The Tenure Track Trap Nobody Warns PhDs About

Tenure-track versus non-tenure-track jobs. If you're in a situation where you need to decide between taking a tenure-track position or a non-tenure-track position, there are a number of things you should consider. While they're both jobs, they can lead to dramatically different career results. On paper, a tenure-track position may seem much more secure, but in practice, the expectations, risks, and trade-offs may not be what you were told in your doctoral program. In this video, I'm going to walk you through how tenure-track and non-tenure-track positions work, the responsibilities, the pressures, and the realities, so that you can make an informed decision instead of just relying upon assumptions. I'm Dr. Steve Tippins, Ph.D. I've been in academia for 35 years, and I've earned tenure twice. I've served as a department chair, and I've coached hundreds of Ph.D.s through real career decisions, both inside academia and outside of academia. This really isn't about which path is better. It's about understanding what each role asks of you and what it gives you in return before you make a decision about which path to venture down. If you're looking for guidance about which path is going to lead to a stable academic career without guessing or wasting time, join our free Scholar Career Network, where you will get support directly from me. Just click the link below to join. So, what actually is tenure? Well, tenure ultimately means you are retained to stay employed, not forever as some people think, but it does ensure longer-term employment. And it's put in place to protect academic freedom, to protect academics to be able to say things that may not be popular with administration or with people who fund the university. It can also protect against political pressures. And that's the purpose of academic tenure. Ultimately, what does it mean today? It can be what I like to call conditional long-term employment, and we'll explain more of that in a minute. There are institutional and financial constraints, though, that bring the word conditional into play. Tenure does not mean immunity from layoffs or even firing. A number of schools in the last 10 years have had financial issues, and many schools' contracts with faculty say, "If we have financial issues, we can, for example, decide we're gonna get rid of an entire department," and that does not mean you get to stay if you're tenured. You can be told that you no longer have a job, and in some cases, getting down to the fine details, it can depend upon where tenure is granted from. Is it granted from your college or school, or is it granted from your university? Sometimes when they get rid of departments, tenured faculty are allowed a limited time to see if they can retool to go into another department if there's openings, and we're seeing a lot more of this as enrollments change and certain departments become less popular than they were in the future, and they're now having many tenured faculty so the concept of what's called a post-tenure review is becoming more popular at many institutions. But how does a tenure-track job really work? Well, the tenure-track job is typically made up of 3 components: teaching, research, and service, and the percentages that are important in your job depend on where you are. If you're at an R1 institution, then research is probably a lot more important definitely than service and most likely than teaching versus other schools which are considered teaching institutions. Teaching is gonna be a higher percentage than perhaps research and service. The expectations for tenure may be documented, they may not be. There are some schools in the past that had point systems to get to tenure. Oh, you get X points for a publication, Y points for a presentation at a conference, G points for teaching evaluations, things like that. And if you add up the points and you got to a certain threshold, you got tenure. It was a pretty simple decision. At other schools, there are tenuous guidelines. Well, yeah, if you get X number of publications while you're here, you should be okay for tenure. But "should be okay" is certainly not a guarantee, and you'll also find that the person who got tenure with 2 publications is now judging you when they're asking for 10 publications. So the barriers to getting tenure tend to change over time. In addition, there may be caps on the number or percentage of tenure jobs, which has nothing to do with you. If your department has a high percentage of tenured people, you may be hired in a tenure-track job, but if nobody leaves, you may not be able to get tenure even if you're a superstar. So early in your career, though, the ways that you publish and the things that you do within your day-to-day workday can be guided to a strong degree by the guidelines for tenure at your institution. It's not uncommon for you to hear things like that. Well, I'm not tenured yet. I don't think I can do something like that. To be risk-averse until you get tenure is a pretty standard position for many people to take. So the pros of tenure: potentially long-term security, academic freedom, especially once you've gotten tenure, and a clear promotion ladder. Some would say the cons: it's a pretty narrow definition of success. It can give you some career geographic inflexibility. I've gotten tenure. I don't know if I want to go through this again, and it does make changing your careers or moving in different directions a little more difficult. And just a story as an aside, the vote for tenure can be— is based upon what the people who are already tenured think about you, and there can be factions within departments, so you have to understand this. I once agreed to serve on a tenure committee and take on more work because I had heard someone else who said, "I'm going to serve on the tenure committee because this person does not deserve tenure," basically because they did not like the person. So I decided, "Well, that's not fair to that person. I'll run for the tenure committee." And I was elected, and I got to vote based on that person's merits, not whether I like them or not. Now let's talk about non-tenured jobs, and this is the area that seems to be expanding most rapidly within academia—positions that don't move forward to tenure. And the underlying basis of these non-tenured track jobs is traditionally teaching and service. Research is not a large component. If you do some, great, but you're typically not required to do much, if any. Research, but you are gonna teach more. You may end up serving on more committees, and ultimately it seems that non-tenure-track positions also get paid less. Many times when you take a non-tenure-track position, you're put on a contract, say 1 to 3 years. If there are financial issues, contracted non-tenure positions are the first typically to go. However, in some instances, I've seen tenure-track positions deleted. Many times tenure-track positions that aren't full at the moment, because what happens is, I'm just gonna make up an example. Let's say this tenure-track position had $100,000 salary. If I take that position and turn it into a non-tenure-track position, It's still funded within the budget at $100,000. I can hire somebody at, say, $70,000 to teach all the courses that a tenure-track person was gonna teach and more. And now I have $30,000 as an administrator to maybe provide raises for other people or travel money or something like that. It frees up and gives me some almost soft money that I can do more with. So tenure-track positions can disappear in that manner. So the pros of non-tenure-track positions: if you really like to teach, then this is the spot for you because you're going to be doing more of it. There's less publishing pressure, and you find many non-tenure-track positions have people who also have industry experience and may even continue doing consulting work. However, there can be less job security, fewer institutional protections, and limited advancement. That's changing a little bit, that now becoming layers of instructors with maybe a little bit more money, but many times instructors are not thought of as department chairs or as other administrative jobs, so there can be fewer opportunities outside of the limited teaching track. What's been tried in the past, I've seen long-term contracts without tenure. Years ago, I saw a school that was providing 10-year contracts. No tenure. You came in for 10 years. They could make decisions after that if they wanted to, but you came in knowing this is just a long-term contract. Contract positions or non-tenure-track positions are highly influenced by budget, by legislatures if you're in a public institution. And by enrollment. It can be easier to bring in a non-tenure-track position to meet the demands of increased enrollment. On the other hand, if enrollment goes down, it can be the contract position that goes away first, or the non-tenure-track position. What we're finding over time is the clear distinctions between tenure-track and non-tenure-track tend to be going away. As tenure-track positions diminish, a number of people who wanted to be researchers are taking non-tenure-track positions because those are the positions they could get, and they're still doing some research. So what are the odds, really, of getting a tenure-track position? Well, right now in the humanities, there's an oversupply of graduates to the number of tenure-track positions. I talked to somebody a couple of years ago who was getting a degree in English with a concentration in 18th-century poetry. And he said at that time there were 2 jobs in the United States for people in that track, and there were more than 2 people applying. So the odds on getting a job was pretty low. There is stronger demand in STEM and in applied professional fields, but it's still not what it was 30 years ago. As I said, with budget issues, you see tenure-track positions being taken away and replaced with non-tenure-track positions. Giving the administrators much more flexibility with a diminishing pile of money that they're getting. Hoping for tenure is not a plan. However, thinking about the concept of career optionality, meaning what other tracks are there, and thinking about it early in your doctoral search is a great way to go about things. If you get the tenure-track position you want, that's great. However, being aware of what your options are and prepared for options is what you should be doing. So, when it comes down to deciding between tenure-track and non-tenure-track, you have to think about things like, "What kind of life do I want? How much income stability do I want? And do I have geographic flexibility?" There, you know, my kids might be in school and I want a job within 40 miles. Well, that can severely limit tenure-track positions. It's best to think about and be ready for parallel or different career paths, and that means being able to translate the skills that you've learned in academia so that employers outside of academia can understand how you can fully be a valuable member of their team. You can also avoid over-identifying with one job title. If you want support from people who actually understand the academic job market, then join our free Scholar Career Network. This is where Ph.D.s stop guessing and start building solid careers that actually work. Just click the link in the description to join.