The Decline of Faculty Tenure: Less From an Oversupply of PhDs, & More from the Systematic De-Valuation of PhD as a Prereq for College Teaching
Contrary to what most journalists and many academics argue, an “oversupply” of people with PhDs is not the primary cause of the decline of tenure for college facultyin the U.S.
First, there is not a large “oversupply” of people with PhDs for faculty jobs in higher education, if we include non-tenure track jobs in our estimate of the “job market” for faculty. And why would we exclude those jobs? The vast majority of college faculty in the United States today are ineligible for tenure. As Marc Bousquet argued in his 2008 book, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation: “We are not overproducing PhDs; we are underproducing jobs. There is plenty of work in higher education for everyone who wants to do it. The problem is that this enormous quantity of work no longer comes in the bundle of tenure, dignity, scholarship and a living wage we call a ‘job.’” (pp. 40-41)
Second, analysis of non-tenure track employment for college faculty reveals that the replacement of faculty teaching jobs with gigs has gone hand-in-hand with the systematic devaluation of the PhD as a credential for teaching college courses in humanities, social science and STEM fields (PhDs are not generally necessary to teach in a number of professional fields). People with PhDs not only face fierce competition for tenure track positions in their fields, but must also compete with doctoral students and people with terminal Masters degrees for teaching positions off the tenure track. This has effectively undermined the bargaining position of many people who receive PhDs, and reduced college student access to instructors who have ever published original scholarship in the fields that they teach in.
