A friend of mine is an adjunct in the math department at a four-year state college. He has a masters in math and is working slowly towards his PhD in mathematics at a state university. He was passed over last year for a full-time lecturer position at the college where he teaches and has become profoundly discouraged regarding his prospects anywhere else.
Questions:
Is it true that colleges and universities (primarily) only hire from within? That is, my friend’s prospects of making a lateral move to another college are virtually zero?
If he completes his PhD at the relatively non-prestigious university he is attending, are his job prospects similarly dismal, considering he’d be competing with people possessing PhDs from MIT and Columbia, for example?
Finally, any advice on where/how to search for math adjunct/professor jobs?
Hopefully posters with more-current knowledge will come along soon, but when I was in graduate school in the US, the majority of the professors came from other schools. There were only two who had degrees from that particular one, and they didn’t get to do all their studying and postdocs there.
I’ve known schools which hired mostly “in house” but they were very specialized (I’m talking about being the only school in its country to offer a particular type of Engineering, for example), and the courses which had wider application were also the ones most likely to have an “outsider” brought in. Calculus, Intro to Physics: very likely. Design of Experiments, Crystallography: a lot less likely.
Are there publications by a national association of mathematicians which publish “wanted” ads? Any major mathematical journals which do?
I’m a tenure-track professor in a closely related field (physics). It took me 6 years from getting my Ph.D. to getting this job, so I’ve done a bit of job searching in my time.
This is certainly false. My doctoral institution, my postdoctoral institution, the two institutions where I was a visiting professor, and my current institution are all different.
However, in all of these cases I was applying for a job for which there was a “national search”. This sounds more impressive that it is; it basically means that they’re planning to fly candidates in for interviews. This is usually only done for positions that are “full-time” (a full teaching load); they’re not going to do something like this for an adjunct who will be teaching a section of Calc II and a section of linear algebra in the fall semester. In such cases, the hiring is more likely to be from a local “pool” of talent.
This is the wrong way to look at it. The right way to look at it is that if he completes his PhD, his job prospects will be much much better than they are now. If you have a PhD in hand (or a solid guarantee from your advisor that it will be done by the time the job starts), you will be much more attractive to potential employers. Very few permanent academic positions are filled by people without doctorates.
That said, there will be people out there with Ph.D.s from more prestigious institutions than his. There are two things to keep in mind about this, though. First, the value of attending a prestigious institution for a doctorate isn’t that you get the name of the prestigious institution on your CV; it’s that you’re able to do really cutting-edge work, and that you have an opportunity to make a lot of connections to other people in the field. Both of these things can be done from less-prestigious institutions as well, albeit with some extra difficulty.
The second thing to keep in mind is that there are a lot of colleges and universities out there; your friend will probably need to abandon the idea of staying in a particular location in the US, but that will allow him to Every time I went on the job market, I sent out somewhere in the range of 60–80 applications; and most of them were to places you’ve probably never heard of. I went for on-campus interviews at Nova Southeastern and King’s College and West Chester University and Hendrix College, along with many others I can’t even remember at this point. All of the institutions where I’ve worked have been in different states. I had a lot less stability in this period, and while I enjoyed working at each of the places I worked, I’m definitely glad to have found something more permanent now.
InsideHigherEd and Vitae (the job bank run by the Chronicle of Higher Education) both have good job listings, at least in my field. You should also look at the site Academia StackExchange, which will be another spot where your friend can ask these kinds of questions and get advice from people who are in the trade.
From my experience, I was an adjunct in Chemistry. It was virtually impossible to be hired out of that position into a full time position at the same school. I don’t know why…I assumed (apparently wrongly) that if I was adjunct there for a couple of years, then I would be an excellent candidate for a full time gig there. It never happened; and the lab director lady told me that in her 30 years there, no adjunct was ever hired on as a full time instructor.
Based only on this one anecdotal piece of evidence, I suspect your friend’s chances are actually better at another school.
Let’s see if I can help- I’ve been an adjunct, hired adjuncts (as a department chair), and am a University professor in the sciences, so I might have some perspective to share for your friend. Also, check out the Chronicle of Higher Education forums for many, many discussions on this point. I haven’t read this thread, so forgive me if some of this has been mentioned already.
No, this has not been my experience. Internal candidates can have some advantages (they are a known quantity, they know the curriculum etc), but there are disadvantages as well (you know their weaknesses, you might want fresh opinions, they may have made enemies). It can really depend on the specific departmental culture. If applying as an internal candidate, emphasize how the really understand the department’s focus and student’s and university mission plus what new ideas you can bring to the position.
It depends on the type of University job he is looking for. A research intensive university (“R1”) would likely value a more prestigious degree coupled with research experience. If he is looking at a PUI (primarily undergraduate institution) the prestige of the degree is less important than robust and varied teaching experience. However, highly prestigious PUI’s may want prestigious degrees. At a community college, teaching experience is really the main qualification being looked at. Even CC these days have PhD candidates to choose among, although the minimum requirement is a MS.
I recommend that when applying to any university/college, understand the mission of the school (the Mission Statement is usually on their web page). Is it to provide access and opportunity to all students? Is it to deliver research opportunities? Is it to educate the top of the top? This will provide insight into what the department’s priorities are. I’ve read so many Cv’s that are all about their research program even those we were hiring at a CC, for example. They had no understanding of the position they were applying for.
Read the job ad and tailor your cover letter to what the ad is asking for. Do they want experience in a specific topic area, curriculum development, accreditation and assessment? Show how your background addresses those needs.
One caveat- a PhD from a for-profit or completely online institution will almost never be looked at positively.
Look at the listings on Chronicle of Higher Education or InsideHigherEd.com Also, if there are colleges/universities that your friend is specifically interested in, check out those websites for adjunct ads. You can also send a brief note the department chair asking about opportunities, but don’t pester.
That’s really department specific. I was an adjunct hired full time at my previous college and I know of at least two adjuncts hired full time in other departments where I am now. It’s hard to overly generalize.
For a new PhD being hired as faculty, I’d agree that one of the barriers is a principled commitment to fresh ideas and perspectives among the faculty.
For the particular issue of adjuncts being hired as full-time, I’m much more cynical about the reasons why it doesn’t happen. (Mostly, adjuncts get such a crappy deal that it would be uncomfortable to have to deal with an individual face to face as an equal colleague after treating them as disposable intellectual inferiors. Faculty can only be comfortable with the difference between pay and working conditions of tenured professors and adjuncts if they believe that adjuncts really are people who just couldn’t aren’t good enough to be real professors. Promoting an adjunct to full-time tenure-track would prove that’s not true, and therefore make a lot of faculty uncomfortable. Since there’s tons of applicants for every academic job, there’s no reason not to take the easy way out and never hire any of your adjuncts.
I’m a math adjunct at two community colleges. At one, almost all of the full-timers hired since I’ve been there (four years) were adjuncts at the school; I can only think of one who was hired from outside. At the other, I don’t think any of the full-timers hired during my time there (three years) have come from within. In both cases, I’m talking about the math department, not the college as a whole. So, it really depends on the school, and the department.
As for searching for adjunct positions… I got both of my jobs by emailing the department chair cold and asking if they needed anyone. I’m sure I got lucky, but it doesn’t hurt to ask!
I’ve seen adjuncts hired on if they made a favorable impression. But usually colleges are required to advertise any openings, so it means that you’d be competing against other people and their resumes.
Not necessarily. Although if he’s given them any reason to be less than satisfied with him in what he’s done for them so far, his chances of being hired to a full-time position are pretty slim.
I think that depends a lot on what kind of job he wants:
Given the current academic job climate, it’s quite likely that he was competing against people who already had Ph.D.'s. It used to be the case that you could get a full time position as ABD, but now Ph.D.'s are spending more and more time in post-doc hell.
In my experience in physics, it’s not uncommon for someone to get a postdoc in the same place where they got their degree, and it’s not uncommon for a postdoc to land a full-time position in the same place, but it’s extremely uncommon for someone to get a full-time position in the same institution where they got their degree.
I jsut came on this thread (I just don’t notice PMs, sorry). In my experience it is virtually impossible to get a job in the same institution that awarded your PhD. I really don’t know about adjuncts, since there weren’t any when I was job hunting. There were limited term instructorships that rarely led to permanent jobs. For research universities, the most important qualification was published research. Even if you were hired into a tenure-track job, your published research would determine whether you got a second three year term and, if you did, whether you would get tenure after another three years.
I am simply not familiar with teaching-only institutions. I guess teaching evaluations will be the main criterion. I cannot recall an adjunct in my department getting a regular position. But we use very few adjuncts, mainly for night courses.
For what it’s worth, I checked my old grad school math department and I found 4 (out of roughly 25) professors (including associate professors) that got their PhD from the same institution.
But were they hired straight out of grad school? Many schools are fine with hiring their own graduates* but only after they’ve gone somewhere else for a while. With getting tenure somewhere else often being the level where it’s okay to bring them back.
(One of my former students is now an Associate Prof. in the department after spending several years in the wilderness.)