Stability of Employment in Academia

Our dean once told us that it's good to be in academia because of employment stability. "Even if you are an adjunct, you can't be fired in the middle of a semester", he said. Yes, but if you do get fired, then you may have to spend at least a semester looking for another job (at least a year if you are looking for a tenure track job).

Don't Jump into a Hot Field

Many prospective PhD students are lured into PhD programs, at least in part, as a result of them thinking that their field is very hot right now and there are plenty of employment opportunities inside and outside academia.

For example, when I was thinking about joining our PhD program, I was told by a PhD program coordinator that in 4 years I will have a six-figure job. This prediction was based on some of the recent graduates getting several offers well-above $100K.

Another example is my professor, who told me that one of the reasons he decided to join a PhD program was because a PhD student he knew got a $95K job offer at a very good school.

But here's the trick. Even if these numbers are accurate, you have to keep in mind that it will take you 4-6 years to get your PhD. The fact that your field is so hot right now is most likely a sign that a peak has been reached and decline is on the horizon. So it may be too late to exploit this opportunity. By the time you get your PhD, the market will be saturated and you will have great difficulties finding ANY employment, unless you are in the top 5%.

Another interesting implication of that theory is that students who fail to complete their PhD programs are usually the winners. They may find industry employment with a masters in that hot field and enjoy at least a couple of years of good earnings. When the market cools off, they will either keep working at their jobs or have enough savings sail through the decline.

So don't go into a field just because it is hot right now. It may be very cold in a few years from now.

In my personal experience, some of the most successful professors jumped on board when a field was not hot - it was in an emerging state. Because the field was so immature, they published a lot of low-quality papers in newly created journals in the field. After several years, the field reached its peak and these journals became top-journals. So they were the ones to exploit the opportunity, and not the students who decided to enter the field at that time. Their success may be a combination of insight and luck, with luck probably playing a much greater role than insight.

Minimum Wage Work = Success ?

From the Chronicle of Higher Education Forum:

Well, I don't know if it counts as a success or not, but I did manage to land some academic piecework for the coming year. My job hunt as an ABD only managed to accumulate (if I was fortunate) a collection of rejection letters, but mostly silence. Wal-mart was looking to be the serious contender.

Three days after I defend, the department chair offers me a lecturer slot (2/2) at graduate assistant wages per course. Plus, these are frackin huge sections -- more students than many SLACs.

Did the math: worked out to be slave wages, but I jumped at the job. Like I had any reasonable alternative -- and it is a teaching job at a research university.

Even so, that wouldn't pay the bills. I ran into a friend who was teaching a DL graduate course for a federal agency, and got a contact. It turned out that they needed some guest help, and my mix of experience and new PhD was just the ticket. So now I have an on-line job as well (and not at a for-profit school).

As I said up front, I don't know if this counts as success -- it's probably more accurate to describe it as a way station. Hopefully I'll be able to chisel out enough time to get something from my dissertation published, and that plus PhD in hand may slightly up my chances. Not that I'm expecting the market to get any better next time around, but any ray of light at this point is a good thing.

Searching for a Job Outside of Academia

Searching for a job outside of academia when you have a PhD can create a dissonance inside your head because of the following contradictions:

• The emotional part of your brain (left side?) tells you that your education, intelligence, and persistence qualifies you for a high-level high-paying job
• At the same time, the rational part of your brain tells you that your skills and experience qualify you only for an entry-level job
  

Corruption in Academia

I applied for two academic jobs for which I was clearly qualified. In both cases they were looking for a person with exactly my research/teaching interests. A few words on my qualifications:

• I've managed to publish 12 papers during my PhD program
• I have exceptionally high teaching evaluations
• I have experience developing new courses
• My adviser is a top 10 professor in my field
  

School one is a decent school. Well, they didn't even invite me for an interview. The school hired a PhD student of a professor who was a buddy of the school's department chair.

School two is a crappy teaching place. I have better qualifications than most of their existing faculty members. They did invite me for an interview. Immediately, it was clear that they were just wasting my time. The department chair kept saying things like "well, this is going to be a good practice for you in your job search". Guess who they hired? A son of one the school's administrators. Interestingly, one of his sons is already working for the department. Now they hired his second son.

So if you think that academics are not like the evil corporate types, your are being naive. Corruption in academia is even more rampant than in the corporate world. When I see discussions on ethics on our field's mailing list, I just want to tell those hypocrites to shut the fuck up.

Why schools do not hire their own graduates

Most graduate programs (with the exception of such schools as Harvard) do not hire their own PhD graduates as tenure-track professors. A common justification of this unofficial rule is that schools want to prevent "academic inbreeding". Gathering people with different academic backgrounds in one department, they argue, is likely to produce better synergies. Another justification of this unofficial rule is that a newly minted assistant professor will always be perceived as a "dumb PhD student" by other faculty members if he continues working for the same department he got his or her PhD from.

One can argue that this noble purpose of creating better synergies and improving well-being of newly minted professors is really a mask for some much more earthly and pragmatic causes.

First, by the time someone gets his or her PhD degree he may have a lot of hate towards professors in the department and simply may not want to continue working with them. I rarely meet a PhD graduate who doesn't hate his or her committee members and the department as a whole.

Second, given the scarcity of tenure-track positions, a second-tier school can easily hire someone from a top-tier school as a tenure-track faculty member. So there's no point in hiring their own graduates when they can easily hire someone much shinier.

Flexible and Rewarding Career

Our college used to run an ad aimed at attracting applicants to their PhD programs. The ad argued that having a PhD is a road to a "flexible and rewarding career).

I'm not going to touch on the "rewarding" part of the ad here. But I will talk a bit about the so-called flexibility.

Flexibility is definitely not a part of a professor's career. In many fields, there are only a couple of dozen openings in the entire United States. Needless to say, you don't have much to choose from in terms of location. Moreover, not all of those openings may be a good fit with what you do in terms of teaching and research. So, in any given year, you are lucky to see a few job ads that seem to align with what you want to do and where you want to live. Given the level of competition for those openings, there may be like 1-2-3 hundred applicants for every position. The applicants pool consists of new PhD graduates, faculty members who got denied tenure and numerous adjuncts. So most people are happy to land a permanent, tenure-track position ANYWHERE, even if it means moving from let's say California to North Dakota.

Now, if you do land a permanent position, you cannot hope for regular and substantial pay raises throughout your tenure. Pay raises at universities may only compensate for inflation, but are not likely to give you any boost to your financial situation. If you stay in one place for too long, new hires are likely to make more money than you, after 10-15 years with the school. Situations like that are very common.

So the only way to improve your financial situation is to change jobs every few years. Again, given the small number of jobs available, getting a new job usually means relocating thousands miles away.

My adviser, a very accomplished professor, lived in 14 different states and 2 different countries throughout his career. Because of his nomadic lifestyle, he didn't have a chance to start a family until he was like 50. The only reason he kept wondering around like a gypsy was pay!

Unless by flexibility they mean that you have to become flexible like a gypsy, you shouldn't buy into that flexibility crap they advertise.

Employment Cycles in Academia

Academia recruits people through lengthy and bureaucratic procedures. The bottom line for anyone who wants to find a university position is that you just can't be hired at any time.

For example, if you are looking for an adjunct position, you won't be hired in-between semesters (for obvious reasons). Therefore, if you don't find a position before a semester starts, you will have to wait for another 4-6 months. Moreover, department chairs usually don't know whether they will need someone from outside to teach a class until 1-2 weeks before a semester starts. So at least some people end up teaching classes or find out that they will be unemployed on a short notice.

If you are looking for a full-time, tenure-track position - there's usually a one year recruitment cycle associated with these positions. So if you hope to start working full time in let's say August 2010, you will have to apply in Summer 2009. Applicants may have through a series of interviews, campus visits, etc. throughout the entire year. Anything can happen during that year. For example, some schools will just suspend their candidate search due to funding for the new position not being approved. If you are not successful in landing a job (and given the oversupply of PhDs this seems to be the case for most candidates), you have to wait another year if you hope to land a full-time job. Even right now there are people who are "looking for work" since 1990s.

What a great field to be in!

Adjuncts: Hope Springs Eternal

I talked to my friend today. He has been an adjunct for several years now. Every year he tells me his school is going to offer him a permanent position. But it doesn't happen...

He applied to a nearby school for a tenure-track position (a crappy teaching school). Then he talked to one of his former professors about the job. The professor told him that he is not likely to get this job. One of the school's existing adjuncts is going to get it. The reason they advertise the position is because they are required to do so by law. In reality, this position is already filled...

On Irrationality of Doctoral Student

I remember my first day in the PhD program. Two senior PhD students invited me to go have lunch with them. They were chatting about jobs. One of them (he later became one of my best friends) said something like that:

"Man, look at Mike. He spent 6 years in the program and got a 60K teaching job! I know a guy who went to a nursing school and he makes about the same after like 2 years in school". Shortly after this lunch, this guy quit our PhD program and got an 80K industry job in a few months.

For some reason, I didn't pay attention to what he said. There's just something about human nature that prevents people from understanding simple things. Some people can solve extremely complex math problems, yet lack the ability to make very sober judgments. May be emotions get in the way of rational thinking. Or may be people just like to gamble.

I think what I should have done when I heard that interesting rumor is extensive research on employment prospects in my field.

Employment for International Students in the United States

International graduate students often find themselves in a much harder financial situation than locals. This has to do with the fact that they often have no where to go if they run out of money. Their folks back at home may not have sufficient money to help them out. What makes the situation even worse is that international students often think they cannot get the money through legal employment.

This is not true. Usually most schools have programs that would allow international students to get authorized to work off campus. For example, there can be a thing called "practical training" (I'm not talking about OPT here, it's a different kind). This practical training thing usually requires you to register for a class (with a minimal fee) and then you can work off campus (even full-time). Moreover, you can do this for a long time (I think at least for several semesters). They usually require the job to be in your field of studies, so that you can make a strong case that this will benefit your education process. Usually, this requirement is not strictly enforced and you can always prove that working as a janitor will be beneficial to your education as an architect.

Tenure-Track Job Search

Gosh!!! Went to the Chronicle of Higher Education forums. Apparently, being "on the market" for 3 years is considered to be normal. There are people who are searching for a TT position since 1990's. Those people remind me gamblers who lost all of their money in a casino and still continue placing bets. There are people who have full-time jobs (outside of academia) and are still attending conferences and trying to publish papers in hope that they will land a TT job some day at ANY school. I don't know how about you, but the word "insanity" comes to my mind when I read about those people...

I would understand someone sacrificing years of his or her life in an attempt to become a millionaire. It can be a gamble, but the potential payoff may be worth it. But I can't understand people sacrificing so much of their lives to get a job which pays as much as a job of an average American worker!

Getting a PhD to Become and Expert

Some people decide to go into a PhD program because they think that they can become an expert in a particular field. Yes, you will become an expert. But not the kind of expert you think. Most likely, you will become an expert in something nobody outside academia cares about.

For example, if you get a PhD in management, most likely you will become an expert in a set of esoteric psychology theories.

I even heard from IT people that they don't hire Computer Science PhD's because they usually have expertise in areas that don't have any practical applications yet lack skills in essential areas of programming.

What They Don't Teach You in Graduate School

A good article full of tips published by Inside Higher Ed

November 30, 2005 4:00 am

What They Don't Teach You in Graduate School

Paul Gray and David E. Drew

Paul Gray and David E. Drew offer rules for finishing up that dissertation and finding a first job.

Each year, Ph.D. candidates and young faculty members come into our offices and sheepishly ask us to tell them what they really need to know about building a career in academia. We usually take them to a long lunch at the Faculty House and give them the helpful hints that we share with you here. We start with tips for getting out of graduate school and into your first job. Subsequent pieces will offer tips for later stages of academic careers.

I. Understanding the Meaning of a Ph.D.

1. Finish your Ph.D. as early as possible. Don’t feel that you need to create the greatest work that Western Civilization has ever seen. Five years from now the only thing that will matter is whether you finished. If you don’t finish you are likely to join the ranks of “freeway flyers.” holding multiple part-time teaching jobs.

2. Be humble about your Ph.D. You don't need to flaunt the degree. Everyone has one. Many of your colleagues, both in your institution and outside it, will be put off if you sign everything "Doctor" or "Jane Jones, Ph.D." In fact, the main use of “Doctor” is in making reservations at a restaurant. When you call in and ask for a table for four for Dr. Jones, you will get more respect and often better seating. One of us recently received a letter from “John Smith, Ph.D. (candidate)” Don’t do that.

3. Remember that a Ph.D. is primarily an indication of survivorship. Although the public at large may view your doctorate as a superb intellectual achievement and a reflection of brilliance, you probably know deep in your heart that it is not. It represents a lot of hard work on your part over a long period of time. You probably received help from one or more faculty members to get over rough spots. Your family, be it parents or spouse, stayed with you over the vicissitudes of creating the dissertation. You stuck with it until it was done, unlike the ABD's who bailed out early.

4. A Ph.D. is a certification of research ability based on a sample of 1. The Ph.D. certifies that you are able to do quality research. Unlike the M.D., which requires extensive work with patients, followed by years of internship and residency, it is based on a single sample, your dissertation. The people who sign your dissertation are making a large bet on your ability to do it again and again in the future.

5. A Ph.D. is a license to reproduce and an obligation to maintain the quality of your intellectual descendants. Once you have the Ph.D., it is possible for you (assuming you are working in an academic department that has a Ph.D. program) to create new Ph.D.'s. Even if your department does not have a Ph.D., you can be called upon to sit on Ph.D. examining committees either in your own or in neighboring institutions. This is a serious responsibility because you are creating your intellectual descendants. Recognize that if you vote to pass someone who is marginal or worse they, in turn, have the same privilege. If they are not up to standard, it is likely that some of their descendants will also not be. Unlike humans who have a 20 year inter-generation time, academic intergeneration times are 5 years or less. Furthermore, a single individual may supervise 50 or more Ph.D.'s over a 30-year career.

II. Finishing the Dissertation

1. Finding a dissertation topic is not as easy as it looks. In fact, for many students it is the most difficult part of their dissertation work. Some students go to a professor they want to work with and ask for a topic. Usually they wind up desperately unhappy because they don’t “own” the topic yet are condemned to work on it. Often these students spend the rest of their life ABD.

2. Don’t assume that if you are having trouble defining a dissertation topic that the entire dissertation process will be that arduous. Once you define the topic, you are in problem solving mode, and most people do well in solving a problem once they know what the topic is.

3. Put a lot of effort into writing your dissertation proposal. The proposal has two important payoffs:

• It is usually one or more chapters of your end product, the dissertation.
• It is a contract between you and advisory committee on what you have to do to receive the degree. In general, if you do well what you promise in the proposal, the committee should sign the final document. If, because of circumstances, you cannot accomplish all you set out to do, you have the basis for a negotiation.

4. If little or nothing is written on your dissertation topic, don’t assume that an abbreviated literature review is acceptable. Thesis committees are used to having a minimum sized review and will insist on it. If only three previous papers even touch on your subject, reviewing them is not considered an adequate literature search. Furthermore, the new data you expect to obtain, even in a specialized topic, can affect a lot of intersecting fields. Those fields have to be identified. In short, a literature review not only discusses what has been done and why but it also points out the areas in which your work has implications.

5. Be skillful in whom you select for your dissertation advisory committee. The worst possible approach is to pick people because they are famous in their field. Rather, recognize that the role of the advisory committee is really to advise and help you. Therefore, choose people who can help you over the rough spots. If your thesis is experimental and requires expertise in two fields, pick an expert in each field and someone who knows about experimental design and statistics. When push comes to shove (and it will at some time while you are working on your dissertation), the person you need will be there to help you because he or she made a commitment to you. Simply hoping that the expert will contribute their time to your problem without being on the committee can prove naïve.

6. In doing a literature search, use the “chain of references”. Begin with one or two recent articles (a survey article helps!). Look at the references that are cited there. Then read those publications that seem apropos and look at their reference lists. Some things will pop out often. These are usually (but not invariably) the classics in the field that you MUST reference. Proceed from reference to reference until the law of diminishing returns takes over.

7. Couple your literature search (typically Chapter 2 of your dissertation) closely with the discussion of results and the conclusions (typically Chapters 4 and 5). You may find that as your dissertation progresses, some parts of your literature search are really irrelevant to your research. In this case, you have to be ruthless. Despite the brilliance of your prose and the long, tedious hours you put into creating the material, you have to delete these pearls. Of course, you should save the work as part of your file of references so you can use it over and over in future publications.

III. Hunting for Your First Academic Job

1. Job hunting is a research project and you should treat it as such. Gather as much information as possible. Read the ads. Contact sources. Follow up leads. Be aggressive. Use your contacts. See next rule. The chance of landing a good appointment is higher if you search broadly than if you sit in your office waiting for one or two possibilities. Begin job hunting early and make it a project done at the same time as your other work. If you are a graduate student, don’t wait until your dissertation is finished to start looking. (But if you find you simply don't have the time and energy for both the dissertation and job hunting, focus on finishing the dissertation.)

2. Most academic fields are dominated by fewer than 100 powerful people. These people know one another and determine the course of the field. Early in your career you should get to know as many of them as possible. More to the point, they should know who you are. You want them to see you as a bright young person on the cutting edge. Although important, there are dangers associated with this tactic. You should not begin the process until you have mastered the literature (particularly the papers they wrote!) and developed some ideas of your own. If they get to know you and conclude you have no ideas, you’re finished.

3. Pick a place where you and your family want to live and which matches your lifestyle. City people are not happy in isolated college towns and small city people have a hard time adjusting to a megalopolis.

4. To get a job (and later, to get tenure) you will need references beyond your dissertation committee. Build a reference pool. That is, identify people who will say nice things about you. They don’t have to be famous or distinguished but they should hold impressive titles or be employed at prestige places. References from abroad are particularly desirable since they show you to be a world figure. Remember that colleges are lazy. When references are needed, they will ask you for a long list of names from which to choose. Pick your friends.

5. Résumés are important. They are the entree to the process. Invest in having them done professionally. They should be neat but not gaudy. Include everything that is remotely relevant in your resume. Some search committees have a checklist of skills, experiences, and other criteria they expect for this position. Do you know something about, say, medieval literature or data bases, since they want that course covered. A committee may blindly drop you from consideration if you don’t have a check next to each of their items. Your problem is that the list of items is different at every institution.

6. When applying for a position, interview your potential boss just as they interview you. You will have to live rather intimately with him or her for a long time. Make sure you are compatible.

7. If you are a new Ph.D. or an active researcher on a campus visit, many, if not most of the senior people who interview you have less, not more research productivity in the last three years than you have. This is particularly true for older faculty members who were granted tenure in easier times. When you are interviewed by such people, be kind. Stress the importance of your research but don’t overwhelm them with the details. You don’t want them to perceive you as a threat to the comfortable position they now hold.

8. Find the best possible institution for your first job. You can only go down the pecking order, not up, if you don't make it at your first place. If you are a success, you can go up one level at a time. Stanford doesn't hire from WinsockiState.

9. Unless you are starving or homeless, don’t take a tenure-track faculty position without the Ph.D. in hand. We estimate the odds are 2 to 1 against your ever finishing your degree. Even if you do finish while on the job, your chances of being tenured have gone down because you have reduced the “seven-year“ clock. Furthermore, without a Ph.D. you will be offered a significantly lower salary and you may never make up the difference. If you must work, the only defense you have is to negotiate with the institution that the clock does not start until they legitimately call you “Doctor.”

10.Non-university research organizations offer the challenge of research without the need or the opportunity to teach. They include industry laboratories, major consulting firms, government laboratories, and nonprofit think tanks. Each has a distinctive culture. Many involve military work. In the not-for-profits and the consulting firms, you are only as good as the last contract you brought in. As a result, these organizations experience a high burnout rate among people 45 or older. If you want to go back to academia at some time in the future, you will have to create your own portable wealth by publishing. Many of these organizations encourage and require you to publish, at least to publish research monographs. Unfortunately, publishing is counter-culture in some of these organizations. In some industrial laboratories it is said that if you write F=ma or E=mc2, someone will stamp your report Company Confidential.

11. Avoid taking a job in a college that you attended, no matter how strong your loyalty as an alumnus. You will always be regarded as a graduate student by the older faculty and will be treated as such.

12. If your field is one in which there is an oversupply of people, one strategy is to seek a job as an assistant dean. This approach is quite tricky. Colleges are always looking for such necessary but non-glorious jobs as assistant dean for student affairs or assistant dean of administration or assistant dean for summer school. You, as an applicant, insist that you also have an appointment (even if not tenure track) in your field of specialty, say, history. You must also insist that you teach one course and that you have some time for research. Unless you do so, you will never have a crack at a tenure-track position. You must then be active in your department and be seen by the department as a member in good standing who gives them access to the Administration. Even then, you may never be fully accepted. However, you will gain experience that can be used later and you will have had the academic title (and the teaching and research experience) needed on your resume when you look for a job involving full-time teaching and research.

13. The law of supply and demand applies to academia as much as to other fields. You are playing a futures game on the job market, no different from a high roller in the stock market, when you select a field of study for your Ph.D. Since it takes 4 to 7 years or more to acquire the degree, you make the assumption that your services will be in demand several years from now. They may be, but then again they may not be. Fields move in and out of favor over time. When a hot new field or specialty opens up, it is an exciting time. Lots of people wander in from adjacent fields.They form departments or concentration areas and begin training Ph.D.’s in that specialty. There is a shortage of people and good salaries are offered. However, what usually happens is that within a relatively short period of time, the Ph.D. market saturates and jobs become scarcer. Furthermore, other new specialties emerge and colleges and universities cut back on the previous fad. A classic example is operations research (also known as management science). In the 1960’s, new departments were formed. By the 1980’s, the job market was saturated. In the last decade the supply exceeded the demand, and this in a field where there is industrial as well as academic employment. The obvious implication for graduate students is that fields with an oversupply of applicants, both initial jobs and tenure are much harder to achieve. Furthermore, the academic level of the school where you will be hired will, on average, be lower and so will the salary.

14. Institutions have their own cultures and, in large institutions, different schools and departments may have different cultures. The culture will range from cooperative to cutthroat. Often the culture will change when a new person is appointed president or provost or dean or department chair. That is what makes these appointments so critical to the quality of your life. A cooperative culture should be treasured. It will help the young faculty member. Conversely, a cutthroat culture is particularly difficult for the young faculty member because they come in not knowing the culture of the place nor being prepared for it. When interviewing, try to find out whether the members of the faculty like one another and try to assess from what they tell you what the cultural norm is. Asking graduate students about faculty infighting won’t help because they are usually insulated from it. Remember that, in addition to trying to assess your capabilities and fit with their needs, the interviewers are trying to present as good a picture of themselves as they can so that you will accept their offer if they make one. Thus, always assume that actual conditions are much worse than they are painted during the interview. If you are lucky enough to have multiple offers, investigate the cultures involved in your choice by speaking to people (if any) who are there whom you know and to people who have recently left there.

15. Two pieces of data about an institution which are important to you are whether you are being offered the right amount of money and the chances of your achieving tenure. To this end, obtain information on the salary levels for people in your field. The American Association of University Professors publishes salary averages for many (but not all) colleges.

16. Tenure levels are a little trickier. First, the number of tenure cases per year in an academic unit tends to be small. You need data for your specialty. However, knowing the tenure fraction for the institution as a whole is also important. If a college tenures 1 in 10 it is a far different place than one that tenures 8 in 10. Just knowing success in the tenure process is not enough. Some colleges weed out at the three year point. Others make tenure so tough that faculty “self-destruct” by resigning early. Talk with people who recently made tenure in the department. They will usually have the best view of what the current situation is.

17. Evaluate a postdoc carefully, particularly if you are in the sciences. You should think of a postdoc in cold, hard economic terms. It as an investment (or speculation, depending on your point of view) just like buying stocks or real estate. You will certainly be paid less than if you took a teaching position but you may gain additional knowledge and experience to make more money in the long run in your chosen field. The anticipated benefits must exceed the short run costs to make the investment worthwhile. Some conditions under which a postdoc is appropriate are:

• You are in a field where jobs at good places are scarce and you did not get one or you failed to follow Rule 1 and delayed too long in starting your job search.
• You feel you need to gain specific research tools (or, if a scientist, experience with specialized equipment) to be able to move your research past your Ph.D. thesis.
• You want to work with a specific individual (preferably one of the powerful 100, see Rule 2) who will further your growth.
• You want to build up your publication list without using up your seven-year clock.

A postdoc is not appropriate if you are afraid of teaching or talking in front of people. You are merely delaying the inevitable. A postdoc is also not appropriate if you lived on a shoestring for years and/or have a family to support.

18. Ask about the retirement system when considering an institution. It is really not too early to worry about retirement when interviewing for your first job because it can affect your mobility economically from then on. Recognize that you will most likely be in a state retirement system or in the TIAA retirement system. TIAA is subscribed to by most private and some public institutions. In TIAA, once vested (usually, these days, at once) you keep what you have when you move to another institution. State retirement plans are portable within the state but not from one state to another. The major problem comes when you move from a TIAA college to a state institution or the other way around.

David Drew and Paul Gray are professors, respectively, of education and information science at Claremont Graduate University.

Jobs for English Majors

From what I know, having a PhD degree in English is the worst kind of degree to get in terms of employment. I personally met a PhD in British Literature driving a wrecker in New York City. I also met a couple of people with PhDs in English getting a second, more marketable PhD degree (can you imagine spending 8-10 years in a graduate school????).

So if you were stupid enough to get a degree like that, here's a tip for you. If you are not a pussy and don't have a family, you may be able to get a well-paying job abroad. There are many countries out there who would love to have an native speaker teaching English and would pay quite well for your work. Here were are probably talking about such countries as China, Japan, Russia, United Arab Emirates, etc.

You can probably make quite a bit of extra money if you do some private tutoring on the side. For example, I know some native speakers charge like $40 per hour of one-to-one tutoring. This is probably more than you will make as a tenured faculty member. Plus, you will get to see the world...

So don't be stressed out! You still have a shot at a semi-decent life ;) But watch out for Mormons! Those folks will steal your business a lot since they offer free English lessons as a bait.

PhD Program Rankings and Employment

Friends, there's a ugly truth profs don't like to talk about. Unless you graduate from a top program, your chances of finding decent, tenure-track job may be very slim. Here's a hypothesis, which tends to be significant at alpha = 0.05

H1: Students from top schools end up getting jobs at second-tier schools; Students from second-tier schools end up adjuncts or simply unemployed

Don't believe this? Read "Professor of Desperation" (see the "References" section to the right)

I was once shocked when I visited an online forum for PhD students in economics. Kids from top schools were praying to land a job at the University Middle of Nowhere.

So if you have scholarly ambitions, you shouldn't even bother applying to mid-level schools and below. Getting rejected by top schools and not going to academia may be your ticket to a much happier life. The only people who should consider attending a PhD program in a second-tier school are retired and financially secure folks who just want something to do between now and their death.