This Is the End

It's time to shut this blog down. I'll leave up the content, but my time as Adunct Nate Silber is over. I spent a long time studying how the job market in German works, but I can't do it anymore. When I started, no one really knew and no one was tracking the data that mattered. By the time I figured out how it worked, it was already too late. Now that we know how it works, no one with any influence over the profession actually cares.

So here's where we are. About 25 tenure-track jobs in German each year, tendency falling. Plenty of NTT jobs to place new PhDs in, enough to keep a lot of people on the treadmill for years, but not enough for a stable career. The grad programs are still churning out 75 new PhDs each year. And the biggest contingent of new TT faculty is still being hired from outside the system, from Germany or from comp lit or elsewhere.

For 2010-2019, there have been a handful of grad programs with TT placement rates topping out at 50% (Cornell, Harvard, U Mass, Virginia, Texas, and the UNC/Duke conglomerate). Wait another five years, and it will be a different set of programs. Not long ago, Princeton was at the top; now it's down to 37%. You could be accepted to an Ivy League grad program and still face an abysmal placement rate (Columbia at 15%, Brown at 0%), or a big prestigious private university (Vanderbilt at 13%), or a big public flagship (Wisconsin, 40 PhDs, 20% TT placement rate).

Your overall chances of getting a TT job are 30%. You're still likely to fail, but perhaps you will fail better than we did.

Hey, I think the market crashed again

From 2008 to 2015 - or in other words, post-crash - there were, on average, 29.5 tenure-track German job ads posted to the ADFL job information list each year. Looking at more recent history, from 2012 to 2015, the average of 27.5 is nearly the same.

Last year was different: 17 tenure track jobs. After 7 weeks of job-list postings, 2017 is running just barely ahead of the pinnacle of awfulness that was 2016: we have 16 TT jobs this year compared to 15 last year at this point. Perhaps we'll see a few more. The opening-day number predicted 15 total, while the 6-week number predicted 19 total - but the 6-week number is, historically, not any more accurate than the opening-day prediction.

But wait, you say, what about 2015? We're running just barely behind where we were after 7 weeks in 2015 (17 TT jobs), and 2015 turned out close to the recent average (26). Maybe we'll see a bunch of jobs turn up in December and January!

It's not impossible, but I suspect not. As you look around the country, do you get the feeling that university budgets are improving, the humanities are more valued, and the importance of foreign languages is more broadly accepted?

I think instead what we'll see is a couple more jobs trickle onto the list by spring, and the new normal will be 15-20 TT jobs in German each year rather than 25-30. Or 1 job for every 4-5 new Ph.D.s rather than 1 for every 3, since the number of Ph.D.s isn't declining.

The market is now small enough that it's hard to tell the difference between a normal level of year-to-year volatility, and an extinction event.

(For you emeriti out there, this makes the job market half the size it was at the absolute bottom of the 70's crash [37 in 1970; average of 71 from 1968-73] and the brief 80's crash [34 in 1982; average of 50 from 1980-84]. Every decade prior to this one enjoyed average numbers between 50 and 70, while the average for the post-crash decade is 27. No, the job market has not always been this bad, and repeating that myth is making things worse.)

The Others

They’re coming to our discipline and taking away our jobs!

Well, not really. OK, maybe a little bit.

One of the exciting things about German Studies as a discipline is that we’re in conversation with historians, linguists, and scholars with many other disciplinary backgrounds. We talk to our neighbors down the hall in comparative literature and we maintain conversations with our colleagues in Germany.

One of the less exciting consequences is that the hiring pool for faculty in German Studies can be drawn very broadly. If there are 17 tenure-track jobs available this year, not all of the people hired will have Ph.D.s in German from North American doctoral programs. Some will hold doctorates from European universities, some will come from outside of German Studies, and some won’t hold a Ph.D. at all. Basically, think of the three alternate sources of German faculty as doctoral programs in Germany, comparative literature and other disciplines, and people with MA degrees. In the best case, this keeps our discipline vital. In the worst case, the dean can undercut any salary demand by simply offering a job to any native speaker he can find, qualified or not.

For the hiring cycles 2006/7-2015/16, a total of 91 searches selected candidates who did not hold doctorates from North American German programs (out of 814 total hires, or 11.2%). This was approximately equally split between tenure-track and non-tenure track positions (12.5% of all tenure-track hires and 10.2% of NTT hires).

In a few cases, no academic background can be determined. For tenure-track hires (42), just above half are from European doctoral programs, mostly from Germany, and just under half are from American doctoral programs, chiefly comparative literature. Only 2 of the TT hires were from the pool of MA holders, in both instances the rare case of TT hires by a community college. For NTT hires (41), around a third are MAs, a third are from other disciplines, and a third hold Ph.D.s from European programs. (The VAP numbers include 4 faculty members who were hired for multiple positions, while the TT numbers include a number of VAP-to-TT inside hires).

The largest single donor of faculty to German Studies is by far the program in comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania (4 TT hires). Princeton comp lit and the Humboldt Universität each had 2 TT hires.

The North American programs that hire outside of North American German Studies most prolifically include Harvard, NYU, the University of British Columbia, and Notre Dame, all with two TT hires from outside North American doctoral programs in German. The outstanding champion in the field, however, is the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with 3 system-external tenure-track hires (and 2 non-tenure-track hires) during the previous decade.

Finally, has there been any change in hiring over time? In a word, yes. From 2006/7 to 2015/16, the percentage of hires from outside North American German Studies for jobs in North American German Studies has risen from around 5% to around 20% of all hires, even as the number of tenure-track jobs in the field has declined profoundly—by around 70%—during the same time. That suggests an amazing commitment to interdisciplinary exchange and intellectual vitality for a discipline that can’t currently provide stable jobs for 75% of its own doctorates. Or maybe it suggests a lack of confidence in its own product and a desperate search for relevance.

Figure 1: Hires in North American German Studies of those not earning terminal degrees in German Studies or from North American doctoral programs, 2006/7-2015/16

What's wrong with German Studies: High School edition

I'm not even going to mention the outsized role that the cult of TPRS plays in secondary language instruction. Instead, I present to you the following exhibits.

First, from the College Board's AP German course description: "The AP course provides students with opportunities to demonstrate their proficiency in each of the three modes in the Intermediate to Pre-Advanced range as described in the ACTFL Performance Guidelines for K-12 Learners" (5).

As far as ACTFL is concerned, "Pre-Advanced" isn't really a thing, so we'll interpret this as saying students passing the AP German test should be at the Intermediate Mid to Advanced Low level of proficiency.

Second, this chart from ACTFL Performance Descriptors for Language Learners (13):

Time as a critical component for developing language performance

There's a lot that's seriously messed up here, and we haven't even gotten to what's really wrong with German Studies (high school edition) yet.

1. According to to the chart, students with four years of high school German don't get to the bottom range of the proficiency level the AP exam is testing.
2. According to the chart, students who start off learning a language in third grade are much better off than children who start in sixth grade, even though the scientific evidence for this is sketchy at best 
3. The most common situation we deal with at the university level, where students start German in grade 9 and continue in college, doesn't show up on the chart at all.
4. The chart claims that children will speak German at an Advanced High level if they start German in kindergarten and take German until they graduate. This is simply false, because no one reaches an advanced level just by taking classes, no matter when they started learning German.

Third, an observation about college-level German proficiency testing. In German Studies, we typically care more about the Goethe Institute and the CEFR scale than we care about ACTFL, because the Goethe Institute comes from Germany and provides the language exam that 99% of people care about and that language programs in the US administer. (Plus the Goethe Institute provides huge amounts of free practice material, while ACTFL provides nothing, which is one more reason to hate ACTFL.) And the exam that nearly all German majors and minors are capable of passing at the end of their programs is the B1-level Goethe Institute exam. Students who go abroad for a year, or who spent some formative years in a German school, or heritage speakers, or the occasional freakishly good language learner have a shot at passing the B2-level exam.

Fourth, there is no complete agreement about how to map the CEFR scale onto the ACTFL scale. According to this ACTFL document (4), B1 falls in the range from Intermediate Mid to Advanced Low. Erwin Tschirner - you know, the lead author of Kontakte - thinks B1 corresponds to Intermediate High. I tend to believe Tschirner.

Fifth, according to the ETS guide to the German Praxis Exam required for German high school language teachers, those who pass the test will demonstrate "Language Proficiency in the target language. (At the Advanced Low level, as described in the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages [ACTFL] Proficiency Guidelines)."

So to sum up what's wrong with German Studies (high school edition):

1. The AP German test for high school students and the ETS Praxis exam for future high school teachers both target the same level of proficiency. 
2. The AP German test to grant credit for a few German classes to incoming college freshman targets a higher level of proficiency than most college students will achieve at the end of a college German major.
3. This is Seriously Messed Up.

Closing the books on 2016-17

For tenure-track academic hiring in German, 2016-17 marks a new absolute low. To find a year where fewer positions were advertised, you would have to look back at least sixty years to the 1950s or earlier. The record low number of TT jobs advertised on opening day (7) was matched by the lowest number of TT jobs advertised all year (17), and by the earliest posting of the season's last TT job ad (in week 11, surpassing the previous record of week 15 in 2013). This year will also mark a new absolute low in the number of TT hires, as one of the 17 searches (Hamilton College) was downgraded to a VAP search; the maximum possible number of TT hires, 16, is lower than the previous low of 19 hires set in 2009-10.

That's just looking at the MLA/ADFL job information list. If you look at listings from all sources as reflected in the German jobs wiki (with 11 years of data going back to 2006), the situation is worse. The previous low, 27 TT jobs from all sources (from last year, 2015-2016), was in line with the number of TT searches from 2009-2015 (average of 33). So the current year marks a drop of 37% drop compared to the previous all-time low in the space of one year. One more time: a 37% drop compared to the previous all-time low in the space of one year.

For non-tenure-track hiring, it was another solid year: 41 positions advertised in the ADFL/MLA JIL before it closed, fifth highest and just a few places out of third (43 in 2007) and even on pace to set an all-time record just a few months back. But the VAP market went flat unexpectedly early this year. As far as NTT positions from all sources, 2016-17 is another solid year: 55 advertised NTT searches, just above average (54 for the years 2006-17).

The lack of late VAP hiring is something of a danger signal, as it suggests that late-spring/early-summer language department budgets are under pressure and the advertising of TT positions in the fall may be impacted.

Our profession is not in good health.

2016-17

Unless something drastic happens - and it's almost May, so nothing drastic is going to happen - this year will mark a new absolute low in the number of tenure-track jobs in German Studies on the MLA job list: 17. That's two positions less than even 2009, the previous record for all-time miserable job markets. Of those 17 searches, one was canceled and converted into a NTT search.

Speaking of which: 2016-17 has been another banner year for non-tenure track jobs, with the number of ads near or at record levels all year. We're already at 39, with several more weeks still to go in a NTT hiring calendar that drags on into June and July. We'll likely end up in the range of such overheated NTT hiring years like 2005-2007, and beating the absolute record of 2014 is still a possibility.

So to recap: The economic recovery since 2008 has not led to a recovery in tenure-track hiring in German (or in any of the languages, actually). The job market in German is not going to make a comeback. There are, however, quite a few opportunities for you to stay in academia by moving every 1-3 years until you either strike out on the market or find yourself no longer geographically mobile (as long as you can live on $36-42,000 per year, including unreimbursed moving expenses).

Job Market Opening Day 2015

How many full-time tenure-track or open-rank jobs in German Studies will be posted to the MLA Job Information List in 2015-16? Take your pick. Seeing how 2014 went, your pick is probably as good as mine.

18. The historical average since 2003 is that 54.4% of all TT jobs show up on opening day. As of today, there are 10 such jobs. 10 / .544 = just over 18.

24. Ten jobs isn't the absolute worst we've ever seen on opening day, but it's close. Other similar years include 2009 (10), 2010 (11), and 2014 (9). The average result from those years is 24 jobs by the time the list closes.

25. The percentage posted on opening day has been declining. If the trend since 2008 (see graph) continues, we're only seeing 40.6% of the jobs today. 10 / .406 = almost 25.

Percentage of TT jobs posted on opening day, 2008-2014, showing declining trend

30. Going back to 2008, there have been on average around 30 jobs each year. The last two years saw 28 and 29 jobs, respectively. If this is an average year, then we'll get around 30 jobs by the end, maybe a few less.

32. Last year, only 31% of the jobs showed up on opening day. If the same thing happens this year, we'll get up to 32 jobs.

My pick: 25. We'll see a reversion to the mean, and 15 more jobs will appear before the list closes, most likely before the end of February. With a bit of optimism and wishful thinking, 2015 will end up in a tie for the second-worst year in German job market history. I would love to be wrong and to see many more jobs appear, but even an outlandish fantasy like 35 jobs would only move this year into sixth-worst in job market history.