How a Famous Academic Job-Market Study Got It All Wrong — and Why It Still Matters

There was no shortage of news in New York City on September 13, 1989.

The front page of The New York Times announced the previous night’s Democratic primary victory of David Dinkins, who would go on to become the city’s first black mayor.

The historic news of the day shared American journalism’s most coveted space with an improbable item: a story about a wonky, book-length study of the academic job market.

“Unless preventive steps are taken soon,” the story began, “American colleges and universities face a major shortage of faculty members starting in the next several years, according to the most comprehensive study ever conducted of the academic job market.”

The study projected a cascade of openings for secure academic jobs in the years ahead, even in the humanities — especially in the humanities. There, just over the hill, lies salvation.

That was the takeaway message, intended or not, of the book co-written by William G. Bowen, the former Princeton University president and legendary academic who at the time headed the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Prospects for Faculty in the Arts and Sciences — “The Bowen Report” as it became known — landed like manna from heaven on legions of dispirited academics and doctoral students who were hungry for jobs.

“There was a time we could all quote parts of it verbatim,” says Scott A. Sandage, a Carnegie Mellon University historian who earned his Ph.D. from Rutgers in 1995. “It was the source of all our hopes and dreams.”

Bowen, who died in 2016, and his co-author, Julie Ann Sosa, then a graduate student at Oxford, wove together federal data to project that an increase in undergraduates pouring into colleges and a departure of tenured faculty members, partly through retirements, would lead to a faculty shortage. It could become so bad, Bowen and Sosa wrote, that there could eventually be more open jobs than applicants. The humanities and social sciences would have it the worst, where there might be only seven applicants for every 10 open jobs. The solution: Students needed to enter doctoral programs in greater numbers to replenish the professoriate.

Higher education — the professors who ran graduate programs, would-be doctoral students, disciplinary associations — heeded Bowen’s call to action.

A winter 1989 edition of the newsletter of the Association of Departments of English declared that “the time has come to shake off the depression mentality” in advising prospective English graduate students. A Washington Post editorial about the report boasted the chipper headline “Springtime for Doctorates.” An influential graduate dean from the University of Michigan wrote in The Chronicle that it would be “tragic” if colleges didn’t encourage students to enter doctoral programs.

It soon all went terribly wrong.

For reasons both outside and within higher education’s control, those jobs never materialized. It’s become common for humanities Ph.D.s to face applicant pools of hundreds. Today the academic job market for budding humanists is a punchline.

The Bowen Report was a “mirage,” Sandage says. “It was the leading edge of what we now describe as the decline of the humanities.”

Legions of smart people in the 1980s, senior professors and prospective graduate students alike, were so eager to put faith in the Bowen Report because it seemed to promise a return to a golden age in the job market that was still within living memory.

They recalled the glory days for universities that followed the Soviets’ launch of Sputnik in 1957, which sparked the space race and an unprecedented American investment in science. America wanted to beef up technological prowess and plowed money into science programs; the humanities and social sciences came along for the ride. Tenure-track jobs were plentiful. It was in this era of expansion and optimism that Bowen earned his doctorate in economics from Princeton University.

The number of doctorates awarded in 1960 was shy of 10,000, according to the federal Survey of Earned Doctorates. Just a decade later, in 1970, that number had tripled to nearly 30,000, by far the largest expansion of doctorate production within a decade in the United States. It led to an oversupply, and by 1970 or so, the academic job market collapsed. The sciences and engineering had more access to other sources of support like foundation grants and private industry, so the academic labor market in those fields didn’t collapse the way it did in the humanities. Perhaps as important, a culture existed in the sciences that did not view working outside academe as a failure.

In the humanities and social sciences, there were no lifelines. Even big-name programs were cash-strapped and hiring fewer tenure-track professors. A glut of recent Ph.D.s, encouraged to pour into graduate school based on a landscape that no longer existed, faced rocky job prospects. Many felt betrayed by the advice of their professors who did not know a time when academic jobs weren’t plentiful. They didn’t realize that the glory days were a historical anomaly.

Thomas Long learned this firsthand. He had just earned his undergraduate degree in English in 1975 and applied to several master’s programs, including a couple of elite private colleges, and was accepted to all of them. But only one, the University of Illinois, offered to cover tuition and provided a stipend that would allow him to steer clear of outside employment.

He earned his master’s from Illinois, and decided not to pursue a doctorate partly because of the depressed academic job market. He was passionate about medieval and Renaissance studies, but another calling tugged at him, one with a little more job security. He joined the priesthood.

Life is complicated. No one makes decisions of passion, like dedicating five or 10 years of one’s life to pursue a doctorate, based on the cold and lifeless statistics of a report. But several graduate students of the era who spoke with The Chronicle said the Bowen Report specifically, or the general feeling of the time conveyed to them by professors that the academic job market would improve, was a key factor in their pursuit of a Ph.D.

Long was one of them. In 1988, he left the priesthood to rejoin higher education — “my first love,” he called it. With his master’s degree in hand, he landed a full-time teaching position at a community college in Virginia. It wasn’t his dream job, but it paid the bills. It was safe. A doctorate would be too risky, he reasoned. Besides, English-department chairs told him that they were turning down applicants who in other times would have been stars, and that the best he could hope for was to cobble together a living as an adjunct.

Then he read about the Bowen Report in The Chronicle.

“I recall it saying faculty members would be retiring, and the baby boomers’ babies were going to pour into higher education so there would be a demand for professors,” Long says, accurately summarizing the gist of the report three decades later. “This was going to be the great golden age. It was going to be the second expansion of higher education.”

Long didn’t check the report’s math. He didn’t actually even read it. Few did. Long wanted to believe. Plus, it felt right. What Bowen projected was, at some level, playing out at Long’s community college. Baby-boomer professors were retiring. Student enrollments were spiking.

Conventional wisdom also suggested that better times were ahead. The widespread belief was that the academic job market behaved like, well, a market. There are boom times. There are bust times. Then the boom times come again. That’s how it works, right?

For all these reasons, the Bowen Report’s conclusions just seemed to add up.

Although Bowen’s projections didn’t pan out, he wasn’t alone in his thinking.

Headlines in The Chronicle, prior to Bowen’s report, warned of coming faculty shortages. A predecessor to Bowen’s study was the 1986 book American Professors: A National Resource Imperiled, by Howard R. Bowen and Jack H. Schuster. While it provided a snapshot of the conditions of the professoriate, it, too, weighed in on the job market and predicted “numerous openings for new faculty.”

“Our findings indicate that fewer and fewer persons, especially highly talented young students, are opting for academic careers,” they wrote. “Indeed, there is serious risk that academic careers will become less attractive for highly able young people over the next ten years and more.”

Why did these projections get it so wrong?

Several sea changes were already underway. The public disinvestment in higher education had begun, but it wasn’t clear at the time how steeply the support would drop. While states still provided most public university revenue in the late 1980s, that funding collapsed over the 25-year period from 1987 to 2012 — the same period Bowen’s report made projections for. The share of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s budget that came from the state, for example, cratered from 53 percent to 17 percent. Thirty-percentage-point drops were common.

This was alien to Bowen’s personal experience. He earned his Ph.D. from an elite private college during higher education’s great expansion. The idea that America would shirk from supporting its colleges and universities may have been hard for Bowen to accept. As he wrote idealistically in his report, “A widely shared dedication to higher education is special to this country.”

Bowen expected an influx of undergraduates into colleges to naturally cause them to hire more professors to handle the teaching load. He was partly right. Colleges needed to hire more teachers. And they did. But they used cheaper labor.

Since the Bowen study, colleges have increasingly replaced tenure-track jobs with contingent jobs — adjuncts, visiting professors, graduate students, and anyone else they didn’t have to pay a tenure-track salary and benefits. In 1989, full-time tenured or tenure-track professors accounted for 39 percent of the academic labor force. In 2011, they accounted for 23 percent, according to an analysis of federal data by the American Association of University Professors.

Bowen told an interviewer in 2014 that he pegged the failure of his projection on the adjunctification of higher education, saying he “just didn’t anticipate” the “incredible increase in the number of non-tenure-track faculty. We’re all still learning how significant this shift really is.”

Meanwhile, Bowen was aware that laws mandating retirement at age 70 would lose effect in 1994, but he and so many others didn’t foresee something that in hindsight seems so obvious: Being a tenured professor is a great gig, and people don’t want to leave it if they don’t have to.

The average retirement age among professors spiked after the law changed, despite expert projections that it wouldn’t. The average age of retiring faculty members at one research university in the Northeast, for example, rose from 69 to 73 after mandatory retirement was eliminated, with a quarter of faculty members still on the payroll at age 78, according to a study by New York University researchers.

Bowen’s projection also did not account for the increasing pressures that would bear down on colleges. Technology costs, competition, and federal mandates such as Title VII and Title IX compliance further compounded financial burdens on institutions, says James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association.

“When I was in college and somebody, God forbid, committed suicide, we didn’t have an army of counselors suddenly available,” says Grossman, who earned his Ph.D. in 1982. “There were many things that universities were not doing two generations ago that they should have been doing.”

In a broader sense, even well-informed long-range projections, like Bowen’s, can be upended by unforeseen tectonic shifts in the economy, says Ronald Ehrenberg, a Cornell University economist who specializes in higher-education labor.

“Who would predict that things like Uber and Lyft would wipe out taxi cabs?” he says. “Or who would have predicted the gig economy?”

Ehrenberg calls Bowen his “idol” — someone dedicated to the pursuit of the truth. “That doesn’t mean,” Ehrenberg says, “he was right about everything.”

Even though profound financial and cultural shifts would alter the landscape for colleges after the report appeared, it’s arguable that Bowen — along with the professors who believed his report — could have known better.

A body of evidence available at that time suggested university hiring behavior was marching toward cheaper labor. Bowen’s own report, briefly, explored a disturbing trend: Universities seemed to be placing a greater burden for teaching undergraduates on graduate teaching assistants.

Some people saw it coming. Lynne V. Cheney, then the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times shortly after Bowen’s report. It was titled “The Phantom Ph.D. Gap.” She wrote, insightfully, that the pool of applicants didn’t include only the doctoral recipients from a given year, but also the accumulation of academic job seekers from previous years. She also noted that students were leaving academe, not because they wanted to, but because the jobs just weren’t there. Cheney declined to be interviewed for this story.

Other critiques followed. But these measured analyses received little or no attention.

Judith I. Gill, then a research director at the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, wrote a paper a year after the Bowen Report that raised skepticism about the value that national-level academic job projections had for individual institutions. She also said that projections like Bowen’s made a faulty assumption: that the ratio of tenured-to-contingent faculty would remain constant. Gill would see this trend unfold firsthand a decade later when she was chancellor of the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education.

In Bowen’s defense, his analysis was measured, too. Just ask Julie Ann Sosa, the forgotten — and she doesn’t mind this — co-author of the Bowen Report, who left economics and never looked back. She was recently appointed chair of the surgery department at the University of California at San Francisco. Before that, she was chief of endocrine surgery at Duke.

The Bowen Report was a lifetime ago for her. She says she no longer has the credentials to defend the report or opine about why the projection didn’t come to pass. But some things stick out to her after all these years.

Bowen, she argues, was aware of just how complicated academic labor projections were and approached the task with humility. The dust jacket for the book is gray. That, Sosa says, was by design. “I remember him saying that life is often gray,” she says, “and we’ve done our best to bring clarity, but there is ambiguity.”

Bowen also never called the book’s conclusions “predictions,” but rather “projections” based on the best available evidence at the time, subject to changing conditions. That nuance, she says, was often lost in the public life of the report. The amount of attention media and academics paid to the report surprised her.

“What people did with it afterward is a different thing,” she says. “The messaging took on a life of its own.”

Sosa is correct about this: Reading the Bowen Report and reading about the Bowen Report are two different experiences. The report itself is filled with the hedging one might expect from an economist, and sprinkled with warnings about the difficulty of making job-market projections. For example, one footnote reads, “Traditional efforts to make manpower projections and to engage in manpower planning have an undistinguished history and are generally as out of fashion as is the word ‘manpower’ itself.’”

Those who wanted to find skepticism about job-market projections, and the need to give students frank career advice, didn’t have to look far. People of the era were warning against the damage inflicted by giving graduate students an overly rosy outlook about the their chances at a tenure-track job. One economist described the sense of betrayal felt by graduate students of a prior generation who felt they were given shoddy career advice.

“By the 1960s,” he wrote, “many faculty members, administrators, and others unwittingly created false expectations, thereby contributing to later frustrations when many who had worked hard to obtain Ph.D.’s had difficulty finding good jobs.”

That economist was William Bowen.

Even today, no one can say for sure why Bowen went so wrong. Expert opinion remains so diverse that a contrary theory has emerged: that Bowen was essentially correct.

Robert Townsend has pored over academic-jobs data and concluded that the Bowen Report was undone by its own persuasive power. In other words, the report changed institutional and personal behavior to such an extent that it overcorrected the problem it foretold. In this view, the report appears wrong today because it was right — and because it was uncommonly effective in its call to action.

To Townsend, who is director of the Washington office of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and oversees its Humanities Indicators data-tracking project, Bowen was correct “on the supply side” of the jobs that later became available. Contrary to popular belief, in some disciplines, like history, the number of tenure-track jobs kept increasing after the Bowen Report appeared. There were more in 1995 than when the report was released, and yet more in 2000, and the 2006-7 year set the record for job postings. But something else erased those gains: a surge in “demand.” More and more students poured into history doctoral programs, and universities kept accepting them. And eventually that faculty shortage wasn’t a shortage anymore.

Historical precedent supports this theory. During the Sputnik era, a faculty shortage did exist. But that shortage was communicated clearly, and universities and graduate students answered the call to action, says John Thelin, a professor of higher education and public policy at the University of Kentucky. Presto: the greatest expansion in American doctoral production. When that era ended in the late 1960s, it’s not that “the bottom fell out,” an oft-used metaphor to describe that period of the academic job market, but rather, he says, that “the tub filled up.”

Evidence suggests that a similar dynamic occurred after the Bowen Report, as Townsend argues. For example, disciplinary associations like the Modern Language Association heralded the report. And the number of doctorates produced annually in the humanities — the area the Bowen Report gave the most hope to — rose rapidly in the decade following its publication. From 1990 to 2000, the number increased 42 percent, to 5,462, a larger percentage jump than any other broad category, according to the Survey of Earned Doctorates.

Some graduate students of the era told The Chronicle that the Bowen Report, or the general optimism about the academic job market, was a key factor in their decision to attend graduate school and pursue a tenure-track job. Several others said they had advisers and other influential professors who sang the report’s praises to encourage them to attend graduate school or stay in it.

That was Townsend’s experience. With a child on the way, and worries about whether he could support a family, he considered leaving his Ph.D. program in 1990 to take a relatively well-paying job at the American Historical Association. His department head at the time, at the Catholic University of America, Townsend says, told him he’d be making a mistake, and pointed to the Bowen Report to argue that better times were ahead.

The Chronicle tracked down the former history-department chair, Jon Wakelyn, who left Catholic for Kent State University in 1996 and retired in 2005. He doesn’t recall the conversation with Townsend. Moreover, though he remembers the Bowen Report and Townsend well, he says he wouldn’t have talked in terms of the job market because he doesn’t think it’s a professor’s job to do so. Pursuing a Ph.D. is a passion, he says, not a rational calculation about career prospects.

“I don’t know how you affix a dollar or a market to a sense of calling,” Wakelyn says. “I just don’t know how you do it. You may think that’s a privileged position, but I think it’s a position about how the mind works.”

Wakelyn is aware that the world he experienced, earning his Ph.D. in 1966, has ended. He called it “the halcyon days.” He had six job offers out of graduate school “without really trying,” he says. “By 1970, that was over.” But he maintains that it’s not the role of a faculty member to educate graduate students or prospective graduate students about the state of the job market. It’s students’ responsibility to know this by doing their own research, he says.

“If they don’t,” he says, “they probably shouldn’t have gone to graduate school anyway.”

Townsend’s experience, however, shows just how important the advice of a senior professor can be to a young scholar. He had another professor, his adviser, who gave him different advice. “German intellectual history isn’t going to feed a growing family,” Townsend recalls his adviser telling him.

Townsend dropped out of his Ph.D. program and took the historical-association job. Though he went back to finish his Ph.D. years later, the second time was with the goal of professional development in his nonacademic career.

It was his adviser who changed his mind and convinced him it was OK to leave academe, he says. Almost three decades later, Townsend says he remains grateful. “I’ve taken him out for at least one meal every year to thank him for that,” he says.

The Bowen Report remains relevant today because the questions raised by its assumptions — and by the failure of its projections — are important and unsettled. How should academics communicate about job prospects to aspiring graduate students? Should universities be better at preparing doctoral students for careers outside academe? Should they be accepting fewer Ph.D. students? How do you change an entrenched culture that defines success narrowly?

The long-term effects of the report lingered well after it became clear that Bowen’s projected faculty shortage would not materialize. By the late 1990s, professors stopped pointing to it as evidence of better times ahead. Meanwhile, the job market kept tightening. Yet students kept pouring into Ph.D. programs, even after the 2008 economic collapse. And universities kept churning out more doctorates.

The mirage vanished. The dream endured.

Take English, for example. According to the Modern Language Association’s Job Information List, the number of assistant-professor job openings in English drastically declined in the 10-year period starting just before the collapse. In 2007-8, there were 879 such jobs. In 2016-17, that number was 320. Meanwhile, non-tenure-track job postings now represent 34 percent of openings in English. Such positions accounted for 21 percent in 2007-8. The pattern is similar in the foreign languages.

During roughly the same period, federal data show that the number of doctoral recipients in the disciplines that feed into English departments remained about the same. The story is the same for all arts-and-humanities disciplines during roughly that same 10-year time frame. In 2006, about 5,300 people received arts-and-humanities Ph.D.s, while roughly 5,500 did in 2016. Despite the tales of woe, which are now everywhere you look in the higher-ed and general press, people keep applying to doctoral programs, and universities keep accepting them. And the academic labor market keeps getting tighter.

Thomas Long, the former priest who entered a Ph.D. program after reading the Bowen Report, knows this.

He earned his Ph.D. in 1997 from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Seven applicants for every 10 open jobs was not quite his experience. Long spent 10 years on the academic-job market, applying to about 10 jobs per year, without any luck. He describes a soul-crushing process. Like dating, and falling in love, and getting your heart broken, 10 times a year, for 10 years.

“You read the MLA’s job list, or the Chronicle jobs, and it’s a little bit like a personals ad,” he says. “You go to the website of the colleges, you start reading about the colleagues and courses you’d be teaching, and you are head over heels in love. By the time you’re writing that job application letter, it’s basically a crush note.”

It always ended the same, though. Long stopped applying in 2007.

But the Bowen Report didn’t ruin Long’s life. In fact, he now has a fulfilling career, one he needed his Ph.D. to get. He is an associate professor in residence — not a tenure-track position — in the School of Nursing at the University of Connecticut, and provides writing support for the school. “Basically, I hustled to create an alt-ac career,” he says.

But he doesn’t let the report, and higher education broadly, off the hook. The report had a self-serving purpose. It gave the green light to higher-education thought leaders like Bowen, administrators who oversaw universities, and the professors who run graduate programs to keep accepting Ph.D. students and not think critically about doctorate overproduction and its potential corrosive effects on the long-term health of humanities graduate education.

Colleges need to take responsibility for creating a glut of Ph.D.s “irresponsibly and unethically,” Long says. One simple way to start is by tracking and publishing data about doctoral completion rates and where doctoral recipients end up getting jobs so that prospective students can gain a realistic view of their prospects.

The necessary but unlikely next step, Long says, is to stop accepting so many Ph.D. students. In his discipline, English, he believes that doctoral programs need to close. But no one seems ready to take that step.

Individual decisions — and stubborn faith — play a role, too. Long has had many conversations over the last 15 years with undergraduates who tell him they want to be a professor.

“I say to them, Don’t do it,” he says. “I explain to them the reasons they shouldn’t do it. They go and do it anyway.”

Vimal Patel covers graduate education. Follow him on Twitter @vimalpatel232, or write to him at vimal.patel@chronicle.com.