Timeline for How hard is it to get tenure in mathematics?
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| Nov 30, 2017 at 15:35 | review | Close votes | |||
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| Apr 13, 2017 at 12:58 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
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| Feb 4, 2011 at 18:29 | comment | added | roy smith | By the way when I sought to become a mathematician, none of this was known, asked, or relevant to me. It was the subject I loved most. At a certain point however I became aware that I was more economically viable with a PhD than without. Still when I was hired in my last job, I (foolishly) neglected even to inquire about the retirement plan, never thinking of it as a finite job. At one point, with a wife and two children, I briefly considered resigning my tenure track job at a public university for a temporary position around great mathematicians at a top research place. | |
| Feb 4, 2011 at 18:17 | comment | added | roy smith | Another phenomenon is how many sources of PhD's do you compare against the available jobs say in the US? In the 80's a huge migration occurred of foreign mathematicians to US tenure track research jobs. This meant the competition level soared astronomically. Full professors with world class credentials, against whom no new PhD could possibly contend, were applying for assistant professorships. This condition has reversed, with some European and Canadian universities successfully hiring away top professors from the US. So how far abroad, and far down the ladder of prestige, will you look? | |
| Feb 4, 2011 at 18:11 | comment | added | roy smith | This question needs a bit more precision. A tenured job as a research mathematician needs defining. If it means a job with tenure in which one does research, then the number of such jobs depends on the number of tenured people who do research. In the old days, research occurred mostly at top tier places. When some PhD's came out in the 70's, it had become harder to get jobs at those same places. But lower tier places absorbed those PhD's who indeed did research, transforming what were tenured teaching jobs into tenured research jobs. This greatly broadened the research base in the US. | |
| Feb 4, 2011 at 15:59 | answer | added | Tom Leinster | timeline score: 4 | |
| Jan 29, 2011 at 10:53 | answer | added | Thomas Riepe | timeline score: 6 | |
| Oct 27, 2010 at 1:15 | answer | added | Deane Yang | timeline score: 9 | |
| Oct 26, 2010 at 22:03 | answer | added | Thierry Zell | timeline score: 5 | |
| Sep 19, 2010 at 1:21 | comment | added | Thierry Zell | Don't forget to put this in a broader context: according to the AAUP, the proportion of tenured faculty in US universities is at an all time low (this is across all disciplines, but I can't imagine why Math would be an exception). | |
| Aug 1, 2010 at 3:38 | comment | added | Deane Yang | I can see why such statistics might be useful for someone working on a national policy on academic mathematics (assuming that one even exists), but I don't see why it is at all useful for an individual trying to decide whether to pursue a career in mathematics. Could someone explain? | |
| May 7, 2010 at 13:08 | comment | added | GS | You may well be right about all of that! I don't know how to measure the changing economic conditions, or the switch from 1 to 2 postdocs (which seems believable to me). I'd still be happy with an answer to the easier question: of the people who got math PhDs in the US 15 years ago and went on to a research postdoc, how many are tenured researchers today? | |
| May 6, 2010 at 20:09 | comment | added | Ben Webster♦ | Well, I'm sure one could factor in changing economic conditions. Also, there's been a trend toward postdocification over time (in the SDR about 1/7 of people who got Ph.D.s before 1980 did postdocs, whereas about 1/3 of people who got Ph.D.s in 2000-5 did), which we can assume will continue. I've made the claim, and not been contradicted yet, that we may be watching the 1 postdoc to 2 postdoc switchover happen as we speak. | |
| May 6, 2010 at 17:26 | comment | added | GS | And I got my PhD 3 years ago, so for my own selfish reasons I'll find this kind of information even more interesting... | |
| May 6, 2010 at 17:13 | comment | added | GS | You mean, how hard it has been for the past 5 years or so, for someone who got a PhD 10 to 15 years ago? I have to admit that I'd regard that kind of data, especially if it's stable going back another 10 or 15 years, as pretty good evidence for how hard it will be 5 or 10 years from now. What more could one expect? | |
| May 6, 2010 at 17:12 | answer | added | Gerald Edgar | timeline score: 7 | |
| May 6, 2010 at 15:47 | comment | added | Ben Webster♦ | Of course, while historical data about this is quite interesting, past results are no guarantee of future performance. So, really, you'll be finding out how hard it was to get tenure in mathematics at best 10 to 15 years ago, which may not have that much to do with how hard it will be for, say, a starting Ph.D. student or postdoc today. | |
| May 6, 2010 at 15:12 | answer | added | Yiftach Barnea | timeline score: 4 | |
| May 6, 2010 at 15:01 | answer | added | Ben Webster♦ | timeline score: 24 | |
| May 6, 2010 at 14:51 | history | edited | GS | CC BY-SA 2.5 |
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| May 6, 2010 at 14:41 | answer | added | Joel David Hamkins | timeline score: 7 | |
| May 6, 2010 at 14:34 | history | edited | GS | CC BY-SA 2.5 |
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| May 6, 2010 at 14:21 | history | asked | GS | CC BY-SA 2.5 |