How was the academic philosophy job market during last season’s “secondary cycle”?

Charles Lassiter (Gonzaga University) has again kindly gathered data about the philosophy job market and reports on his findings for January through June of this year and some trends over the past several years.

(A version of this post first appeared at his site.)

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The Philosophy Job Market: Secondary Job Cycle, January – June 2024
by Charles Lassiter

Greetings! As the fall term gets underway, it’s a good time to take a look back at the job market: job ads from January-June of 2024 in particular. As a reminder, I break the application cycles into primary (July-December) and secondary (January-June). We’ll look at the numbers for the secondary cycle of 2024 and then put them in wider context. You can find the dataset and code under “Blog Data.”

Here’s the big picture:

Junior faculty leads (206), followed by postdocs (108), and visiting positions (55). Now we’ll take a look at contract types.

There are far more fixed-term positions offered than tenure/tenure-track, which is standard for this cycle. Onto the intersection of contract types for junior and postdoc openings:

Now that we’ve seen what’s going on now, let’s add some historical context.

On the upside, there’s been an overall increase in the number of jobs advertised over the last decade with the exception of open contracts. Open contracts have decreased slightly over time. For fixed-term positions, the last two cycles have seen a cooling-down after a post-COVID bump. But how do junior and senior faculty fare in all this? Let’s look at junior and postdocs first.

What’s interesting about this is that fixed-term positions for both junior faculty and postdocs have been increasing over the last 10 years, but openings for postdocs have had greater increases relative to fixed-term junior positions. What could account for this? One possibility is that more philosophers are winning grants, so the demand for postdocs is increasing. Another is that departments are getting specially-allocated funds for postdocs from private foundations or donors. I don’t really know but those seem like plausible guesses.

Independently of the causes, the increase in postdoc demand is a double-edged sword. On one side, freshly-minted PhDs can have some more training and support as they get their careers off the ground, especially new PhDs from programs outside the Philosophical Gourmet Top N (take your pick of an appropriate value for N). On the other, postdocs are typically paid worse than junior faculty.

Looking at positions other than junior faculty and postdocs, there’s a noticeable trend for senior faculty hires as well as visiting positions.

Both are trending downwards, and visiting fellowship positions have more or less leveled off for the last four years. To explain the decline, my only guess is general belt-tightening: senior faculty are more expensive than junior faculty.

Finally, let’s compare hiring in the primary and secondary cycles.

This plot is disheartening. The trend line for tenure-track jobs in the main hiring cycle is flat over the last 10 years while the trend line for fixed-term jobs is increasing in both cycles. In fact, the average number of jobs per year for fixed-term positions is 145 (primary cycle) and 157 (secondary cycle). The average number of tenure-track jobs is 184 (primary) and 33 (secondary). Let’s combine both cycles to get the bigger picture.

While there have always been more fixed-term than tenure-track jobs advertised in the last 10 years, the former is growing at a faster rate than the latter. We’ve noted this in previous analyses, and the pattern continues.

Finally, let’s look at the same data but for junior and postdoc positions only.

No surprises: the same pattern holds.

One final plot before closing. These data are especially sobering when compared with the cumulative number of philosophy PhDs conferred every year.

The data for PhDs conferred comes from the Survey of Earned Doctorates. (Go to “Build a Table” to find the historical data for philosophy.) The plot here ends at 2022 because that’s the last year for which the data from the SED are available. From 2014-2022, not only have there been more PhDs conferred than junior jobs advertised, that gap has been growing.

Recently, the APA’s Committee for Non-Academic Careers has set up office hours to talk with philosophers in industry, shared by Daily Nous. Given the data, folks working on their PhDs (as well as newly-minted PhDs) might do well to take advantage of those office hours.

On that note, let me know if there’s any other analyses you’d like to see.