For six years, Sean Keilen pursued one of the job market’s most elusive prey: a bona fide, salaried job as a college professor.
Keilen, a PhD candidate in English Renaissance poetry at Stanford University, sent out 11 applications and sat through interviews with 22 people at four colleges.
As 1999 came to a close, he was beginning to lose heart. “I had numerous examples . . . of people who had wonderful credentials. They were talented, they were diligent, they had published already, and they still couldn’t find a job,” he said.
Then, in January, Keilen snagged his quarry. He was offered a job as an assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, starting at around $45,000 a year. “It’s a blast,” said Keilen, who is 30. “It’s nice to know that the incredible amount of work that has gone into this has finally borne fruit. I feel really lucky.”
Luck is only part of it. Larger forces are at work to pry open the door to the ivory tower, the teaching profession’s nirvana. Where else can you aspire to earn $100,000 a year playing the wise elder to eager students for a few hours a week, get extended summer and winter vacations and sabbaticals, read and write about your favorite topics and lock in a juicy TIAA-CREF pension to boot?
Indeed, the lure of academia is so strong that the supply of would-be professors has outstripped demand for their talents for most of the last quarter-century. Stories have abounded of PhD’s with gold-plated resumes who got rejection after rejection at even the more obscure schools. But now, the dynamics of the market have suddenly changed, and college teaching is emerging as a hot career in a hot job market.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that the number of college and university professors will surge 23 percent, to 1.06 million, in 2008 from 865,000 in 1998. That compares with projected growth of 14 percent in the overall American labor force in the same 10 years. And the job prospects are improving not only in traditionally high-demand fields like business, computer science and engineering but also in such disciplines as English literature and the social sciences, which have been the hardest to crack because opportunities for employment outside academia are so slim.
“It does appear the academic market has turned around,” said Ronald Ehrenberg, who is Irving M. Ives professor of industrial and labor relations and economics at Cornell. “My experience in talking to people nationwide is that there is a much hotter market for students in the social sciences.”
Several factors are driving demand for more professors. Enrollments are rising as the children of Baby Boomers reach college age and as more of them decide to go to college. Professors who began their careers in the last big hiring binge, which lasted from 1955 to 1972, are retiring.
And even as demand for PhD’s is increasing, the number of such degrees awarded annually is expected to remain flat through 2009, according to projections from the National Center for Education Statistics in Washington.
The change in the hiring environment could not have come soon enough for Paul Eggers, who has a PhD in English from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and is the author of a novel. After three years and 24 interviews, Eggers, 46, had decided to go back to technical writing if he did not get a teaching job soon, even though he shuddered at the prospect. “Technical writing is incredibly dull,” he said.
Then, in March, Eggers got a full-time, tenure-track job teaching creative writing at California State University at Chico. “I feel great,” he said. “I’m excited and relieved that the job search finally is over.”
It was an even longer haul for Linda Handelman, a PhD in philosophy and higher education who has held adjunct or part-time positions at several colleges in the Los Angeles area since 1994 and who taught seven classes at four colleges last spring. She had a lot of company too; people like her are known as “freeway fliers” on local campuses. “Some mornings, I didn’t know what direction I was going in,” Handelman said.
But she considered philosophy a calling, she said, and never thought of abandoning academia, despite the fact she had no health insurance, no office and annual pay of about $30,000. “I was holding on to the edge of the cliff and just refused to let go,” she said.
Handelman’s perseverance paid off in May, when she landed a full-time job teaching philosophy at Pasadena City College, a community college. If she can get her contract renewed three times in the next three years, she will become a permanent member of the faculty. “I am grateful and relieved,” she said. “It’s a miracle.”
