31, no. 2 (Winter 2000): 6-21 To the Editor Search

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THE 1996-97 census of PhD placement is the tenth in a series the MLA initiated in 1976-77. The ten studies record the employment placements reported by PhD-granting departments in United States universities for graduates to whom they awarded doctoral degrees between 1 September and 31 August of the given survey year. The studies track placement of PhD recipients in five fields: English, foreign languages, comparative literature, linguistics, and classics. This report focuses on degree recipients in foreign languages: Spanish and Portuguese, French and Italian, Germanic, Slavic, Near Eastern, Asian, and classics; linguistics and comparative literature degree recipients are included where possible.

The 1996-97 study provides information about placements of doctorates who received their PhDs between 1 September 1996 and 31 August 1997. Data collection, which was conducted for the MLA by Response Analysis Corporation of Princeton, New Jersey, began in October 1997 and concluded at the end of February 1998. The 1996-97 study, like the nine preceding it, is limited to those employment placements obtained within the year the PhDs were conferred, thus excluding a large number of job seekers.

Over twenty years and ten surveys, the PhD-granting departments that provide employment information about their recent graduates have sustained a high level of support for the MLA's placement studies, and the studies have consistently achieved response rates of between 92% and 100%. The 1996-97 study is no exception; it has a response rate of 97% and can thus be regarded as a census of PhD placement in the fields of modern and classical language and literature. That is, the study provides a picture of PhD placement based on the experience of virtually all 1996-97 doctorate recipients rather than just a representative sample. The MLA thanks those in PhD-granting departments who responded to the questionnaire for the 1996-97 survey. Without their assistance these data could not be made available.

Departments Surveyed and Responding, and Doctorate Recipients Reported

When data collection began in October 1997, the MLA database contained 542 United States university PhD-granting departments in English, foreign languages, comparative literature, linguistics, and classics. When data collection concluded at the end of February 1998, 524 of the departments had responded: 141 English departments, 254 foreign language departments, 38 comparative literature departments, 55 linguistics departments, and 36 classics departments. Of the responding departments, 429 reported granting at least one PhD between 1 September 1996 and 31 August 1997. They reported on a total of 2,332 PhD recipients. Table 1 shows response rates and the numbers of graduates reported by departments in each of the five fields.

In foreign languages, of the 260 departments contacted, 6 did not respond, and 55 granted no degrees. The 199 departments that awarded degrees granted a total of 718 degrees; information about job placement was reported for 676 of these doctorates. Fifty-two foreign nationals returned to their countries of origin after receiving their degrees; they are excluded from most of the calculations for the following tables since they did not participate in the United States job market. The data in table 1 for foreign language departments excludes classics, but comparable figures are provided for comparative literature, linguistics, and classics departments, all of which had a response rate of 92% or more.

We have tried to replicate the kind of information available in our 1993-94 survey for easy comparison; however, the MLA did not collect information about the citizenship and residency status of doctorate recipients before 1993. To preserve the comparability of findings across all ten placement studies, the base number of doctorate recipients whose employment status is known, including those who left the United States, is used where appropriate. Table 2 shows percentages of the 1996-97 foreign language PhDs placed in seven major employment categories and calculated according to two different base numbers: with known employment status and remaining in the United States and all reported 1996-97 PhDs. As the table shows clearly, the different base numbers make very little difference in the overall placement picture. There are additional small variations in the base numbers used for specific categories of findings (for example, in the tables presenting placement findings by sex, race or ethnicity, and region), since the information available about individual PhD recipients varies. In previous surveys we reported only information about the numbers of awarded PhDs in classics, but this year we are reporting employment data for degree recipients in classics as well, to give a more complete portrait of the whole profession. Thus the total number of degree recipients may vary, but typically the numbers for classics are included. If the information is not obvious in the tables themselves, the reader is advised to consult the note at the end of a table or figure to determine which groups are included in those calculations.

Table 3 shows the number of PhDs awarded in 1996-97 by language in comparison with 1993-94. All languages except classics awarded a slightly higher number of degrees in the more recent survey. Table 4 provides the history of PhD placement, summarizing findings from all ten placement studies the MLA has conducted over the two decades 1977-97. The placement picture for tenure-track positions is actually quite stable; most of the percentages remain above 40%, but the extremes range from 49.6% to 34.8%. The degree of difference is made clear in the graphic representation of figures 1. (Placements to full- and part-time non-tenure-track positions have been combined in figures 1, and placements to postdoctoral fellowships and academic administration have been eliminated.) In the 1996-97 survey, tenure-track appointments have decreased slightly since 1993-94 (bringing the overall decline since 1986-87 to just over 10%), and non-tenure-track full-time positions have increased slightly, but not so much as they had in 1981-82, when the percentage of placements to non-tenure-track appointments was actually higher than that for tenure-track appointments. Contrary to what one might expect, placements outside higher education and the numbers reported of those unemployed did not increase in this survey.

Table 5 displays placement of 1996-97 PhDs and provides detail about different employment sectors and all the fields surveyed where job candidates found positions. The percentages for those teaching in higher education are consistent across all fields represented with only one exception, linguistics, falling below 69%. The greatest variation across fields occurs in tenure-track appointments; the range is from 28.4% to 43.2%. In placement outside higher education, the numbers are very small but there is also a noticeable range.

Table 6 shows the same information for foreign languages and classics taken together. Here the number of tenure-track placements reaches almost 40%. A breakdown of percentages for the placements of all 1996-97 degree recipients is shown according to language in table 7.

Table 8 gives detailed information about placements for each language (or group of languages) for 1996-97; these data from 1976-77 to 1996-97 are represented visually by figures 2 through 7. All placements decreased during the bad market of the early 1980s and grew gradually until 1991-92, only to decline again from 1993-94 through the 1996-97 surveys. While the distribution of placements by language reflects what is known about undergraduate enrollment patterns, some languages demonstrate their own employment variations. While job candidates in Spanish and Portuguese had a better than 50% chance of getting a tenure-track position, that percentage has declined since the high recorded in the 1991-92 survey. French and Italian follow a similar pattern except that the decline over the last two surveys is greater: 27.4% in French and Italian compared with 8.8% in Spanish and Portuguese. The slight decrease in unemployment in French and Italian may be due to a 10% increase in candidates accepting non-tenure-track positions. In Germanic languages there was less expansion in the 1980s and therefore the drop does not appear to be so severe, but German candidates faced a particularly difficult time in 1996-97, in part because the number of PhDs increased over the number reported in the previous survey. (See table 1.) As in earlier periods and as has been seen in French and Italian, many PhDs turned to non-tenure-track positions, thus decreasing unemployment slightly.

Figures 4 through 7 show great fluctuation in part because the numbers are very small in the less commonly taught languages; therefore, it may be dangerous to generalize about employment patterns from these statistics. For 1996-97 among those who remained in the United States and whose employment status is known, there were 48 PhDs in Slavic, 31 in Near Eastern, and 46 in Asian languages Thus the improvement in Near Eastern languages may no more represent trends than does the decline in Asian languages, which was offset by the large percentages of graduates who took non-tenure-track positions. Slavic has been subject to many ups and downs, and 1996-97 was a particularly difficult year for new doctorates. Slavicists have responded as they did in 1978-79, another tight year, by finding work outside the academy.

Gender of PhD Recipients and Placement of Men and Women PhDs

The MLA has tracked gender distribution and proportional placements of PhDs since the 1970s, when women began to enter the job market in greater numbers. Of the 773 foreign language and classics PhD recipients in 1996-97, 336 were men and 437 were women. Since 1979-80 women have outnumbered men in earning PhDs, but for this census the imbalance in favor of women is the largest it has ever been, with women earning 30% more degrees than men. Table 9 shows the placement rates of men and women in 1996-97, and table 10 shows the division of degrees and placements according to gender through time. A higher percentage of tenure-track appointments was typically awarded to men until the 1991-92 and 1993-94 surveys, in which these appointments were noted as going to a greater percentage of women, though not a percentage commensurate with the proportion of degrees earned. Notably, the trend toward hiring women for tenure-track appointments has been reversed in this survey, in which women received 56.5% of the PhDs and only 35.7% of tenure-track jobs. It is impossible to know if this is a return to the older order or simply a phenomenon of this particular year. Over the years more men than women have been hired in full-time non-tenure-track jobs, while women have taken a greater number of part-time jobs.

Table 11 shows in detail the distribution of PhDs and placements according to language. More women than men earned doctorates in all the commonly taught languages, including Slavic and linguistics, but men outnumber women in classics and all the less commonly taught languages. Placements follow this pattern in postsecondary institutions but are different in the proportion of men and women who were hired in tenure-track appointments. In Romance, Germanic, and Slavic languages, the percentages are about even; in French and Italian women fared much better than men; and in the less commonly taught languages, classics, and Spanish, men did better than women. In Spanish, where 31.2% more women received doctorates than men, a slightly higher percentage of men (5.8%) gained tenure-track positions. Women, however, in all the languages consistently took a greater percentage of non-tenure-track jobs, except in most of the less commonly taught languages, where a greater number of candidates were men.

While table 9, 10, and 11 show placement rates for men and women who received PhDs from 1979-80 through 1996-97, the next two tables show what proportion of the total pool of placements went to men and to women. Table 12 and 13 show these percentages, along with the total number of PhD placements reported in the various employment categories, for the 1993-94 and 1996-97 surveys. In 1993-94 men received 42.3% of the degrees granted and 39.2% of tenure-track jobs, while women received 57.7% of the doctorates but nearly 61% of the tenure-track appointments. In 1996-97 men claimed 13% fewer PhDs than women, but men were awarded 49.1% of the total tenure-track appointments and women 50.9%. Figures 8 and 9 show these relations in graphic form for tenure-track and non-tenure-track academic placements for the two most recent survey years. The first bar in each group of three shows the percentage of PhDs awarded to men or women; the second and third show the percentage of tenure- and non-tenure-track appointments men and women obtained. When the second or third bar is longer than the first bar, the group obtained placements in that category exceeding its representation in the entire pool of doctorates. When one of these bars is shorter, the placements of that type obtained by the group fell short of its representation in the pool.

Numbers and Placement of Minority PhDs

The MLA studies of PhD placement first gathered data about the racial and ethnic background of PhD recipients with the 1991-92 survey. According to table 14, whites received the majority of degrees except in Spanish and Portuguese, where more than half the degrees were granted to Hispanics, and in Asian languages, where more than a third were granted to Asians.

Table 15 compares the rates of employment in 1993-94 and 1996-97 of candidates identified as minority with those of whites; the success rate of minority candidates in securing tenure-track positions is higher than that of whites and higher than the 40% in foreign languages overall. (See table 6.) A detailed account of the various ethnic groups is displayed in table 16.

Table 17 shows the proportion of graduates by language in the pool of 52 who returned to their countries of origin and were not part of the United States job market. A much smaller percentage of these foreign nationals are reported as having returned home in this survey than in the 1993-94 study.

Placement Findings by Geographic Region of Degree-Granting Institution

PhD placement varies notably by the location of the degree-granting institutions. Table 18 presents the job placements of 1996-97 PhDs in relation to where they received their degrees in four broad regions of the United States and shows that although the proportion of graduates teaching in higher education is quite consistent at 75%, there are variations in the proportion of degrees granted and tenure-track appointments.

Table 19 provides a comparison of regions from the two most recent surveys. While universities in the Northeast produced a greater number of graduates in 1996-97 than did the other three regions and an 8.8% greater proportion than in the 1993-94 survey, graduates from these institutions had a much lower rate of placement in tenure-track positions. In the South the proportion of graduates increased from 12.6% in 1993-94 to 18%. Even though graduates there faced a lower total placement in tenure-track positions than in 1993-94, they did better overall in 1996-97 than graduates from other regions. Not only did they obtain a greater percentage of tenure-track positions, their unemployment rate in 1996-97 was also the lowest and their placement outside higher education was the highest. The proportion of graduates in the Midwest decreased from 32.4% to 28.7%, while their success rate for tenure-track positions remained about the same. In the West the proportion of graduates moved marginally lower, from 22.4% to 19.6%.

The results of this survey confirm what most job seekers are experiencing: a tight job market, though the decline may be smaller than it seems to those seeking positions or advising job seekers. In foreign languages, placement by language echoes the distribution of language enrollments, which is to be expected. For this survey, a slightly higher percentage of men found positions than women, reversing a trend that was reported in the 1991-92 survey. Regional patterns have shifted slightly in relation to the 1993-94 study favoring the Midwest rather than the South in the proportion of tenure-track placements. Placement by race and ethnicity has changed very little. Overall, there are no large variations in comparison with the 1993-94 survey, but, except for placement by gender, in most cases there is a slight change or a reiteration of previously established trends.

The author is Director of ADFL and Foreign Language Programs at the Modern Language Association.

Note

Table 1
Departments Responding and Doctoral Degrees Reported, 1996-97 MLA Census of PhD Placement

Table 2
Summary of Job Placement for 1996-97 Foreign Language PhDs (Percentages)

Table 3
Foreign Language PhDs Granted by Degree Program, 1993-94 and 1996-97

Table 4
Placement of Foreign Language PhDs, 1976-77 to 1996-97 (Percentages): Findings from Ten MLA Studies