Academic Job Market Stats in Theater – Guest Post

This is a really long post about the academic job market and part of what we’ll be looking at is the percentage of PhDs in Theatre and Performance Studies who have gotten hired into various types of labor and the ways that people have moved in and out of the academy from 2011-2020. There have been multiple instances of economic chaos and I suspect that this is a stressful thing for some folks to encounter on their timeline. But my hope with this work has always been to share data and to make legible the career prospects of those who pursue the PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies.

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This year I’ve been on a parental leave so I didn’t have a research assistant to assist me on the project this year, but I’m obliged to the previous labors of Emma Futhey, Teri Incampo, Mia Levenson, and Reza Mirsajadi. Peter Spearman and Danielle Rosvally have also been essential to this project.

I have a decade of data now. I’ve been charting the 905 PhDs produced by the 39 PhD programs in Theatre and Performance Studies in the United States as listed on the ASTR webpage from 2011-2020. As always, when I say PhD, I’m including Yale’s DFAs. When I’m looking at programs specific data, I’m also making distinctions between between Arizona State’s TYA and Theatre of the Americas PhD program, NYU’s Performance Studies and Steinhardt Educational Theatre programs, and Northwestern’s IPTD and Performance Studies programs.

What’s New:

I added the 59 PhDs produced in 2019 (more on this later), as well as correcting the following errors in my data set

*I previously omitted two Pitt grads from 2015 and two from 2016, a Cal-Berkeley grad from 2017, and 7 grads from Brown, UCSD and Missouri in 2019

* I moved two grads who I had incorrectly listed in the class of 2018 to the class of 2019

* I moved one grad from the class of 2019 to their place in the class of 2020

I find the field’s PhDs using ProQuest’s dissertation database, or in the cases of Brown, Georgia (pre 2019), LSU, Ohio St, Stanford, Texas, and Yale I use institutional databases because their dissertations do not seem to be available on ProQuest’s Dissertations and Theses Database. Then I try to figure out what folks are doing using some combination of LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google searches isolated to the past year.

From 2011-2019 there were an average of 90.5 PhDs produced in the field per year, ranging from a high of high of 127 PhDs in 2013 to a low of 59 PhDs this year. The previous low number for PhDs produced in a year was 84 in 2011 and in 2019. This year’s PhDs easily outpaces that, which makes me worried that there will be a mass of 2021 and 2022 PhDs who tried to wait out the pandemic and who end up flooding the job market. I know, for example, that we had some folks at Tufts who could have finished in 2019, but who chose to stay enrolled as PhD students to maintain some income and because so many searches were cancelled or frozen in the 2019-2020 academic year. I’m also mindful that due to the vagaries of Proquest, that I may look back on this number next year and find out that I missed some folks, as I did in 2019. I think that’s less likely for a variety of reasons. Nevertheless, I’ll be very curious to see what the number of PhDs conferred in 2021 looks like.

The number of PhDs varies widely by programs. SUNY Buffalo has produced one PhD in this period, while NYU Performance Studies and CUNY have produced 63 PhDs. From 2011-2019, each program on average produces 23.2 PhDs.

What I’ve also been able to do is to track movement that’s happened in the job market.

For instance, I can tell you that among PhDs conferred in 2011, two people moved into tenure-track jobs who did not already have one, and one person moved from a tenure-track job to a position out of the academy. I saw one person move from an independent scholar position to a job outside of the academy and another take a contingent position as an adjunct instructor. 2011 is one of only two years in this study in which a majority of graduates (43 out of 84) hold a tenure track job, The tally for the 84 2011 PhDs shows 43 people in tenured/ tenure track gigs, 19 working outside of the academy, 12 in contingent positions, four people working as freelance artists/ independent scholars, three folks working in university administration or staff positions, and two members of this class who have died.

For 2012 PhDs, one person moved on to the tenure track from a contingent position. Two people moved into contingent academic positions — one from a freelance scholar role and the other from a job in university administration. Two people left contingent positions and now identify as independent scholars or freelance artists, while one person in a freelance position left the academy to take work outside of the field. This is also true of three people who were formally in contingent roles. The tally for the 96 2012 PhDs shows 46 people in tenured/tenure track gigs, 18 people working out of the academy, 17 in contingent positions, eight identifying as freelance artists/ independent scholars, four with whereabouts unknown and three folks working in university admin/staff positions.

Three members of the PhD class of 2013 moved into tenure-track gigs, all from contingent positions. Two members of this class moved from tenure-track positions to gigs out of the academy. Two people moved from contingent positions to identifying as freelance artists or independent scholars while two others moved in the opposite direction. Finally, two people moved from contingent positions to taking jobs outside of the academy. The tally for the 127 2013 PhDs shows 56 people in tenured/ tenure track gigs, 23 people working outside of the academy, 22 in contingent positions, 11 identifying as freelance artists/ independent scholars, ten working in university staff/ admin positions and five with whereabouts unknown.

2014 marks the first year in this research when contingent laborers outnumber those people who have left the academy to take positions in other industries. There was very little movement in the class of 2014. One PhD moved into a tenure-track position from work with a professional theatre company, one person moved from a self-described independent scholar position into an adjunct teaching position and another person moved from an adjunct role out of the academy. The tally for the 87 2014 PhDs shows 41 people in tenured/tenure track gigs, 19 in contingent positions, 15 working outside of the academy, five people in university staff/admin positions, four with whereabouts unknown, and three identifying as independent scholars/ freelance artists.

2015 is the other year in this study, along with 2011 in which the majority of PhDs graduating this year (48 out of 92) hold tenure track positions. Does this have something to do with economic recovery following the down economies at the early part of this decade? I don’t know and I don’t really have the background to do anything more than hypothesize. Two people moved from contingent positions into tenure-track jobs and two others moved from contingent positions to jobs outside of the academy. One person moved from a contingent position to self-defining as a freelance artist, while two people moved from that identifier to careers out of the academy. The tally for the 92 2015 PhDs shows 48 people in tenured/tenure track gigs, 16 working outside of the academy, 14 working in contingent positions, nine in freelance/ independent scholar positions, three in university staff/administration positions, and two with whereabouts unknown.

2016 saw two people move from contingent positions to jobs out of the academy and another two people move from contingent positions to tenure-track jobs. One person moved from identifying as an independent scholar to taking an adjunct position. Two people moved from freelance artist identifiers to taking university admin/staff positions and one person moved into a university admin/ staff role from a job outside of the academy. Finally one person moved from a postdoctoral position to identifying as an independent scholar. The tally for the 97 2016 PhDs is 41 people in tenure-stream positions, 23 contingent laborers, 18 people holding positions outside of the academy, ten people in university admin/staff positions, three people with whereabouts unknown, one person identifying as a freelance artist and one person who is deceased.

Among the 2017 PhDs, three people moved from contingent positions to jobs on ten tenure-track and one person moved from a contingent position to a university staff position. One person who was previously contingent has moved into the unknown category. Three people moved into contingent positions, two from jobs outside of the academy and one from a self-identified freelance artist position. Finally, two people who had previously self-defined as independent scholars have moved into jobs outside of the academy. The tally for the 77 2017 T&PS PhDs shows 31 people in tenure-track positions, 19 working as contingent laborers, 14 in jobs out of the academy, nine people in university admin/staff positions, five self-identified freelance artists/independent scholars, and one person whose whereabouts are unknown.

100 PhDs graduated from T&PS programs in 2018— the second largest class of this decade. Perhaps because of that alongside the down academic job market, this is the first year in this study where a plurality of graduates are working in contingent positions (36 of 100) rather than in tenure stream jobs (26 of 100). Of the year’s PhD graduates, one person moved from the unknown category into the tenure-stream after having worked at a university in Africa for several years. Another person moved into a tenure-track job from a contingent position. One person moved from a tenure-track position to work outside of the academy, as did two people who were previously contingent laborers, two people who identified as freelance artists/ independent scholars, and one person who was in a university staff position. One university staff employee to a contingent position as did three people who had previously identified as freelance artists/ independent scholars. Finally, one person who was in a contingent position moved into identifying as a freelance artist. The tally for the 100 2018 PhDs shows 36 scholars in contingent positions, 26 individuals in tenure-stream positions, 24 out of the academy, nine identifying as freelance artists/ independent scholars, four in university staff/admin positions and one person whose whereabouts are unknown.

As bad as things might look for the class of 2018, things for the class of 2019 look particularly bad for the profession. This is the fourth year of my study of PhDs, although my data stretches back to 2011. In 2018, 26 people who were two years removed from their PhDs had tenure-track jobs. In 2019, 22 people who were two years removed from their PhDs had tenure-track jobs, and in 2020 25 people who were two years removed from their PhDs had tenure-track gigs. This year only 19 members of the PhD class of 2020 have tenure-track gigs. Furthermore tenure-stream employees are now behind contingent laborers, and those who have left the academy to take jobs in other industries. With that said, six members of this class did move from contingent or freelance positions to take tenure-track gigs and two people moved into contingent roles. But seven people left admin, contingent and independent scholar roles to take jobs outside of the academy and one previously contingent employee became an independent scholar. The tally for the 84 PhDs of 2019 is 27 people in contingent positions, 20 working out of the academy, 19 in tenure-stream positions, 13 freelance artists/ independent scholars, and five people working in university admin/staff positions.

Finally, the class of 2020. This class is small – roughly 33% smaller than the average PhD class in Theatre and Performance Studies produced this decade. And admittedly some of these PhDs were Fall 2020 PhDs, which means that some of them are may still be supported by their degree-granting institutions. However the initial numbers are 31 people in contingent positions, (the vast majority at their degree-granting institutions), 12 people identifying as independent scholars/ freelance artists, nine people in positions outside of the academy, six people in tenure-track gigs, and one person in a university/staff position.

In totality, of the 905 PhDs in the field produced this decade have seen 357 people find tenure-track gigs (39.44%), 220 (24.30%) working in contingent positions, 176 (19.44%) working outside of the academy, 75 (8.28%) defined as freelance artists or independent scholars and 53 (5.85%) in university staff/administrative positions, 3 (.33%) deceased, and 20 (2.20%) with whereabouts unknown to me.

I’ve been doing this long enough where I’ve started to see many people who have acquired tenure-track gigs get promoted to Associate Professor. I hope that those folks will use their newfound voices and privilege to work and reshape the field to make better working conditions for those who graduate our programs.

We all need to work in unison to decrease the stigma that PhDs feel when they start to look for work outside of the academy, to incorporate professionalization that encourages our students to consider positions within and beyond the academy, and to share resources and pedagogical practices.