Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
There may be no greater concern in political science than the state of the job market. Particularly for newly minted Ph.D.s, the number and type of jobs available and their possibility of success on the market are sources of great anxiety. Similarly, department chairs, graduate directors, and dissertation chairs struggle as they make choices about recruiting faculty and students and determine how to advise their students as they progress toward their degrees. These concerns are common in most years, but they have been especially salient in the last several years, when the economic downturn has affected nearly every aspect of higher education. The purpose of this report is to present data that will assist faculty and students in navigating the political science employment landscape.
The report on the job market and placement in any given year is based on two datasets. One is the APSA e-Jobs market dataset, which includes all academic (and some nonacademic) advertisements made between June and May of each academic year for fall term starts. In this report, data from 2003-11 provide a longitudinal and cross-sectional perspective on the market. The other source of data is the APSA Graduate Placement Survey, which is administered in the fall to graduate directors, who provide information about those of their students who were on the market in the previous academic year. Because of the timing of the survey, these data are a year delayed. Thus, this report presents data about individuals in the placement class of 2009-10, who just finished their first year of employment. Next year, the report will focus on those individuals who were on the market during the academic year that has just ended.
SIGNS OF RECOVERY IN THE POLITICAL SCIENCE JOB MARKET
Table 1 presents the e-Jobs listings for the last nine years by the type of position advertised. It is encouraging to see that 2010-11 marks an 11% increase in the total number of listings from the previous year, a number nearly equal to the mean for the previous eight years. Even during 2009-10, which recorded the greatest dip in total jobs advertised in years, there were still more available positions than there were candidates on the market (as reported in the Placement...