The number of college teachers in the humanities has not grown at the expected rate. A survey of department heads found the number of full-time, tenured faculty teaching English, modern languages, history, and philosophy to be dwindling and that it seemed that opportunities for humanists to earn a living through college teaching appear to be diminishing.
Owing to the cause of the traditional link between college teaching and scholarship in the humanities, the first question to be asked concerns the number of such opportunities there are likely to be during the next decade or two. To estimate this number is not simple, and to estimate openings in particular disciplines is harder still.
Associations of engineers have regularly projected shortages and then after a few years had to say red-facedly that in actuality surpluses had developed. This anomaly occurred as the forecasts attracted college freshmen and sophomores to engineering and thus created a later glut. Hence, anyone trying to project demand for college teachers has to take warning from this example and also to bear in mind the possible influence of some event not now foreseen.
Demand for college teachers, however, is not quite the same as demand for engineers. New jobs for engineers can be created by new technology, by shifts in public interest, say from clean air to energy, however, new jobs for college teachers can develop from one of only three conditions: (a) more students; (b) fewer students per teacher; and (c) replacement needs created by deaths, retirements, and resignations.
Since most of the college-age population has already been born, the pool of potential students is known, and projections can be made of numbers likely to attend college.
Some obvious forces should work toward having each teacher teach more students, which would mean there would be even fewer job openings. When prices and wages go up in the economy as a whole, costs in colleges and universities go up at an even faster rate; most of what is spent falls in sectors most sensitive to inflation. Historically, services, fuel, and food, lead price advances, whereas producer durables and consumer durables trail.
Of colleges already accepting almost all applicants, many are likely to lose enrollment. Many will probably close. Some, however, will resist. Some 2-year colleges may upgrade themselves to 4-year colleges with an array of pre-professional programs and departmental majors. Since 4-year colleges tend to have fewer students per faculty member, these institutions might employ more teachers.
Extrapolation from historical evidence on student-teacher ratios, turnover rates, and proportions in particular fields can yield projections of numbers of openings for teachers.
If economic conditions become worse, many students will not be able to afford school. If they become better, many will go to work instead of going to school.
Even if higher education has declining monetary return, the proportion of young Americans going to college probably will not diminish. If enrollments should increase, they would probably do so gradually rather than abruptly. The proportion of high-school graduates could go up, and so might the rate at which high-school graduates go on to college. Numbers of new students in their late thirties or older may increase. All of these developments could occur simultaneously.
If student-faculty ratios should meanwhile remain constant or possibly even worsen, it would follow that employment opportunities in college teaching would fall sharply. Professors, like gem-cutting machines, create items for consumption. Since each grinds slowly and finely, more have to be added to meet increases in demand, but each lasts a long time. When demand levels off or diminishes, the call for new ones disappears. When enrollments go down, the need for new professors becomes nonexistent. The only new openings stem from resignations, deaths, and retirements, and not all these openings are filled, for some institutions simply reduce staff.
Even among colleges that have had difficulty filling classrooms during the years of expansion, faculty shrinkage would not necessarily match shrinkage in student numbers. Many such colleges exist for reasons other than simple demand for educational services.
Two decades or so from now, there may well be a revived demand for higher education and on the basis of this possibility, civic leaders in small towns and suburbs might keep local colleges operating no matter how few young people attend them. Similar decisions might be made by clergymen and laymen responsible for church-related schools. In some instances colleges may be kept alive by loyal alumni.
In demand for college teachers, the more selective and the less selective institutions could, during a long-swing decline, form different markets, virtually walled off from one another. The more selective group could continue to have more or less constant enrollments and hence constant need for replacement faculty.
If the enrollment decline were 20% or more, somewhat less than one-quarter of colleges and universities would not be affected, but if the decline were only 10% or so, as many as half could be in that position. Employing disproportionate numbers of faculty and steadily replacing professors who died or retired, these institutions would have considerable new career openings every year. On the other hand, people not lucky enough to get jobs in selective schools would find themselves competing for a handful of jobs, many in institutions whose own survival might well be in question.
The key question, both for students contemplating graduate work and for all people concerned about humanistic scholarship, has to do with numbers of additional people who can hope to acquire tenure to spend their lives on college faculties. These projections, even if one adopts optimistic assumptions about total faculty numbers and hypothesizes a sharp upward trend in the proportions of professors in the major humanities, are disquieting.
Although the numbers of professors with tenure are not large enough to close off all openings, they are sufficient to stir concern among university and college administrators. A tenured teacher usually costs more than a new hire, and administrators will surely try to keep down the proportion of replacement appointees given long-term appointments.
For people interested in doing graduate work, teaching for a few years but not making a career of it, openings are likely to be abundant. In fact, the number of short-term vacancies could be much higher than in the past because the proportion of resignations could greatly increase the turnover rate.
The decline in college and university revenues might thus proceed at less than half the rate of decline in enrollments. Depending on the extent to which operating costs could be held constant and the extent to which faculty members will accept a decline in real wages, total numbers of faculty could remain relatively high.
