It will only get worse in the future.
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This is not necessarily true, because grad programs have no interest in letting loose hordes of their own unemployed Ph.D.s (I’m speaking from the perspective of a history Ph.D. with a tenured faculty job). I remember a year not too long ago when the University of Michigan’s history department accepted ZERO applicants – because they knew the job market was too tight to justify it. And last I checked (it’s been a few years), my own grad program, which used to plan for a yield of 9-10 grad students a year in my field, now plans for maybe 2-3. When the prospects of employment are so bad, you really don’t have professors loading up on Ph.D. students so they can have their TAs.
And these are some of the numbers I cite with my own undergrads seek advising on grad school. I give them “the talk,” and it’s not pretty.
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Professors do decide this, within limits set by departments and universities. The university will establish a standard for admitting students and probably allot departments a range of acceptances, but the decision to admit lies with the department (the university often decides funding), and the decision to take specific students on often lies with the faculty member.
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Adjuncts in the arts and humanities in the Northeast, in my experience, make $3,000 per course sometimes higher, up to $5,000.
Top administrators usually come from tenure track teaching so the option to go into administration instead of teaching usually means lower level positions.
This is something that would be interesting to see over time. Maybe there is a study somewhere without a political axe to grind that traces the elements of operating cost growth of universities over the past 25/50 years. The use of adjuncts over tenure track positions does seem to be a decision driven by budgetary concerns. But the with cost of attendance of college skyrocketing (well in excess of inflation over the past 30 years – all in when I graduated from a private in the early '80’s, barely over $10k (about $32k in today’s dollars) to close to $90k today), you wonder where the money went. Somehow, I don’t think a bunch went to teaching faculty.
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I commend you for giving them “the talk”.
But for whatever reason, it seems that too few budding PhD students seem to get it. One statement that resonated with my kids was when I explained that a professor might teach 30+ PhD students over their career, but only one is needed to take that professor’s place. So either the rest have to be employed by industry, or you end up with a lot of underemployed PhDs.
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It is also a way to manage changes in student demand for different programs and majors. Adjuncts can be added or dismissed as student demand for various academic programs and majors shifts. Having more tenured faculty means less flexibility to manage shifting student demand, except possibly for a few very well endowed colleges.
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When I was in college in the 80’s, I had many friends who went on to PhD programs and rewarding academic careers. I feel like we were the last generation to have that wealth of opportunity. It’s discouraging; especially since many of us in other fields (i.e. health care in my case) also feel like we wouldn’t want to be starting out in our own fields today.
I read one article (can’t remember where) in which it was noted that tenured professors with rewarding careers often advise students to follow in their footsteps, but taking their advice is like taking financial advice from a lottery winner.
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Seems like many career paths (a) require more or more expensive educational preparation, and/or (b) require being more elite to get into, compared to a generation or two ago.
For those wanting to become tenure track faculty, the decades of relatively better opportunity were probably the 1950s to 1980s, when universities were expanding more rapidly and needing more faculty.
Perhaps a more common analogy would be parents who worked their way through college with little or no college money from their parents expecting their kids to be able to do it today. It was not easy then, but it is even more difficult now.
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Often about $5k per class, no benefits, per semester.
As the spouse of a tenured faculty member, what I’ve seen is that the department, not the university, runs Ph.D. admissions.
And for what it’s worth, my spouse has never encouraged a promising student to pursue a Ph.D. precisely because the job prospects are so horrible.
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At my university they are paid by the course: for 3 hrs teaching a week for 13 weeks (not counting preparation of the course, supervising TA’s if the class is large, answering emails, grading if the class is less than 100 people etc) pay is ~$9,000. We try to schedule the 3 hrs all together at the end of a single workday to cut down commuting but it’s a tough gig.
Of course, the Dept runs the Admissions process, but the open slots are determined/approved by the University and ultimately Regents/Trustees.
In my experience, hiring adjuncts IS about saving money, but not money in general, just money on faculty. As to where the money has gone that should have gone to teaching? – central administration, which has ballooned like a cancer. When I started 25 years ago there were 1000 majors in my department. Today we have 2000 but the same number of tenure stream faculty and less than half the department level administrators (who used to help with expense reports, course scheduling, graduation approvals etc). However, the central administration, whose purpose seems to be to add levels of paperwork, generate arcane regulations, and to make everything from getting travel reimbursements to getting a new course approved less efficient, has quadrupled in size.
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Not at the schools where he’s taught – the Provost sets a max number of spots that will be funded for each department, but the department often brings in fewer, particularly because of the near impossibility of getting tenure track jobs afterwards. Trustees had nothing to do with anything so granular as the number of grad student spots.
and the Provost does not obtain budget approval from the President/Chancellor, who ultimately reports to the Trustees?
It’s not quite that simple, because a lot of those students will get jobs at institutions that don’t grant Ph.D.s. So doctoral institutions have to supply beyond just replacement levels. However – when I started my doctoral program in the late 90s, we were told time and time again of the looming retirement wave, which would open up lots of new jobs for people of our cohort. The retirements happened (sort of, eventually, or maybe they’re still happening – more of a trickle than a wave), but the hiring didn’t, because more and more universities have come to rely on an underpaid and professionally insecure adjunct teaching corps, resulting in fewer tenure-track jobs.
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Unfortunately, that is not the case for many programs. Many programs rely on grad students for TAships, and often the actual teaching, and in many programs, a substantial amount of the productivity of the department is the work being done by PhD students. Much of the rankings of a department are dependant on grad students, from the number of international students, productivity, as I wrote, citations per faculty, and more.
I do know faculty at some universities who are required to have graduate students, and, in many departments, promotion, and even tenure, are dependant on the faculty member graduating a certain number of PhD students.
Much of academia is built on the fallacy that there should be a constant flow of PhDs into the system, and that the quality of a faculty member as a faculty member is dependant on the number of PhD students they have and that they graduate.
So we have a situation like the Tragedy of the Commons. The benefits are personal, but the costs are shared. Actually, it’s worse, the costs are not evenly shared by academia, but borne mostly by the people who gain no benefit from grad students - people with PhDs who are looking for TT positions.
On the other hand, I would guess that a university like Michigan already has a very strong reputation, and they are not trying to push their rankings up. So they can allow themselves to take a break. Harvard did that with accepting PhD students to its English department. Their faculty are also well regarded, so the impact of this decision on them will be less.
To change the subject, the article cited above does not tell us is how many PhDs are being produced in these universities. While 80% of the faculty are trained in 20% of the doctoral universities, how is the distribution of the number of PhDs produced?
Comparing to the top 50 doctorate-granting institutions from the 2021 Survey of Earned Doctorates, you can see that, while OSU is #7 by number of PhDs granted in 2021, it is only #15 of the top 100 universities for providing faculty members. Worse is U Florida, which is #8 in number of PhDs that are granted, but only #26 at supplying faculty. On the other hand, U Chicago is at #28 for number of PhDs granted, but is #12 among universities from which faculty member come.
This means that the PhDs who cannot find faculty positions are not evenly divided among universities.
Of course, these comparisons cannot be done with places like MIT which has a larger percent of PhD who are in engineering a field in which the majority of PhD do not go to academia. It also misses Caltech, which produces to few PhDs to be on either list, but likely has one of the highest hiring rates of PhDs to faculty positions.
But still, it is very clear that the relative number of faculty from universities tells us little on its own. However, the “prestige” ranking in the article. It is also obvious that PhDs from some universities have a far higher likelihood of ending up with a faculty position.
Ironically, the universities whose graduates who seek faculty positions but are least likely to end up in faculty positions, are those which are least likely to stop producing PhDs.
BTW, Michigan not producing PhDs in a field with a glut of PhDs will not make a difference for the people graduating with PhDs from these universities whose graduates have a more difficult time being hired to faculty positions. The places will be filled by applicants from other universities in that top 20%.
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Yet when colleges which are surely far down on the prestige scale like WVU drop their phd programs in math, posters were outraged. Surely math doctorates from WVU, a program not ranked in the top 100, have very little chance of employment in academia, and maybe not elsewhere either.
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By class. And in some places the number of classes an adjunct can teach is capped. Adjunct I know gets $3400 per class. No benefits or anything else.