I'd like to hear some confirmation from insiders before I even begin to believe this. Cries of looming capacity crises have been heard before in the education sector, and tend to be nonsense. And academic positions in general are wildly, insanely, ridiculously competitive because of overproduction of new PhDs, with hundreds of applicants for every open position.
EDIT: Hmm, my alma mater Waterloo is looking to hire "up to ten tenure-track (assistant professor) or tenured (associate/full professor) faculty positions." That's out of (or in addition to?) 89 current faculty members. A larger number than I would have expected and as such some evidence for the proposition.
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.
The key phrase (IMHO being in this market myself) from your comment is "top schools." The market for CS faculty is vastly different at lower ranked schools than it is at higher ranked schools. I'm sure this is true in any field.
I disagree with you when you say we need more "reasonably paid adjuncts." Yes, adjuncts should be paid better, but what we really need is more reasonably paid full-time teaching faculty who do not have research responsibilities. Students appreciate full-time faculty who are fully committed to teaching them, although of course some adjuncts do a fantastic job as well.
You're right, I know much less about competitiveness at lower-ranked schools. I would expect that the funding situation also changes there? The refrain I have heard is that at lesser-known schools base packages may be better but outside funding and good research partners (e.g. colleagues or grad students or undergrads) become harder to find.
I think the wider point about decoupling research and teaching still stands, though. And even elite schools (Berkeley, Cornell, Stanford) have noted recent cases of having too many students even as they maintain extremely tough faculty standards.
I'm finishing my PhD this semester, and looking for a University teaching job (unfortunately, these are not tenure track), and the number of openings is staggering. For that matter, don't confuse a teaching-track job with an adjunct job. They are most definitely different. Also, teaching faculty aren't the 2nd class citizens that they may have been 10 years ago. Most teaching faculty are specialists not just in teaching but also in the most up-to-date info in the field itself.
It is a seller's market where I (the seller) get to be selective and universities (the buyers) are having to offer premiums (including sign-on bonuses... who would that thought that a teaching position could get a 5-figure sign-on bonus?!?) in order to attract top candidates. Many schools that I have interviewed at say that they are looking to hire multiple positions (both the tenured research-track, as well as the non-tenured teaching track).
Also, from personal knowledge, there are not hundreds of applicants for many of these positions. There may be several dozen, but I know of candidates who have applied to 40, 60, and even 100 jobs.
Combine this with the knowledge that many Comp Sci programs have doubled enrollment in the last 5 years, but have not had a corresponding doubling of faculty size, and the article's assertions make even more sense.
While my experience does not consitute a formal study, I can tell you that everwhere that I have interviewed has said the same thing: "This is a very good year to be looking for a CS, university job!"
Meaning that you will be able to apply for 200 open positions that never pan out, instead of just 100?
I tend to measure my ease in finding a new job by the brevity of the timespan between deciding to look and accepting an offer. Around here, that's usually 2-6 weeks. I don't usually apply to university positions, but for those I have attempted, I frequently see a delay of months between the time of application and their first attempt to put together an interview. None have ever been able to establish initial contact in less than 5 business days. Also, the postings frequently have bizarre requirements, such as requiring a masters in CS and 10 years of experience in C and Matlab, in order to write a glorified CRUD app that requires neither.
The teaching positions might be different, but I have personally never found any year to be a good one to be looking for a university job.
I only applied to 9 universities, all R1. After the rounds of interviews, I have received 3 offers so far, and am still waiting to hear back from the majority of the others. Each of the schools is hiring multiple positions, and I can only take one of the positions.
The timeframe is longer, of course, but I am beginning to look for those jobs while finishing my PhD (e.g., still employed at my previous job as a grad student). It's no secret that schools generally hire within the timeframe of the academic year. It's different from industry, though, because schools must hire early enough so that they can schedule classes and plan teaching loads, and that means that it must be early enough for students to be able to register at the end of the previous (spring) semester, but the job itself doesn't begin until the fall. That's the nature of the academic calendar.
As for speed of response, it has generally been quite quick, which is amazing given the committees that everything must go through. I have not had any experiences with bizarre requirements.
They are very very very different. You have the normal "applications close on / for full consideration submit materials before [month] [day]" thing. But if you submit your application on that day (or anyways, pretend you did) then the typical schedule was something like:
* phone interview the next week
* onsite between one week and one month from phone interview
* offer within a few days/weeks of onsite.
Actually, my teaching job process moved much faster than my industry job process.
Maybe at least in CS we need to move to a "rolling basis" style.
Are you coming from a top school? You're applying to R1 schools so I'm wondering if your anecdote, as an ideal candidate, falls outside the "normal" range of actual job search difficulty.
Well, that's why anecdotal evidence is not research. ;)
You are absolutely correct, though: I'm a strong candidate. But when I said that I knew people who were applying to 40, 60, and even 100 positions, those, too, are from top schools.
When I say that schools are only receiving dozens of applications (50-70), those are also top schools.
What I didn't say was that, due to my personal network, I also know of dozens of smaller schools (who aren't advertizing on the CRA job board, for example) who are desperate to find good applicants. I have been contacted by them, as have some of my collegues.
I also happen to know that many of the applicants are international, who are (presumably) looking for a ticket to the US, because they don't have any relevant experience. (Obviously, there are many good international applicants, too!)
My personal experience is that this is a good year to be looking for an academic job. The link just confirmed my personal experience.
While it's certainly not common, there are some school that offer tenure track positions for lectures. The University of Toronto is the only one that immediately comes to mind, but I know there are others.
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.
CS, and engineering in general, have much better job prospects than other fields. As a result, fewer PhDs are fighting to get open academic positions.
Furthermore, I know many people in CS and engineering who have left a tenured professorship for a job in industry. That is exceedingly rare in many other academic fields, such as classics or literature.
So it is possible that there are more openings in certain fields than others. I'm inclined to agree with you that most fields are absurdly competitive and professorships are very difficult to come by.
I'm a phd student currently on the job market for more teaching-oriented (but sometimes still tenure-track) positions.
Outside of R1, the article actually understates the shortage. It's definitely a seller's market, and many of the buyers are viscerally panicked about failed searches.
Look at CS enrollments over time. This is a unique point in history. The phds graduating now went through undergrad at a historic lowpoint in enrollment (the 200x post-dotcom-all-the-jobs-are-going-to-India era) and are graduating into the single largest upswing in undergraduate enrollment in the history of the field.
How's the market look for MS holders with experience in industry? I've always had the yen to teach (enjoyed it in graduate school!), but the pay tends to be 1/2 what I make in industry, with similar benefits.
> How's the market look for MS holders with experience in industry?
If you like teaching and can deal with the cut in pay, you should seriously consider applying to lower-ranked colleges/universities that have teaching positions. You will get an offer, and you will make those places so happy!
> but the pay tends to be 1/2 what I make in industry, with similar benefits.
It's both far worse than that and far better than that, depending on the place.
1. Half is pretty good for lower-tier places. My prototypical offer was around 29% of my best industry offer in terms of raw amounts. Maybe close to half after counting up benefits and doing the CoL adjustment?
2. My best academic offer was about 50% of my best industry offer in terms of what typically goes into comp calculations in industry (salary/stock). But after cost of living adjustment and counting the value of the tuition (divided over a 30 year career and multiplied by the number of children I'd like), the academic position was within 20%. Which is pretty good. So make sure you're counting everything (including tuition remission) and accounting for cost of living (college towns are often dirt cheap compared to hub cities).
3. Oh, and make sure you know what "9 month salary" means. At some places you really can disappear all summer. At other places you need to work all summer even if not teaching; the salary is only nominally for 9 months.
My university's CS department resorted to having adjunct faculty or part time lecturers come in, and this was after dealing with not having enough of them with time to teach more than one or two section of a course. It was so incredibly bad with a lack of instructors and/or time they could spend on multiple sections that there would be waitlists for students to get into courses at least two times as full as the section allowed. This wasn't just a matter of elective type courses being incredibly popular, but quite literally even regular core requirements simply not having enough lecturers/professors.
does the huge number of phd increases show a symptom of the bar being too low to receive a phd, or the number of qualified candidates actually receiving the phd? Same question for the compsci degree.
I know a ton of people who have comp sci degrees, but, cant write my mysql query or write a block of code, or solve some rudimentary problems, or talk through problem solving questions like rational human beings.
Same goes for other faculties. Hell, I once hired a finance major with a business degree who couldn't handle doing the books for our startup.
Just because they are graduates, it doesn't make them candidates
Are you talking about CS undergrad degree holders or CS PhDs?
Some CS undergrads might have chosen CS without commensurating aptitudes and interest, and graduated without much skills. Same goes for other majors at the undergrad level. They are a mixed bag with great and inadequate graduates receiving the same degree.
Also, did you look at their undergrad performance (GPA, research papers, senior project)? They can be more indicative than the degree itself.
PhDs are a whole different ball game. At least they are usually good at problem solving. They might not know SQL off-hand (since they never needed to learn it) but give them a day or a couple of hours to learn, they should be able the master the basics pretty well.
The usual view of academics is that the Ph.D. is a research degree. One of the requirements is the ability to hold chalk and write on a blackboard. The other three qualifications are research, research, and research, especially as in getting a research grant from the NSF, etc. to pay the bills.
For doing research, skills writing MySQL queries, using MathLab, writing JavaScript with AJAX, etc. are rarely important. Uh, can't publish a paper in a peer-reviewed journal or get a research grant based on writing MySQL queries, even clever MySQL queries. Relational database WAS important as research for, say, E. Wong or E. Codd 30+ years ago.
Researchers quickly learn that they can't carry the library around between their ears. In particular, a Ph.D. holder in computer science, mathematics, physics, biology doesn't know everything in computer science, ....
Instead, the requirement for a Ph.D. is roughly (A) pass the qualifying exams and (B) show that can do some research. For (A), that might still be testing over quite a lot of material that was taught to undergraduate majors. For (B), a common requirement is "an original contribution to knowledge worthy of publication" where the usual requirements for publication are "new, correct, and significant".
Now a major theme in research in computer science is to build on, or even borrow and extend, sometimes even to apply, applied math that goes back nearly 70 years. So, as is common in a lot of research, the main tools and abilities are in applied math and, then, as has been said for theoretical physics, can do the physics (computer science) in the footnotes.
Net, it stands to be the case that some of the best researchers in computer science will be from pure/applied math and may never have written a SQL query or, for that matter, never taken a course in computer science.
How can this be the case? Did I mention that the main goals are research, research, and research? The high end universities are fairly solidly stuck on these three goals.
So, why should such researchers be teaching courses to undergraduates? Well, maybe they would be teaching some course "Applied Math for Computer Science 101" with some set theory, abstract algebra, deterministic optimization, probability theory, stochastic processes, and statistics.
More generally, the attitude is that a good researcher has done some impressive things, and, thus, the quality of the course content should be better than from "teaching faculty". In fact, commonly that is the case.
Or, the emphasis is not on tutorials on material 30+ years old, e.g., relational database, but on what is new, in theory and/or applications. And, computer science also wants to find what is fundamental in the field -- a darned ill defined goal super tough to reach. Well, the question of P versus NP looks "fundamental" so, whatever connection it has with practice so far, it has been heavily pursued, and a good solution is a Holy Grail problem for the field.
The belief is strong, although maybe rarely made clear in ugrad courses, that it is in the best interest of the grant funders, universities, professors, students, job seekers, computer applications, the computer industry, US standard of living, and civilization to concentrate on what is NEW, powerful, and valuable.
An example of this view is from a statement, at one time at the Web site of the Princeton math department: IIRC, "Students are expected to prepare for the qualifying exams on their own. No courses are given for preparation for the exams. Graduate courses are introductions to research given by experts in their fields." -- IIRC, from memory. Well, bluntly, as a special case, essentially everything a student might want to learn for an ordinary job NOW the graduate program is not interested in teaching!!!
So, really, if want to hire a Ph.D., then should not use as criteria what ugrad or self-taught computer programmers have learned and use, e.g., HTML, CSS, JavaScript, C++, Matlab, R, etc. And don't look at courses, credits, or grades. Grades? Commonly grades in graduate courses, those introductions to research, don't mean much. Indeed, at some Ph.D. programs, there is no coursework requirement. In such a course, a student is looking for a research direction. So, maybe in the course they see a research direction they like and maybe, likely, not. So be it.
So, instead, to evaluate a Ph.D. look at their research.
And why hire a Ph.D.? Because you want work that is NEW, as in so far no one has done it, and hopefully powerful and valuable for some goal the company has.
And why a Ph.D. for work that is new? Well, doing research is commonly just darned challenging, and essentially the only education for that is the Ph.D. degree. And, to be more clear, such research likely doesn't have much to do with lots of facility in writing SQL queries or teaching or even just making an A in an ugrad course in database.
To be more clear, it is assumed that if some good research has been done and is well written about on the shelves of the research libraries, then anyone at all good at research will be able, routinely, to teach themselves the material so quickly it never was clear they didn't know it. Indeed, in research, commonly it is necessary to review, and learn well enough, quite a lot of old material. So, bluntly, the learning of what is well presented on the shelves of the libraries is considered routine, not worth academic tenure or even a title of professor.
So, e.g., for MySQL and relational database, that subject has been written about voluminously at essentially every possible level from a secretary just starting with a computer using Microsoft's Access to generate a mailing list to the normal forms, locking and transactional ingtegrity, foreign keys, clustered keys, connection pools, backup of a live database, distributed database, and much more. No tenure or professor honors for knowing that stuff.
Precisely. The PhDs direct the research. They solve the (previously) unsolvable. If you want a deployable version of their research, you want a software developer, possibly specializing in research. If you want some python written, hire a regular software developer. A PhD is an entirely separate career path from a regular software developer.
1. The preference (note: not requirement) is quite explicit.
2. No one in CS (literally, even the upper echelon) has the applicant pool that provides them with the luxury of prioritizing on the basis of diversity.
EDIT: Hmm, my alma mater Waterloo is looking to hire "up to ten tenure-track (assistant professor) or tenured (associate/full professor) faculty positions." That's out of (or in addition to?) 89 current faculty members. A larger number than I would have expected and as such some evidence for the proposition.
https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/about/open-positions/faculty-positio...