This makes me sad. What are passionate, optimistic undergraduates to do?!

Would be interesting to see a comparison of total positions available versus number of graduating PHD's as well. Are we graduating more hopefuls for fewer openings?

I'm stuck by the fact that the graph shows the number of Ph.D.'s with jobs by graduation. This is rare for life science Ph.D.s - most of us who want jobs in academia are expected to do postdoctoral training. How common is this is the other fields in the graph? Data after several years, like the 1999 study mentioned, would be more useful.

Wow, thanks for the pick me up.

So this may look like spam but when I was getting my Ph.D., I found this book very helpful in thinking through the options outside academics. Given I went that path by choice, I don't see it as all doom and gloom - http://www.amazon.com/What-Are-You-Going-That/dp/0226038823

You wrote: "On a second other hand, I’d love to see some research on what happens to academics — especially in the humanities and social sciences — when they don’t get a job in academia or are denied tenure after getting there."

It's pretty much the end of your life.

Hey professor, second sentence should be 'there' not 'their'.

Not getting an academic job wasn't the end of my life. I was anxious and depressed and unhappy in grad school. Leaving academia was a relief. It was a blessing that no one ever called me back. I have an admin staff job now, and I'm so much happier than I was in years.

"A study published in 1999 found that 53% of all new PhDs said they wanted to become professors. Ten years later, just over half were tenured (54%) and a handful more were tenure-track (7%)"

I don't understand how these numbers could be depressing. More people got tenure than wanted it!

Perhaps you are presenting the numbers badly, and the 54% refers to the proportion of people who wanted to be professors. In other words, 53% wanted to be professors, and 29% were tenured ten years later, with an additional 4% on tenure-track. In this case, it's still not depressing until we learn how many PhDs are professors off the tenure track.

My husband is getting his PhD in chemistry and is on the fence about an academic vs. industry career. But what has been very clear is that he NEVER to say he might want to work in industry—not when writing applications for school or grants, etc. It is just not done. I find that ridiculous; it's patently obvious that there will not be an academic job for everyone.

I'm pretty confident that the proportion of people with ph.d.s living below the poverty line is extremely low. The vast majority of people who don't find tenure track jobs will find something else to do that pays them a decent salary. I used to be scared of that, but now i realize that whatever I do, wherever I go, I'm going to have to do something for work, and it will involve some nice things and some crappy things. Academia is no different. Academia has some nice perks, but at the end of the day, it's just a job, and there are others.

53% of all new PhDs said they wanted to become professors- how many still do after a while? I mean, I know PhDs in social science who started off wanting to become professors, but as they progressed (and oftentimes after the actual experience of working with undergraduates, such as marking papers or facilitating seminars) became a bit disheartened and started to see going into public policy or research as preferable options.

As a current PhD student hoping to be done in the next couple of months, my hopes for an academic job pretty much evaporated once I saw what it is like to be a prof in academia. i came to school after 20 years building my career and decided I liked the aspect of teaching others and am pretty damn good at it. I am also very good at the research aspect. (What I am about to write appears as a broad brush for all academia. I know it isn't this way everywhere but I have spoken to many graduate students and current profs who support much of what i say. So read at your own risk.)

What I discovered when I got here though was that most profs have issues with competition and have real trouble with honest collaboration. Advisers often bully their graduate students and seem to get away with it a bit easier with younger students than someone like me that won't tolerate being treated so poorly. I've seen how a healthy professional workplace can function and more often than not academia doesn't cut it. In addition, security of your job depends on MONEY more than anything. Bringing in grants is key. I didn't get an advanced degree to be a development coordinator - there are people who do that for a living, like it and are good at it. Teaching, particularly teaching undergraduates, is seen as a necessary evil and many profs really suck at it and have little respect for 18-21 year old's who are learning. If you are a good educator, it doesn't really get you far. You are expected to work more than 60 hours a week if you intend to get tenure which for many folks is the equivalent of getting $20/hour.

While I love my field and would happily be an instructor, lecturer or professor at a community college or liberal arts college, I am more likely to pursue work in my field outside of the ivory tower. I expect to be much happier that what I currently see profs in my university experiencing. Even tenured profs have indicated to me that they aren't really fond of the work environment. The whole culture of higher ed needs to change. I'd rather be happy and make a decent salary than miserable but well known in my field.

Is it somehow surprising that there isn't an exponentially expanding market for professors? The number of openings per year is exactly equal to the number of professors who retire, plus the number of new positions created through expansion.

Or consider it the other way around: Each professor can train on average roughly one replacement professor, ever.

I finished my PhD, but by the third year I knew I didn't want to be an academic. Granted, my department wasn't a paragon of model behaviour, but I found I didn't love research, I hated conferences, and there were better uses for my talents. I finished last year, and I have exactly the job I want where I want today. It takes just as much luck to land like that outside of academia, but I don't find anything depressing about PhD programs not being self-perpetuating machines.

"I’d love to see some research on what happens to academics — especially in the humanities and social sciences — when they don’t get a job in academia or are denied tenure after getting there."

In my experience in my field (English), most of them get non tenure track positions - they become adjunct faculty or "lecturers" or whatever new name the university has come up with to screw over people. I think many accept positions like this as temporary measures because they do believe that not getting a tenure track job is the end of the world. Taking a temporary position allows them to say to themselves that they're still on their way to pursuing that goal of a tenure track job. I think existing faculty need to do a much better job of preparing people for the likelihood that they will not get a tenure track job. People need to be aware of other options so they can advocate for themselves as they search for a job rather than just accepting a position that will sentence them to a lifetime of low pay and long hours as adjunct faculty.

What on earth makes you think that PhDs who don't get academic jobs aren't "employed in the area of their expertise"? In science and engineering, most PhDs go into industry, where they work in the area of their expertise. There are a large number of industry jobs that require PhDs. Most of the people in my PhD program went into graduate school knowing they wanted to work in industry. And in non-STEM fields, where there aren't as many conventional industry positions, there are still plenty of options that require PhD-level expertise and experience. The real question is, why do you think of a PhD as a means to one specific end (being a tenured professor) rather than as preparation for a much broader spectrum is interesting jobs?

When I was granted my Master's in 1974 the American Historical Association advised individuals such as myself that there would be few if any tenure track openings until 2006 and 2007. That information saved me from going for a Ph.D. I enjoyed a 36 year job as a public school teacher and a community college instructor.

so interesting that you ask for more research on what the phds are doing outside the academy. I would like to see that too. I've been working on getting a 2nd blog started about just that (i earned my phd in 2004 in literature and, no surprise, couldn't get a tenure track job). I've been wondering if this would be an interesting topic to other people. i've set it up - www.professornever.com but have only written the About page so far! if i can find the time to really get it off the ground, i hope it might offer the intellectual community that others like me might miss.

So disappointing that a sociologist would present these non-comparable comparisons. As Allyson pointed out not all fields routinely send people into tenure-track teaching jobs -- certainly not "at graduation" and often not ever. It is meaningless to compare the sciences and engineering with the social sciences and humanities on this measure.