ADPA data on job-market competitiveness of candidates over time

Last week, I linked to a post by Charles Lassiter (Gonzaga) on when a PhD degree goes 'stale.' In my post, I noted that it is hard to know whether and to what extent the PhD goes stale without knowing how long academic job applicants stick it out on the market. Interestingly, a handful of readers chimed in noting that, like me, they actually seemed to become more competitive of the academic job-market over time. However, because these are just anecdata and real hard data is important data to know, I reached out to Carolyn Dicey Jennings (UC Merced) of the Academic Placement Data and Analysis (ADPA) project and found out that this kind of data has already been collected and reported upon.

Specifically, I learned that back in 2017, the ADPA's comprehensive report (p. 23) indicated the following:

One’s chances of obtaining a permanent academic job in a particular year past graduation are as follows: 

• • 1 in 5 in the first year after graduation
  • 1 in 8 in the second year after graduation
  • 1 in 8 in the third year after graduation
  • 1 in 12 in the fourth year after graduation
  • 1 in 17 in the fifth year after graduation
  • 1 in 22 in the sixth year after graduation
  • 1 in 23 in the seventh year after graduation

Although the chances of finding permanent academic employment after one’s 7th year are very low, 22% of all 2009 and earlier graduates in the APDA database are now in temporary academic employment

In other words, it does look like job applicant competitiveness on the academic market does drop off over time--at least on average--though not exponentially (and not relatively early on) in the manner hypothesized by Lassiter. Here are a few other interesting facts. The ADPA's 2019 report found (pp. 29-30) that most candidates who are not in academic jobs prefer academic jobs to non-academic jobs:

Overall, 96.3% of those in academic employment preferred an academic job (n=967).  

Overall, 45.7% of those in nonacademic employment preferred an academic job (n=46). 

Overall, 74.5% of those with no known employment [largely current students] prefer an academic job (n=247).  

However, as we see here, a majority of those in non-academic jobs prefer non-academic employment. Moreover, the 2017 report (p. 24) found that the salaries of those who have reported non-academic employment are substantially larger than those in academic employment: 

Most relevant to the previous section is the difference between those in academic and nonacademic positions. Survey participants included a small number in nonacademic positions (n = 18, but as a percentage of the participants this is similar to the database as a whole, at 5%). These participants reported an average annual salary of $103,035. The average reported salary of all other participants was $65,426. Restricting this to those in permanent academic positions, the average was $70,495. Thus, those in nonacademic positions appear to be making more than those in academic positions. This di fference was significant, as you can see in the results of an analysis, below (see Table 2). 

.....

If no other employment option were available, this might be unsurprising. Yet, given the availability of nonacademic employment, and that it on average appears to be a better fit than temporary academic employment (at least for those who answered our survey in 2016) with higher pay (see the section on salary differences below), we find the number of those in temporary academic positions to be higher than expected. In the future, it would be worthwhile to explore this preference in more detail. We suspect that graduates are not receiving adequate guidance on nonacademic placement, which would ideally take place prior to their first year of seeking employment. A model similar to that of economics, in which nonacademic jobs are treated as on a par with academic jobs in one’s job search, might be desirable.

In other words, although there may be candidates who remain competitive on the academic market over time, the ADPA report suggests that it may be more advantageous to long-term academic job-candidates to pursue non-academic work, as these jobs appear to pay very well on average (much better, it seems, than many people tend to think!).

Comments

[Bill Vanderburgh]

I looked briefly at the report you cite, and I'm not sure I understand the methodology. The "1 in 12 in the fourth year after graduation" means, I think, that *of all those who graduated but did not yet have permanent academic jobs three years later*, 1 in 12 got a permanent academic job in the fourth year. (But, I would guess, a proportion of those who did not get a permanent academic job after a certain number of years stop trying to get one, so I'm not sure this "1 in 12" is very helpful.)

Or is it that *1 in 12 graduates* got a first permanent job in the fourth year after graduation?

I suppose the number we would all really like to know is, *of those still actively seeking a first permanent academic position*, what is the chance of getting that job this year?

Any idea, in total, what percentage of graduates get a permanent job (with 7 years of graduating, say)?

[anonymous TT]

What about as ABD? This information seems to be missing.