Recently on H-Albion (and I apologize for forgetting the
name of the person posting this), someone offered a fairly
sanguine assessment of the future academic job market for
Ph.d's based on the prospect of a very large proportion of the
current professoriate retiring over the next decade or so.
Although I haven't examined this issue with much care myself,
and hence don't want to say the following assessment is infallible,
in response to the sanguine assessment just mentioned, I did want
to call attention to the assessment by William Bowen (former President
of Princeton and a former Professor of Economics) and Julie Ann Sosa
in their 1989 book, *Prospects for Faculty in the Arts and Sciences*
(Princeton U. Press). On a casual look through the book, it struck me
as thoughtful and reasonably carefully done. On p. 26 of Bowen
and Sosa's book, they make the following statement based on their
projection of retirement and other exit factors from the professoriate,
"THE FLOW OF PRESENT FACULTY MEMBERS OUT OF HIGHER EDUCATION WILL BE
REMARKABLY STEADY OVER THE NEXT TWENTY TO TWENTY-FIVE YEARS."
[Bowen and Sosa's italics.]
Anyone who wants to see the details of their projections and why they
minimize the impact of near-term retirement trends can refer to their
book, expecially pp.26-27. Again, I don't want to say their projections
on this point are infallible. But anyone giving advice to prospective
Ph.d students based on a putative improvement in the academic job market
based on mass exodus due to retirement may want to consider the
Bowen and Sosa counter-
assessment based on what seemed to me thoughtful and careful analysis.
Another source of advice on whether to pursue a career in academia is
that offered by Clarence Long (another economist and for many years
an influential Congressman) in his article "Professors' Salaries and
the Inflation," in the *American Association of University Professors
Bulletin* for Winter 1952-53. In that article, after documenting
that academics' pay lagged behind earnings of comparable professions
and manual labor for the decades prior to 1950, Long concludes by
stating:
"With or without subsdidy, there will probably always be enough teachers
at moderate prices to fill the demand; for the demand will be anemic
and undiscriminating, easily met in a pinch by converting graduate
students into teaching assistants, and teaching assistants into assistant
professors. Any attempt to raise salaries by restricting entrance into
the trade might in the long run defeat itself; for it is not
far-fetched to suppose that a scarce supply of teachers could eventually
undermine intellectual standards and bring down the demand, with no lasting
benefit to price. A high standard of living for pedagogues does not, alas,
appear to be compatible with maximization of scholarship. Wisdom must
continue to be produced and distributed by the relatively few who are, or
try to be, content with reversing the priority attached by the mass of men
to the nourishment of the body over that of the mind."
David Mitch
Department of Economics
University of Maryland Baltimore County
Mitch@UMBC2.UMBC.EDU