New Report on Faculty Job Market in Physics and Astronomy Departments
This post is adapted from an American Institute of Physics (AIP) web page:
The AIP Statistical Research Center recently posted a new report, "Faculty Job Market in Physics and Astronomy Departments." It is based on data from the 2018 Academic Workforce Survey, in which physics and astronomy departments reported the number of faculty member departures, retirements, recruitments, and new hires.
PhD departments were most likely to have departed, retired, or newly hired faculty members. Among new faculty members, PhD-granting departments hired a greater percentage of tenure-track faculty members. Departments that only award physics bachelor’s degrees hired a greater percentage of temporary full-time faculty members. For both PhD and bachelor’s departments, most new tenure-track faculty members held postdocs before their new position and earned their PhD in the United States within the last five years.
In any academic department, faculty members leave for a variety of reasons, and new faculty members are hired to replace retiring/departing faculty or to fill newly created positions. This report focuses on departures, retirements, recruitments, and new hires in physics and astronomy departments. In our Academic Workforce Surveys, we collect the number of faculty departures in the previous academic year, the number of retirements for the previous and current academic years, the number of new hires in the current academic year, and the number of recruitments for the next academic year. These are the most current data the departments can report. Thus, the numbers for departures, retirements, recruitments, and new hires reflect different academic years — in this case 2016-2017 and 2017-2018.