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HUMANITIES JOB OUTLOOK EVEN BLEAKER
NY Times -With colleges and universities cutting back because of the recession, the job outlook for graduate students in language and literature is bleaker than ever before.
According to the Modern Language Association’s forecast of job listings, faculty positions will decline 37 percent, the biggest drop since the group began tracking its job listings 35 years ago.
The projection, based on a comparison between the number of jobs listed in October 2008 and October 2009, follows a 26 percent drop the previous year.
"Students thinking of going to graduate school in English should understand that right now their chance of landing a job that provides them a livable wage is 50-60 percent," said Rosemary Feal, executive director of the M.L.A., the world’s largest association of scholars and professors of language and literature. "What I often hear from grad students is, ‘I had no clue it was this bad.’ They need to go into it with their eyes wide open."
While the association does not having listings for every academic position available, its list does track the overall faculty job market.
The association expects about 900 English language and literature positions to be filled over the next year, a 35 percent decline from the previous year; it projects about 750 foreign-language jobs, a 39 percent drop from the year before. Typically, 1,000 to 2,000 positions have been advertised each year in each category.
To make matters worse, the share of tenure-track jobs available has been shrinking. Tenure-track positions for assistant professors made up 53 percent of the English jobs advertised and 48.5 percent of those in foreign languages. From 1997 until recently, the group said, 55 percent to 65 percent of the advertised positions were tenure-track jobs. And since part-time adjunct positions are less likely than those for tenure-track jobs to be listed with the language association, the overall share of faculty members being hired for tenure-track jobs is probably smaller than the survey indicates.
Ms. Feal said the trend toward hiring adjunct faculty members rather than permanent tenure-track professors had been going for about three decades, but was more pronounced than ever, as a growing number of struggling colleges and universities hired by the course or by the semester — usually paying little, and providing no benefits.
According to the Modern Language Association’s forecast of job listings, faculty positions will decline 37 percent, the biggest drop since the group began tracking its job listings 35 years ago.
The projection, based on a comparison between the number of jobs listed in October 2008 and October 2009, follows a 26 percent drop the previous year.
"Students thinking of going to graduate school in English should understand that right now their chance of landing a job that provides them a livable wage is 50-60 percent," said Rosemary Feal, executive director of the M.L.A., the world’s largest association of scholars and professors of language and literature. "What I often hear from grad students is, ‘I had no clue it was this bad.’ They need to go into it with their eyes wide open."
While the association does not having listings for every academic position available, its list does track the overall faculty job market.
The association expects about 900 English language and literature positions to be filled over the next year, a 35 percent decline from the previous year; it projects about 750 foreign-language jobs, a 39 percent drop from the year before. Typically, 1,000 to 2,000 positions have been advertised each year in each category.
To make matters worse, the share of tenure-track jobs available has been shrinking. Tenure-track positions for assistant professors made up 53 percent of the English jobs advertised and 48.5 percent of those in foreign languages. From 1997 until recently, the group said, 55 percent to 65 percent of the advertised positions were tenure-track jobs. And since part-time adjunct positions are less likely than those for tenure-track jobs to be listed with the language association, the overall share of faculty members being hired for tenure-track jobs is probably smaller than the survey indicates.
Ms. Feal said the trend toward hiring adjunct faculty members rather than permanent tenure-track professors had been going for about three decades, but was more pronounced than ever, as a growing number of struggling colleges and universities hired by the course or by the semester — usually paying little, and providing no benefits.
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