Tenure-track faculty positions at universities have been on the decline for years — and a recent study found that even at the top universities, less than half of English Ph.D. graduates wind up on the academic tenure track.
There are more than 130 graduate programs in English nationwide. David Colander, a professor of economics at Middlebury College in Vermont and co-author of the study, said the report organized these programs into four tiers based on the common academic job entry level upon graduation.
He found that 39.5 percent of graduates from the top Ph.D. tier will go on to a tenure-track position, while just 27.9 percent of those from Tier 4 universities went on to fill the same spots. UNC-Greensboro was classified as a Tier 4 school, while UNC-CH wasn’t mentioned specifically in the study.
Colander said professors, students and others requested that he do the study, which mirrored a previous report he’d released on economics.
“The reaction has been significant,” he said.
Less than 50 percent of the graduates from the top Ph.D. programs end up in tenure-track jobs, while many of the graduates end up with jobs at universities that are ranked lower than the school they attended.
The academic jobs are arranged into different groups — with tenure-track positions as the highest ranked, non-tenure-track positions in the middle and high school teachers or editors as the lowest ranked. The report then shows the percentage of graduates from each tier who go on to each profession.
Examples of Tier 1 universities are Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania; Tier 2 universities include Cornell University and Princeton; Tier 3 universities are Boston College and Boston University; and Tier 4 schools include Lehigh University and the University of New Hampshire.
Colander said the problems faced by students earning their Ph.D. in English might be worse than the study suggests — no matter what tier they are in.