The Ecology of the History Job: Shifting Realities in a Fluid Market

Robert Townsend is deputy director of the American Historical Association.

Ask almost any historian employed in academia today, and they will tell you how lucky they are to have a job. The problems of the academic job market in history extend back to 1970, rising and falling through a series of seemingly intractable crises in every decade since. But the solutions, much like the problems, are not as simple or straightforward as they often appear. Bringing the number of new PhDs conferred each year into line with the number of new academic jobs that become available cannot in itself solve all the problems.

As a discipline, we need to get past the notion that the history job market is neatly characterized by the ratio of academic jobs to PhDs. Examining the relationship is important, as it does help us to see that the number of PhDs conferred in history has been fairly consistent—at about 1,000 per year for more than a decade—while the number of jobs has gone through a series of rather wild gyrations that generally follow the larger economy up and down (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Number of New History PhDs and Advertised Job Openings,
1970–71 to 2010–11

But that is not the whole story. In many ways these two trend lines are much too simple as a description of the problem, as there are many other factors that actually shape the relationship between any two corresponding points. These include the number of new PhDs entering programs, the types of jobs they are prepared for, and a range of other potential shifts in academic employment that are slowly reshaping the careers and opportunities of those who find jobs....