The times are changing: Is PhD Comics still relevant?

[cosmicfish]

Here is an actual study done by researchers back in 2006:

http://www.opia.psu.edu/sites/default/files/AIR_Tenure_Flow_Paper_06.pdf

And here are some highlights:

At many colleges and universities this figure is usually in the vicinity of 90 percent (a half dozen institution-specific studies are cited below). While this is a reasonable, basic data point, taken alone it is not especially revealing. It only captures final decisions, and says little about the rigor of the process overall, or the likelihood that a newly appointed assistant professor will or will not achieve tenure at some point in the future.

While this matches with your experience, the paper points out that this is evaluating only the tenure decision itself, and ignores faculty who leave prior to being submitted for tenure. In other words, this number is like giving the graduation rate at a university by dividing the number of graduates by the number of students with enough credits to graduate, ignoring transfers and dropouts.

*For the last nine entering cohorts – that is, those beginning in 1990 through 1998 – 55 percent of new entrants had received tenure by the end of their seventh year on the tenure track.

Definitions and methodologies do vary somewhat among the peer institution studies that have been found… comparative tenure rates appear to in the range of about 40 percent to about 70 percent. The picture is mixed on the effects of gender; in some cases, women are tenured at higher rates, and in others at lower rates. With one exception… the peer institution studies reviewed here did not relate differences in tenure rates to minority/nonminority status… Again, the comparisons are imprecise, but Penn State’s overall tenure rates appear to fall about in the mid-range of available benchmarks. *

This process compares the number of individuals entering tenure-track positions and then actually getting tenure at that university, a more honest comparison.

Of interest to me is that it appears that (at least at Penn State, the focus of this particular study), tenure recommendation rates are pretty consistently at or above 90%. The paper doesn’t really go into the disparity in the numbers - why so many people, who only got to their positions through a lifetime of hard work leave despite apparent confidence from their departments and universities. I can’t imagine that it is because academia is so much more pleasant than their options in private industry.