier and B/C tier profs in this ability to pull in grant money is likely substantial in many fields that are heavily dependent on research funding given the many biases present in professor brand name recognition, exponential growth dynamics in citation counts, and knowing how to work the grant system, let alone differences in actual talent (which from my observations are substantial).
"But why aren’t colleges more like un-salary-capped sports teams, trying to outbid one another for their rivals’ superstars?"
Institutions do this (we always heard that many top-tier Stanford profs were paid in the low to mid six-figures). However, departmental research budgets are finite with high potential upside but definitely not startup go-to-the-moon upside (how much grant money can one prof pull in? How can you predict who will win a Nobel just from a track record early in someone's career? patent potential is rarer) Switching universities is a huge move and as always, you have reputational risks if you e.g. move around too frequently and lose research productivity. What motivates academics is mostly not money, but freedom to do research. This means freedom from teaching/departmental responsibilities as well as the ability to collaborate closely with other leaders in your field (different schools have different specialties and you may not be able to find similar collaboration opportunities at peer institutions no matter what they pay you). Academics (in the hard sciences/engineering fields at least) could generally get paid way more out in private industry.
There's only so much grant money to win. It could be an interesting question whether unis are optimized for winning grant money based on faculty counts (whether they're over or under hiring)
Some hires appear to simply be political appointments, like Noam Chomsky at University of Arizona. I know they never replaced Ed Abbey. But he was the eco terrorists' darling. Really? Noam Chomsky for Ed Abbey? I don't get it.
Chomsky merely mumbles his way through his monologues; Abbey had a goal in socializing, you might say.
Apart from his political side, Chomsky also basically founded the entire field of modern linguistics.
(I hadn't actually put together that this was the same person, until I found out from the linguistics department that he'd come to campus one weekend to give a few speeches. I missed the one on linguistics on Saturday, so I decided to go to the one on Sunday. I was quite surprised when it turned out to be a strident political speech.)
So far as I know, Abbey wasn't political about his role. I went back to UA in the 1980s, when I was in my 40s, to finish a degree, and Abbey was rather known for enjoying the company of female undergrads. His rustic and secret gravesite is regarded a shrine to devoted Abbeyites.
Sorry to be blunt, but discarding Chomsky as a scientist is utter nonsense. It doesn't matter whether you like him or not, or whether you find him overrated or not. He *is* a scientific superstar. He was the most-cited scientist in arts and humanities in the 1980s, and is still one of the most cited scientists until today. He is also a superstar by any other scientific metric, even if you restrict to fields like CS where his contributions are not political at all.
Yitang Zhang is a fascinating case: he failed to get a tenure-track job because his early work had no real successes, he bounced around as a lecturer (and even fell out of academia for a while), and then he produced a monumental advance on the twin primes conjecture and was instantly given tenure at his university (and naturally, he was poached the next year). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yitang_Zhang
That's an extreme exception.
I’m a tenure track faculty member at an Ivy. From my experience, I think this analysis gets almost everything right, except:
1) take Scott’s observation that every hour spent in the classroom is an hour not spent doing research together with the observation that the greatest research contributions tend to come earlier in people’s careers, and it’s no big mystery why universities don’t hire everyone as adjuncts and wait for the superstar researchers to rise to the top — if everyone had to teach a moderate amount, those future superstars wouldn’t have enough time to do the research that would make them superstars and everyone would be less productive as a whole.
2) I don’t think students are really clamoring for famous thought leaders to teach them. With maybe a few exceptions at the very top (eg. Steve Pinker), few undergrads have any idea who the field-famous research stars at their university are and almost none of them know when they are being taught by a research star and when they’re being taught by an adjunct who isn’t doing much research at all. That might leave us without an explanation for why the titles are so confusingly similar, but I’m not sure that needs much special explanation. All titles are pretty confusing to outsiders. How many people know the difference between the Dean of the College and the Dean of Student Affairs? I’m not sure they’re less confusing outside of academia, either. Is the difference between a Software Architect and a Software Enginneer really less opaque?
Regarding 2, in my outdated experience, undergraduates rapidly learn that teaching ability is uncorrelated or negatively-correlated with research superstardom, and that most of the direct benefits to working with a research superstar only apply at the graduate level. But for an undergraduate who is focusing on a major and planning on grad school, they'll absolutely learn what the state of the field is, and taking courses with research superstars can be useful if you can impress one enough that they're willing to put in a word to help get you into a good graduate program.
I should clarify: I think most undergrads have no idea that any faculty do research at all. From inside academia, research is obviously a huge part of the job, but it’s easy to forget what insider knowledge that is. I can’t count how many times undergrads, even seniors, have asked what I’m doing with my summer “off” or just asked what I do when I’m not teaching. Those undergrads who do get involved in research mostly phone in a bit of work on a project and leave. Only sometimes they get interested in the field as a whole enough to learn a little about who the star researchers are, but I’d estimate that this is no more than 10% of the total undergrad population at an Ivy+, and less than that in less research-focused institutions
Maybe my friend-circle was unusual? It included both graduate students and undergraduates from academic families, and perhaps that filtered through.
Because, a brand new Ph.D. can be all things to all people. Someone with experience can only be what they are.
Why not hire a promising toddler? My two-year-old seems pretty smart, are you listening Harvard?
I mean you joke, but the only earlier hireable person is an ABD...who are also hired in fairly large numbers.
Like a gadgetbahn?
This looks like a multi-armed bandit solution. If the variance in outcomes among inexperienced hires is greater than the variance in outcomes among experienced hires, and you are trying to maximize your likelihood of making a great hire, you're going to make a substantial number of offers to untested but possibly great new hires. If they don't turn out to be great, you can decline tenure later.
I don't think it's a mystery why the job market (in humanities) penalises experience. It's a bit like the dating market, desirable candidates get snapped up quickly, and if you're single for five years straight there's probably something wrong with you.
It's only slightly different in the sciences, where there's an expectation that you need to be a postdoc for a few years. This really just means the clock starts a few years later.
Universities hire based mostly on prestige rather than ability. Whether that's because prestige is an easy-to-measure proxy for ability or whether they genuinely want prestige more than ability, that depends on how cynical you are. But you don't become more prestigious just by sitting around on the shelf. There's a chance you might, in that extra year, do something that makes you extra-prestigious, but it will need to be something pretty special.
> But why aren’t colleges more like un-salary-capped sports teams, trying to outbid one another for their rivals’ superstars?
Because there's not enough benefit to doing so which would offset the huge cost of a bidding war. The fifth best basketball team can become the best basketball team by hiring the best player in the world, but no single hire or handful of hires is going to loft U Chicago above Harvard. Bidding wars cost a lot of money, and they also piss off your existing staff who are annoyed that Professor Big Shot down the hall is suddenly earning four times more than them without doing anything meaningfully better.
“ no single hire or handful of hires is going to loft U Chicago above Harvard.”
Interesting example. In almost all cases, you’re correct of course, but you’re clearly not thinking of MBA programs. U Chicago spends an incredible amount of money to do just that at the Booth School.
This is what I’ve been told: universities like to hire young PhDs for tenure-track because they want to make sure you can be productive for as many years as possible into the future. If you’ve had a PhD for 6 years already, the university fears that’s 6 less years of productive output and once you get tenured, the university is basically stuck with you. That’s what I’ve been told by profs who are / have been on hiring committees.
acoup is generally on point about the structure of the academic profession. Basically, much of teaching is done by specialized teaching faculty who get little money and are looked down upon by "research" faculty.
With that said, we have major disagreements.
First, I don’t think universities can easily save a lot of money. Universities spend huge sums on administration not due to incompetence but because all stakeholders are demanding more IT support, more support for student mental health, more support for finding jobs, etc. There is spending I see as clearly wasteful, but is generally spending that pays for itself – fancy buildings requested by donors, luxury dorms that attract out of state rich kids who pay the bills, conditional government grants, etc.
Second, it isn’t clear to me that spending more on adjuncts is the most compelling priority for any money that can be freed up. Adjuncts are highly educated adults repeatedly choosing to take crappy wages in exchange for a nominally cool job and a chance of a better job. Compare that to, for example, undergraduate students who are often literally children when they commit to spending in the low six-figures on a college education that is now a barrier to entry for a middle-classhood. I'm not sure I'd spend extra money on the adjuncts over just reducing tuition.
Full disclosure – highly remunerated tenure track faculty at R1.
Answering specific asks, at least for my discipline:
-> But then why do they only hire inexperienced people?
If you hire experienced researchers you generally have to offer tenure. Offering tenure is incredibly risky because one bad apple can spoil the department.
That is a severe issue because it is very hard to move established professors. The people who want to move are (generally) unhappy with their current department and so are disproportionately likely to be a bad apple.
-> Why only people from outside their own institution?
It's hard to move professors but it's very easy to move adjuncts. Adjunct jobs suck and so adjuncts at R1s are likely constantly applying to and being rejected for TT positions at any reasonable school. It's very hard to improve your profile so much that you move from being not good enough for a tenure track job at any reasonable school to being good enough for a tenure track job at an R1. More likely, you'd move from an adjunct job to a low ranked tenure track job.
Some additional variables:
1) Grants. An Einstein doesn't just bring in prestige, they bring in millions of dollars of funding, which can then be used to hire more people. As a result, there's pressure to find people who have markers of future grant success. But grant funders are cautious, they want to make sure that their millions of dollars are going to be put to good use (which is exactly the kind of strategy that en masse makes research worse, as moonshots almost never get funded), so another vicious cycle develops where they preferentially fund people who have already had grant success, or certainly look like they will. This then interacts with....
2) Hyperspecialisation and illegibility. Grant decisions are often made by non experts. Job searches often feature someone from management or outside the department. Even within departments it can be hard to assess the quality of someone's work if it's not your exact area. As a result other markers (E.g. outputs in ranked journals) become the lowest common denominator. So if youre a few years post PhD and don't have these markers, it makes you look much less likely to have future success compared with the newly minted PhD who already has a few but hasn't had much opportunity to fail yet either
3) Relatedly, the pressures for more presige, publications, and funds point towards 'collaboration' and interdisciplinarity - it's easier to tell a future grant success story if you can say you've teamed up with Einstein at another university, and universities that work together can feed off each other's prestige, and if you add your name to their paper while they add theirs to yours you can get more outputs. So new hires who have connections with other instutitions, or whose supervisor was Einstein, can be a genuine asset, and have an advantage over someone local who only knows everyone you know.
4) It's also important to remember that the Adjunct market isn't normal. Departments preferentially give jobs to their current grad students so they get the experience. As you finish your PhD, there's a new batch of grad students needing work, so it gets harder and harder to justify giving the job to you even if you are more qualified. This means that as you get further out adjuncts often have to find non-academic work which makes it difficult to research and get those other markers.
Point 1 is made often - that low probability high upside research rarely gets funded. But examples are rarely given. What do you have mind? Good ideas are genuinely hard to come by.
Regarding why potential research superstars aren't made to teach, and why teaching track is incompatible with research track:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/
Regarding why there's some poaching but not a huge amount: the people are involved are all quite intelligent, and can recognize Moloch traps, even if they're not entirely immune.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
Overall, the academic job market is like all the worst parts of asymmetric dating markets. I think literally you can just pick the worst dynamics from dating markets, and there'll be an academic equivalent, and vice versa.
On that note, maybe one of the reasons it hasn't gotten fixed is that you just don't talk about it. The impression I get is that it's airing dirty laundry in public, and erodes trust in the Academy at large. I've been in a discussion with some academic friends about Bret Devereaux's blog, and they were distinctly unenthusiastic, and I think one part of it was the dirty laundry aspect.
Writing something on the topic - one of my big Qs is whether there are indeed any miscalibrated expectations, and if so why (nothing is "bad" about having "bad" adjunct positions, we're talking upper-middle class people with plenty of external options here, but if expectations are off then sure that causes unnecessary suffering and presumably should be not that hard to correct)?
like, for other superstar careers (sports, acting etc) people generally presume that "strivers" with tiny odds of success know what they are signing up for, and have reasonable expectations of their odds of success (past basic human overoptimism bias)?
is that not the case for academia, and if so why?
is that not the case for adjuncts specifically? (which is at the minimum much more of a "superstar" market segment than others, and at maximum as other commenters here pointed out effectively a notice that all realistic chance of tenure track for you is gone)
I agree that there's nothing inherently bad about having adjunct positions, same as there's nothing bad about having janitors. And to be clear, I'm speaking in broad generalities about something with which I have no personal experience, although I've seen a number of friends go through it with varying degrees of success.
The problem is that the adjunct positions (and postdocs and grad student positions) are currently filled by playing on the hopes and dreams of people who will never succeed. There's an old joke with a lot of variants, about a guy who describes his awful job at the theatre (stage performances, not movies); one variant is scrubbing up the rotten fruit that people throw, and who describes how it pays so little that he has to sleep under the stage and wear worn-out costumes as clothes. And when asked why he doesn't get a better-paying job elsewhere, he says, "What, and leave the theatre? Impossible!"
One of my favorite comparisons is with Jane Austen novels: how the lower-upper-class women there are often under pressure to marry a gentleman with an independent income. It's presented as a necessity. There are other options, but since they're unthinkable, the women aren't prepared for them. How would they keep house by themselves, if they marry a tradesman? Not to mention what would happen if they dropped lower and had to work outside their own house.
For an example from several opposite ends of the dating spectrum, being an adjunct is like being "friend-zoned" by the Academy. They'll be strung along and exploited, but never given what they really want. The only healthy solution is to leave, and figure out who they are when they're not part of the Academy, and find some other field of human endeavor that will give them satisfaction.
It's brutal to get the feedback that you're just not good enough to go as far as you want in the field that you love. Or to come to the realization that what the field needs from you is not something that you're prepared to give. Don't ask me how to give that nicely, because I don't know. All I know is that it's necessary.
wrote up my take
https://rgonstuff.substack.com/p/whats-the-deal-with-adjuncts-suffering
think very much jibes with your last reply/espcly second paragraph.
think we agree the expectations need to be adjusted, though I focus on doing that earlier in the pipeline in the note (I guess I kinda do advocacy of the kind I talk about/helping people update expectations and snap out of it, with PhDs that reach my orbit/walk into my reddit career advice trap.. kinda inspired to explore the space and see who's doing what and whether I might want to do more there now).
believe there are maybe not even too hard cultural improvements possible once we acknowledge/popularize the notion that academia is a bit cult-like, and either get profs take a bit more responsibility over their guiding people to academia, or at least make students more aware of the cult-like nature of the academia recruitment and indoctrination
“ The problem is that the adjunct positions (and postdocs and grad student positions) are currently filled by playing on the hopes and dreams of people who will never succeed”
This is common in many fields. College athletes who dream of the pros, where the chances are minuscule, entrepreneurs and startups who dream of success but mostly fail, novelists, politicians, musicians, and on and on. Do we blame the system for their unrealistic expectations? If anything, academics should have a better understanding of their statistical likelihood to land a tenure-track job than these less-educated fields.
I still think there's a difference.
For most of what you list, it's simply a matter of success or failure or the area in between. You try, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, probably there's degrees of success and failure. You dream of being world-class, but probably you won't be. You won't know unless you go all in, and you shouldn't go all in unless the attempt is its own reward, unless that's just who you are. That's the nature of life.
Academia is different in that the educational system requires a large number of human teachers. Since they keep the circles of tenure tight (which is another topic), there aren't enough tenure-track teachers (in the broadest sense, including grad students who have a good chance of tenure), and so they have to find a way to get more. This puts a finger on the scale, and encourages people who would otherwise find something healthier to do, to sacrifice themselves on the altar of Academia. This is, in my opinion, a corrupting influence.
Ah, here's a parallel. It's like movie producers telling young actresses that they have a chance at being a star, but only if they show that they're "willing to do what it takes", which means the "casting couch".
I don't get why my nice tenure-track job exists. I teach political science in a largely undergraduate program (no PhD students, sort-of-related Masters program) in an institution that excels in STEM. Nobody is expecting truly great research out of *anybody* in my liberal arts college. Anybody in it who does do great research moves on to a more prestigious university (especially for social science) in no time. So, why even have 30% of the faculty in my department (and college) on this much more expensive tenure track. The university's overall reputation is made by scientists and engineers. I think there's a lot of path dependence and a lot of prestige to publishing research even if almost all of it published in my college is... fine.
My wife is tenure track research faculty. Based on her experience, I would say the elephant in the room is grant funding.
Essentially, research faculty are as valuable as the grant money they can bring into the university. Universities get an additional 30-50% of the value of the grant paid directly to them for overhead costs (and there is little accountability for how the university chooses to spend that money). Also, research faculty are expected to fund a portion of their own salary from their grants. The percentage varies, but my wife funds 50% of her salary from her own grants, so as long as she has grants then the university only pays half. If you are research faculty with funds you are an asset. If you are research faculty without funds you are a burden. Anyone the university considers making tenured faculty needs to prove they will not be a long term burden.
The best NIH grant you can get is an R01. If a researcher has that, then your lab is funded securely for the next five years. Once you show you can write an R01 grant and get it, universities are willing to make you tenure track. If you write and get an R01 as part of your post-doc work, then you can apply to tenure track positions immediately and are likely to get one. Then all you have to do for tenure is get a second R01. However, if you finish your post-doc without an R01 then you need to find a non-tenured position and scrape by until you get a big grant.
In short, there are no superstars. There are professors with a track record of bringing money into their university and professors without that track record. From the university point of view, if your people keep getting grants it means they are probably rising to the top of their field. Or maybe a university could poach a superstar, but the actual value added is the money they bring with them. A 'superstar' that has no active grants is no longer one for the purpose if hireability.
That may be true for STEM, but not true for the humanities, arts, and social sciences, where grant funding is both rare and far less money (occasional exceptions like Templeton).
Academia is basically one of the "dream careers", in that there are tons of people who dream of doing research and/or teaching at the college level, and so you have a huge field of folks fighting over limited space. It doesn't help that by the time they're looking for tenure track jobs, your professor folk have spent virtually all of their adult life (and a big fraction of their overall life) inside academia with its peculiar ways.
great comment!
I've been asking in comments above re whether there are actually any miscalibrated expectations and why that might be: ultimately nothing intrinsically wrong with having "bad" adjunct jobs, we're talking about well-educated upper-middle class people who very much do have options who keep taking up those deals, given voluntary dealing/no coercion/external options availability imo it's hard to make the case that "harm" is somehow being done by simply offering those jobs and willing adults taking them up.
Your comment actually does answer my question: it implies yes, for many participants expectations are miscalibrated, due to cult-like culture of the domain and inculcation in the membership of a range of anti-rational beliefs (there is no life outside academia, given that one has to abandon realistic cost-benefit analysis and pursue one's only chance at salvation aka research job/tenure however low the odds might be, despite being pretty much shown the door by getting nothing better than adjunct offers etc).
The comment also presents a much more reasonable model of where the harm is being done: professors inculcating their talented undergrads/PhD students in the cult dogma above do set them up via this "neural programming" to suffer through many postdocs or adjunctorships until the maladaptive beliefs are corrected. Think this neatly resolves the (in my mind) apparent contradiction between "feels like harm is being done" and "free agents making free deals in their own self-interest can't be value distractive" econ101 sense - econ101 is limited, introducing psychologically and anthropologically plausible "limited rationality via persistent beliefs" model above resolves the issue.
"Maybe colleges really do want “superstars”, not just moderately good researchers. The value of the #1 brightest new PhD is that she has a 5% chance of becoming a future superstar; the value of the #100 brightest new PhD is that she has a 1% chance of becoming a future superstar. Once you’ve been around for five years, colleges can see your track record, satisfy themselves you’re not the next Einstein, and lose interest."
Reminds me of this by DeBoer on NFL hiring:
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-nfl-rookie-pay-scale-is-somehow
Others have said this for specific other fields above, but my main reaction to this was just: that graph of decaying chances to get into good jobs looks *right*. It looks like the way the world should be if it's functioning properly. These are all PhDs, which means that the academic world has already kicked the tyres of these people and determined which ones are roadworthy. On the first pass, most of the good ones should get swept up into the good jobs. On the second and third passes, there are fewer good ones who escaped notice first time round, so there are few hires into the good jobs.
There are presumably lots of ways in which academia is messed up, but I don't see how that graph can be one of them.
My experience is that academia is not a closed system. It's competing with private industry. And industry will always have more openings and bigger budgets.
I did my master's at a research university. Not tier 1, but well regarded in a few specific fields. My lab was swarming with tech and defense companies looking for specialists. Tenured professors would consult with or at least exchange interns with these companies. For a fresh PhD, then, the BATNA wasn't settling for a different track or a lesser university. It's getting a six-figure job offer in Huntsville and leaving academia entirely.
If industry and academia have similar demand for fresh PhDs, but industry's demand grows faster with experience, I would expect industry to win. That could generate the weird curve that Bret showed.
A few thoughts on this:
a) a lot of the most groundbreaking research in an academic's career happens when they are relatively young. Since you mention Einstein, it's worth going to take a look at how long he lived vs. his age when his most famous theories were elaborated. So this means that, to paraphrase Pulp Fiction, academic's minds don't age like fine wine like they think, but instead slowly turn to vinegar. Hence older academics who haven't become famous are not very valuable.
b) Tenure committees are probably incapable in most cases of distinguishing between candidates based on objective quality criteria (the few true megastars everyone knows about and get hired quickly, leaving a bunch of grinders who are more than capable of doing job but don't quite have the "it" factor). In that context as you say hiring the young guy who less proven either way provides more upside, but conversely if people have been on job market for years without getting tenure anywhere that also becomes an easy way for the committee to ding them. Sort of like a house that for whatever reason sits too long on the market, you start wondering what's wrong with it even if you can't see any obvious issues.
c) am skeptical it's politically acceptable to start paying professors in a differentiated and market-reflective way. If professors with similar job titles make vastly different amounts of money that's going to create tons of jealousy/infighting, and if they get truly paid free agent type money the marxist types all too common among student body are going to be picketing the president's office to fire them (like they regularly do to try to cap pay for the finance people who manage the university's giant endowment programs). Happy to be enlightened otherwise, but would be very surprised that universities compete on individual-specific pay packages in a meaningful enough way that professors would be tempted to regularly jump ship.
> So this means that, to paraphrase Pulp Fiction, academic's minds don't age like fine wine like they think, but instead slowly turn to vinegar. Hence older academics who haven't become famous are not very valuable.
The most useful older academics that I've known are no longer doing great thinking, but they're great managers of research groups. If you can bring in smart young grad students and postdocs (using your prestige), get grants (using your prestige), think up reasonable projects for them to work on (using your decades of experience and knowledge and big network of collaborators) and basically be a good manager who allows their group to be productive, then you don't need to be all that brilliant on your own any more.
Many (most?) professors don't ever make this transition properly, and the ability to manage a large research group isn't the thing that gets hired for, nor is it something that gets actively taught.
it's the same problem in most fields. Peter principle etc. Senior positions tend to require skills around sales, people management and internal politics that have little to do with those required at entry level. But despite this being a very well known problem organizations still hire / promote based on performance at second set of tasks rather than projected ability at the first, because doing otherwise would trigger a revolt (you would confine people doing a great job under a glass ceiling because they can't hack it at next level, while you promote people to manage them who were doing a worse job at lower levels, etc.)
I’m a professor… some additional clarifications. 1) Adjuncts are sometimes Ph.D.s (particularly in the humanities), but in other fields are frequently simply people who know a lot about the field (practitioners). Practitioners don’t do research, therefore they are not candidates for tenure track positions. Adjuncts with Ph.D.s are almost always out of the research game almost entirely. 2) Teaching faculty don’t have much time to do research. A full course load in many schools is 4 courses a semester, at others it’s 3. Grading, teaching, dealing with student issues, etc. all take up a great deal of time. Research is not a side-activity — it takes an incredible amount of time as well. Anyone on the teaching track is likely to not have much time for research. 3) In fields supported by grants / labs / access to technical equipment, universities frequently must fund the up-front costs in the hope that the professor will obtain grants to cover future costs. In Engineering, a startup package for a new tenure track faculty member might be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, for example.
Overall, however, the analysis that universities have a “prestige” track and a teaching track; that the teaching track has a surfeit of people willing to go into it, and that it is deliberately obfuscatory so that the “advertising” can be about prestige is spot on. To speculate a bit, I think that one of the reasons that teaching is easily undervalued (not just at the university level), is that it is so difficult to measure teaching quality. Clearly some teachers are better than others at getting students to learn the material. However, our instruments for measuring teaching quality are really terrible. By contrast, everyone can count papers, citations, and grant dollars and can assess the quality of journal that the paper is in (but assessing actual impact is very hard as well, which is why that also isn’t a big evaluative component).
Once you are on the teaching track or an adjunct you spend way more time prepping new teaching materials and applying for jobs the next year so you don’t get research time. Changing universities or being given new teaching to do every year has an enormous marginal cost compared to teaching your same courses year on year when you are TT. In some professions the journals are corrupt and they will publish the work of people who already have good prestige signals so when you get a little prestige it compounds very quickly
Working on the research side... I think it's even more dysfunctional.
There's research and academic staff. Research staff typically have to chase their sallary from grants.
Academic staff typically get a steady paycheck and don't need to chase their salary and have more teaching duties.
Many research staff enjoy research and want a quiet life but almost universaly hate the constant grind and uncertainty of chasing grants.
Many research staff at prestigious universities will at some point move into an academic post in a less prestigious university for more money and more stability.
Almost any particular field is a small world where everyone knows everyone and networks, collaborations and connections have their own value.
I was one of those PhD students who graduated with a much better teaching CV than research CV, so I was considering applying for university teaching positions when I graduated. (I ended up at an tech start-up instead.) I think I had very different impressions of the market.
(Context: American R1 institution, graduated a couple of years ago, in engineering.)
My impression was that the academic job market was primarily for research, and if you mostly wanted to teach, you were basically looking in a different job market. Traditionally, some of those people would be job-titled lecturers, and there was some grumbling among teaching-focused faculty about being treated as second-class citizens. But there was some optimism about change, as some institutions came round to treating teaching more seriously. Some departments in some research universities had started hiring for tenure-track teaching faculty positions—"with voting rights", one of my professors explained to me—with it explicit in the job title, say, "Assistant Professor (Teaching)". It wasn't super common, but those departments would've wanted to build very strong undergraduate foundational programs. Or, you could go for teaching-focused colleges, like liberal arts colleges, or engineering colleges like Harvey Mudd or Olin. But this was still functionally a different, and smaller, market to the "real" academic job market.
In the real job market, people seemed to think that hiring committees claimed to care about teaching, but didn't _really_ care. And as a student, every faculty member I knew was research-focused (and possibly loved teaching, but it wasn't their primary role), or if they were teaching-focused you knew it from their job title. So I never really felt that there was any attempt to obscure the distinction between teaching and research roles, more just that teaching roles… weren't that big a thing.
That said, I admit I can't really provide any insight into how the adjunct thing works, other than to say I didn't think it was about teaching.
The question Scott asks is an excellent one (Why Is The Academic Job Market So Weird?). I've often wondered this, and it's weird in so many different ways that answering it touches on almost every aspect of academia and higher education. It's perhaps pointless to write when there are already 300 comments (!), many of which are excellent (esp. noting the existence of postdocs in STEM), but here are a few notes from the perspective of a tenured faculty member in a natural science (Physics) at a large U.S. public university. These comments here are fairly minor; perhaps at some point I'll attempt an actual answer to the question, which I think involves (i) the existence of multiple competing, incompatible, and often cryptic goals and (ii) the mismatch between these goals and where money comes from.
1 Poaching. As many have noted, in the sciences it is essentially hopeless to go from an adjunct to a tenure track position, mainly because the former is (usually) based on teaching, and the hiring the latter is based largely on research. A more puzzling question is why there isn't much more poaching of tenured professors, since these people have *demonstrated* that they can succeed, and postdocs newly on the job market have not. I think the answers are (1) a somewhat irrational desire for young blood and (2) the higher cost of more senior faculty, especially in terms of lab startup funds (in most STEM). Also, the lack of immediate incentive for tenured people to move leads to attempted senior hire processes dragging on forever (> 1 year) and often being unsuccessful.
2 Research income. "Colleges want two things from their professors." Actually three, the third being grant funding, from which the university takes a cut (at least 30%). This also relates to the "superstar" part of the essay -- grant success isn't uniformly distributed, and superstars can bring in a lot of money.
3 "colleges will enter a bidding war to get you" -- there is remarkably little variation in salaries, and often a lot of institutional constraints on this. There are, however, bidding wars in terms of STEM startup costs. In Physics, Chemistry, and Biology, these are often ~$1M.
4 Postdocs. As others have noted, postdocs exist, which is in some sense a trial period pre tenure-track. However, schools generally don't hire their own postdocs, and this makes sense: that postdoc's research area is probably already represented by the lab he/she is in, and hiring the postdoc as faculty would create questions of nepotism, independence, etc.
Devereaux's post is also excellent, though I do think he underestimates the role of the willingness of people to take terrible jobs in encouraging the existence of terrible jobs.
It's honestly very difficult not to read Devereaux's post as mostly being an argumentum ex butthurtum over not having the tenure-track job he admits he wants. I don't think there's any real mystery about why there are many adjuncts and few tenured professors: adjuncts are cheaper and they don't have tenure so you can fire them. And as you suggest, the fact that they're teaching (a necessary evil) instead of doing research (what academics actually want) means they can be pretty crap – and since they don't have tenure, you can fire them if they're *too* crap.
And Devereaux not having a tenure-track job also seems like just a good decision by his admins, since he's rampantly ideological to the point it hurts his academics – for example, he freely admitted that he wrote his terrible "exposé" of alleged Spartan incompetence pretty much because he hates laconophilia and the ideology of those moderns who admire them, but flat out admitting it doesn't make it any better. Academia may be grossly ideologically skewed, but "being wrong on purpose to own the cons" probably still isn't what even very liberal faculty want in a researcher.
> "being wrong on purpose to own the cons" probaby still isn't what even very liberal faculty want in a researcher
I do believe you're overestimating the intellectual honesty of faculty members.
Bear in mind that Devereaux, as a specialist in European military history (a subject consisting almost entirely of the exploits of white males!), is already considered pretty ideologically suspect by the woke types.
I never really got any strong ideological tone from anything Devereaux wrote. Highly improbable that he e.g. voted for Trump, but I never saw any of his work come across as far-left.
My impression is that on today's linear scale he's center-left, but what that conceals is that he's actually coming from a somewhat Marxist school of historical analysis. Not that there's anything wrong with that.* So while he does take issue with the far-identitarian-left, it's coming from a different side of the left, rather than the right.
* If I were a Patreon subscriber of his, one thing I'd love to see him write about is different schools of historical analysis. Where they came from, what they're useful for, what their blind spots are, and how he ended up where he is.
This may be a long discussion, but what is factually "wrong" on his Sparta series, as you see it? I agree that he wore his distaste for various pro-Sparta voices openly, but I saw most of his critiques as factually correct.
Personally, I don't know of anything wrong with that particular series (aside from the political axe-grinding), but I wouldn't expect to. He knows **so much more** than me, that if he does mislead, I don't think I would be able to see it. It'd be in selective omission of facts, de-emphasis of certain lines of research, prematurely ending chains of analysis when they reach a point where they support his thesis, that sort of thing. If I tried hard, without doing research of my own, I could catch where he makes conclusions that are more sweeping than the data he presents would allow for, but how would I know that the supporting data weren't simply omitted due to space? (He does, after all, have a problem with series getting longer and longer and longer...)
And if I did by some miracle come up with something real, he would almost certainly be able to point to several sources that would back him up, and I'd have a hard time finding and reading them, much less rebutting them. You'd need a real historian for that, someone who's already read most of the important sources, and knows something about the rest, and knows the reputations of all the authors involved, and that sort of thing.
Me, I just like reading Herodotus and Thucydides and Xenophon, and occasionally some relevant historical analyses that put them into perspective.
I read them years ago, so don't expect me to recall minute details, but a few brief representative sketches:
He basically doesn't even engage with why, if the Spartans were as shit as he wants us to believe, *all their Greek contemporaries* basically thought of them as fucking invincible until Leuctra, or where the laconophilia came from *in their own time, among their enemies*. IIRC he attributes it to some sort of vague propaganda effort, something which the Spartans were notoriously contemptuous of, and washes his hands of it. I may misremember this last part, but the point is, normally, if you know that someone's contemporaries had an opinion of him which doesn't seem to match the evidence that you have, thousands of years later, you would reasonably conclude that there are gaps in the evidence and that the people who were right there may have known something you didn't.
Relatedly, I recall a long bit where he tries to axe the Spartans' reputation as the best soldiers by dealing with modern misconceptions of ignorant people, misconceptions that you probably haven't suffered from any more than me, like that the hoplite phalanx was unique to them. Again, though, this totally fails to engage with the fact that their reputation doesn't originate with jocks who saw the film 300! *Other contemporary Greeks* like Xenophon presumably knew that they were themselves hoplites and participated in phalanxes! And they still held the Spartans in high regard as the best soldiers! In fact, the modern myths are irrelevant for obvious causal reasons, except as an illustration of the longevity of their reputation! This does not seem to trouble Devereaux.
He writes a bunch of contemptuous stuff about their terrible logistics in the Peloponnesian War and doesn't really engage with the fact that this was nevertheless a war which they *unambiguously won*, including according to the Athenians who would have strong motives of their own for denying this.
He also has a huge screed about how it's stupid how people historically praised the Spartan system for its egalitarianism, even though in his position he *has to know* that what a 2nd century BC or 18th century AD aristocrat thought of as equality isn't the same thing that a 21st century Marxist consumed by envy denotes by that word.
Finally, I fully endorse Moon Moth's post. The whole benefit Devereaux has of his learning is knowing how to elide things so that laymen can't tell he did it.
yeah, adjuncts are obvious win-win for institutions filling a tricky staffing need for cheap and applicants getting the whatever "dream is still alive" fix they are craving.
the real question is why the adjuncts do it to themselves (we're talking upper-middle class adults with, objectively, plenty of options, not some hanging by the string black single working moms here).. see my one of my other comments here on what I think is a pretty compelling explanation
I think there are two equilibrium tenure cultures: a strong presumption of tenure, and a strong presumption against tenure. Anything in between leads to too much politicization and infighting. In legal academia (where I work) there is a strong presumption that a tenure-track professor will get tenure. Tenure denials are rare and traumatizing events for law faculties. One consequence of this is that there is much more pressure on the entry-level market hiring decision, because you are basically hiring this person for life unless they are good enough to lateral somewhere better.
These days hiring in law is mainly focused on how exciting/interesting/productive you are as a scholar (and secondarily on diversity and course offering considerations). In prior generations there was less of a focus on scholarship, and the model was just to hire the smartest recent law graduates (many of them supreme court clerks). But now there is basically an expectation that you will have a PhD and two or more full published articles. Adjuncts in law faculties are on an entirely different track - they are either explicitly time-limited fellowships of one or two years (with the idea that you will go on the market for a tenure track job), or they are longer-term teaching position with 0 expectation that you will ever move to the tenure track (e.g. legal writing, clinical professors, etc.).
The emphasis on scholarship for tenure-track hiring (as opposed to teaching) is, I think, a product of institutional culture rather than incentives. Faculties are self-governing and (at least at most law schools) concerned with producing interesting/important ideas. I'm not sure how much the law students themselves care about how good their professors are as scholars (I suspect very little), and the new US News rankings basically don't weight faculty scholarship at all.
Within my immediate circle of current and former colleagues there has been pro-athlete style poaching of researchers by universities and non-university academia. At t=1, t=3, through t=25 years from completion. Within Engineering, Physics, and CS.
My advisor was poached from R2 to R1, months before I joined his newly forming group. 50-ish guy then. My sister’s advisor had the same - her first advisor had been recently poached from a DOE lab to R1 university. Both cases were university corporate donors who committed to funding specific research expansion, then deans etc headhunted - not existing grantors coming along with professors/researchers deciding to go looks for greener pastures. Full disclosure: I quit mine, my little sis quit hers.
Within CS there are 10+ professors or PhD’d researchers I know personally who have been approached by approached by at least one university dean/board member/prestigious alum with an offer of “come join us, we want you, and have funding lined up + new space for you + (perks)”.
But since it’s CS, and decently talented folks with recognized achievements start at $1m-$2m base salary + $xM I’m stock at any one of hundreds of tech companies, universities have to compete to play for that talent.
As an academic drop-out I do want to mention that in my experience the tenure track profs are sometimes Einsteins, and often just people who know how to play the funding/publication game.
My advisor was a "meeting post" type. He published a paper in the 80s that sparked a bunch of futurist speculation in the media. The research itself did not end up being seminal in the field, but it happened to catch the public's imagination at the time.
He leveraged that fame/prestige into setting up a self-reinforcing cycle. He has access to a lot of funding, so he attracts a lot of smart people into his lab. A small subset of those students end up doing interesting work. He takes those students and parades them through conferences and such, which secures him more funding.
So cynically, universities mostly compete for prestige. And prestige has little to do with meaningful contributions to human knowledge, at least in my experience.
In terms of colleges being good at predicting research success, and virtuous/vicious cycles, this is what things look like from my perspective as a math postdoc.
There are 50-100 top universities that hire full research professors. When I talk about tenured positions I will be talking about these research positions, despite the fact that many other positions are also tenured with some level of teaching. You can determine if a professor is a research professor or not by looking at their teaching load. It varies by field, in math the lowest teaching load at top universities is typically 1,2 which means you teach 1 class one semester, and 2 classes the other. A position with 1,2 teaching load is a research position. A 2,2 teaching load is mainly a research position as well. 3,3 is a teaching position with maybe a little research on the side, and anything more like 4,4 is entirely teaching. This is just a fact of life because there are only so many hours in the day and time spent teaching is time spent not doing research. (these numbers are for math. For chemistry/physics and other sciences the teaching loads are lower, say 0,1 or 1,1 for research positions. This seems to be because everyone takes math classes in college, but many students never take a chem or physics class so less teachers are needed, also likely because other sciences bring in big grants for labs and universities like this. Math is a bit weird in being a STEM field which requires next to no funding or grants to do good research.)
Research professors are hired entirely based on their research prospects and teaching is essentially irrelevant. Tenured Research positions tend to be very comfortable, and have many more good applicants than there are positions. You can tell how impacted/competitive a field is by looking at how many years people with recent tenure track offers spent in postdocs (short term research positions that are not tenure track) before they got that offer. In math people typically do ~3 years of postdocs. In theoretical physics I hear it is more like ~6 years. In econ I hear it is often ~0 years so many people are hired right out of grad school. There are people who get tenure track offers in math right out of PhD but these people are exceptional even among people who make tenure track and were successful enough in their PhD research that they were at basically no risk of not getting tenure somewhere if they did a few years of postdoc.
I see 3 reasons for the empirical fact that if someone does not get a tenure track research position after the standard number of years in their field plus one or two years, they are likely to never get one. (So if you have been a math postdoc and not gotten a tenure track research offer after 4-5 years you likely won’t get one.)
First: People have different levels of aptitude in research. Some people are strong on some combination of intelligence/hard-work/choosing good research problems/having a personality well suited to research. People who are sufficiently good at this are usually apparent by the end of PhD or a few years after. People get tenure track offers when it becomes obvious they have this, so if you haven’t gotten an offer after doing a PhD and a few years of postdoc, then you have spent a lot of years doing research without displaying this. Universities want someone who has a chance to do crazy good research. After you have spent 6 to 8 years doing research in PhD and after, the chance of you suddenly getting a bunch of way better results is not that high. Skill caps are very real in math research and the top end is extremely high. I was pretty successful in PhD and have a Postdoc at a top 20 school, but I knew several grad students who made me look like a lazy idiot. Think 5 times as many papers as me and their best papers are orders of magnitude better than mine.
Second: The more promising you appear as a researcher, the more likely you are to find postdocs with no teaching load or very little teaching load. This means you have more time to focus on research than the people who looked a bit less promising, and the gap widens.
Third: If you have done obviously good research in the past then people are more likely to reach out to you about exciting questions in the field because they know you might be able to help solve them, and people are more receptive to working with you on projects you are excited about. This means if you have better research than someone else at the end of your PhD, then you will likely collaborate with better researchers in the following years and have more/better research problems to choose from.
Another fourth thing that is not very relevant in math but is relevant in experimental sciences is lab funding. Someone with more promising research gets a postdoc at a top 5 lab with a bunch of cutting edge equipment, and their friend with less promising research goes to a top 50 lab with decent equipment. There are more opportunities to do exciting research with better lab equipment. I work in math so I don’t know how big an effect this has.
Getting a tenure track research position many years later than usual does occasionally happen but it is quite rare. Examples of this look something like Yitang Zhang, who spent 22 years after finishing his PhD in several positions including lecturer and accountant, then surprised everyone by proving an extremely impressive result related to the twin prime conjecture. He won a bunch of prestigious prizes for this and got a tenured position at UCSB 2 years later. This is an extreme case, but the general idea is colleges want research professors who get results that are so good they attract people to the college. For people early in their career, universities speculate a bit based on the quality of your previous research. If you want to get a tenure track position more than a few years later than usual, you probably need to get a result that big before you get that position. That late in your career colleges will not speculate on you.
Maybe graduate students are the missing link in all of this? Prestige doesn't just come from top-level professors, it also comes from students which find immediate success upon leaving the school. Job guarantees are a big recruitment tactic, after all. So, tenure track positions are given to recent graduates, in order to pad the school's success rate. But, hiring too many of your own students is suspicious, so colleges dance around this restriction by hiring externally, weaving a sort of web of academic interdependence. This probably wouldn't be feasible in a different industry, but with all of the collaborative research and critique going on, I'd wager that tenured professors from a broad range of colleges are fairly well connected.
This is barking up the wrong tree. There is a strong prejudice *against* hiring your own students. And in any case, most graduate students will not get a tenure track job, even at the most prestigious universities.
Maybe I wasn't clear? The prejudice against hiring your own students explains why so many universities hire externally. Even if most students don't get a tenure track position, the majority of the ones that do receive it immediately following the receipt of their PhD.
In order to maintain the prestige gained from students which immediately find success, universities mutually give tenure track positions to external, inexperienced workers.
Also doesn’t work. At least in stem there is usually a postdoc period between graduation and TT hire
I'm just working off of the graph that I was given. Check the post, it clearly shows that the majority of Assistant Professors are hired within a year of getting their PhD, with significant drop off for every year after that.
The graph is particular to history. STEM is different.
When asking the question "What process carves off 30% of professors to get good pay and benefits, but passes over the rest?" it's very important to note that the process is not in equilibrium. Tenure track roles used to be a much higher proportion, but that proportion fell in the past few decades and is seemingly continuing to fall.
You have to think of the "superstars" thing a bit like venture capitalists with Unicorns. They're gambling on "potential", but the potential they're hoping for is even more rarely realized than you're thinking: literal Einstein (or at minimum Weinberg, who according to legend demanded to be paid more than the football coach). Everybody else, they're trying to find a really big story really early. So what you get is kind of the same dynamic where people invested in Theranos rather than a comparable startup that wasn't run by a charismatic Stanford dropout. (It's also like Theranos because of the reputation cascades: the top people like this person, so they must have potential, so we bid them up, etc.)
Now, does that mean they're unhappy with superstars they hire who are not literal Einstein? No, because everyone else (grant agencies, philanthropists, heck on a "what is worth covering" level science journalists) is trying to make the same gamble. So as long as a sub-Einstein/Weinberg superstar can keep seeming like they could end up as Einstein/Weinberg later, people will keep throwing money and status at them, and the university won't need to spend much in the way of resources to keep them around.
(Disclaimer: I'm saying this from the perspective of a (sub-)field that in general does not do the adjunct thing. I know zero people in my field who became adjuncts, and a lot more who left to do data science or machine learning or finance.)
I'm a professor at a "teaching college" in Europe. I don't mean that research doesn't happen here, but (1) it's not supposed to be a priority and (2) what research does happen is applied research, i.e., industry projects.
Even so, research sounds so sexy to the school administration. I am a teaching professor, and always have been. A few years ago they put in the requirement for me to...publish? At first, I cheated by publishing pop-sci articles. Now, with only a couple of years to retirement, forget it. By the time they notice my paper deficit, I will be gone.
What I find hard to understand is this: Educating our young people is a hugely important task. Why does the school administration not understand that? Why are they suddenly trying to compete with research university that have different staff, nationally funded laboratories, etc, etc? We cannot compete in that space, and wasting effort to do so distracts from what we are supposed to be doing.
Finally, allow me to offend a lot of academics: There are too many low quality PhD students, and low quality universities awarding them degrees. Almost every university has a bunch of PhD programs, which they want to fill, because PhD students make for cheap labor as TAs and even teachers. Most of those PhD students don't do useful research, but they serve their purpose for a few years and get their doctorate as a reward. Then they join the ranks of adjuncts, driving the pay even lower.
"There are too many low quality PhD students, and low quality universities awarding them degrees."
This appears to be a problem throughout humanist academia, not just on the PhD tier. Far too many bad BA students getting places on bad courses who then get bad degrees from bad colleges. And on the other end of the scale, bad professors of bogus subjects like queer theory and whatever the hell happened to ethnology.
> But why aren’t colleges more like un-salary-capped sports teams, trying to outbid one another for their rivals’ superstars?
There are three big pieces missing in this analysis:
a) The "superstars" have their own ambitions about what kind of places they want to work in. Adjuncts who become "superstars" move to more prestigious places, but they can be offered better positions where they currently are too. See e.g. Yitang Zhang, who solved a big maths problem and then, quoting wikipedia: "He served as lecturer at UNH from 1999 until around January 2014, when UNH appointed him to a full professorship as a result of his breakthrough on prime numbers. Zhang stayed for a semester at The Institute For Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, in 2014, and he joined the University of California, Santa Barbara in fall 2015."
b) It's not so much about money - working in a "top tier" place with "top tier" people and better research funding (often from external grants) seems to be more motivating than getting more money yourself. The people who want to make money are already pre-selected against, or they make money from side-hustles.
c) Such poaching *does* happen, but is usually more subtle. See e.g. KAUST, a Saudi university which pays enormous amounts of money for researchers to be affiliated with them (and sometimes also work there). It's working moderately well.
Wrote up my take:
https://rgonstuff.substack.com/p/whats-the-deal-with-adjuncts-suffering
The idea is that deficient guidance leads to sticky unrealistic expectations causing adjuncts (and to a lesser extent other "trying to break into academia" players) to engage in what to outsiders seems like self-harmful and irrational behavior
I cannot claim I read all 351 comments carefully, but one thing I have barely seen mentioned, which is the big thing, is that most of these tenure track jobs are held by people who have been in their job for years and likely decades. As they retire, many of these tenure track lines are simply abolished instead of being filled by someone else. The 30 percent mentioned by Devereaux is likely to shrink a lot further, and many subfields are basically dead as tenure-track already. Tenure as it was once known is likely to vanish in our lifetimes. (And this is completely separate from any political attacks on the concept. DeSantis et al. are simply trying to hasten the inevitable.)
Going big picture for a moment, this is clearly the same process that Turchin describes for lawyers.
https://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/bimodal-lawyers-how-extreme-competition-breeds-extreme-inequality/
Lawyers are traditionally elite jobs, but there's just too many credentialed professionals to admit them all into the elite, and on the other hand too much demand for their work to limit the number of jobs available to them, and on the third hand there's little incentive for the current elite to forego their own professions' elite status. So the elite status remains available, but only for a select few - some actual superstars, but mostly the current elites' progeny and proteges. The rest remain commoners with elite job titles.
I think this is right. It’s all about money but also about who controls the money. University’s make money from three ways: student income, research grants and philanthropy. They are all proportional to prestige which is proportional to research metrics of top researchers more or less so hiring them brings in more student dollars. Once students are committed the teaching just needs to be at a certain level and you’re good so no need to compete on teaching just hire bare basic there and cut it to the bone and use the rest of the money to subsidize research so you can max out support for top researchers. And I agree make the titles confusing so everyone thinks they’re being taught by the top researchers. Prestigious researchers also bring in more research money as they can put in more competitive grant apps because they have the metrics and the money for a big team who are all providing them with data and help writing grant apps. Those people can then make demands about how they want things to be as otherwise they’ll go and take the money with them. Also it’s the prestigious researchers and their friends who all decide who gets the funding as they are the ones who review grants and who funding agencies and journal editors seek advice from. So they structure the system to benefit themselves. This is natural and unsurprising. You might think it’s ok if the system were actually good at picking excellent researchers but really it’s not, it’s good at picking people who can play the game well. Which means making friends with the right people to get good reviews getting invites to the right conference etc. These tend to be very outgoing people who are socially very skilled but often scientifically pretty mediocre. Also they tend to be a lot older as relationships tend to accrue. Same reason the leadership got real old
In the Soviet Union. Like it takes forever to get high up in academia to a position where you can actually influence things as you have to be a senior researchers which means old. Like it’s almost structurally impossible to lead anything in academia unless it’s in a field where you can bring in large amounts of money from a rapidly growing new industry. Like in comparison to the age of ceos of breakthrough companies it is kind of silly how old academic leadership tends to be.
I haven't managed to look at all the comments, so sorry if this repeats someone. I've spent time as a part-time teaching lecturer (in the UK, may be a bit different), and one thing is that you spend your time preparing and teaching – there isn't much time to do the research/publishing stuff you need in order to appeal to a TT job recruiter. Perhaps a fresh PHD is [a] current in all the required new stuff a university needs (both academic and cultural – i.e. progressive, whatever, doctrine), [b] fresh and ready to do research as that's what they have just been doing. [c], possibly, young and malleable to be moulded for the politics of the institution. (No, I'm being frivolous...)
The usual path for research STEM faculty is to get a PhD and then do a postdoc, after which the best researchers have had time to develop and often have stronger records than people with much more experience. Some people are late bloomers and do a second or third postdoc and succeed after that, but being hired as a teaching adjunct usually means failure to get a good additional postdoc.
I was hired as tenure track at MIT after being a postdoc at MIT and doing a PhD that involved working with MIT professors. If a college really wants you, they'll be happy to higher you for tenure track even if you were already there. If you perform above expectations along the tenure track, other colleges will try to higher you away and offer large salaries. If you perform below expectations you might be denied tenure.
I haven’t read all the comments, so apologies if this point has been made.
I think a hypothesis has been skipped. Departments (who do the vetting of tenure-track candidates) have a pretty good idea of who can be a thought leader based upon their graduate level research and pedigree. A candidate who attends a top tier institution and has a thought leader as an advisor has a better chance of becoming one of the prestigious research professors of the future. So, the promising candidates get hired out of grad school and are retained by the institution that hired them. Of course there are surprise outliers, adjuncts who publish important work while maintaining a heavy teaching load, but this is uncommon.
There are also errors in the other direction, hires who get to tenure then rest on their laurels, but this is also uncommon.
I’m not defending the system, but noting that the data can indicate a type of market efficiency.
> But then why do they only hire inexperienced people? Why only people from outside their own institution? Here I’m even more confused, but a few guesses:
Surely some degree of this is the woke purity tests?
A young person is likely better at being for all the required beliefs, like supporting newly trans rapists being legally considered women, have a shorter history on social media and head just has exploded at the rapid swapping of beliefs where they confuse the politics situation of 6 months ago as the current beliefs, maybe they don't remember bird flu at all so when corona happens they are a blank slate for whatever medical claims are acceptable this month(masks dont work, we lied about masks for front line workers, masks outside 50 feet away from anyone are saving lives) or that obama bombed civilians and so can believe that if a black man was in the white house Americas forien policy would be magic.
A far away institution probably has less knowledge of what someone has said in private.
All this is making me *so glad* I left academia.
It’s making me very glad I ignored the advice to just take out debt to go to a phd program. Got lots of advice to do that, now work less and make more than my peers who did.
My PhD was funded by a national research council (pretty standard over here, at least for STEM), and I don't regret it: it probably reduced my total lifetime earnings, but I think having "Doctor" in front of my name helps me get more interesting jobs. I *do* regret my postdoc, which destroyed my mental health.
What subject were you considering taking out debt for a PhD in? In the sciences no one ever takes out debt to do a PhD at a credible program. Your study is either funded by an NSF fellowship or other fellowship if you're lucky or it's fuded by a teaching assistantship/research assistantship. My advisor told me it's not considered acceptable in the field to admit a student to a PhD program without any kind of funding.
A lib-ed one, where this is not the case. Even top 10 programs tend to admit 12 students and only fully cover 8 or 10 and ratios like that.
I'll echo what others have said about this post, and the relevant source, not generalizing well to STEM, confusion as to why postdocs were not mentioned at all.
To Scott's final confusion: Why not hire everyone in some low level capacity?
I can only speak for STEM fields, but my impression was that this is what Assistant profs used to be. There were many openings and it wasn't too competitive, but getting tenure was quite hard. This is essentially placing low-stakes bets on many people, and seeing who becomes a superstar. Now it is flipped in that it is very hard to get a faculty job at anywhere doing high quality research: my department recently went through ~400 applications for a position and made no offer... but tenure (although not guaranteed) is much easier. I've heard that MIT and other places are still "old-fashioned" in this regard.
The confusion is then stated as: why did things change? I don't have a great answer. Perhaps it is related to funding structures. I'm not convinced that Scott's idea would be any better than what we have now, because most people don't end up becoming superstars.
Another subtlety: faculty in some of the sciences can be divided into two categories:
1) Research faculty: these people win grants (from which the Uni takes a cut), advise many students, and teach ~a course per semester. Typically these would be more applied fields like quantum information, biological physics, condensed matter be they theorist or experimentalists
2) "Liberal arts faculty": Profs who can't win grants because they work on fields no one funds (String theory, quantum fundamentals), but the uni takes them on because of the "prestige" of having them. They aren't making the uni any money, and many of their students (if they have any) are supported by external fellowships. Dominantly theorists, and they all teach; most of their courses are hard! (A friend of mine took a course from a string theorist who handed out the final, said "I'm sorry" and left the room)
There are vanishingly few of 2), if any, in the biomedical sciences, a few in Evolutionary bio, and a bit more (but still few) in Physics/Math. Many don't properly separate these and get further confused when trying to understand why the responsibilities and hiring for some faculty can be so varied. The vast majority of real liberal arts faculty follow a model like this where support comes almost entirely from the university.
Does anyone understand the first "plot"? I've only known one STEM grad to get a faculty job directly after their PhD (and they were told it would be better to do a postdoc first!); most postdoc gigs are 2--4 years. Among Social sciences / Humanities I've known a few, -- but my impression is that there are far fewer openings per year in these fields. I'm very confused....perhaps only the ones who know they can get a job apply their first year out, and the applicant pool is just much larger in the 2-4 year range?
Article brings some interesting points, despite it has been deeply discussed in media and with professionals and organizations in the field.
As I am involved, I’d like to put here my perspective here more impartial possible.
So, at first, and been absolutely partial only in that subject, I don’t think everybody who was taking to this job, actually was looking for fame and money. Primarily, I dislike generalizations once they never will represent the whole, soon even if it is the minority, this shouldn’t be desmoralize or not listen because of the main majority.
FACTS:
Actually, particularly in this situation, the individual who was recruited and he/she didn’t look for or apply for the job.
He/she capability of production has to be measure by the amount of tasks, challenges and daily work and homework, which, maybe you doesn’t have this known, but the program is established in a progressive school, where students are launched. While the tests requires a great deal of memorization, (it’s all about “mind games”), it can be told it is not purely educational. It is about stressing in the maximum level students to make them learn focus and learning in the worst scenarios. In that way, they can learn how to unblock and access contain they even know it was there.
The main factor that some scientists disagree is about not to teach and develop the necessary skills before start the training. The program consist in make the student self-learning. Detail: it is require lots of technical skills.
Considering less than six months, I consider the improvement and increase of the individual very impressive.
But, to be honest and impartial, I will let the own scientists give you the results:
https://youtu.be/xoVJKj8lcNQ
The numbers before and after it is really impressive.
Thank you for the space and anyone who wants to discuss or ask something I am at disposal.
🥰🙌💃
I think the major component of "why is it so weird" is that status draw.
There are literally something like 20 people working on PhDs and post-doctorates, hoping for a hire of some sort, for every possible position to fill.
The closest analogous market I can think of is acting in movies, and we know just how messed up Hollywood hiring is.
All these theories assume that departments are acting in their own rational best interest, so I'd like to propose a totally different explanation: the failure of decision by committee.
An adjunct who has worked in the department for 6 months to a couple years is known to the people on the hiring committee; their work, their attitude, their skill set. Some of the people on the hiring committee will like them and want to bring them on, but others will be looking for someone else (more research focused, less research focused, more interested in teaching a particular class, better at teaching certain classes, particular personality differences, etc etc etc). A new applicant is unknown, and everyone can convince themselves that "maybe this person is what I'm hoping for", and so gets more general support (or at least, less severe no votes).
I think I can answer Scott's questions but warning: this comment is long. I did my Ph.D in the natural and physical sciences at a top 10 institution and now have a tenure track job at a small liberal arts college where I teach several classes per semester and do some research. Some background first.
About teaching: Teaching is particularly time and attention consuming. When I'm teaching, especially large undergraduate classes, the top thought in my brain is usually about that. Research is also time and attention consuming, so even for talented people it's hard to do both. If I take on research that's too ambitious I'm likely to fall behind the rest of the field or get scooped entirely because I work more slowly since my attention is split with teaching. Research also moves fast, with new techniques being adopted over a period of a few years. Being out of a research area for several years, or just being slow to keep up because of a heavy teaching load, means you have a lot of learning to do if you want to try to ramp up your research productivity, on top of the time and difficulty of the research itself. Most people who try to be good at both solve this by working on problems that aren't very interesting to anyone else where it doesn't matter if they go slow. Or, they work at prestigious liberal arts colleges with lower teaching loads and more resources for research. Ruthless time management is also important, but not enough on its own.
About grants: Productive researchers don't just add to a college's prestige, they also contribute financially. They are expected to bring in millions of dollars in grants of which 40-50% goes to "overhead", where the college takes the money and uses it for whatever they want, and the grantee doesn't see any of that. Grant funds are also used to pay graduate student "tuition." This is another transfer from grant funds to college since on paper graduate tuition is as much as or more than undergraduate tuition even though for most of their Ph.D the student isnt taking any real classes, just doing research full time. The student never pays a bill, it just comes out of their advisor's grant funds.
About networking: Getting grants is partly about actually having good ideas and results, and partly about convincing reviewers that you have good ideas and good results. For research that is good but not outstanding it's a subjective decision who to fund and who not to. Since reviewers are other researchers in your subfield, there are high returns to networking and selling your work. People preoccupied with teaching don't have time to do this at all, while prestigious researchers spend a huge amount of time on it in the form of giving talks and going to conferences - my former advisor was often away for weeks or months at a time. Top 10 graduate schools are also full of networking opportunities, eg. the college pays for students to take visiting professors in their subfield out to lunch.
Ok, now to answer the questions:
1. In the natural and physical sciences colleges can't hire everyone into a low commitment job because just to get started requires a huge commitment, usually a startup package in the hundreds of thousands or millions. Colleges put this up because they expect to make it back later in graduate tuition and overhead from future grants. They can't do this for everyone because if the new hire flames out, they wasted a bunch of money on stuff that will be hard for others to re use like salaries for graduate students and postdocs, consumables, and specialized equipment or instruments that may not be useful to anyone else.
2. Colleges mostly hire new Ph.Ds or recent postdocs because they are current in their field and haven't fallen behind by spending all their time on teaching. If they are politically savvy they have also been networking with others in their subfield during their graduate and postdoc years which makes them more competitive both for grants and for getting the job in the first place. Colleges do sometimes hire experienced superstars by poaching them from other colleges, but usually you need to offer an established superstar a very sweet deal to get them to move, like their own building. Superstars bring in more grant funds but not that much more, so the decision usually only makes sense if you think trading money for prestige is a good deal, which it only is at top 10 institutions.
3. I'm not certain why departments have a cultural norm of preferring to hire from other institutions. My former advisor told me it's because they dislike the appearance of neopotism. Maybe, but I suspect it's also because cross hiring is good for networking. If your entire department was trained at your institution and mostly knows each other you'll be at a disadvantage when applying for grants or looking for collaborators.
These weird confusing things happen less in fields where research is cheap, like math, or where cushy highly paid industry jobs are readily available, like CS. In math Yitang Zhang went from adjunct to superstar by solving a huge open problem. This worked because he didn't need specialized equipment, worked on it slowly for literally decades, and the problem was so hard he wasn't in much danger of being scooped. In CS it's more common for senior people to transition back and forth between academia and industry.
Thanks for that explanation. I remember there used to be something called a "teaching college", which I always took to mean a college where faculty had significant teaching loads every semester, but did little new research. Does this track no longer exist? Or not in some fields? Or did I always misunderstand the concept?
Thanks again.
There are many "primarily undergraduate institutions" that are what you describe, including small liberal arts colleges and large primarily teaching focused institutions that don't grant Ph.Ds. Usually at these there is some research expectation, but notably smaller than top 10 or big state universities, with more focus on training undergraduates as researchers over doing top-tier research. Faculty at these get tenure and have reasonable (not amazing) pay and benefits, probably somewhere between teaching professor and tenure track at a large school.
Not a current academic but family members are.
1.) You really, really can't do good research and have a heavy teaching load at the same time. Your proposed idea of "hire adjuncts and see who turns out to be superstars" doesn't make sense. The adjuncts will not have the time (or, in lab science, the grant funding) to demonstrate that they are superstar researchers.
2.) As many other people have said, poaching absolutely happens.
3.) Maybe this has changed recently and my experience is pretty math-specific, but traditionally my impression is that academics fundamentally trust Academia's ability to recognize a researcher's quality, and trust that department rankings accurately reflect department quality.
The model is, "good people get jobs at top institutions right out of grad school; those who don't are probably not good."
Sure, there's general acknowledgment that there are more qualified people than there are tenure-track positions, so good people get rejected all the time, and there's an element of luck in career advancement. Everyone knows this. Everyone also knows that there are "who you know not what you know" elements and you're more likely to get hired/promoted if you have personal relationships with people influential in the department.
Somehow this doesn't seem to translate to an equally firm belief that there are underrated people who "got unlucky" on the job market but would be as valuable to the department as their luckier peers, or a desire to "scoop up" underrated applicants.
Losing, it seems, brands you as a loser...even though *everyone knows* that many excellent people must lose every year through bad luck alone, by virtue of too many people chasing too few jobs!
While a lot of the incentives here make sense, having spent most of my life being raised by/married to college professors who have been part of or run the hiring process for their departments, this doesn't match the process on the ground as I've heard about it.
I think it mostly fails by imagining 'the school' to be a unified entity with coherent goals and plans, rather than a conglomerate institution with a a bunch of heavily divided and often openly antagonistic factions.
To whit: my impression is mostly that colleges and universities have pretty strong unions for professors, which want to have 100% high-paid tenure-track positions. Who are in a constant state of cold war with the very powerful and goal-oriented administrators, who want 100% cheap adjunct positions.
(Or, if they're trying to be a top-tier prestigious institution, maybe want 10% tenure track all-stars and 90% cheap adjuncts. But if you're looking at national statistics rather than anecdotes from the ivy leagues, those few prestigious schools will get swamped by the thousands of community colleges and 'average' local colleges that make up the bulk of the numbers)
What I've seen is basically a slow shift in the power balance, with administrators ratcheting in few more adjunct positions every time there's a lean year of budget-tightening, and giving handouts to the old tenured professors who are about to leave anyway to molify the unions, while never actually adding more tenure positions back in when things are good again.
As for why there's a preferences for newer professors in tenure-track positions, I think there are three main factors I have seen in action:
1. Being an adjunct for 8 years and applying for a tenured position is sort of like being unemployed or working as a Walmart greeter for 5 years and then trying to get hired as a program lead on a large software project. Everyone knows that being an adjunct sucks, and there's an assumption that if you haven't been able to get a better job than that for many years on end, there's probably a reason why. It's taken as strong evidence against your quality as candidate.
2. Professors always want their department to tech exciting new ideas and use exciting new techniques that the field has developed sine the last time they were is school, but they almost never want to take the time (or have the resources) to learn enough about them to teach them themselves. Hiring the freshest graduate means getting the newest techniques and ideas and feeling a little bit less behind the times and a little more useful to your students.
3. Because the administration keeps shrinking the number of tenured jobs, the remaining tenured faculty form sort of a 'core' that serves as the heart and soul of the department, and ensures its values and character get preserved into the future. This is probably tacitly the #1 thing that existing tenured professors care about when they interview for tenure track positions, they are basically hiring the new pillars that will have to fight with them in the trenches and continue fighting after they're gone to keep the department healthy and independent, and they'd much rather get a new pillar that is young and will be there for 40 years than one that is experienced and will be there for 20 years. (And of course, the less experience they have, the more you can impose your own values and priorities to teh new hires who will have to carry them after you retire)
“Colleges want to pretend to students that the same people are doing both these jobs, because students like the idea of being taught by prestigious thought leaders.”
I get the 2nd half of this in the most basic sense, but outside of the most elite schools, I'm wondering what anyone's thoughts are on the percent of college students (or their parents) who even know that some professors do both those jobs, what the tenure system is, or what a research university is and whether or not they attend one, especially the further you get from the hard sciences. I was a philosophy major in the early oughts and don’t think I had a clue. I'm currently doing a PhD at a public R1 and would put the percentage very low in the classes I've taught in human development/ed psych- both undergrad and master’s level.
The worst part, is that industry professionals aren't in the mix.
Let's face it, for STEM degrees, the student is really earning a ticket to apply for a vocation. Let's give them a step from university to industry.
Who are the most impressive vocational instructors? Those who have spent ten years in the industry, not the bloke who couldn't really cut it in industry. What do graduating students really need? Internships, industry contacts ... the very things that vocational instructors who rotated out of industry can provide.
Most of even our high school teachers should be drafted out of industry for a year of teaching, then return. In my senior year, I saw the least motivated students say 'I'll just take the BA and become a high school teacher.' Oh right, that person is going to be a great motivator. [last sentence was sarcastic tone]
What do you mean industry professional aren't in the mix? If you're talking STEM (which you explicitly are) then there absolutely is lateral movement between the tenure track faculty and industry research lab systems. Also between TT faculty and national labs.
Suprisingly few mentions of the fact that this isn't a steady-state situation. It's adjunct*ification* that he's talking about.
The process is optimised for hiding problems more than anything else. It's easier to quietly shift more people to the 2nd class track than to make the experience of members of either track (especially the 1st class one) worse.
Honestly this would be an interesting situation to throw a marxist lens at. The preference for choosing the tenure-track ἐκλεκτοί as soon as possible in their career separates those who will make the decisions from those who will bear the brunt of them.
I'm reading B. Devereaux and thinking; this is just like the moral mazes (by Zvi), (middle management capture of the 'ropes of power' of the institution.) It's a piece of Moloch. What to do? Maybe teaching colleges and research universities. With only a smaller percentage (of students) going onto research. There would still be research at the teaching college, but the focus would be the students and not some new result... though 'new' stuff happens every where, all the time.
Oh and cut out the middle management, Profs have to run the place.
I'm in computer science, and think maybe what I say below is somewhat true of close disciplines like math or engineering, not sure about other fields though.
> Or it could be a vicious cycle - if hiring committees dismiss you, then grantmakers and journal editors will also dismiss you, and you won’t have the resources you need to do great work.
> Here’s another question that confuses me even more: Why don’t colleges hire everyone in some low-commitment capacity, maybe as adjuncts, wait to see who becomes superstars, then poach them?
The vicious cycle is more like this (and explains why the second strategy won't work): It is almost impossible to do good research without a job that grants you significant time to do research. Yes, Einstein was a patent clerk, but guess what... he's Einstein. The rest of us need much more time to think and devote to research if we want to get anything done.
Adjuncts have high teaching loads and little time for research, so it's rare for them to improve their research record while working that job.
To counter your claim about preferring newly-minted PhDs... actually more experience DOES help you get a tenure-track job. I was a postdoc for 6 years and got a WAY better job than I could have straight out of my PhD. With a few exceptions, most people we've hired in my department since I got there have several years of postdoc experience (or were tenure-track faculty at another institution).
Postdocs are somewhat similar to adjuncts in being lower status and having no job security. (In fact, their job is guaranteed to end after 1-5 years, whereas an adjunct can in principle stay indefinitely.)
But the key difference: since a postdoc's job is almost exclusively research (or say for math postdocs, have a low teaching load, so still lots of time for research) they can improve their research record in a way that's much more difficult for an adjunct teaching 2-3 courses per term. No one is as *single-handedly* productive in research as a postdoc: they have the research skills of a professor coupled with the free time of a PhD student. (Professors with lots of papers every year typically have lots of PhD students and postdocs working for them, but if they were on their own they'd publish less than a typical postdoc due to their extra job duties.)
I've never seen anyone on a hiring committee ding someone just because they are an adjunct. I've just never seen an adjunct with a strong research record apply in our department. Obviously there will be a counter-example someday, and likely there are counter-examples now, and I'm not making a claim about any individual adjunct. But the law of large numbers kicks in at some point to make the *average* postdoc much more research-productive than the *average* adjunct.
> But are superstars really that loyal and inert?
No, they aren't. Lots of poaching happens, as discussed by the other commenters.
But you really have to be a SUPERstar. If you're merely doing well, then that's typically not enough to get hired by a place even at the same rank as your current university, and certainly not enough to move UP. In general, it's much more difficult to get hired as an Associate Professor (the rank just after you get tenure) at a university than it is to be granted tenure (i.e., to be promoted from tenure track Assistant Professor to tenured Associate Professor) at that same university.
Am I right in saying that this article focusses on the US academic market? How does it generalize to e.g. Europe or Asia?
Here's my guess: Once someone has been an adjunct patiently for five years, you figure they'll probably still stay on even if you don't give them tenure.
Or roughly the same thing from another perspective, maybe people who care about money will leave academia within five years unless offered a tenure or tenure-track job. The rest can be taken advantage of.
The article mentions this:
"Now you may ask why anyone would take a job like that with poor pay (for a job that requires a PhD!), no job security and no benefits. And of course the answer is ‘because they have no other choice;’ leaving academia, even temporarily for a non-academic job is generally a career death sentence"
This is my question, and the answer is provided, though I consider it unsatisfactory. Someone with a PhD should be able to be hired into some useful, PhD-related position, unless the degree is in something purely academic, like history. One should, therefore, if one aspires to a career involving a university and cannot get on the tenure track, then one should hope to come to the university as a "professor of practice".
Anyone who can earn a PhD ought, by definition, to be intelligent. I still don't understand how the majority of adjunct professors would maintain that position and fruitless hope for a tenured position under those conditions for more than two years.
I have recently started as an Assistant Professor at an R1 institution, in biology/life sciences. I think the reason places try to avoid hiring internally is twofold: the first as Scott identifies is that there would otherwise be pressure to keep everyone, including more marginal hires, since you know them. But there is a second stronger force - R1 institutions are trying to hire faculty that will become the next superstars. And it is a LOT harder to become a superstar, with your own independent brand, if you stay at the institution where your previous mentors are located. Initially most people in the field at large will assume the ideas came from the mentors and you just executed them. There are exceptions of course - post-docs and trainees who are so good that they already have a lot of their own recognition in the field, and often these are the very few people who are recruited and retained internally.
The stated reasoning of many places that don't hire internally for tenure-track professorships is to intellectually diversify - bring in others from outside the institution to give them a chance to impress you and showcase their ideas, which are presumably more distinct from those of people you've trained internally, who are necessarily shaped by whomever is already at the institution. I think there is probably truth and value to this perspective as well.
Academic in mid-tier university in the United Kingdom here. I want to explain concretely how the graph makes sense (which others have done fairly well), but also to provide some context about the financial incentives to the university that may be UK-specific.
For academic teaching & research jobs (which may have a greater or lesser research focus depending on the university and department), one of the main factors considered by the hiring panel will be the applicant's publication record. What we are specifically looking for is high-quality publications in the last few years, rather than 20 spam papers. (High-quality usually means prestigious journal/conference, as it's not like we have time to read the papers ourselves.)
If you have just completed your PhD or postdoc, you will almost certainly have some good publications co-authored with your PhD supervisor or PI. We're prepared to take the punt that you'll be able to produce more, or kick you out after 2-6 years (depends on which university) if you don't.
If you've been working as some kind of adjunct (which for us, usually means fixed-term contract full-time teaching-only staff, although can be part-time in other universities) or as a permanent teaching-only lecturer, you probably won't have been publishing recently. So your number of publications will be the same as someone finishing a PhD or doing a post-doc, your publications per year will be lower, and you've probably already been rejected for teaching & research jobs when you applied for them with the same research record when you were younger.
I think that's sufficient to explain the graph in the post. But why do we care so much about publication record?
Scott is partly right when he says it's because of prestige. There's a specific mechanism by which that operates in the United Kingdom. About every 5 years, the government runs an assessment called the REF (Research Excellence Framework). This is unpopular, but is meant to hold universities to account for the quality of their research. Details vary from cycle to cycle, but each department has to submit around 3 papers per research academic (teaching-only staff don't count) to a panel of external academics in the same subject, who score the papers on a scale from 1-4. The score of the department is published and feeds into highly publicised university league tables, as well as affecting the amount of government funding the universities receive.
So it is about prestige, but also about money. Hiring low-quality researchers lowers your department's average, sending it down in the league tables and losing you government funding.
Of course, there's a more direct mechanism that makes hiring active researchers financially important. If you have a good publication record, you are more likely to be taken seriously when writing grant proposals to the government-funded research councils. Some of this goes directly on hiring new post-doc researchers or buying equipment, but maybe half goes towards the general running costs of the university. As ever, it varies by university, but in the top research universities, most of the income comes from research grants, not student tuition fees. (In Oxford/Cambridge, the university loses money on home undergraduate students.)
Once again you admit to basically being clueless about how an institution functions, only to then speculate brazenly. You don't have to endorse the structures, but if you really want to add something of value to the conversation you should ask a lot more questions before attempting to spread a bunch of guesswork.
Many very smart people have put a lot of thought into centuries-old norms such as tenure and non-incestual hiring. Such practices are fundamental to the mission of higher education, but are easily ridiculed with the help of facile libertarian assumptions emerging from a basic lack of interest in that mission. (Preferring to weigh the efficiencies of markets, status implications, etc, may be more in your wheelhouse, but without investigating how/why the structure was built it amounts to just idle disruption.)
Of course there's a ton to be fixed in academia, but it's like democracy: if your heart's not in it, you're contributing to its failure. Yet you settle for a cartoonish version of colleges writ large, personified as a businessman who "prefers" a game of pretense with his customers, while most colleges have in fact been wrestling tirelessly to retain many core, long-held values during this period of late-capitalism, where popular opinion treats them as if they were just glorified trade schools.
There are other institutions with this same two track system, for example officers and enlisted in the army or partner-track and non-partner-track jobs in a law firm or consulting company. So whatever is causing this structure probably isn't driven explicitly by academia, but rather some property of academia that it shares with both the army and legal partnerships.
Don't know about lawyers, but there are processes for enlisted to become officers after enlistment, they aren't locked out.
There are processes for non-tenure track researchers to become tenure track. But the non-tenure track researchers are postdocs, or national lab researchers, or industry lab researchers. Adjuncts are not in the same field at all. Adjuncts being locked out of tenure track is like bartenders being locked out of officer track in the army.
"Second, they need them to do good research, raise the college’s reputation, and look prestigious."
The obvious problem being that there are entire fields where "good research" is literally impossible, because those fields draw no distinction between fact, taste, and opinion. Most of the original academic disciplines fall into this category (I'm looking at you Queen of the Sciences.) Nikole Hannah-Jones was insta-tenured, yes in order to give Howard prestige (among the right sort of people) but you're going to need a particular sort of metaphysics and a lot of hope to think she's going to increase the amount of knowledge in the world.
What about the trivially simple explanation:
When a college wants to hire for a research position it's in their interest to consider all possible interested applicants and have no incentive to favor internal canidates.
Ok, so in that system how often would an internal canidate get promoted to a research position? Well, only when the college had an opening for a research position at the same time as an adjunct at that university had put together a publication record good enough to warrant hiring there but not so good as to let them secure a better job and hadn't yet been hired elsewhere...and the fates smiled on their application (lots of randomness in who gets hired).
Given that most academics on the market apply for multiple dozens of jobs the chances of this happening are just going to be really low.
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Yes it does suggest that there isn't that much of a premium on staying put (academics prefer a TT job at Harvard than a TT job at no name uni even if it means moving) but that seems mostly correct.
Ohh and the difference with sports teams just mostly comes down to the fact that there is a greater variability in what different universities want. Universities often want to complement existing research teams or have views about what kind of research is valuable.
This makes the system much more like a matching market (eg medical residencies...but more so) than bidding on a commodity.
I think this post is misleading for a few reasons. Someone else probably already mentioned the points I'll make, but in case they haven't:
1. The chart in the post is based on data about historians, not all academics. Your post doesn't make that clear.
2. The bar chart depicts the *number* of historians hired N years after completing their PhD. Even if there was no preference for less-experienced applicants at all, the chart could look the same. Clearly, people are more likely to look for a job right after they get their degree than several years afterwards. There will be fewer history professor job applicants with 3 years of experience after getting their PhDs than with 0, because a lot of people with 3 years of experience are already in a TT position and will not apply for jobs. The chart doesn't correct for that.
I'm not denying that there's a preference for less-experienced applicants; I think there likely is, but that chart in particular doesn't really show this.
3. In a lot of STEM fields, it is vanishingly rare to be hired for a TT position straight out of a PhD; you need a postdoc first. Bret Devereaux mentioned this in his post, but your post makes it seem like getting a TT job right out of grad school is the expected career path in all academic fields.
Perhaps it's an instance of efficiency wages? According to efficiency wage theory, overpaying some employees can be profitable because it raises loyalty, morale, and productivity. https://www.investopedia.com/efficiency-wages-5206757
Tenured professor at a mediocre public university in the US here. I think a lot of what you say here about the separation between research and teaching, and why people fresh out of grad school are likely to get jobs, is probably right. But I think you also need to factor into the equation just how *bad* universities (and everyone else) are at predicting who's going to be the next Einstein. Including the case of Einstein himself, who in my limited understanding was not respected in his field at all until after he revolutionized it. So I don't think it's true that there is competition over the top few PhDs, because I don't think universities will have enough of a coherent set of criteria to even converge on the top few; once you get into the class of 'wrote a competent dissertation at a respected PhD program', within that class of people you're pretty much throwing darts at a dartboard. And it's definitely not the case, at least in my field, that there is a shortage of such people: there are far too many promising recent PhDs to fill the small number of tenure-track positions that come up each year. That said, I think 'able to secure large external grants' might be more predictable than 'will do amazing research in the future'. But I have no data to back that up; it's just a hunch.
A few mechanisms I've seen in play that I haven't seen mentioned in the comments I read:
- For impressive profs you don't want large research accumulation, you want evidence of ability to identify and lead important research. You can estimate pretty well from PhD (plus maybe post-doc years) whether people are doing important work per year.
- There's a huge pool of applicants you need to filter. Having been on the job market for many years is strong evidence that nobody else wanted to hire you. A cheap heuristic for filtering is therefore that lots of time on the job market indicates a candidate who is unlikely to succeed in your hiring/isn't valued by other hiring committees etc.
- Perhaps an uncomfortable point, but teaching university students and leading research are very different activities, and experience in one is not necessarily even helpful for doing the other (past a point). "Experience manifestly hurts applicants" seems very misleading, because they are experience in different jobs. Insofar as there is a problem here, it is with unrealistic expectations about a path from teaching-focused posts into research-focused posts (which might be encouraged unfairly by research institutions who want high supply of teaching).
Few thoughts. First of all, this is not just true of colleges. It’s also true of funded startups. I’d think of it like this: there are probably two Nash equilibria when it comes to getting talent at “low risk”. (A Nash equilibrium is a situation where no one can improve their results by deviating to another strategy.) One is let another institution shoulder the initial risk of fielding a farm team and seeing who shines and who washes out, then poach the winners. This probably seems less risky than fielding your own farm team because if true 1% stars are one in a thousand but your local farm team can only be 100-deep, odds that the true superstar will come from your own back bench are low. My guess is that this is priced in when poaching superstars, so you’re probably overpaying substantially for someone else to incubate them.
The second Nash equilibrium is probably “moneyball” where you take the pain up front and invest in becoming better predictors of talent so you raise the odds of somebody in your own incubator being a break out star. Because this requires patience and up-front sacrifice, we’d expect it to be less prevalent than the first Nash equilibrium, especially in a niche known more for playing the game than questioning the game, until the price of free agents is literally outrageous.
If my theory about the second Nash equilibrium is correct, though, it’s what somebody at one of Scott’s Bay Area house parties would call “ripe for disruption”.
If superstars are generally underpaid (to prevent e.g. "upsetting the apple cart" of other employees' expectations of no one making waaaay more than them for doing "the same job"), then they are from a hiring perspective much more lucrative and their allure to institutions totally makes sense. If they were paid what they are worth, there'd be no incentive to hire them over others. The perverse incentives created by underpaying stars hurts others rather than just the stars.