Saturday, April 11, 2009

The 2007-2008 hiring season

I have previously posted summaries of the 2005 and 2006 hiring seasons. This post summarizes the 2007-2008 season.

The usual disclaimers apply – there may be occasional errors; although I have done my usual double-checking. I do not intend to post the full data; there is little use for that at this time.

General summary

There were about 152 assistant professors hired in 2007-2008 season in PhD-granting political science departments. This figure is well below previous year’s number (183), but still above the number two years ago (138). Of primary fields – about 52 (34%) were in American, 45 (29%) in Comparative, 36 (23%) in IR, 3 in Methods (I probably coded several who were "methods" hires as Americanists, though), and 16 (11%) in Theory. The following chart shows that the numbers don’t vary much (and much of the variation may be due to coding errors):

Field 2007 2006 2005
American 34% 38% 43%
Comparative 29% 25% 24%
IR 23% 21% 24%
Theory 11% 14% 6%

Theory does experience noteworthy changes; 2005 was a particularly bad year, and 2006 seems to be an above average year.

Here is a table of schools whose PhDs have been hired most in the three years of 2005-2007. This includes all hires, including those who were re-hired from some other tenure track job. I think comparisons year-by-year basis are not that useful. However, Duke did seem to have an extraordinarily good year in 2007.

1T. Harvard, UC Berkeley (25)
3. Duke (24)
4. Stanford (excl. GSB) (19)
5T. Michigan, UCLA, Yale (16)
8T Columbia, UC San Diego (15)
10. North Carolina (14)
11. WashU (12)
12T. Chicago, Rochester (11)
14. Princeton (10)
15T. Cornell, Indiana, Michigan State, Northwestern, Ohio State (9)
20T. Florida State, Texas A&M (8)

Of the 152 new hires, 87 (57%) received their PhDs in 2008 or later. Further 21 received their PhDs in 2007. The year before, only 49% of the hires graduated the same year or later.

Top 30 hiring

I also took a quick look at hiring in “top 30” departments (I used the U.S. News and included Harvard, Stanford, Michigan, Princeton, UC Berkeley, Yale, UC San Diego, Duke, Chicago, Columbia, MIT, UCLA, Ohio State, UNC, Rochester, Wisconsin, WashU, Cornell, NYU, Minnesota, Northwestern, Michigan State, Texas A&M, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Texas-Austin, Washington, Emory, Rice, SUNY Stony Brook, UC Davis, Maryland and Pennsylvania).

In those departments, 45 (68 in 2006 and 53 in 2005) assistant professor hires were made. The rankings of schools who placed most graduates in "Top 30" in 2005 and 2006 combined:

1T. Harvard, Stanford (excl. GSB) (16)
3. UC Berkeley (14)
4. Michigan (12)
5. Rochester (8)
6T. Columbia, Princeton, UCLA (7)
9T. Duke, UC San Diego, WashU, Yale (6)
13T. Chicago, North Carolina (5)

Of the 45 hires, 26 received their PhD in 2008 or later, 7 received their PhDs in 2007.

New PhD hiring

Finally, I took a look at “new PhD” hirings. As mentioned above, there were 87 assistant professors hired who received their PhD in 2008 or later (thus, the following information does not take into account those 2007-2008 hires who received their PhD in 2007 but were never on market before – there are a couple of those).

The departmental “rankings” by "new PhDs" placed in 2005-2007 combined (I used previous year’s numbers and added what I found this year).

1T. Harvard, UC Berkeley (13)
3. UC San Diego (12)
4. Duke (11)
5T. Stanford, WashU, Yale (10)
8. Michigan (9)
9T. Columbia, Cornell, Rochester, UCLA (8)

Gender & hiring

In 2008, about 39% of the persons hired were female (among new hires, the number is 38%, in top 30 departments, 36%). Altogether, of all assistant professors, about 38% are now female. This number seems to slowly creep up.

Assistants “gone”

Finally, a quick look at departures and promotions. There were 127 assistant professors in PhD-granting political science departments in early 2008 who are no longer assistant professors in PhD-granting departments in early 2009. Of those, 75 became associate professors in their own department, 11 in some other department (including few in non-PhD granting departments), about 11 became assistants at non-PhD granting departments, with about 15 taking various visiting, administrative, or non-academic positions (I’m missing information on further ten or so – but they almost certainly did not become associate professors).

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

thanks. will you post the new spreadsheet?

May 12, 2009 10:06 AM  
Blogger Assisting Politics said...

Unlikely right now.

May 20, 2009 6:10 PM  

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