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How blue can you get? The 2020-2021 job cycle

11/1/2020

Before we get to the numbers, perhaps you should soothe your soul with BB King.

Comparing cumulative job postings from August 1 to October 31 for the past three years, there are 53% fewer jobs posted on PhilJobs in 2020 compared to 2018 and 2019.

You read that right: there are fewer than half of jobs advertised this year compared to the last two years. Take a look at the graph below.

By the end of October in 2018 and 2019, there were 270 and 267 jobs posted (respectively). In 2020, there have been 126 jobs posted so far. If you're a real glutton for punishment, you can see the decline in job postings across three months:

Everyone suspected that the job market would be bad this year, but I didn't think it would be this bad, with fewer than half the number of jobs posted compared to this time last year.

Of the jobs that have been posted, what's the distribution of kinds of jobs looking like? Below is doing counts of job type (e.g. postdoc, senior faculty, etc) and contract types (e.g. fixed-term, tenure-track, etc)

Most of the jobs advertised are postdocs or tenure-track positions. Unfortunately, most departments don't advertise adjunct positions on PhilJobs. I'd like to see if demand for adjuncts is increasing amidst all this.

Now, let's look just as tenure-track positions. How many have been posted now compared to this time last year?

There have been 28 posted so far. In 2018 there were 108 posted by this time, and 102 posted in 2019. That's 73% fewer tenure-track jobs posted compared to this time last year. There will likely be some more jobs trickling in, but we've passed peak job-posting season. (Check out this blog post for details.)

Finally, let's look at the postdoc scene:

So here's one silver lining: the number of postdocs seems to be more or less in line with the last couple of years. I imagine that's because postdoc funding comes from different pots than faculty and admin funding.

The long-term effects of this are hard to discern, but of this much we can be confident: there's going to be a hell of a backlog of job-seekers for the foreseeable future. The job market wasn't pretty before, and it's only going to get worse. It's not as though the jobs are going to spring back right away, if at all -- but I'd love to be wrong about it.

In light of this, I hope that departments and the APA increase their efforts to promote non-academic careers. Yes, yes, I know there's an APA committee for non-academic careers, and I know every department can tout some of its graduates who have gone into non-academic careers. But the non-academic-career-side of professional philosophy is still the red-headed stepchild (no offense to my fellow gingers). The situation was already unsustainable, and the pandemic has only made matters worse. The profession can't keep continuing to prioritize academic over non-academic careers. This is an opportunity to grow and adapt. I hope the profession doesn't squander this opportunity.

The award for most job postings in the 2018-19 job cycle goes to...

3/22/2020

Princeton! They had nine job ads: eight postdocs and one assistant prof. Since the postdocs have names and institutes attached to them, I'm assuming the department doesn't do the selecting? How the heck does that work? (Clearly I wasn't fancy enough to win a named postdoc anywhere.) Who picks the Louis Skolnick Postdoctoral Research Associate? Surely it can't be the department doing the selecting. How the hell could any department do nine searches, even if eight are postdocs?

Runners-up include:
1. University of Chicago (three postdocs, two junior, one senior)
2. University of Pittsburgh (four open rank, one visiting fellowship, one junior)
3. Rice University (three open rank, two postdocs)
4. Stanford University (one open, one postdoc, one junior, one senior, one fixed-term junior)

2018-2019 Job Cycle: some data on dates

3/20/2020

I'm at home moving my classes online and doing my best with my wife to (a) stave off illness and (b) home-school our kids. So I says to myself I says, "let's make Friday night crazy by doing some analysis of the 2018-2019 job cycle!" Strap in, nerds. It's gonna get nutty up in here.

First, let's take a look at job postings for the last 5 years. Notice the obvious cycle:

You can see each year's peak, which quickly tapers off. Now this is for posting dates. Let's check out for when apps are due. You'd expect the same kind of cycle aaaaaaand.......

That's exactly what you get. Cool cool cool cool cool.

Let's zoom in on posting dates for 2018-2019. FYI: 14 posts didn't fill in the "deadline" field. I guess is was in the body of the post? Annoying...

That peak you see is 9 job-postings in one day on September 11. But we can also see that the peak job posting period is August 28 - November 1. Those are the first and last days where there at least four job postings in a day. This period accounts for nearly half of all jobs posted during this cycle (153/322). Keep in mind we're filtering for junior, postdoc, and open rank positions. We can also see two longish stretches of days without posting jobs: from December 22 to January 1 and May 31 to June 15 (roughly -- there's a day with two posts in that stretch).

Now let's take a look at when job apps are due.

Holy guacamole! That peak you see is November 1. Here are the top 5 due dates with the number of deadlines on each day (well, top 6, since there's a tie for 5th place).

November 1..... 31
November 15... 22
December 1...... 12
March 1............. 10
October 15........ 9
January 15........ 9

You get some downtime in the summer: mid-June to early July tends to be pretty chill.

Are there differences by job type?

Open rank and junior faculty have their intense period in November. Postdoc apps don't have the same peak. The takeaway? If it's the fall and you absolutely have to choose between prepping junior apps and postdoc apps, focus on the junior apps. You'll miss some postdoc deadlines, but you'd do better to focus your energy on the junior apps. But wait, we can do even better. Let's look specifically at TT jobs and postdocs.

So it looks like the lesson holds even filtering out junior, fixed-term jobs.

One more question: how much time to applicants get between the day the job is posted and the deadline?

Your eyes do not deceive you. There's one junior job for which applicants had 0 days. Two plausible hypotheses: a typo or the posting the job was just a formality. Junior faculty openings have a median of 41 days and most apps are due between 30 and 60 days of posting.

For postdoc positions, the shortest time between the posting and the deadline is 3 days, but most are between 34 and 65, with a median of 48. But postdoc postings have more dispersed outliers.

So there you have it. Some interesting findings about last year's job market. As always, feedback is welcome, especially if there's other analyses you'd like done.

2018-2019 job cycle: how many and where

3/4/2020

I recently downloaded some data from PhilJobs on job openings in the past few years. I wanted to share some findings from that dataset: some where's and when's.

The data has a number of variables of interest: hiring school, kind of job (academic or not), date the ad was posted, date apps are due, level of job (postdoc, junior, etc) and contract type (TT, fixed-term, etc), among others. With these data, we can ask some interesting questions. Here's what we're looking at today.

1. how many jobs were there?
2. where were the jobs? like literally, where in the world were the jobs?

I filtered the data for three kinds of job: junior faculty, postdoc and open rank hires. (FWIW filtering for "junior" doesn't discriminate between TT and fixed-term. We'll have a chance to separate out TT and fixed-term later.) We might look at admin jobs or senior hires, but I'm not terribly concerned about those groups, tbh. When reflecting on how terrible the job market is for philosophers, the usual victim is a newly-minted (or newishly-minted) PhD looking for steady employment.

And as far as the boundaries of the hiring cycle, I used August 1 to July 31 to define 'hiring cycle'. As we'll see, jobs are posted year-round, but these bounds feel natural for identifying the beginning and the end of a cycle.

But before we completely leave the non-junior jobs behind, let's look quickly at the number of jobs posted last year in each category.

So during the 2018-2019 hiring cycle, there were roughly 180 junior jobs, 70-ish postdocs, and 60-ish open-rank. Let's zoom in on the junior faculty

So 110 or so jobs are TT and 65 or so are fixed-term. 10-ish are junior but "tenured, continuing, or permanent." I imagine this is a catch-all category for "junior faculty, long-term"

Now, let's look at where the jobs are. I used the ggmap package. Word to the wise: this package is awesome, but make sure you (i) get your google apps key and (ii) enable the static maps API. (Details are in the documentation for ggmap.) It took me forever to figure out that I didn't tell Google that I wanted to use the static maps.

Anywho, we'll start with postdocs, junior faculty, and open rank and then focus on junior positions.

So here's something interesting: most jobs are on the east coast -- particularly the northeast corridor -- or California. No jobs in the Dakotas, Utah, Wyoming, or New Mexico.

Now let's look at junior faculty jobs, and we'll color the dots by contract type.

There's no clear pattern to TT vs fixed-term jobs in terms of location. CA had a bunch of TT jobs. So did the northeast.

What's the takeaway? There's a big divide in the density of job openings east and west of the Mississippi River. Once you move west of those states whose eastern borders are the Mississippi, jobs are a lot scarcer. Beyond that, there are higher concentrations of jobs in (1) California and (2) the northeast (NJ, NY, CT, MA...and also some bordering states like PA, VA, and MD). If you get your PhD on the east coast or CA, you have a decent chance of staying there.

So I says to myself I says, "I wonder how this compares with median household income per county..." Here's the map:

Hmmm.... nothing obvious. The northeast and Midatlantic regions have a higher median income per family than lots of other places in the country. (Holy shit -- Northern Virginia has a median income of $125k! That's higher than the Bay Area! And I'm astonished because I grew up the son of a handyman in NoVa.) More detailed investigations might yield something, but now it doesn't look like much.

"Leiter Year in Review" Review

1/27/2020

"So Charlie, why are you doing this given your stack of grading and journal deadlines?" you might be wondering. Well get off my back! You're not my real mom!

I have an abiding interest in the culture of professional philosophy. A lot of that culture is moving online, which is handy for folks like me who know enough about coding to get themselves into trouble and just enough to get themselves out of it (most of the time). LR boasts on his blog that it's the "world's most popular philosophy blog since 2003". (Maybe that's true? IDK if he's got the stats for Daily Nous. But of course "since 2003" might describe the blog's birth year and not how long it's been most popular.) It's influential in our profession; I have no doubt that many people read it. I also know that at least some people have VERY STRONG OPINIONS about LR and BL himself.

Given how popular it is, it's worth getting the big picture of the blog. If we wanted to describe the last year of blogging in a nutshell, we might say that LR is a lot like Slate or National Review: lots of good and important news interspersed with a lot of editorializing. How do we come to this conclusion? There is a lot of news about the profession and academia in general shared; there is also quite a bit of news about stifling academic freedom and rights to free speech; and more info on the PGR and job search advice. But along with all that are opinions expressed about Weinberg, Manne, Jenkins, Ichikawa, and the Twitter Red Guard. (I will note that there are no tags for Christa Peterson or Nathan Oseroff-Spicer, both of whom get mentions in the content of posts. BL tags tenured faculty at institutions with PhD programs, but not grad students. I, for one, can appreciate that. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but it seems a bit more punching sideways than down, at least with respect to tags on LR.)

Leiter's Year in Review doesn't reflect his overall blogging patterns for the year (not that it has to). If I had to speculate, the posts picked are the most sensational ones and not the ones that reflect the blogging practices. You might get a more representative view of the blog by following the "Phil in the News" tag and then skimming some entries at random.

Finally, maybe you're interesting in our three areas of investigation for the whole year? Here ya go.

Leiter Reports year in review, 4th quarter

1/24/2020

Go here for methods.

Lot's of blogging happening here -- only 5 days off! On average 2.9 posts per day. Looking at the shape of the plot, it seems a bit like a very sharp and compressed sine wave: days with one or fewer posts are usually followed by an upswing in posting, followed by a sharp decline. Not perfectly, of course, but close enough to suggest that high-posting days are followed by days of little posting until bottoming out in 0 or 1 posts on a day, with the cycle beginning again.

This broadly follows the pattern from previous quarters. "Fascism Alerts" is underrepresented in BL's picks (unusually). Named-philosophers are are slightly over-represented in BL's picks. And the PGR is definitely over-represented in BL's picks.

Quick detour

1/24/2020

I mentioned before that "Phil in the News" is a ubiquitous tag on LR. Given that tag, what is it most likely to be paired with?

There's a good deal of pairing with tags about the profession, the academy, and news updates. In fact, those are the top 5 co-occurring tags. After that, we get into the conflict with the "New Infantilists" and more Leiter-centric interests. So given a "Phil in the News" tag, you'll find co-occurring tags dealing with issues in the profession a good deal of the time (around half, I think), and a lot of Leiter-centric tags beyond that. (Though keep in mind that "Issues in the profession" and "Of Cultural Interest" also co-occur with "New Infantilists" etc. A deeper dive would look at posts with three and four tags...maybe that'll come later.)

Leiter Reports year in review, 3rd quarter

1/24/2020

In case you're just joining us, the methods are here.

Again, lots of blogging and the average for the quarter is 2.13 posts per day. Always good to take a step back during the summer months.

A few interesting things to note: individuals are again over-represented in BL's picks. I found the absence of "wankers" in the BL picks rather interesting. Granted, it doesn't take up a huge proportion of the total number of tags but even so there's more "wankers" than "Justin Weinberg" or "Jonathan Ichikawa". And "Kate Manne" is over-represented in BL's picks; so are "Humor", "Know-nothings", and "Twitter Red Guard".

The ones that stad out here are "Twitter Red Guard", "Justin Weinberg", "Jonathan Ichikawa", and "Kate Manne". They definitely glow a lot brighter in BL's picks than in the whole quarter. In fact, "Twitter Red Guard" and "Jonathan Ichikawa" always co-occur in BL's picks; but while "JI" always occurs with "TRG" in the 3rd quarter, there's more to "TRG" than just "JI".

Conclusions? Again, BL's picks for highlights of the 3rd quarter over-represent beefs he's got with individuals.

Leiter Reports year in review, 2nd quarter

1/22/2020

In the last post, I gave details on methods, so I'll skip that for the next posts and get right to the data. First, blogging volume.

There's no regression line to show the downward trend, but it's pretty visible. BL posted an average of 2.4 times per day and we can see he took more time off in the summer. Good for him to get some rest!

Now let's compare tag frequency for the whole 2nd quarter versus BL's picks.

"Phil in the News" is top for both and BL's picks reflect how frequently the tag was used in the 2nd quarter. "Fascism Alerts" is under represented in BL's picks and "New Infantilism" over-represented. And again, looking at blogging in the 2nd quarter more broadly, BL is concerned with the profession and its manifestations in the wider world.

What's neat to see is that the "Phil in the News" tag isn't used as widely as it was in the 1st quarter (see below). Rather, the tag is used in a more focused way. It has a lot of co-occurrences with particular names -- Chris Bertram, Justin Weinberg, Jonathan Ichikawa, though not William Vallicella -- relative to the total number of instances of those names.

Something interesting to observe is that, in the 2nd quarter, "Fascism Alerts" co-occurred quite frequently relative to "Cultural Interest" and "Phil in the News" but the former doesn't show up in BL's picks. Instead, "Fascism Alerts" always (or nearly enough) occurred with "Academic Freedom", ""Phil in the News", "The Academy", and "New Infantilism." In fact, looking at the row "New Infantilism", "Academic Freedom" always (or nearly enough) occurs with it. So BL's picks for the 2nd quarter over -represents the co-occurrence of "Academic Freedom" and "New Infantilism". So if you were reading the Year in Review for the 2nd quarter, you'd get a skewed view of what was on LR.

Leiter Reports year in review, 1st quarter

1/19/2020

Brian Leiter ("BL") posted his 2019 "Year in Review" on Leiter Reports ("LR"). I looked for criteria about how he picks them and didn't see anything. My guess is that he picks posts that he found compelling throughout the year. So I says to myself I says, "I wonder how that compares with his blogging for the entire year." I'd been working on a project scraping all 300 or so pages of LR and thought I'd start out smaller: scraping his posts for 2019. (The entire LR scraping project will come along sooner or later. I'm off sabbatical now and have substantially less time.)

I used the rvest package created by the great Hadley Wickham. If you're already good with the tidyverse, then web-scraping with rvest is a pretty easy learning curve. Just make sure you read the tutorial on using the SelectorGadget! And thank goodness WordPress is so easy to scrape: pages are individuated by the base URL (http:\\... etc.) and then a sequence of numbers.

The method here is pretty simple. I scraped LR for tags and dates. There are three questions I'm interested in answering:

1. what are blogging patterns like? i.e. how frequently does BL post on LR and how much each day?
2. what tags get used most frequently?
3. what's the frequency for co-occurring tags?

In this post and the next three, I'll answer these three questions. Then I'll attempt a wrap-up.

1. Frequency
To me, this is probably the least interesting question, but it's one that can be answered easily.

UPDATE: This was not as easy as I suspected (but it was still a useful exercise). Scraping LR gave me the dates that BL posted but it doesn't fill in the dates he doesn't post. Here's a good set of instructions for how to fill those in.

Here's a line graph showing the volume of blogging from 1 January 2019 to 31 March 2019.

BL is a prolific blogger. He took off from blogging only five days in the 1st quarter! At most, he's posted 6 times in a day and on average he posted 2.7 times a day.

2. Tags
A quick methodological note: I often shortened the tag to something that captured the spirit of the tag but was much more readable on a plot. E.g. "The less they know, the less they know it" was shortened to "know-nothings." Also, all guest bloggers were collapsed into "guest" (but BL hasn't had many guest bloggers on in the last few years, so that's not a worry for right now). What tags got used the most during the 1st quarter? Here's the histogram.

'NA' indicates those days when BL didn't use a tag. So what's to see? BL's go-to tags are about philosophy in the news and stuff of cultural interest. He doesn't use LR for law school updates very much. In fact, the majority of the tagging is about issues related to the profession. BL posts quite a bit more about professional issues that what he colorfully calls the "Twitter Red Guard" and "The New Infantilism." Nonetheless, he has a special place on his blog (and in his heart?) for Justin Weinberg and a handful of other folks (as we'll see in the next few posts).

However! The "Phil in the News" and "The Academy" tags are often paired with "Justin Weinberg" and "The New Infantilism." So at least some of the professional-issue tags are also about the subculture in our discipline that prefers Daily Nous to LR. What can help clear this up is a plot looking at tag co-occurrence.

3. Tag co-occurrence
This plot shows how often pairs of tags so up together. (This is a super helpful set of directions for computing the co-occurrence matrix.)

So what does this tell us? Notice first that the plot isn't symmetrical: what's above the yellow diagonal isn't the mirror of what's below. So for any co-occurrence of two topics, you could have two different values. Look at "Academic Freedom" and "Justin Weinberg" for an example. To interpret the plot: wherever the co-occurrence, it's relative to the total number of occurrences of Topic 1 along that row.

Take "Academic Freedom" and "Justin Weinberg" to start. The plot tells us the co-occurrence of these tags relative to all occurrences of each. To find their frequency relative to "Academic Freedom", find the intersection of both but with "Academic Freedom" appearing as the row value. Their co-occurrence relative to all instances of "Academic Freedom" is rather low (~.07). But the co-occurrence of "Academic Freedom" and "Justin Weinberg" relative to all instances of "Justin Weinberg" is rather large (it's about .67). So Justin is one concern about academic freedom on BL's blog, but he's far from being the only one. But whenever BL is talking about Justin, it's often about academic freedom.

Why do it this way? It doesn't make sense to relativize everything to the topic with the greatest number of tags. It just swamps everything. "Fascism Alerts" and "Cultural Interest" co-occurred 10 times, but that's a blip against the total number of times "Phil in the News" showed up (which is 454). I tried relativizing to whichever of the Topic 1 and Topic 2 was larger. This makes a symmetrical plot but it papers over important info. If A and B have a co-occurrence value of .5, it's not clear whether that's relative to all instances of A or B.

So what does the plot tell us? One thing that stands out is the rather light-colored column for "Phil in the News". This tells us that "Phil in the News" is a rather promiscuous tag, relative to how often other tags are used. This is confirmed by the relative dark shading of "Phil in the News" for Topic 1: no single tag stands out relative to the total number of tokens of "Phil in the News."

A few other bright-colored spots:

notice that "PGR" (Philosophical Gourmet Report) & "Job Search Advice" relative to "PGR" is a bright yellow. So whenever BL is talking about the job search advice, it's in connection with PGR.
But given all posts about the PGR, BL might be talking about different things: job search advice, but also philosophy in the news, issues in the profession, and the nature of philosophy. This last thing is kinda interesting: given the total number of PGR tags, you get "What is Philosophy?" roughly 20% of the time (PGR as Topic 1 and "What is Philosophy?" as Topic 2). Looking at the histogram above, the PGR didn't get tagged much in the 1st quarter of 2019, but it's an interesting insight that it's tied to tags about the nature of philosophy as much as it is.
given all instances of "academic freedom" (which has the 4th greatest number of tag-tokens), you'll find "Fascism Alerts" with it roughly 1/4 of the time and "The New Infantilism" a little less than that.
BL doesn't often use the "Justin Weinberg" tag (see histogram) but when he does, you better believe it's coming with "The New Infantilism".
And "wankers" is rare, but it's almost always news.

Let's compare these last two plots to the posts BL picked out in his year in review. The method here is exactly the same as before. The only difference is in the scraping code: I went to the collection of links for the 1st quarter of the year in review, grabbed those links, and then scraped the tags.

Some stuff to see here: "Phil in the News" is top again, but that's not surprising given how promiscuous the tag is. "PGR" and "Job search advice" occur a lot more often in BL's picks than in the 1st quarter overall.

Let's look at the co-occurrence plot.

And there's the previous one for easy reference:

Co-occurrence of "New Infantilism" and "Academic Freedom" relative to all instances of the former is greater in BL's picks than in the 1st quarter overall; samesies replacing "New Infantilism" with "The Academy". And "What is Philosophy" co-occurring with "PGR" relative to all instances of "What is Philosophy" is also overrepresented in BL's picks.

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Soaked feet, bone-dry cuffs

How blue can you get? The 2020-2021 job cycle

The award for most job postings in the 2018-19 job cycle goes to...

2018-2019 Job Cycle: some data on dates

2018-2019 job cycle: how many and where

"Leiter Year in Review" Review

Leiter Reports year in review, 4th quarter

Quick detour

Leiter Reports year in review, 3rd quarter

Leiter Reports year in review, 2nd quarter

Leiter Reports year in review, 1st quarter

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