As a PhD student in CS who's seen other people go through the academic job market gauntlet in the last couple of years, this is news to me. My understanding fro

As a PhD student in CS who's seen other people go through the academic job market gauntlet in the last couple of years, this is news to me. My understanding from up close (disclaimer: but, still, secondhand) is that competition among faculty candidates is high, and extremely high at top schools. Even looking through the report linked in this article, I'm confused about where they got this "factor of five" number. I suspect there's something odd going on with the accounting here. Universities tend to advertise faculty openings saying "we want to hire tons of people!" when they really mean "if tons of elite candidates want to come here, we will certainly hire them". However, there are necessarily not many elite candidates. More broadly, what appears to be going on here is an illustration of the tension between faculty as researchers and the way they're hired, funded, and work. Tenure-track faculty candidates are still evaluated overwhelmingly based on research and funded in the same way (by research grants, many of which come from outside the university). Research funding is tight, so competition for these research grants is fierce. Accordingly, new faculty must be quite competitive as researchers to get hired, get grants, and get tenure. And as a result, there are not that many new faculty each year, though the number is ticking up. This is all pretty orthogonal to the problem of actually having enough people to teach undergrad CS. It's as if you hired firefighters by requiring that a hired firefighter must be able to bench press 600 lbs and maintain that bench press ability for five years, and then you expressed surprise that you find it hard to hire enough firefighters who are actually good at...firefighting. There are plenty of good firefighters out there, but this quirk in the hiring and performance evaluation process means you're making it harder for yourself to find them. IMO, we need more reasonably-paid adjuncts. Adjunct pay needs to stop being a place to cut costs to the bone. There are plenty of CS PhDs who are good but not spectacular researchers who would gladly take a pay cut from industry to be full-time lecturers. But you'll probably have to pay well (maybe even high five figures!) to get them.