Bret Devereaux

The issue with that is that this is a stocks-and-flows problem. Each year that the number of new PhDs is much higher than the number of jobs, the job market is essentially picking up job-debt, because those PhDs do not go away or poof out of existence. 8/25

Some handful of them, each year, give up and do something else. Of the people I know in that category, very few of them are happy about it. Universities and sometimes departments like to say nice things about alt-ac, but fairly few people in alt-ac WANT to be. 9/25

It's not *none* mind you, some people thrive in alt-ac jobs...but there's a lot of bitterness and broken dreams in alt-ac too, especially since many supposedly alt-ac jobs don't even remotely require a PhD. They're not alt-ac jobs, they're just jobs. 10/25

But of course a lot of a given year's unlucky candidates do not just leave. They get adjunct gigs, or teach high school, or university admin jobs or whatever and then apply again because they want to actually get the job they spent a decade training for. 11/25

There are a ton of scholars on that particular merry-go-round on this birdsite. That means that each year the job market is bad (blue line below orange line), it is getting worse, because most of the gap from the previous year rolls over into the next. 12/25

So when you are assessing 2019, you don't just want to think in terms of comparing it to another year, you need to be thinking 2019, plus most of the 2018 jobs gap, and the 2017 jobs gap, and the 2016 jobs gap. 13/25

In history, that gap only goes back really to 2008, but in some other humanities disciplines, hiring has been underwater since the 90s. The terrifying thing about the history graph is that for the humanities, history is relatively *better* than most. 14/25

All of that then runs into this year. Obvious there's no data for this year, but signs point to a year probably not meaningfully better than 2019 or 2020. But we know one thing that is likely to be higher: PhDs granted. 15/25