pankisseskafka.com | Original Article | by Adjunct Nate Silver

The triumphant return of Adjunct Nate Silver! Anytime anyone, ever, says “the market’s always been bad”–send them here.

I would like to drive a stake through the heart of the myth that the academic job market in German has always been bad. This is going to be long, but keep reading. If you want to understand why your career is such a mess and what the threat is facing our discipline right now, you have to stop believing that the way things are now is simply how things have always been.

When we say that the job market is good or bad, what we are really referring to is the ratio of available tenure-track (TT) academic jobs to the number of applicants with Ph.D.s. We could push on this definition in some places, but overall it’s fairly robust. A wealth of part-time or temporary non-tenure-track (NTT) jobs does not make for a good job market, and the Ph.D. has been a minimal qualification for tenure or tenure-track employment at most colleges and universities for the time scale we’re concerned with here. Read More...