11 ms·

I mean, isn't it clear, ever since the bulk creation / funding of so many colleges (and faculty positions) pre + post WW2, the US faculty job market has been on

I mean, isn't it clear, ever since the bulk creation / funding of so many colleges (and faculty positions) pre + post WW2, the US faculty job market has been on a decline ever since -- (that is, from the average postdoc's point of view of success % when seeking a faculty position). You do understand right, that the faculty system relies on a pyramid of people entering and leaving the system? And only a certain fraction getting to the top, and people having to vacate the top of the pyramid for anyone else to get there? (for stable, or in other words, stagnant fields) When the US was in a college-building phase (funded by economic stimulus / public programs), all these posts were new and empty, waiting to be filled. So it enabled a generation of new professors to fill those ranks. As that became stable, now instead of a fresh pyramid you fill with eager people (who think that's still how easy it is), you have grad students and postdocs seeing who can outlast each other (or publish more) to get to the top through attrition or publishing prowess. Certain fields, let's say, pure math, or history, until a professor retires or dies, there's just no spot for the people below even to compete for. That's why you see people going to Asia, Middle East, etc. where the new money and universities are. Follow the money. I mean this is pure population pyramid, demographic stuff that you can predict. You almost don't even need to know the student's thesis topic to say what chance he/she has of becoming a professor. And Covid put all this on hold now -- or at least the departure end of the pyramid. No one in their sane mind would retire or give up their faculty position in this environment. And colleges can barely bring in enough revenue to maintain their classes, let alone expand some department. And yet you see stories of more students going into grad school for this limbo period. Joining the climb up the ladder -- it's not going to end well. Or, it's going to be even worse than before, I'm guessing.

JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> Certain fields, let's say, pure math, or history, until a professor retires or dies, there's just no spot for the people below even to compete for Lots of research happens at government agencies, non-profits, museums, for-profit companies and international projects (e.g. ITER). As long as a grad student doesn’t insist on making faculty, they’re not necessarily constrained to a zero-sum field.
- supernova87a 6y ago
  Yes, but the scope of the comment and article was just about the state of faculty path. But it follows the same logic even if you bring in your point about other outlets. Those obey the same rules too. Unless government expands, museums grow, or some tech company has a need, there's also a finite set of jobs being competed for by an increasing population. Some fields have it better. In biotech, computer science, engineering, etc. at least those are growing, viable, and profitable fields (and respected). In other fields, not so much. Not only do you not find a job easily, you get looked down upon for leaving the "pure" path, when in fact most people eventually have to face that future anyway.
- cbkeller 6y ago
  Yeah, this is consistent with what I have seen. At the end of the day, unemployment numbers for holders of PhDs [1] are starkly different from those of the general population. [1] https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf14310/ https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf14310/
  - barumi 6y ago
    I would interpret these values with care. My experience leads me to suspect that these numbers might be a textbook example of correlation does not imply causality. Just because you are employed it doesn't mean you are not underemployed or working in an entirely different field due to circumstances that have barely or no relation at all with your academic work. I mean, it's already a widespread stereotype of old graduate/PhDs in unrelated STEM fields pivoting to data analysis/ machine learning positions even when they did no work in the area. And then there's the "just learn to code" cliche. And I mean a PhD working at a McDonalds still counts as employed, right?
- barumi 6y ago
  > As long as a grad student doesn’t insist on making faculty, they’re not necessarily constrained to a zero-sum field. This assertion doesn't play out in the real world. A graduate student does not have exclusive access to these non-academic positions, nor is the skillset developed in the academic niche world applicable in non-academic environments. In fact, the realization that graduates with an academic background underperform in non-academic settings is widely known, not to mention the negative impact that some soft-skill traits developed in academic environments have on their employability (for example, the false sense of entitlement).
woopwoop 6y ago
I recently finished a pure math ph.d at at a highly, but not THAT highly, ranked public school in the US. I didn't continue in academia, but based on my classmates, most of whom did, the market is not as much of a pyramid as you're portraying it. Most of them ended up with postdocs at equally or more prestigious institutions than the one we graduated from. Edit: to be clear, this is based on the pre-covid experience. I gather that this year things indeed look pretty bleak.
- samstave 6y ago
  So what are you doing with that ph.d?
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  > postdocs ...are fixed term soft money positions. Check back in 2 years.
  - W-Stool 6y ago
    The soft money vs. tenure track / tenured positions is a huge difference in money, future, and security, and it is supprising to me how many future doctorate students don't understand the difference until it is too late. Next stop for many of those postdocs after the soft money runs out - teaching at a community college on semester contracts at a fraction of a university salary, probably not what they had in mind when they started their professional acedemic journey.
    - barumi 6y ago
      > (...) and it is supprising to me how many future doctorate students don't understand the difference until it is too late. Oh don't be confused. I assure you each and every single one of the understands the difference very well. What it seems you're not understanding is that to them it's not a matter of having picked the soft money track over the tenure track. No, that choice was never on the table. Their choice was between the soft money track and no track at all. Thus the ones who are fortunate enough to be in a position to choose will pick the soft money track in hopes that it puts them in a better position to transition to a tenure one.
pbuzbee 6y ago
> No one in their sane mind would retire [...] in this environment. Why is this a bad time for a faculty member to retire?
- warkdarrior 6y ago
  Tenured faculty jobs are low-risk, low-stress positions (or can be made to be, based on the professor's preferences).
  - jackpirate 6y ago
    Retirement is an even lower risk and lower stress position :)
    - barumi 6y ago
      Let's put things in perspective: tenure positions are seen as a kin of retirement: you do what you love and at your own pace, and are paid generously for the privilege. The only impact of retirement is that you cease to be paid generously, and also you lose status.
      - cyberdrunk 6y ago
        What about the stories of tenured professors being essentially managers and grant-chasers for their unit? Doesn't sound low-stress to me.
        arethuza 6y ago
        They don't stand to lose their jobs if they don't bring in enough "customers" - which is quite different to comparable jobs outside of academia.
        iudqnolq 6y ago
        That's essentially only necessary if you want grant money or want to be seen as a team player (and get promoted, and not have your colleagues be annoyed with you, etc)
barumi 6y ago
> You do understand right, that the faculty system relies on a pyramid of people entering and leaving the system? And only a certain fraction getting to the top, and people having to vacate the top of the pyramid for anyone else to get there? (for stable, or in other words, stagnant fields) To put it differently and in terms that's easier to follow and understand, demand for tenured faculty positions is far smaller than the current supply of skilled labour.
Legogris 6y ago
You seem to imply that there is a general expectation among grad students that if they just keep at it long enough and do good work, they will become a professor one day. Isn't that kind of a crazy assumption? What's wrong with continuing your career as a researcher indefinitely? Or leave for industry/NGOs/public sector/politics/entrepreneurship if that's not what you want? I'd think that the vast majority of people who enter grad school now don't do that with the intention do "climb up the academic career ladder", and if that is true, it doesn't need to be a problem at all. There seems to be this assumption that it's desirable for everyone to always be progressing upwards in the institutional hierarchy. I don't think all these people are as delusional as you imply.
- fock 6y ago
  I guess historically grad school was an apprenticeship for academic research and teaching. I don't think you "need" this kind of skills (working 4+ years on one thing with a very small team) anywhere else. Nowadays, the excess of graduate students made this _the_ convenient signalling criterion for a lot of jobs (ML at FANG, liberal arts jobs (for which studying makes real sense - think museum curator, school curriculum development)). While this has been around for these kind of jobs for ages, the glut of PhDs, etc. effectively limits access to people being able to finance their PhD and having access to the required signalling from their undergrad. In the US in general and liberal-arts worldwide this effectively means that the aforementioned positions (of a certain power) are only available to the already privileged. If you get a rare living-wage scholarship or happen to live in certain parts of the EU, this can be quite ok though if you want to increase your signalling value and do something off the beaten path.
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  > You seem to imply that there is a general expectation among grad students that if they just keep at it long enough and do good work, they will become a professor one day. That's because there is. It's not universal, but it's much more common than what would be healthy. And it's often incentivized by the professors and academic administrations (most with the best interest of the student at their hearth, but also delusional themselves). > Isn't that kind of a crazy assumption? Yes. That's what the discussion is all about. > There seems to be this assumption that it's desirable for everyone to always be progressing upwards in the institutional hierarchy. There is this generalized assumption that it's desirable for everyone to always be progressing upwards on whatever hierarchy they find themselves. Students happen to find themselves on the academic hierarchy. It's not a healthy assumption in any circle. But the academics get the worst form of the problem for many reasons. You are perfectly correct in thinking that an academic formation should primary lead into some innovation related career, or into some high complexity practical field. You are not correct in thinking that people are not delusional enough to be a problem.
toast0 6y ago
> No one in their sane mind would retire or give up their faculty position in this environment. This environment will probably drive some faculty to retire. Distance teaching is a lot more work than in-person teaching, and it's a lot of new skills and fiddly technology. Someone who could retire anytime now, and was planning to retire in the next five years may decide to do it sooner than later. Although, they may not be immediately replaced, given enrollment/revenue drops.
- jbob2000 6y ago
  My father is a 65 year old professor and he now loves digital teaching. He’s terrible with computers, he single-finger types (despite all my attempts to help him improve over the years), and still loves it. His college has him pre-recording lectures, which the students can watch the following day (and can rewatch them). He doesn’t have to travel, doesn’t have to be “on” that day to teach, and doesn’t have to deal with managing students. He just sits down in front of his laptop and gives his presentation. He interacts with his students more, it’s way easier to field questions from people over the course of a day, as they all watch the lecture, than it is to try to force out some questions with the leftover time at the end of a lecture. He was definitely looking to retire before covid, but I sense a renewed passion as he’s finally discovered the digital frontier.
  - a-nikolaev 6y ago
    Nice story. It can go either way, I think, depending on the courses you teach, how you re-structure them for teaching remotely, and how the college helps you with it. This is a good example of changing things for the better! On the other hand, I think, certain courses and disciplines that require university facilities (experimental labs) or more immediate individual instruction are hard to do fully remotely.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      >certain courses and disciplines that require university facilities (experimental labs) My sense is that, by and large, they're not being done remotely at the grad level. The schools I'm familiar with also have undergrads back in limited numbers in part so that they can take care of courses that have to be done physically.
marcandre 6y ago
Another way to state the conservation of professors: in the lifetime of a tenured professor, of all the grad students (s)he suppervised, the number that will succeed in getting a tenured position is (on average) equal to 1.
- goodcanadian 6y ago
  And yet governments provide incentives to train ever more PhDs as though that will somehow turn into a knowledge economy rather than just producing a plethora of unemployed researchers. I would be much happier to cut funding for and limit the number of graduate students in exchange for more permanent research positions.
  - supernova87a 6y ago
    Well, in sympathy with those governments, you have to ask what else can they possibly do? The response I heard directly from the head of PPARC (defunct UK research body) 10 years ago was, "so, instead of having us train and produce capable researchers, even if they don't all get faculty positions, you would prefer we cut their numbers?" This was in response to the question, why aren't we funding more permanent positions in proportion to the number of students we're training. It's not an easy situation to solve. You end up having to trade off permanent positions against students. But in some countries, including a lot of EU countries, training students is a hidden way to prevent unemployment. And would you say that denying willing people a useful education just for less competition for faculty jobs is the ideal outcome? What would the best choice be? Not clear. When a pie isn't increasing, but the number of people is, things get uncomfortable.
    - goodcanadian 6y ago
      "so, instead of having us train and produce capable researchers, even if they don't all get faculty positions, you would prefer we cut their numbers?" Instead of training and producing large numbers of capable but underemployed researchers, I would definitely spend more on permanently employed researchers. I am certainly not advocating one student per permanent position: some of those excess PhDs will go into important roles in industry, but most will not: https://theconversation.com/young-educated-and-underemployed-are-we-building-a-nation-of-phd-baristas-53104 https://theconversation.com/young-educated-and-underemployed... I might spend more effort on practical Masters degree level education which can fill roles where a PhD really isn't necessary.
PrinceKropotkin 6y ago
This is why capitalism needs to die. Humans are insanely bad at valuing long-term investments.
pmiller2 6y ago
> Certain fields, let's say, pure math, or history, until a professor retires or dies, there's just no spot for the people below even to compete for. Sadly, 100% true in pure math. The worst part about it is that, you know those same 2 or 3 people who pop up in most of your classes? Yeah, they're your competition. Times every university that does anything in your specific subfield.
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
> No one in their sane mind would retire or give up their faculty position in this environment Tenured professors who were already about to retire might consider the addition of Zoom to that one undergrad class they had to teach but always hated may very well retire earlier than they wanted. I know some people in other fields who pushed their retirement up a year or two because Covid made things worse in their industry.
newen 6y ago
People doing their PhDs is one of the main ways in which actual research gets done. It’s a good in and of itself. Also, there are tons of research labs and other research positions that need PhDs.
sevensor 6y ago
> When the US was in a college-building phase ... all these posts were new and empty, waiting to be filled. So it enabled a generation of new professors to fill those ranks. Funny story about that. Shortly after the war, my grandfather, who had a Ph.D. but had not been working in academia, landed a position as professor of economics. Not only was it an academic job, not only was it a full professorship, it was in fact an endowed chair. Granted, he was brilliant, but back in those days, being brilliant was all it took.
- jrumbut 6y ago
  My grandfather was also hired as a professor after the war. Not direct to endowed chair, but he retired as professor emeritus. His highest degree was a bachelor's of engineering and he had been selling mattresses before he got the job.

JumpCrisscross 6y ago

> Certain fields, let's say, pure math, or history, until a professor retires or dies, there's just no spot for the people below even to compete for Lots of research happens at government agencies, non-profits, museums, for-profit companies and international projects (e.g. ITER). As long as a grad student doesn’t insist on making faculty, they’re not necessarily constrained to a zero-sum field.

supernova87a 6y ago
Yes, but the scope of the comment and article was just about the state of faculty path. But it follows the same logic even if you bring in your point about other outlets. Those obey the same rules too. Unless government expands, museums grow, or some tech company has a need, there's also a finite set of jobs being competed for by an increasing population. Some fields have it better. In biotech, computer science, engineering, etc. at least those are growing, viable, and profitable fields (and respected). In other fields, not so much. Not only do you not find a job easily, you get looked down upon for leaving the "pure" path, when in fact most people eventually have to face that future anyway.
cbkeller 6y ago
Yeah, this is consistent with what I have seen. At the end of the day, unemployment numbers for holders of PhDs [1] are starkly different from those of the general population. [1] https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf14310/ https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf14310/
- barumi 6y ago
  I would interpret these values with care. My experience leads me to suspect that these numbers might be a textbook example of correlation does not imply causality. Just because you are employed it doesn't mean you are not underemployed or working in an entirely different field due to circumstances that have barely or no relation at all with your academic work. I mean, it's already a widespread stereotype of old graduate/PhDs in unrelated STEM fields pivoting to data analysis/ machine learning positions even when they did no work in the area. And then there's the "just learn to code" cliche. And I mean a PhD working at a McDonalds still counts as employed, right?
barumi 6y ago
> As long as a grad student doesn’t insist on making faculty, they’re not necessarily constrained to a zero-sum field. This assertion doesn't play out in the real world. A graduate student does not have exclusive access to these non-academic positions, nor is the skillset developed in the academic niche world applicable in non-academic environments. In fact, the realization that graduates with an academic background underperform in non-academic settings is widely known, not to mention the negative impact that some soft-skill traits developed in academic environments have on their employability (for example, the false sense of entitlement).

woopwoop 6y ago

I recently finished a pure math ph.d at at a highly, but not THAT highly, ranked public school in the US. I didn't continue in academia, but based on my classmates, most of whom did, the market is not as much of a pyramid as you're portraying it. Most of them ended up with postdocs at equally or more prestigious institutions than the one we graduated from. Edit: to be clear, this is based on the pre-covid experience. I gather that this year things indeed look pretty bleak.

samstave 6y ago
So what are you doing with that ph.d?
throwawaygh 6y ago
> postdocs ...are fixed term soft money positions. Check back in 2 years.
- W-Stool 6y ago
  The soft money vs. tenure track / tenured positions is a huge difference in money, future, and security, and it is supprising to me how many future doctorate students don't understand the difference until it is too late. Next stop for many of those postdocs after the soft money runs out - teaching at a community college on semester contracts at a fraction of a university salary, probably not what they had in mind when they started their professional acedemic journey.
  - barumi 6y ago
    > (...) and it is supprising to me how many future doctorate students don't understand the difference until it is too late. Oh don't be confused. I assure you each and every single one of the understands the difference very well. What it seems you're not understanding is that to them it's not a matter of having picked the soft money track over the tenure track. No, that choice was never on the table. Their choice was between the soft money track and no track at all. Thus the ones who are fortunate enough to be in a position to choose will pick the soft money track in hopes that it puts them in a better position to transition to a tenure one.

pbuzbee 6y ago

> No one in their sane mind would retire [...] in this environment. Why is this a bad time for a faculty member to retire?

warkdarrior 6y ago
Tenured faculty jobs are low-risk, low-stress positions (or can be made to be, based on the professor's preferences).
- jackpirate 6y ago
  Retirement is an even lower risk and lower stress position :)
  - barumi 6y ago
    Let's put things in perspective: tenure positions are seen as a kin of retirement: you do what you love and at your own pace, and are paid generously for the privilege. The only impact of retirement is that you cease to be paid generously, and also you lose status.
    - cyberdrunk 6y ago
      What about the stories of tenured professors being essentially managers and grant-chasers for their unit? Doesn't sound low-stress to me.
      - arethuza 6y ago
        They don't stand to lose their jobs if they don't bring in enough "customers" - which is quite different to comparable jobs outside of academia.
      - iudqnolq 6y ago
        That's essentially only necessary if you want grant money or want to be seen as a team player (and get promoted, and not have your colleagues be annoyed with you, etc)

barumi 6y ago

> You do understand right, that the faculty system relies on a pyramid of people entering and leaving the system? And only a certain fraction getting to the top, and people having to vacate the top of the pyramid for anyone else to get there? (for stable, or in other words, stagnant fields) To put it differently and in terms that's easier to follow and understand, demand for tenured faculty positions is far smaller than the current supply of skilled labour.

Legogris 6y ago

You seem to imply that there is a general expectation among grad students that if they just keep at it long enough and do good work, they will become a professor one day. Isn't that kind of a crazy assumption? What's wrong with continuing your career as a researcher indefinitely? Or leave for industry/NGOs/public sector/politics/entrepreneurship if that's not what you want? I'd think that the vast majority of people who enter grad school now don't do that with the intention do "climb up the academic career ladder", and if that is true, it doesn't need to be a problem at all. There seems to be this assumption that it's desirable for everyone to always be progressing upwards in the institutional hierarchy. I don't think all these people are as delusional as you imply.

fock 6y ago
I guess historically grad school was an apprenticeship for academic research and teaching. I don't think you "need" this kind of skills (working 4+ years on one thing with a very small team) anywhere else. Nowadays, the excess of graduate students made this _the_ convenient signalling criterion for a lot of jobs (ML at FANG, liberal arts jobs (for which studying makes real sense - think museum curator, school curriculum development)). While this has been around for these kind of jobs for ages, the glut of PhDs, etc. effectively limits access to people being able to finance their PhD and having access to the required signalling from their undergrad. In the US in general and liberal-arts worldwide this effectively means that the aforementioned positions (of a certain power) are only available to the already privileged. If you get a rare living-wage scholarship or happen to live in certain parts of the EU, this can be quite ok though if you want to increase your signalling value and do something off the beaten path.
marcosdumay 6y ago
> You seem to imply that there is a general expectation among grad students that if they just keep at it long enough and do good work, they will become a professor one day. That's because there is. It's not universal, but it's much more common than what would be healthy. And it's often incentivized by the professors and academic administrations (most with the best interest of the student at their hearth, but also delusional themselves). > Isn't that kind of a crazy assumption? Yes. That's what the discussion is all about. > There seems to be this assumption that it's desirable for everyone to always be progressing upwards in the institutional hierarchy. There is this generalized assumption that it's desirable for everyone to always be progressing upwards on whatever hierarchy they find themselves. Students happen to find themselves on the academic hierarchy. It's not a healthy assumption in any circle. But the academics get the worst form of the problem for many reasons. You are perfectly correct in thinking that an academic formation should primary lead into some innovation related career, or into some high complexity practical field. You are not correct in thinking that people are not delusional enough to be a problem.

toast0 6y ago

> No one in their sane mind would retire or give up their faculty position in this environment. This environment will probably drive some faculty to retire. Distance teaching is a lot more work than in-person teaching, and it's a lot of new skills and fiddly technology. Someone who could retire anytime now, and was planning to retire in the next five years may decide to do it sooner than later. Although, they may not be immediately replaced, given enrollment/revenue drops.

jbob2000 6y ago
My father is a 65 year old professor and he now loves digital teaching. He’s terrible with computers, he single-finger types (despite all my attempts to help him improve over the years), and still loves it. His college has him pre-recording lectures, which the students can watch the following day (and can rewatch them). He doesn’t have to travel, doesn’t have to be “on” that day to teach, and doesn’t have to deal with managing students. He just sits down in front of his laptop and gives his presentation. He interacts with his students more, it’s way easier to field questions from people over the course of a day, as they all watch the lecture, than it is to try to force out some questions with the leftover time at the end of a lecture. He was definitely looking to retire before covid, but I sense a renewed passion as he’s finally discovered the digital frontier.
- a-nikolaev 6y ago
  Nice story. It can go either way, I think, depending on the courses you teach, how you re-structure them for teaching remotely, and how the college helps you with it. This is a good example of changing things for the better! On the other hand, I think, certain courses and disciplines that require university facilities (experimental labs) or more immediate individual instruction are hard to do fully remotely.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    >certain courses and disciplines that require university facilities (experimental labs) My sense is that, by and large, they're not being done remotely at the grad level. The schools I'm familiar with also have undergrads back in limited numbers in part so that they can take care of courses that have to be done physically.

marcandre 6y ago

Another way to state the conservation of professors: in the lifetime of a tenured professor, of all the grad students (s)he suppervised, the number that will succeed in getting a tenured position is (on average) equal to 1.

goodcanadian 6y ago
And yet governments provide incentives to train ever more PhDs as though that will somehow turn into a knowledge economy rather than just producing a plethora of unemployed researchers. I would be much happier to cut funding for and limit the number of graduate students in exchange for more permanent research positions.
- supernova87a 6y ago
  Well, in sympathy with those governments, you have to ask what else can they possibly do? The response I heard directly from the head of PPARC (defunct UK research body) 10 years ago was, "so, instead of having us train and produce capable researchers, even if they don't all get faculty positions, you would prefer we cut their numbers?" This was in response to the question, why aren't we funding more permanent positions in proportion to the number of students we're training. It's not an easy situation to solve. You end up having to trade off permanent positions against students. But in some countries, including a lot of EU countries, training students is a hidden way to prevent unemployment. And would you say that denying willing people a useful education just for less competition for faculty jobs is the ideal outcome? What would the best choice be? Not clear. When a pie isn't increasing, but the number of people is, things get uncomfortable.
  - goodcanadian 6y ago
    "so, instead of having us train and produce capable researchers, even if they don't all get faculty positions, you would prefer we cut their numbers?" Instead of training and producing large numbers of capable but underemployed researchers, I would definitely spend more on permanently employed researchers. I am certainly not advocating one student per permanent position: some of those excess PhDs will go into important roles in industry, but most will not: https://theconversation.com/young-educated-and-underemployed-are-we-building-a-nation-of-phd-baristas-53104 https://theconversation.com/young-educated-and-underemployed... I might spend more effort on practical Masters degree level education which can fill roles where a PhD really isn't necessary.

PrinceKropotkin 6y ago

This is why capitalism needs to die. Humans are insanely bad at valuing long-term investments.

pmiller2 6y ago

> Certain fields, let's say, pure math, or history, until a professor retires or dies, there's just no spot for the people below even to compete for. Sadly, 100% true in pure math. The worst part about it is that, you know those same 2 or 3 people who pop up in most of your classes? Yeah, they're your competition. Times every university that does anything in your specific subfield.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago

> No one in their sane mind would retire or give up their faculty position in this environment Tenured professors who were already about to retire might consider the addition of Zoom to that one undergrad class they had to teach but always hated may very well retire earlier than they wanted. I know some people in other fields who pushed their retirement up a year or two because Covid made things worse in their industry.

newen 6y ago

People doing their PhDs is one of the main ways in which actual research gets done. It’s a good in and of itself. Also, there are tons of research labs and other research positions that need PhDs.

sevensor 6y ago

> When the US was in a college-building phase ... all these posts were new and empty, waiting to be filled. So it enabled a generation of new professors to fill those ranks. Funny story about that. Shortly after the war, my grandfather, who had a Ph.D. but had not been working in academia, landed a position as professor of economics. Not only was it an academic job, not only was it a full professorship, it was in fact an endowed chair. Granted, he was brilliant, but back in those days, being brilliant was all it took.

jrumbut 6y ago
My grandfather was also hired as a professor after the war. Not direct to endowed chair, but he retired as professor emeritus. His highest degree was a bachelor's of engineering and he had been selling mattresses before he got the job.