Major Gains in History Jobs
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The academic job market for history Ph.D.s has undergone a remarkable expansion over the past five years, rising eighty-one percent since its nadir in the 1995-1996 academic year. Yet despite these gains, many Americanists have good reason for continuing to be gloomy about the job market. American history continues to suffer from the widest gap between academic history jobs and new Ph.D.s, which feeds into an ongoing sense of crisis. Notably, the production of U.S. history Ph.D.s has grown faster than every other field in the discipline over the past decade, and almost a third of all history Ph.D.s are being produced in one time period (twentieth-century U.S. history), which accounts for only about twelve percent of the new junior faculty jobs (1). Insofar as most history Ph.D.s are trained and prepared to work in the research university environment that produced them, the field will not see substantial improvement until this disparity is corrected.
As Figure 1 reflects, if we use the government's figures, American history produces the largest number of Ph.D.s in the field, and led the growth in the number of new history doctorates over the past decade (though this tends to undercount the actual number of U.S. history Ph.D.s that are aggregated under "general" and "other" categories). While the number of new history doctorates was growing 45 percent between 1992 and 2000, the number of Ph.D.s in American history increased by just over 60 percent--rising from 277 Ph.D.s in 1992 to 442 in 2000 (2). Over the same period, the number of new junior faculty job openings in American history increased just 40 percent, rising from 206 to 297 job listings, which significantly widened the gap between jobs and doctorates in the field (3).To get a more accurate picture, I analyzed the list of history Ph.D.s received in 1999-2000 (as reported in last year's Directory of History Departments and Organizations in the United States and Canada, 1999-2000) and tabulated them according to the field of specialization of their dissertations. This significantly increases the number of new doctorates over the government figures, and also allows us to parse out particular subfields. By my count almost half of the Ph.D.s produced in 1999-2000 (505 of 942 listed) were in U.S. history.
When these figures are broken down into chronological subcategories and compared to relevant job openings for junior faculty, the particular nature of the job crisis comes into sharp relief. As Figure 2 indicates, twentieth-century U.S. history dominates all other fields, accounting for almost 60 percent of the new doctorates in American history (and almost a third of all the degrees conferred in the field as a whole). In contrast, the number of job ads requesting specialists in the field of twentieth-century U.S. history was only marginally larger than the number of openings in nineteenth-century U.S. history, which produced less than half the same number of Ph.D.s. Even with a significant number of additional openings for thematic specialists in U.S. history, which would be open to specialists in these fields, the gap between jobs and potential applicants in these fields is appalling. Only colonial American history enjoys near parity between the number of jobs and new doctorates. The effect of this disparity is borne out in a couple of recent surveys of job advertisers and department chairs. A follow-up to a survey of advertisers who listed jobs two years ago found that twentieth-century U.S. history received an average of 133 applications for each job opening--up 6 percent from a similar survey conducted 4 years before (4). And a more recent survey of department chairs this past fall found that while a number of department chairs singled out openings in colonial American history and African American history as eliciting significantly fewer applicants than expected, departments with openings in twentieth-century (or "recent") U.S. history reported they were quite satisfied with the number of applications. These trends carry through into the placement rates for new Ph.D.s in the academy. To develop a rough idea of placement in the academy, I compared the 1999-2000 cohort of history doctorates to the faculty listed in the most recent Directory and on the web sites of 250 smaller colleges and universities that do not list in the Directory (5). The findings, presented in Figure 3, demonstrate the highly differential character of employment and the large number of history Ph.D.s who did not find employment in a school with a substantial history program. Less than half of the 1999-2000 cohort of U.S. history Ph.D.s could be identified as having full-time academic employment, as 42 percent had full-time academic jobs, 7 percent were employed in part-time academic positions, and another 15 percent were employed outside the academy (the remaining 36 percent could not be tracked in their post-Ph.D. employment). Once again, twentieth-century U.S. history Ph.D.s seem to be suffering the worst of the job crisis, as only 39 percent could be identified as finding full-time academic employment. In contrast, 53 percent of the specialists in colonial American and early U.S. history found full-time jobs in the departments reviewed. Viewed more broadly, receipt of a Ph.D. from even the most prestigious programs provides no guarantee of a job. The top 25 programs in the U.S. News and World Report rankings placed only 50 percent of their U.S. history Ph.D.s into full-time academic employment, though this is certainly better than the 32 percent placement rate among the other 75 programs on the list. However, the future is not likely to be as grim as this present snapshot suggests. The production of new history doctorates should contract over the next few years, as the number of history dissertations reported to the American Historical Association as "in progress" has been dropping over the past couple of years. While we cannot differentiate these by subfield, the number of "dissertations in progress" has fallen below the number in 1997-98. At the same time, Ph.D.-granting history departments reported last year that the number of "actively enrolled" graduate students in their programs was down 13.5 percent from its peak in 1995. This is a credit to Ph.D.-granting history departments that have been cutting back on graduate student admissions since the job crisis became readily apparent five years ago. Unfortunately, since the completion of a history Ph.D. takes an average of about eight years, the drop in new admissions has been slow to reverse the rising production of new Ph.D.s.
At the same time, the current supply of jobs seems likely to remain at its present elevated level for at least the next few years. The 1999 National Survey of Postsecondary Faculty reported the average age for historians in academia was 51.8--the oldest of any of the fields in the survey and more than three years above the average for all fields. With more than a third of the history faculty over the age of 55, it is not surprising that over 35 percent of historians in the academy said they planned to retire within the next 10 years. As a result, the number of job openings seems likely to remain at its present elevated rate, as history faculty who entered the academy in the late 1960s and early 1970s leave their posts. Recent events have somewhat clouded our ability to draw easy conclusions from these trends, however, as the effects of the recent economic downturn threaten to close off a number of job lines, and perhaps increase the pressure to hire more part-time faculty. My survey of history department chairs nationwide found that state programs from Florida to California are already dealing with modest budget cuts this year, and many more have been told to prepare for cuts ranging from 1 to 15 percent next year. Over 62 percent of respondents at state institutions said they have been told to prepare for cuts, and another 9 percent have had budget constraints imposed upon them in the current academic year. In comparison, only 15 percent of the programs at private institutions said they were facing budget cutbacks. All but two of the programs were continuing with hires that were already underway--and a few programs said they were actually accelerating the hiring process to complete them before a hiring freeze took hold. Once again, it is hard to plot out how this will affect particular subfields like U.S. history. But the evidence is fairly clear that programs training U.S. history Ph.D.s need to be more attentive to the larger job market for their graduates. It will be quite some time before the academic job market can sustain the number of doctorates being produced in the field of twentieth-century U.S. history. Endnotes
Robert B. Townsend is assistant director for publications, information systems, and research at the American Historical Association. Special thanks to Roy Rosenzweig for pointing out the potential problem in state budgets. |
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