A few decades ago the number of full-time college teachers was over 82,000. The number of graduate students was over 47,000. These statistics included teachers and graduate students in all academic fields--science, education, and business as well as the humanities. The number of teachers had doubled and the number of graduate students had increased six-fold. The Office of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) reported four decades back full-time college teachers numbering in the neighborhood of 450,000, and graduate students, full-time and part-time, numbering over a million.
National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics (annual) and The Condition of Education (4 decades ago):
The number of college teachers in the humanities had not grown at an equivalent rate. Twenty percent of the total in earlier years, they formed smaller proportions later. A survey of department heads conducted four decades ago by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) found the number of full-time faculty teaching English, modern languages, history, and philosophy to be about 61,000, which was only 14% of the total full-time college faculty counted contemporaneously by the NCES. Though no comparable survey has been made since then, the American Historical Association estimates the number of full-time college teachers of history to have fallen from 12,900 to 10,875 in five years -- from 3% of all college teachers to about 2.4%. Opportunities for humanists to earn a living through college teaching appear to be dwindling.
Because 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. 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. As Richard Freeman has explained, forecasts attracted college freshmen and sophomores to engineering and thus created a later glut.
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 events not now foreseen. The history of American higher education became very different after the Soviet Union launched its first Sputnik spacecraft and thereby provoked national alarm about the state and prospects of American science and engineering. Some such unexpected event could occur again.
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-as from clean air to energy-or by many other changes; 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. Extrapolation from historical evidence on student-teacher ratios, turnover rates, and proportions in particular fields can yield projections of numbers of openings for teachers. A review of what such extrapolation would have yielded in the past suggests that the projections deserve to be taken seriously.
It is instructive to consider projections that simple assumptions would have produced with no intimation that Sputnik I would soon go into orbit. Census Bureau data showed a national birthrate that had been rising on a gradient resembling the takeoff path of a jet plane. Junior high schools and elementary schools were as warm. The freshmen then in cradles and playpens were even more plentiful. Over the preceding century, moreover, the proportions of youngsters graduating from high school and going on to college had been steadily going up.
To go on to estimate demand for faculty would have involved more guesswork. Although historical data on population and enrollment trends might have been suspect, they were wonderfully precise as compared with data on faculty, for criteria used to distinguish full-timers from part-timers and senior faculty from junior faculty varied from institution to institution and year to year. (Who are considered faculty and who are not, how they are counted and by whom, it should be said, remain unclear.) As of middle of last century, one could have done no better than to assume that the ratio of faculty, full-time and part-time, to students, also full-time and part-time, would remain around 1:10, as over most of the preceding century. Such an assumption would have yielded a projection that total college faculty by the early 20th century would be between 800,000 and 1 million. And, in fact, official counts were to put total faculty at around 950,000.
A projection of full-time faculty would have been equally near the bull's-eye. More than a third of the total college faculty consisted of teaching assistants and others not filling the category of "faculty, instructor and above." Of those considered faculty, 3 out of 10 were employed part-time. Hence, for practical purposes, full-time faculty represented about 44% of total faculty. On an assumption that this proportion would remain constant, estimated numbers of full-time faculty would have run between 350,000 and 440,000. The actual figure was to be around 430,000.
By assuming that the proportion of full-time faculty in the humanities would remain constant, at about 20%, one would have forecast an increase from 30,000 to about 80,000. In reality, as already noted, the proportion of faculty in these fields dipped to below 14% what would have been projected.
Estimates from very crude assumptions and data, without foreknowledge of Sputnik, would thus have been inexact but not wholly detached from reality. What developed in aggregate enrollments, faculty, and even full-time faculty fell well within the range of what would have been projected. A guess as to faculty totals in the humanities would have been off by around 25%. Still, rehearsal of what could have been predicted just on the basis of the national birthrate lends some force to an assumption that birthrate data provide at least a clue to what we are likely to see during the next 18-20 years.
We know with certainty that after 1960 American women began having fewer babies. Although 1 in 8 became a mother during early 20th century, only 1 in 14 was doing so after. It is children of this later period-all of them already alive-who will pass through adolescence and become eligible to go to college between now and the late 1990s. In the 1970s, the group aged 18-21 provided two-thirds to three-quarters of all full-time college enrollments and almost 75% of full-time-equivalent enrollments.
In absolute numbers, native-born youth of this age-group will become almost 25% fewer between 1980 and the mid-1990s. Those between 22 and 24 years of age, who have heretofore made up another 15% of the full-time and full-time-equivalent student population, 3 U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports, Series P-20, No. 303 (December 1976). (The standard formula for computing full-time-equivalent enrollments or faculty assumes three part-timers equivalent to one full-timer.)
If Census Bureau projections of the birthrate for the early 1980s are accurate, the two age-groups will be expanding again by the end of the century. The 18- to 21-year-old cohort will be about 90% of what it was earlier; the 18- to 24-year-old cohort will be well over 80% of its early 1980s total.
A larger percentage could, of course, end up in college. Over the long term, the proportion of Americans obtaining college degrees has been increasing. It is not unimaginable that college education will someday be as nearly universal as high-school education. The American Council on Education has developed and publicized possible strategies for increasing college enrollments during the 1980s. In releases aimed at com-batting "too much concentration on decline/' the American Federation of Teachers has argued that national attention should go instead to the fact that many millions do not have college degrees.
Realistically, however, it has to be recognized that the hopes of professional educators may not come true. The ratio between each year's 18-year-olds and each year's high-school graduates leveled off in the 1970s. The ratio between high-school graduates and first-time enrollments in colleges similarly leveled off. Since some high-school students will always fail or drop out, and some who do not will always work instead of going to college, it could be that the levels of the 1970s are plateaus and that the proportions of young people completing high school and entering college will never increase.
American Council on Education, College Enrollment: Testing the Conventional Wisdom against the Facts (Washington, D.C., 1980); Robert M. Nelsen and Irwin H. Polishook, "Academic Morbidity," American Federation of Teachers Higher Education Papers, Chronicle of Higher Education, 21 April 1980, p. 9.
Also, it is not wholly impossible that these proportions could decrease. Richard Freeman and some other economists have reasoned that the basic college degree has had declining appeal as it has become worthless in income. White males became able to calculate that over a lifetime the interest on money saved while working for 4 years might match any extra earnings resulting from having a B.A. The estimated rate of return on investment in a B.A. fell from 10% in the early 1970s to only 9% by 1980. When preliminary counts showed college enrollments higher than expected in the fall of 1980, the obvious explanation lay in high unemployment rates and other indications of severe economic recession. If that explanation was valid, the increase is bound to be temporary. 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.
To be sure, students from older age-groups could lift college enrollment levels even if proportions of younger people going to college remained constant or declined. The 1960s and 1970s saw an increase in numbers of students over 24. The hopes of the American Council on Education and the American Federation of Teachers depend in large part on an acceleration of this trend. The fact is, however, that most of the older undergraduates were still in their twenties or early thirties. By the mid-1990s, any new students under 35 will be simply late registrants from their particular cohort of 18-year-olds. Although students over 35 make up more than a tenth of all enrollments, fewer than one in five are full-time students. Since it takes several part-time students to equal one full-timer in terms of demand for faculty, the impact of this older group on prospective numbers of teaching jobs is comparatively small. For practical purposes, therefore, projections of the student population can be framed on the basis of estimates of the 18- to 24-year-old population and of the proportion of that population likely to enroll in college.
Even if higher education has declining monetary return, the proportion of young Americans going to college probably will not diminish. The worst likely future is one in which conditions remain much like those of the late 1970s. First-year enrollments would then continue to approximate 60% of each year's 18-year-olds; total enrollments, full-time and part-time, would represent about 40% of the population 118-24; and full-time students would form about three-fifths of this total.
The basic work on enrollment and faculty employment projection is Allan M. Cartter, Ph.D.'s and the Academic Labor Market (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976). A technically more sophisticated review! Richard Freeman and David Breneman elaborate methodological problems in Forecasting the Academic Labor Market, National Board on Graduate Education Technical Report No. 2 (1974).
All of these developments could occur simultaneously. But only an extraordinary and unprecedented surge along all these lines could keep numbers of college students at or even near the levels of the late 1970s. If, with all else remaining the same, the number of high-school graduates should approximate 90% of the year's 18-year-olds, or if the number of first-time college enrollments should approximate 90% of the year's high-school graduates, the proportion of the 18- to 24-year-old population in college would increase by about 10%-from 40% to 44%. The actual increment would probably be smaller, for it would almost surely include larger numbers of people unwilling or unable to stay in school for more than a year or two.
As is apparent, the figures yielded even by this highly optimistic assumption fall far short of satisfying the hopes expressed by educators' organizations. Enrollments still have to be reckoned as dropping significantly below levels of the late 1970s. On the less optimistic assumption that conditions of the late 1970s persist, with the proportion of full-time students dwindling by about a quarter of a percent a year, total enrollments follow the downward trend of the census projections, and full-time-equivalent enrollments fall by as much as 30%. Yet these numbers probably embrace the boundaries of reality. What seems almost surely in prospect is a long period in which college enrollments are not increasing and may well be decreasing.
If student-faculty ratios should meanwhile remain constant or possibly even worsen, it would follow that employment opportunities in college teaching would fall sharply. Allan Cartter characterized professors as producer goods. Like gem-cutting machines, they 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.
Total numbers of faculty would fall either gradually or precipitately. Only in the worst circumstances would the year-to-year drop be so great as to exceed the ordinary rate of attrition due to resignations, deaths, and retirements--a rate that Cartter calculated as averaging 2% a year. Hence, there would usually be some new openings. The totals, however, would be very far from those of the 1960s and 1970s.
Between 1955 and 1980, demand for new full-time faculty averaged over 27,000 a year. Even with the relative decline in openings in the humanities, the demand for teachers of English, modern languages, history, and philosophy ran over 5000 a year. For a time in the middle of the 1960s, new openings for full-time faculty exceeded the total number of new openings for teachers because institutions were upgrading their staff as well as enlarging it. In the humanities, the number of new posts for full-time faculty averaged for a time over 6500 a year.
If these projections were to prove realistic, prudent planning would anticipate that, until the very end of the 1990s, average annual full-time career openings in English would be 70-80, those in either modern languages or history 40-50, and those in philosophy fewer than 20. Even with enrollments in the high range of reasonable projections, the numbers for English would not get much above 200; those for modern languages and history would however be around 100 each; and those for philosophy would be between 40 and 50. And these would be in all types of colleges, 2-year as well as 4-year, and would not necessarily be filled by Ph.D.'s.
In fact, such numbers are probably unrealistically low. In addition to being based on straight-line projections of enrollments, they assume that student-faculty ratios and proportions of faculty in each discipline remain constant. It is more than likely that at least one of these conditions, perhaps both of them, will change.
Some obvious forces should work toward having each teacher teach more students and hence toward there being 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, and colleges and universities spend more for of colleges already accepting almost all applicants, many are likely to lose enrollments. A number will probably close. Some, however, will resist. Some 2-year colleges may upgrade themselves to 4-year colleges with panoply 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.
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. Four decades or so from now, there may well be a revived demand for higher education. 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, regardless of what happened in the less selective institutions. In Pennsylvania, for example, West Chester State and Gettysburg College, each of which reports turning away one applicant in three, could still need teachers even if Harrisburg Community College and Waynesburg College, which appear to accept nearly all applicants, run short of students and have to lay off faculty. As labor markets, one sector could be merely sluggish, whereas the other could feel most of the effects of ups and downs in enrollments.
If the enrollment decline were 20% or more, somewhat less than one-quarter of colleges and universities would not be affected. 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 between 4000 and 7000 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.
Of course, however much total faculty numbers may fall, conditions for teachers of English, modern languages, history, and philosophy could be different from conditions for teachers as a whole. During the decades of expansion, proportions in these fields dropped. In part, this shift can be traced to the growth of 2-year colleges, where teachers in the humanities are less in demand. In still larger part, the shift was due to the abandonment or modification of requirements in English, modern languages, and history. Philosophy, a required subject in only a few schools, suffered less of a falling off. The possibility that a number of 2-year institutions may upgrade themselves, and indications of a trend toward restoration of requirements, suggest an increase in demand for teachers of language, literature, and history in the 1980s and 1990s.
On the other hand, some forces that worked during the 1960s and 1970s to preserve demand for humanities faculty are likely to have less effect in the future. Undergraduates used to be able to indulge their interest in literature or history by rationalizing their studies as possible preparation for a teaching career. As word has circulated about bleak employment prospects and declining pay for teachers, students have turned to other fields.
If there are fewer graduate students in the humanities that, too, will have a depressing effect, especially at universities where graduate programs kept proportions of faculty in the humanities high when national trends ran otherwise.
Whatever the trend, there will be some openings for college teachers. To be sure, many young professors were hired during the boom of the 1960s and early 1970s. Less than two-fifths of the faculty members given life tenure before 1978 will die or retire before the year 2000; at least in 4-year colleges and universities, more than three-quarters of the Ph.D.'s teaching humanities have such tenure. For practical purposes, tenured faculty can be fired only if their schools can prove in court inability to pay their salaries. Even so, their numbers do not seriously constrain possibilities for replacement appointments on college and university faculties. In the worst foreseeable circumstance, they do not tie down more than 40% of all faculty posts in English, modern languages, history, and philosophy.
The key question, both for students contemplating graduate work and for all people concerned about humanistic scholar-ship, 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. Until the last years of the century, they do not approach the levels of the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, the most optimistic estimate of the average number of new openings, full-time and part-time, in 1981-2000, is less than half the average for 1956-1980. That for new full-time openings is about a third the average for the earlier period.
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. The prospect is thus that, in the best of circumstances, comparatively few critics, historians, or philosophers can expect opportunities to spend their lives in college teaching.
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. At the end of the 1970s, academic pay was increasing at 6% a year, but pay in other occupations was going up at an average of 8% a year. Though rates of increase improved at the end of the 1970s, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) estimated that, in constant dollars, professors' incomes had fallen 20% during the 1970s.
