Do you want to be a professor? Countless PhD students harbor this dream. However, a firsthand look at the nature of academic hiring is enough to change the minds of many. A new research paper published in Nature, which explicitly analyzes faculty hiring, certainly won’t help matters: The picture it paints of the academic hiring market is not pretty.
Large universities maintain departments in most academic fields, and the competition for prestige and ranking between departments is ferocious. The paper examines 387 U.S. universities, containing more than 10,000 departments, with nearly 300,000 faculty coming and going over the ten years under study. (Here the term faculty represents a person who is tenured, or in a tenure trackposition, which gives them a shot at tenure. This excludes part-time instructors and other adjunct positions with no chance of obtaining tenure.)
PhD inequality
One might be tempted to believe that a PhD is a PhD; that is, once you have a “golden ticket,” you are employable as a faculty member. This is not so. The top five universities, which might be expected to produce roughly 1.3% (5/387) of all eventual faculty hires, produce 13.7% (53/387) — more than ten times what is expected. Continuing down the list, the top 3% of universities produce 27% of all professors; the top 10% produce 58% of professors.