Job Market Stats for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine

Edit: Looks like I goofed on how to calculate UK-inclusive stats when I first posted this. Up is down over there, lecturer is professor and tenure is as dead as it will be in 10 years in the US! Anyway, it should be correct now (but I'd welcome feedback if not).
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It's nearing the end of the tenure-track portion of the annual job market. We might see one or two more positions, but usually from January onward it's just temporary positions - postdocs, VAPs, lecturer positions, etc.

It's been a rough year. My subjective feeling was that there were far more senior hires than usual, and fewer tenure-track spots. In order to see if I was right, I calculated statistics from the past several years of postings on the Academic Wiki page for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine: http://academicjobs.wikia.com/wiki/History_of_Science,_Technology,_and_Medicine_2015-2016

For anyone not familiar, the Academic Jobs wiki is a user-generated stream of information about the job market. People post jobs, and update when they hear back (requests for info, interviews, campus visits, offers being made, offers being accepted). It's crucial in a market that seems to thrive on opacity, and where rejection letters, if they ever arrive, may be as much as 12 months past when you applied. Since it's user-generated, it's not truly thorough, but it's probably a good starting point at the least.

Here are statistics for the job market since 2010 (TT stands for Tenure-Track). I'm tossing together all specialties and sub-fields:

Jobs in North America

	2010-11	2011-12	2012-13	2013-14	2014-15	2015-16
Senior	0	3	5	2	1	4
Open	4	7	3	0	1	2
TT	12	23	33	17	25	13
Non-TT	2	5	6	5	4	1

It might make sense to combine Senior/Open Hire searches, since my subjective impression is those very often go for senior hires:

All Jobs in North America, combining Senior/Open

	2010-11	2011-12	2012-13	2013-14	2014-15	2015-16
Senior/Open	4	10	8	2	2	6
TT	12	23	33	17	25	13
Non-TT	2	5	6	5	4	1

Since foreign university systems are pretty different, it's hard to make a direct comparison. Let's make the following approximations:

Fellow = Non-Tenure Track
Lecturer = Tenure-Track Asst. Prof.
Professor = Tenured Prof.

Not a perfect fit, but maybe close enough to see where we are on an international scale:

All Jobs in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine

	2010-11	2011-12	2012-13	2013-14	2014-15	2015-16
Senior	1	5	5	3	3	8
Open	4	7	4	0	1	2
TT	16	33	42	25	36	18
Non-TT	3	5	7	6	4	1

All Jobs in HistSTM, combining Senior/Open

	2010-211	2011-12	2012-13	2013-14	2014-15	2015-16
Senior/Open	5	12	9	3	4	10
TT	16	33	42	25	36	18
Non-TT	3	5	7	6	4	1

Discussion

As you can see, our "recovery" from the depths of the Great Recession has not been sustained. In fact, we're almost as bad off this year as we were in 2010. If anything, it's likely that data is missing from 2010-11, in which case this year might be the worst for which this data exists.

My suspicion about the aberrant number of senior hires seems to be correct insofar as it's a moderate increase in those and a moderate decrease in tenure-track listings, compared to the last few years in which I've been on the market. Interestingly it's still less than in 2011-12, though.

If we want to get generational-warfare-y, here's the annual difference between TT job listings and senior/open hire listings, in North America:

2010-11: 8

2011-12: 14

2012-13: 25

2013-14: 15

2014-15: 23

2015-16: 7

So, it's a really bad time not to have a job. No news there, but it is actually worse than the past few years. It's good news if you're tenured and looking to move around; it's bad news is you're a department running one of these 6 senior/open searches, since there's much better chance of a failed search.

For reference, Harvard's Department of the History of Science alone lists 46 grad students, 8 postdocs, and 9 visiting faculty. Assuming those grad students are evenly split across the average length of 7 years, that's ~14 Harvard folks on the market next year. They alone could fill up every tenure-track job listed this year in North America, and still have a person or two left over. What a world.

In fact, let's run with this:

Overproduction of HistSTM PhDs, underestimated

(Or, Underproduction of HistSTM Jobs, But That's a Tough Nut to Crack)

Here are a few top programs, just grabbing the number of their History of Science/Tech/Med grad students (ignoring postdocs and VAPs) from department websites:

Harvard	46
MIT	36
Princeton	29
U Penn	28
Johns Hopkins	25
Yale	22
Chicago	11
UC Berkeley	7
Total	204

Estimating 7 years for a degree, that's about 30 PhDs in the history of science each year just from these top programs, probably underestimating.

We average about 21 tenure-track jobs, anywhere in North America, each year.

Even if we assume that there are a half-dozen more jobs each year posted than get listed on the Wiki (which is generous), that's still overproducing PhDs (again, just from these top programs). 

Then there are the dozens, probably hundreds of grad students doing great work at programs outside of these schools, or perhaps in other STS programs at these schools I'm not counting.

Then there's the army of postdocs, VAPs, adjuncts, and others who already have PhDs and are also competing for each of these jobs each year.

That's grim. 

What can be done? Well, we can continue to discourage prospective students, but universities needs to take some responsibility too. Can you really produce more new PhDs each year than there are new jobs in your entire field, around the world, Harvard? It's certainly true that we can and should be pushing alt-ac careers as legitimate and important, but that seems like a stretch to me.

Specifics / Data

Of course, not all jobs are created equal. I haven't tried to split out into categories of prestige, or R1 vs. SLAC. There are also some funny effects of jobs repeating for a few years, presumably because of failed searches. It might make sense to look at the actual job listings, then. Forgive the sloppy copying of names. Repeated entries are for multiple jobs listed at that university:

2015-16

Senior	Open	TT	Non-TT
Nebraska	Cal State East Bay	Cal State Channel Islands	Carnegie Mellon
NYU	MIT	Harvard
Purdue		Harvard
Yale		Mississippi state
Aarhus		Mississippi state
Copenhagen		Penn
Westminster		RIT
York		Southern Connecticut
		UC Davis
		UC Riverside
		UC Riverside
		Washington Univ. in St. Louis
		Waterloo
		Cambridge
		Freiburg
		Korea Advanced Institute of Sci-Tech
		Liverpool
		Nazarbayev

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2014-15

Senior	Open	TT	Non-TT
RPI	UCLA	Bucknell	ASU
Regensburg		Birmingham	Oklahoma Norman
Oxford		Cal SLO	Puget Sound
		Harvard	UCB
		Hopkins
		Kansas Medical Centre
		MSU
		MSU
		MSU
		Northern Kentucky
		Notre Dame
		Ohio Univ.
		Penn
		RIT
		Tennessee Tech
		Tufts
		U Wash Bothel
		UC SC
		UCB
		UCD
		UVA
		Vanderbilt
		VT
		Washington St. L.
		Wesleyan
		Aarhus
		Cambridge
		Kings College
		Leeds
		Leeds
		Nazarbayev
		Swansea
		Sydney
		Warwick
		Yonsei
		York

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2013-14

Senior	Open	TT	Non-TT
Harvard		ASU	Columbia
McMaster		Auburn	NASA
Freiburg		Cal SLO	Rhodes
		Cornell	UCB
		Creighton	Utah St
		Drew	Cambridge
		Drexel
		MIT
		Penn
		San Diego
		Stevens
		Toronto
		Tulane
		UC SB
		Wis-Mad
		Yale
		Bristol
		Cambridge
		Edinburgh
		Exeter
		Kent
		Korea Advanced Institute Sci-Tech
		Oxford
		UC London
		UC London

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2012-13

Senior	Open	TT	Non-TT
Duke	Illinois U-C	CSU Fullerton	MSU
Illinois U-C	MO - Columbia	Alabama	Cal Tech
MIT	NJ Inst. of Tech	Amherst	Duke
Penn	NYU Shanghai	Carlton	MSU
Wichita State		Chicago	MSU
		Cornell	Vanderbilt
		Drew	Imperial London
		Drexel
		Emory
		ETSU
		Farmingdale State
		Harvard
		McMaster
		Montana State
		Northern Arizona
		Penn
		Princeton
		Stanford
		Stanford
		Texas Austin
		U Idaho
		U Pacific
		UNC Wilmington
		UNM
		Vanderbilt
		Vassar
		VCU
		Winnipeg
		Wisc Mad
		Wisconsin - Stevens Point
		Wright State
		Yale
		Bristol
		Cambridge
		Edingburgh
		Kent
		Kings College
		Kings College
		Melbourne
		Tsinghua
		UC London
		Universidad del Roasrio-Bogota

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2011-12

Senior	Open	TT	Non-TT
Johns Hopkins	Maryland Institute College of Art	Drexel	ASU
Penn	Georgia Gwinett	Albany, SUNY	Drexel
Wichita State	Illinois	ASU	National Library of Medicine
Sydney	Rutgers	CUNY - Staten Island	Northwestern
Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona	Texas, Medical Branch	Drexel	NY Academy of Medicine
	Vanderbilt	George Washington
	Yale	Houston
		Johns Hopkins
		Kansas
		Minnesota
		Mississippi State
		Mississippi State
		New Jersey Institute of Tech
		New Mexico - ABQ
		Northwestern
		Puget Sound
		RIT
		Stevens Intitute of Tech
		Texas Austin
		Texas Dallas
		Texas Galveston
		UC Irvine
		Wisconsin-Madison
		Cambridge
		Gottingen
		Hull
		Oxford Brookes
		Queen Mary, Univ. London
		UC London
		UC London
		UC London
		Warwick
		Yonsei [cancelled]

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2010-11

Senior	Open	TT	Non-TT
King's College	Emory	Cornell	Ryerson
	Harvard	Alabama Huntsville	Stanford
	Johns Hopkins	Chicago	Manchester
	Virginia Tech	Dickinson
		Harvey Mudd
		Illinois Institute of Tech
		Minnesota Rochester
		Missouri Univ. of Sci-Tech
		Penn
		Princeton
		RIT
		St. Louis College of Pharmacy
		Cambridge
		Glasgow
		Imperial College London
		Yonsei