The Demographic Dilemmas of Academia

Justice requires expansion, demographics make it hard to justify

As previously noted, it’s college decision season, which in addition to having me offering advice, has me thinking again about some structural issues that I’ve kind of been dancing around for the last several weeks, in my posts about predictions of impending doom and stats about gender balance in physics, and also in thinking about things like Matt Yglesias’s optimism regarding higher ed. As I said when I included that in last week’s links dump, I hope he’s right, but I think there’s a genuinely difficult problem here where good and noble goals conflict badly with a lot of facts on the ground in ways that make it hard to satisfy everyone who needs to be involved.

The core issue really has to do with the size of the academy, which comes up in both of the posts linked above. Attempts to achieve a more equal gender split in physics faculty run up against the fact that there just aren’t enough jobs to drive rapid change— as I wrote a few weeks ago:

To put it in round numbers so extra digits don’t obscure things, you’ve got about 10,000 total faculty in the country, and in any given year can replace only around 400 of them. If you hired all of the women granted Ph.D.’s in any one of the recent cohorts, and only those women, the biggest shift you could possibly get in the faculty gender balance is moving from about 19% to about 23% women (assuming that these are just replacements, not an increase in the overall number, that none of the existing faculty who get replaced were women, and that none of the new Ph.D.’s would prefer a career outside of academia).

At the same time, the number of Ph.D.’s being produced is well in excess of the total number of faculty jobs— around 1,900 new doctorates awarded in the last year of the AIP stats I was writing about, or close to five per tenure-track faculty job opening. And that doesn’t count the backlog of people who got degrees but not jobs in previous years, who are still holding out hope of an academic career. This is at the root of a lot of other problems, as I said in the other post, regarding adjunctification:

This is, to my mind, the most plausibly existential of the threats to the system, because it’s the most transparently unsustainable: there’s just no way a system that churns out 10 new Ph.D.’s per tenured faculty career can continue indefinitely without some kind of change. We either need to train fewer Ph.D.’s, or massively expand the number of faculty jobs, and both of those are widely regarded as unthinkable. That seems a recipe for crisis.

(This does, to some extent, vary across disciplines— the problem is less acute for disciplines with lots of non-academic options. I know that my computer science colleagues start their faculty searches with much smaller pools simply because it’s hard to compete with the dump truck full of cash that Google can back up to the driveway of most of the people who would make good professors. Broadly speaking, though, my impression is that across academia as a whole, the number of good candidates exceeds the number of good jobs by a significant factor.)

It might seem that both of these issues conveniently have the same solution, namely creating a lot more faculty jobs. That would allow a faster shift in the demographics of the faculty, and also improve the working conditions for an enormous number of people currently struggling to make ends meet in precarious jobs. Everybody wins.

Except, there’s the looming problem of the “demographic cliff,” mentioned in Yglesias’s post. The number of “college age” people in the US is dropping, particularly in college-dense regions like New England. This makes it really hard for tuition-dependent private institutions to recruit enough students to pay the bills with the faculty they already have, let alone undertake any significant expansion. And while we could, in principle, use public funds to support massive growth, it’s a bit of a hard sell to ask for more faculty to teach fewer students.

(It’s not an impossible case to make, mind— that is, after all, a big part of the way those of us in the elite private college world keep the lights on. There’s reasonably good evidence that smaller student-to-faculty ratios allow for more effective and more enjoyable educational experiences, and to some extent people are willing to pay for that. But it’s a case that takes a bit of work to put across, particularly to the parents and legislators we’d be asking to sign the checks.)

A similar issue affects a lot of diversity and equity initiatives, particularly those that look to lower the barriers to entry for students coming from under-privileged backgrounds and schools. (This is mostly a STEM thing.) These are all fundamentally ideas that you would expect to increase the total number of students in the target programs— making it easier to get through introductory physics is unlikely to drive off any of the students who already succeed in those classes, after all— which is only going to make the other problems worse down the road. All the later steps in the path to a career will get more competitive unless we have a corresponding increase in the number of spots in grad school, and the number of jobs for those people once they graduate.

There’s a disappointing tendency for a lot of these discussions to feature a kind of unstated zero-sum-ism, particularly in the diversity context— that is, a tacit assumption that it’s perfectly fine to maintain the current number of jobs, and just change the demographics of the people who get those jobs. There’s a common rhetorical trope that casts the DEI program as replacing mediocre white men with brilliant Black women and, you know, to the extent that that’s possible, I’m all in favor of it. The problem is that in practice, the mediocre white men need to go somewhere, so actually effecting change demands creating more jobs, and that really ought to be part of the conversation.

(You can, I suppose, profess complete disinterest in where the mediocre white guys go and what they do, but that’s not a very appealing rhetorical stance. Or tactically wise in a system where the mediocre white guys get to vote.)

So, as I said, I think this is a genuinely difficult problem for higher education (in the US, at least), and one that isn’t usually discussed as forthrightly as it ought to be. Unless we want to restrict the production of Ph.D.’s in ways that are pretty unappealing, solving the problems that academia has created for itself will require either making the case for a significant expansion of the number of jobs within the academy, or making the case for significantly expanded opportunities outside the academy for the people getting Ph.D'.’s. As an industry, we’re unfortunately not doing a very good job of either of those.

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This is a topic where I’m so worried that something I write will be taken the wrong way that I often end up hedging so much that nobody finds it worth a response. In the event that you’d like to see more of that, here’s a button:

And if you think I didn’t hedge enough, you can tell me that in the comments: