Why Economists on the Academic Job Market Must Strike Quickly

A few weeks ago, our JobTracker project took on a tricky question: How long do scholars on the academic job market stay marketable?

You can read our full conclusions here. But here’s the short version: Across the humanities and social-science disciplines we’ve tracked, the largest group of tenure-track hires was made up of scholars who had yet to finish their dissertations. What’s more, in the fields of English literature, history, composition and rhetoric, anthropology, and philosophy, 80 to 90 percent of the jobs in the 2013-14 hiring season went to people who had had their degrees in hand for four years or less.

The message seems to be that if you’re looking for a tenure-track job, you should try to strike quickly. But we didn’t want to put that in stone, because we had data from only a handful of disciplines.

Well, here’s another message. In economics the trend has continued. In fact, it’s even more pronounced. In our sample of 2013-14 tenure-track jobs, 64 percent went to A.B.D. candidates, those who had finished “all but dissertation.”

Of the economics jobs filled by scholars with degrees already in hand, about 65 percent went to those who already had tenure-track jobs and were making lateral moves. We also found several instances of people coming from industry into academic positions, but not in any significant number.

Here’s a breakdown of how many years past their Ph.D.s scholars were when they landed tenure-track jobs in economics.

Now that we’ve identified a large group of economics hires, we’ll add names and information to the JobTracker database shortly. More updates to come.