I've been involved in hiring at a highly ranked small liberal arts college. We are hiring and are desperate for applicants. Every "peer" college we know is hiri

I've been involved in hiring at a highly ranked small liberal arts college. We are hiring and are desperate for applicants. Every "peer" college we know is hiring, many with multiple open positions. Most of the data (e.g. [1], [2], [3]) we are looking at agrees with the article. Just as a direct anecdotal comparison, in very recent years our school tried to hire in both math and CS. For math, there were nearly 200 applicants, most of which which were at least superficially qualified, and 30-40 of which were deemed "top contenders". These candidates were from top universities, with stellar track records, multiple awards, a few years of postdocs at great schools, multiple papers in top journals, and recommendations saying things like "best postdoc I have seen in 30 years". We are a good, well-known school, but this was still surprising to me. It certainly appears there are plenty of very strong math candidates and few math positions available. For the CS position, there were fewer than 25 applicants total in the pool. Two thirds were effectively spam (e.g. foreign applicants only minimal English language skills, applicants who think we are a company or an R1 university with grad students). Half the remainder were people with degrees only tangentially related to CS and/or no formal training in CS, but who apparently can't get teaching jobs in their field. Of the four or so candidates left, most had multiple tenure-track offers on the table before we even had a chance to talk with them on the phone. Others dropped out before we could schedule an on-campus interview. All our peer colleges are telling us they are seeing the same things. So yes, I would completely buy the premise of the article. [1] https://cra.org/crn/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2017/05/2016-Taulbee-Survey.pdf https://cra.org/crn/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2017/05/2016-... [2] http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~cew/papers/CSareas18.pdf http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~cew/papers/CSareas18.pdf [3] http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~cew/papers/outcomes17.pdf http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~cew/papers/outcomes17.pdf