Professor for 35 Years Reveals What Search Committees Really Want

How to become a college professor. If you want to become a college professor, you need to know this up front. In 2026, the path to becoming a professor is harder, slower, and more competitive than most people realize. The market has changed dramatically over the last few years, and following outdated advice is not going to help you get the job you're looking for. My name is Steve Tippins, Ph.D. I've been a professor for over 35 years, at several different universities. I've been tenured twice and sat on a number of promotion, tenure, and hiring committees. And for years now, I've helped hundreds of people with doctorates find and build fulfilling careers both inside and outside of academia. In this video, I'm gonna walk you through, one, what the professor career path actually looks like today. Two, what actually gets you hired. 3, the hidden filters that seem to eliminate most candidates, and 4, how to decide if this is the right career path for you or just a costly detour. So what is the reality of the professor job market in 2026? Tenure-track roles today are fewer, slower to open, and much more competitive. If you're looking for a growth area within the professor community, you should be looking at teaching-focused roles— instructor, professor of practice, job descriptions such as that. These are non-tenured, full-time faculty positions. There's also hybrid and online instruction. Adjunct is seemingly no longer that path to a stepping stone into that full-time position. Many successful professors today have planned and implemented multiple income streams, stayed geographically flexible, and made early and strategic choices about types of institutions as well as jobs that they were open to. Becoming a professor today is no longer a single ladder or single track. It's a branching decision tree. There are more and more and more people earning doctorates today and fewer tenure-track, or even teaching positions. So as universities get into a budget crunch and we face more and more supply, it's harder and harder to get these jobs. So you want to be thinking about this early and preparing yourself for the market as it is today, not what it was 5, 10, or 20 years ago. If you have a doctorate and are looking for support in your career path, join the free Scholar Career Network and get career guidance directly from me. Just click the link in the description to join for free. So to begin this process, you really should start with getting clear with why you want this role. You really ought to look at your motivators. Why do you want to do this? Do you want to be that college professor you saw in a movie wandering across campus in his cap and gown and randomly stopping to throw a frisbee with someone and helping someone else? With a math or geometry or a physics problem and then being waved to all by all of them. That really doesn't exist. But what are your drivers? Is it teaching and mentoring? There's nothing quite as rewarding as a student writing after the fact saying, "You've changed my life." If that's one of your reasons, yes, great. But know that. Is it research? Is your goal to dig deep into an issue? And come up with solutions. Some people like academia because of schedule flexibility. Yeah, there can be schedule flexibility within a pretty strict set of guidelines. Yes, you can get summers off, and yes, you may teach at certain times and be able to pick the kids up, but then you also may be grading papers at 10 o'clock at night until 2 in the morning or something like that. There's a saying you get, you know, there's incredible flexibility, within a doctoral program, as well as in teaching and being a professor. You can work 18 hours a day. You just get to choose which 18 hours a day you work. You know, there is prestige to this, being a professor, and, you know, think about that versus your purpose in life. There are financial realities and lifestyle trade-offs with this too. Yes, you can in certain disciplines make a decent income. In other disciplines, you aren't going to make a big income. and it may be very difficult to support yourself and/or a family, especially in higher cost of living locations and/or disciplines that don't pay a lot. If tenure or job security is the main reason you want to be a professor, yis, there's some misalignment here because tenure and job security are a lot less part of the job than they used to be 20 years ago or more. But if you want to make an impact through teaching, through mentoring, through scholarship, the role of a professor may be the ultimate path for you. Getting clarity here at this level, as you're beginning the process, thinking about it, this helps you with every decision after. So you want to be a professor. What qualifications do you actually need? Well, first, the big one at almost every school is a doctorate. And not only is it a doctorate but it's a doctorate in field, meaning you're going up for education position in higher education. Well, you better have a doctorate with an emphasis in education in higher education. Just because you've been involved in higher education for 2 years and you have a doctorate in philosophy, they're probably not gonna hire you because when they have accrediting bodies visit, they wanna know, how much of their faculty or how many of their faculty have degrees in field, meaning in education, in higher education. A degree in philosophy is not going to count, so it's going to count against them for accreditation. So having a degree in field is a minimum bar, but it can become higher. I've seen a number of positions recently within business or finance where they've said, yes, you need a degree in finance, but we also want you to have these professional designations along with it to be able to teach these specific courses. So yes, you have the minimum, but if you don't have this other professional designation, we're not going to consider you. So thinking, well, I've got a degree, I'm ahead of everybody. You've got a degree just like everybody else who's applying. So like I said, when it comes to accreditation, you need a degree in field. You also may need a degree from a specific type of institution. Within therapy, they want people who have degrees, but also degrees from institutions that are accredited by a certain body within therapy or within business. There are several accrediting bodies, and they want you to have a degree from one different accrediting body. So it's not just a degree, but it's other things that they're looking at. Being aware of this early can open up more opportunities for you in the future, but limiting yourself early without thinking about it means you don't have those options in the future. The name or type of institution you went to can be very, very important. Schools hire from schools like themselves typically, or some schools say, well, I want to hire someone above my stature. So an Ivy League school, if you want to apply to an Ivy League or an R1, Research I institution, things like that. They want people with degrees from Ivy Leagues and/or Research I institutions. They are not going to be hiring people who've come from institutions that don't meet their level. So if you don't have a degree that they would consider, they're never going to look at you. The last search committee I sat on, I remember going into a group meeting and there were 5 of us on the committee, and there were 2 of them who had well-worn tracks in their brains about certain types of institutions, and they looked and said, look, 40% of the applicants come from these types of institutions, we're not hiring them, and they just wiped them off the table. There were already 40% of the committee just said no because they didn't meet what this type of school was looking for. If you're looking for, for a teaching-focused school, they're going to look Have you taught? What type of teaching have you done? What type of courses have you done? Do you fit their institution? Have you only taught courses where there have been 900 people in the class versus a school that limits class sizes to 30? It might be different. They might not see you as a good institutional fit. So you're gonna have to understand who they are and represent to them how you can fill their needs. As an aside, yes, research pedigree. If you're doing amazing research and it's hitting at all the top journals, it can overwhelm your degree. If you want to be teaching at one of those R1 or Ivy League schools, it can overwhelm your degree. But those are rare stories that those type of people get into those positions. It's not a well-worn path to to get there. So I've talked about R1 or research schools and teaching schools. They seem to have different requirements. So if you want to be a professor at a research institution, know that of the triumvirate of demands on faculty— research, teaching, and service— research is probably going to be the most important, where they're going to expect you to put most of your time into, and that time is going to need to translate into publications at journals that they deem worthy, higher-level journals. So your teaching load may be lower and your compensation may be higher, all good if you want to be a researcher, but you need results, and you need results relatively quickly to get tenure and be able to stay. So you need to be aware of the requirements that are going to be there. and this is a very hard path if you haven't done a lot of research. Somehow you get a job without having done a lot of this research. You all of a sudden have to create a portfolio of research. You all of a sudden have to create a system of getting data, and it has to be done quickly. To get into these top-tier journals can take over a year, so you need results very, very quickly. But if that's the path for you, Great. Research institutions also are more interested in long-term publishing, not, "Hey, you did something once. Can you replicate this? Can you do it over and over and over again?" Because at these schools, research is the currency that they deal with, and they're looking at research that their institution's name is on, not that you did it in the past. Fine, that might get you hired, maybe, but you have to be able to show you're going to keep doing it. Schools that are deemed more teaching-oriented— yeah, you're going to teach more. You may have a 3 or 4 course load per semester versus 1 or 2 at a research institution, so more of your time is going to be on teaching, much less on research. Student outcomes— we're going to be measuring more. So you want to know what's the right fit for you. If you love teaching and you get a job at a Research I institution and put all your time into teaching your 1 or 2 courses, you're not gonna be there long. Or if you're a heavy researcher and get a job at a teaching school, you're first of all not gonna have a lot of time to be doing your research, but anytime you do have, you're doing your research and not putting into your teaching, you're probably not gonna be there long either. So you wanna be able to understand the requirements and match them with your desires. Most issues here aren't from competence, it's from misalignment. So how does hiring actually work now? One thing a lot of people aren't aware of is academic hiring is kind of a year-long cycle. Think of it that most schools' budget cycles run from July 1st through June 30th. So in July, they find out what the budget is. They then get positions released and they're announced. Typically August into mid-October through job board posting, the Chronicle of Higher Education, highereducationjobs.com, through associations that you might be joining as part of a discipline. There'll be postings of jobs. So that's the first part. In fact, most schools, especially if they're public entities, they have to post these jobs. and they have to post them in certain places within maybe even certain timing, but they have to do it by law. Then there's a period in which you apply. Now, that doesn't mean the position isn't already taken, meaning they already have somebody they know they want, but they go through a process. So you have to be aware of this, that yeah, there's a job and hopefully it, it's fully open and they don't have someone they've already decided on. For example, they might have had a visiting professor who they then want to hire. They're going to have to go through the process, but that visiting professor is probably going to be a finalist and known much more to them because they've already been there for a year. So you found out about a position, you submitted all of your material, your CV and your research agenda and your teaching statement, maybe a diversity statement and your cover letter, and now we get to the initial round of interviews, which in the past was typically always done at a conference. Now, many times they're done via Zoom. That's one of the things COVID brought along. And they're gonna find the top potential 20 people, and everybody gets a half an hour of those 20 people with 5 people on the committee, and they get the same 6 to 8 questions. After that, they're ultimately gonna decide on who are the 3 typically people we're going to bring into campus for on-campus or what some people call fly-in situations, and that's going to be a day or two where you come in, you're going to be interviewed by a bunch of people, the committee, the department chair, most likely the dean. In addition, you may get walked around to many faculty's offices for 20-minute talks with them. At a teaching school, you're, you're going to most likely do a teaching presentation. They may give you a topic ahead of time, and they'll bring in a number of students or put you in front of a class and allow you to teach. At an R1 or a research school, you will make a research presentation, and at some schools you'll do both of these, a teaching and a research presentation. The research presentation will be in front of faculty and doctoral students if there are doctoral students there, and there will be questions, so you have to be ready for those. The interview process is not just when you're brought on campus, not just the time you're on campus. It's when you're picked up from the airport. It's when they're at lunch. It's in between meetings. It's the whole portfolio they're thinking of. I was at a school once where a candidate came in. I was not involved in this search. The candidate went to lunch with a committee. They had lunch, and then the candidate said, "You know, I'd like to order another lunch so I can have it later," and did. Well, the candidate or the committee looked at that as a little weird behavior. At another time, a candidate came in for a job interview, and they brought him to the hotel, and he went up to his room and looked at the room and came back downstairs, and he said, "You know, I don't like my room. I'd like one on the other side of the hall where I can see the water," which was about a $75 more a night room or whatever that the department had to pick up. And of course, the department got to know about it. You know, these are things that you're going to be looked at and evaluated upon as part of the process. You want to Present a professional appearance in your emails, in your meetings, in every discussion. Don't get too familiar with anybody too early. So they call you up and say, "We wanna offer you the job." And you say, "Great, fantastic. What are you gonna pay me?" You don't wanna ask that on the interview because they don't know. That's up to the dean and it's budgets and they don't know it. So, and it's not gonna be important until you get the job anyway. So wait until they tell you. They're going to give you a salary, and you can, to a small extent, negotiate because there are small ranges here, but it's not like a huge range. But there are other areas where you can negotiate because not a lot of people realize that while schools work on budgets, there are many different budget lines. So there is a salary budget line, and they give you the salary they can give you. But there can also be a summer teaching budget line and a research support budget line and a travel support budget line and a new teacher support budget line. So you want to ask them, what are the other parts of the offer that are out there? Because it's more than just the salary. For example, some schools say, yeah, we'll pay you X dollars, and if you teach in the summer, we'll pay you another third, but that's a different budget line. Summer teaching comes from a different budget line than your traditional salary, and it's what will they offer you up front. Hey, yeah, we'll guarantee you the first 3 summers of summer teaching, or we'll guarantee you this many dollars of research dollars for the first 2 years. So here's areas where you can negotiate more. So now you got to make a decision. Is this the path for me? Is being a professor, being a faculty member, going to be a fulfilling career for me? The answer can be yes if you go in with your eyes open, if you know what you're getting into, if this is part of a strategic plan for your career, and if you have reasonable expectations. It's the people who get to the job without having explored it, without having expectations, who just kind of drift in there, who many times are not happy with the job and what they're doing. If you want clear guidance as to whether becoming a professor is part of your goals and how to pursue this path without wasting years, join the free Scholar Career Network. Just click the link in the description to join.