An Introduction to the Blog Part III: The Big Job Market Picture

In my previous post, I went over a single representative anecdote, drawn from the social sciences, on the nature of academic job searches, offers, and hires. Now, I’d like to take a step back, and look at the bigger job market picture.

I am currently in my second year of a PhD program in English and Comparative Literature. Writing what I know, I’ll draw heavily on statistics and information in that field. My discussion speaks, though, to the academic job market as a whole, and I’ll often make use of data and anecdotes from other fields to fill out my picture.

For the 2007–08 employment cycle, the MLA Job Information List (JIL), the go-to source of information not just on particular job opportunities in English and contemporary languages in a given year but on long-term trends therein, posted 1,826 advertisements for positions in English.

By the 2009–10 cycle, that number had fallen to 1,100, has averaged approximately 1,037 advertisements per cycle every year thereafter up to the 2017–18 cycle, and has not risen above 1,000 advertisements since the 2014–15 cycle.

Moreover, over the years from 2009–2010 to 2017–2018 (this is compared to the average for 2004–05 through 2008–09), the average percentage of the ads which were advertising tenure-track positions dropped by more than 10% in both English and languages (these figures are derived from the MLA’s Report on its own Job Information List).

So the number of jobs in the field, and of tenure-track jobs, has been going down steadily for a decade.

How many people are likely to apply to any one of these scarcer and scarcer jobs? The applicant pool includes not just newly-minted PhDs, but postdocs, adjunct professors, and people already holding assistant professorships who are looking to change institutions. And we are still talking about the time period before a global pandemic.

Jonathan Kramnick, a professor of English at Yale who has kept an informal count of job offerings in English post-COVID, estimated in October of this year that since the onset of the pandemic, there have been approximately 17 job offerings across the discipline (including interdisciplinary posts overlapping with such fields as American and African-American Studies), compared to roughly 800 in the previous year (Kramnick).

This is the general state of the discipline, but these numbers I’ve just laid out won’t actually strike every reader the same way. We are not exactly in the worst possible employment crisis imaginable, like the one of technological unemployment affecting, say, retail cashiers as a result of the proliferation of self-service tills. And while the realities of competition on the academic job market exact an immense human toll on those pursuing a tenure-track job, but, before COVID, getting one of these jobs wasn’t unthinkable (for a more detailed comparison of things pre- versus post-pandemic, see the following piece by Kramnick: https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-humanities-after-covid-19).

Even now, though, there will be people who continue to pursue the dwindling number of tenure-track academic jobs. Many of these people will have independent means and no desire to start a family in the immediate future. Most of us, though, face unforgiving odds, and a necessity both to think seriously about other options (just as seriously as about academic jobs), and think about what all of this means for English and for universities in general.

Notes-

-Report on the MLA Job Information List, 2018–19: https://www.mla.org/content/download/134145/2569649/Job%20List_2018-19_Linked.pdf

-Jonathan Kramnick Facebook post https://www.facebook.com/jonathan.kramnick/posts/10224447409080650?__cft__[0]=AZU4bXUr-RHgo2jkYg9tP9jlNJqYNwNkIXTszWcud7PMCtAzVO776GfAQ6skobMBxpgRreFGWWU8cJFfNP1FOm4D6QpW5SwjK1duym3MpGyai0IoPpKZqmEe-MlydgDZuR0&__tn__=%2CO%2CP-R