The job market offered fewer employment opportunities for history Ph.D.'s in 2012-13, while the number of doctorates earned in the field continued to increase, according to a report released on Wednesday by the American Historical Association.
After two years of gains, the number of positions, both academic and nonacademic, advertised with the association fell 7.3 percent, from 740 to 686. The report, published in the association’s Perspectives on History newsmagazine, was issued a day before the group’s annual meeting began here.
Like some other scholarly associations, the group has yet to see its job advertisements rebound to prerecession levels. In 2007-8, employers listed 1,064 jobs.
Although the association’s job listings are viewed as a credible measure of the history job market, they’re not comprehensive. In an attempt to gain a broader view of different segments of that job market, the association, for the first time, expanded its analysis of job listings to include positions for historians that were listed on H-Net, an interdisciplinary online forum for scholars in the humanities and social sciences.
In 2012-13, H-Net’s Job Guide listed 322 jobs for history scholars seeking work at universities, historical institutions, or other places. An additional 150 jobs were open to historians as well as to Ph.D. holders in other humanities disciplines. The H-Net jobs, which were unique to that website, pushed the pool of openings analyzed by the association to 1,158, according to the report, which was written by Allen Mikaelian, editor of Perspectives on History.
But the combined data sets didn’t hold much good news for those who recently earned Ph.D.'s in history—1,066 in 2011-12, according to the latest federal data available. The association projects that 1,112 history Ph.D.'s were awarded in the 2012-13 academic year. Yet there were only 654 jobs in the sample open to assistant professors.
“This suggests a ratio of 1.7 new Ph.D.'s for every new assistant professor job—and that includes temporary, visiting, and other non-tenure-track positions at that academic rank,” Mr. Mikaelian said in an interview.
However, the report shows that the geographic specialty of a scholar could improve the odds of landing a job. When the association compared the number of entry-level positions advertised with the number of recent Ph.D.'s, it found that African specialists fared better, with a ratio of roughly one to one. Scholars in Asian history were the only ones to see more entry-level jobs than new graduates, with 1.5 jobs for every Ph.D.
Geographic specialty could also worsen a job seeker’s chances of success. Specialists in North America who earned a Ph.D. in 2012-13 faced a ratio of 2.2 new Ph.D.'s for every advertised entry-level job, while the ratio for Middle Eastern specialists was 1.5 to one.
