In colleges and universities across the nation, more people are earning their doctorates and finding work as professors, a development that higher education experts say will actually lead to more adjunct professors and lower-quality teaching.
According to an Associated Press article released earlier this month, the overawarding of doctorates has resulted in more adjunct professors employed by universities nationwide. This overabundance, the report said, had negatively affected the quality of university education and diminished the professional securities of untenured educators.
“The usual comparison of Ph.D. numbers with the replacement rate for academic positions misses the important point that a doctorate can prepare an individual for many other career options in addition to the professoriate,” said Boston University College of Arts and Sciences Associate Dean J. Scott Whitaker. “The question of Ph.D. overproduction has discipline-specific and time-dependent answers.”
He said the university’s 10-year growth plan will overcome the adjunct professor proliferation by adding 100 faculty members to CAS, increasing the faculty by 20 percent. Whitaker said the positions will be chosen with respect to areas with high student interest and research opportunity.
A Feb. 5, 1996 Scientist article said adjunct professors are not eligible for tenure and they often have reduced salaries and benefits, which making them a cost-efficient labor source.
Jesse Ausubel, the author of the article and currently the director of the Program for the Human Environment and a senior research associate at the Rockefeller University in New York, wrote that the demand for such labor from the university would in turn encourage them to admit more doctorate students, who would also be underemployed.
According to Ausubel’s article, students stay in school to get doctorates because they lack job prospects or they receive grants for research and expanded doctoral programs perpetuate overproduction.
Students whose employment options lie outside of academia said they go for their doctorates to pursue individual ambitions and are not necessarily affected by more doctorates in the field.
Boston University School of Theology doctorate student Melissa Bowman said though some Ph.D. students planning to stay in academia may have trouble finding jobs, she will not be affected by an overabundance of doctorates.
“My plan is to be ordained in the United Methodist Church and pursue a ministerial career,” she said. “So, my concerns would in no way be related to academics and the like.”
Law is a field with a steady flow of jobs, BU law student Ben Narodic said in an email, and so is not worried too many law degrees will hurt his chances in the job market.
“The economy is definitely a concern,” he said. “But the need for lawyers will not disappear overnight — I am confident in my ability to secure a job.”
