Friday, September 13, 2019

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.

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