The academic job market is often considered a buyer’s market. In many disciplines it’s common for colleges to have their pick among hundreds of qualified applicants for an opening. But in some fields the opposite is true, and colleges scramble for months, even years, to fill teaching positions.
People who have earned Ph.D.’s in certain fields, such as health care, can often earn more elsewhere—and they often do opt to work outside of higher education. And in other fields, like criminal justice, undergraduate demand is growing but the number of Ph.D.’s in the field remains limited.
One university has been searching for a criminal-justice professor for nine months and counting. At the same institution, it takes only about four months to hire in more common disciplines, such as behavioral sciences or English.
Since September, 18 people have applied for the criminal-justice faculty position at Sul Ross State University, in Texas. Only seven met the basic requirements. Two were interviewed, and the job was offered to one candidate, who turned it down to stay at his university until his contract expired. There aren’t many criminal justice Ph.D.’s on the market, and Sul Ross can’t afford to offer big salaries, said Quint C. Thurman, its interim president.
“Our chances of finding someone are slim to none,” Mr. Thurman says.
Having a position open for so long has required Sul Ross to shift faculty duties and make temporary stopgap hires. The institution has offered one-year contracts to instructors who have earned their master’s degrees and are willing to teach lower-division, undergraduate classes in criminal justice. That frees up senior-level professors to cover upper-level classes. Some of those professors have taken on heavy teaching loads; one is now teaching six courses per semester. Leading four courses is considered a busy schedule at Sul Ross, Mr. Thurman said.
When a Ph.D. holder in a field like criminal justice does enter the academic job market, it becomes a race among institutions to grab that person before he or she is offered a job elsewhere.
Positions in criminal-justice agencies don’t typically require anything above a master’s degree, so Ph.D.’s in the field are hard to come by. In 2012, the latest year data are available, only 80 people earned doctorates in criminal justice and corrections, according to the federal Survey of Earned Doctorates, and 86 earned doctorates in criminology. That compares, for example, with more than 1,100 who earned Ph.D.’s that year in economics, nearly 700 in foreign languages and literature, and more than 500 in anthropology.
Since there are so few Ph.D.’s in criminal justice, the degree nearly guarantees an offer for a tenure-track position, probably several offers, said Craig T. Hemmens, professor and chair of the department of criminal justice and criminology at Washington State University.
“There’s job after job posted throughout the year,” he said. “There are more jobs out there than there are people graduating with Ph.D.’s.”
A 3-Year Search
Competition for faculty members is also tough in professionally oriented fields, such as physical therapy. It took three years for the University of Central Arkansas to hire an instructor in that field. The small number of qualified applicants, coupled with the college’s rural location, made for a tough search, said Nancy Reese, professor and chair of the department of physical therapy at Central Arkansas and a member of the Board of Directors of the American Council of Academic Physical Therapy. In Arkansas, Ms. Reese said, the number of applicants in the health-science field can average in the single digits.
During the search, Ms. Reese said, only about two or three people applied per year—and not all of them met even the basic job requirements. Eventually her department decided it had to be more proactive. Faculty members brainstormed to come up with a list of people they knew in the industry who might make a good fit and contacted them, ultimately offering the job to someone who was suggested to Ms. Reese by a colleague at another institution.
Job advertisements don’t often work for filling these kind of jobs, she said. “You know someone who knows someone,” she said. “It’s that network that actually gets someone there.”
One reason colleges struggle to hire professors in some fields might be the careers implied by the discipline. Most students going into social work, for example, don’t envision themselves leading a classroom, said Tory Cox, assistant director of field education at the University of Southern California’s School of Social Work.
Among the hundreds of master’s-degree students at USC who interact with Mr. Cox, about 15 or 20 will pursue a Ph.D. in social work, and only four or five of those will even consider teaching.
Teaching isn’t necessarily compatible with the goals students often have of working directly with people who are poor and disenfranchised, Mr. Cox said.
In nursing, meanwhile, higher paychecks in the professional sector often draw qualified candidates away from faculty positions. Someone with a Ph.D. in nursing, or a doctor-of-nursing-practice degree (a doctoral degree that emphasizes practice rather than research), can earn, as a conservative estimate, 15 to 20 percent more in a “practice setting” than in higher education, said Robert Rosseter, chief communications officer for the American Association of Colleges of Nursing.
The median salary of an associate professor with a doctoral degree is $92,736, according to the association’s data. But the median salary for a nursing director, who typically holds a doctoral degree, is $125,073. Likewise, the median salary for a chief nurse anesthetist is $179,552.
There is little comprehensive data to show where Ph.D.’s across many fields end up working. But the American Association of Colleges of Nursing tries to track where Ph.D.’s in the field are employed and began to notice a faculty shortage a decade ago.
The association also keeps track of how many students are entering nursing Ph.D. programs. So many nursing students want the credential that there aren’t always enough qualified instructors to teach them. Over the past decide, the number of students enrolled in nursing Ph.D. programs increased by 49 percent. And lack of staffing was cited as a reason almost 280 applicants were turned away from those programs last year. Nearly 1,500 applicants were turned away from doctor-of-nursing-practice programs, according to the nursing association’s data.
On top of that, a wave of nursing professors are either retiring or nearing retirement age, Mr. Rosseter said.
“It’s a perfect storm, really,” said Linda K. Young, dean of the College of Nursing and Health Sciences at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire.
Incentives to Teach
Ms. Young helped get a state grant, worth $3.2-million, to ease faculty shortages in Wisconsin. The money was awarded to four nursing programs in the University of Wisconsin system, which turned away between 50 and 80 percent of qualified applicants last year.
“We do not have faculty to teach them, and it breaks my heart because we are turning away solid candidates,” Ms. Young said.
The grant offers money for students to complete pre- and postdoc fellowships, with the caveat that they stay and teach for three years in one of the University of Wisconsin nursing programs. The grant also covers loan forgiveness for new hires in college teaching positions.
Gunnar W. Larson, a clinical instructor at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire, took advantage of the predoctoral fellowship opportunity. He’s enrolled in classes to earn his doctor of nursing practice and will be required to continue to teach at one of the six Wisconsin nursing programs after completing his program.
With five children, including one in college, Mr. Larson said he had been unable to pay to further his own education. Then the grant became available.
“It’s a great opportunity,” Mr. Larson said. “I’m benefiting from it; I’m grateful for that. It’s a benefit to our teachers in the state.”
