The academic job market is horrible and will stay horrible for the rest of our lives. The academic job market is somewhat better for clinical psychologists than for persons in the humanities and the other social sciences. Most Ph.D's in those fields will never find a a tenure-track academic position. Even persons with Ivy-league PhD's in sociology, anthropology, literature, etc. are going to find academic positions very difficult to find and retain. However even for psychologists, the prospects of an academic career are slim. Clinical, counseling, school and industrial psychologists have the option of working outside of academe fortunately.
Here's what they didn't tell many of you in your graduate program. Higher education across the country is undergoing a massive and permanent restructuring. This is especially occurring at state universities who have discovered that hiring adjunct faculty rather than tenure track faculty will save them enormous amounts of money. Right now approximate 70% of ALL college-level instruction in the United States is being done by adjunct faculty. See the following
http://www.labornotes.org/2013/05/adjunct-faculty-now-majority-organize-citywide and also
http://inthesetimes.com/article/15080/mad_professors/. The latter site notes "Tenure-track faculty positions today constitute just 24 percent of the academic workforce, an all-time low, according to an April report from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP)." Think about that statistic for a minute. There are no conceivable economic forces that will even make this change.
In addition, technology is going to impact higher education to an ever greater degree and that process will never end! Various forms of online education are going to continue to grow and expand. State governments are going to ask why are they paying for 170 to 200 professors of history or anthropology or creative writing or whatever when web-based learning using MOOCS and other technologies can allow a state-funded higher education systems to educate the same or more people using 20 professors. Higher education costs have increased faster than inflation for decades. Why should a particular state continue to fund multiple state universities providing the same degrees in the same subject matter when a centralized institution can provide instruction across the entire region at vastly reduced costs with far fewer personnel? such a system would allow a state university system to track educational achievement and modify the system to maximize educational outcomes. The creation of a common but rigorous rubric would mean that the *value* of a particular degree would be reliable and valid, concepts with which we are quite familiar with. This would be "evidence based higher education. But in this new evidence based higher ed system, the traditional tenure track system will continue to decline..
The British discovered this in the 19th century when they had to run their empire across the globe. They devised a system of distance education based on rigorous exams administered by the University of London in which students studied independently and then passed exams that were graded according to a common rubric. The advantages of this system was that it was cheap and the persons getting the degree qualification had a common set of skills and competencies. The University of London system still offers these kinds of degrees today and after 170 years of doing so they are widely respected. See
http://www.londoninternational.ac.uk/ Most of the universities in the Commonwealth began as teaching sites where students would study for the U of L exams but the institutons themselves did not have degree granting powers. For the British, the result was a group of educated skilled professionals in India,, Australia, The West Indies, New Zealand etc .. who had been educated to a common set of competencies ... all in the era of the sailing ship.
This competency-based system has been rediscovered in the US as a way to maintain quality control over the educational product (degree holders) and vastly cut costs. The model has been introduced to this country in the form of Western Governors University which was invented by a coalition of state governments as a way to expand educational opportunities and cut costs enormously. See
http://www.nationalreview.com/agenda/350143/future-tuition-free-higher-education-reihan-salam Faculty in such as system do not "teach" but rather facilitate student's independent learning and oversee the examination process for each course. Students do not take "classes" by "semester" but move through as rapidly as they can take and pass the standardized competency based exams. Western Governors University has recently expanded into Missouri and Tennessee where the state governments are hoping to set up this kind of system in a trial basis to cut costs while concurrently expanding educational opportunities.
http://www.tn.gov/governor/legislation/wgu-tn.shtml This means fewer jobs in academe and fewer professors. This process will only accelerate across time.
Higher education is rapidly pricing itself out of the market. And as much as people in academe like to believe that they are immune from market forces, this is extremely untrue. Higher education is like any other institution. It requires money to run and it has a market value. When that cost becomes too expensive, society ceases to purchase what it has to offer or the system creates better, faster, cheaper, ways of providing the same service more efficiently with fewer people. While universities play a role in the generation of new knowledge and there will always be those institutions with high endowments who will maintain a traditional structure, the landscape of most higher education could be very very different in 5 10 or 20 years. One of my favorite quotes is from the sci-fi show Babylon 5 where an alien character says "The avalanche has already started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote." Today a freshly minted Ph.D. seeking a traditional tenure track academic appointment is a pebble and the avalanche has begun. Regardless of ones opinions about this kind of education, its coming and it is and will be unstoppable. The best thing in my opinion is for persons seeking an academic job is to embrace these changes and find a place in this brave new world.
