Abstract Between 1985 and 2014, the number of US doctoral graduates in Anthropology increased from about 350 to 530 graduates per year. This rise in doctorates entering the work force along with an overall decrease in the numbers of tenure-track academic positions has resulted in highly competitive academic job market. We estimate that approximately79% of US anthropology doctorates do not obtain tenure-track positions at BA/BS, MA/MS, and PhD institutions in the US. Here, we examine where US anthropology faculty obtained their degrees and where they ultimately end up teaching as tenure-track faculty. Using data derived from the 2014–2015 AnthroGuide and anthropology departmental web pages, we identify and rank PhD programs in terms of numbers of graduates who have obtained tenure-track academic jobs; examine long-term and ongoing trends in the programs producing doctorates for the discipline as a whole, as well as for the subfields of archaeology, bioanthropology, and sociocultural anthropology; and discuss gender inequity in academic anthropology within the US.

Citation: Speakman RJ, Hadden CS, Colvin MH, Cramb J, Jones KC, Jones TW, et al. (2018) Market share and recent hiring trends in anthropology faculty positions. PLoS ONE 13(9): e0202528. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0202528 Editor: John P. Hart, New York State Museum, UNITED STATES Received: March 31, 2018; Accepted: August 3, 2018; Published: September 12, 2018 Copyright: © 2018 Speakman et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability: All relevant data needed to replicate our study are contained within the paper and its Supporting Information files and/or are publicly available. The data on which this study is based were generated by the authors using the 2014–2015 American Anthropological Association AnthroGuide [25] (with exceptions as noted in the text) and the National Science Foundation [6–8]. A Microsoft Excel spreadsheet containing the database developed is available upon request. Please send requests to the University of Georgia's Center for Applied Isotope Studies at cais@uga.edu. Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction We recently examined the realities and prospects of obtaining a faculty position in anthropological archaeology at BA/BS, MA/MS, and PhD institutions in the US and Canada [1]. Here we expand the study to include the other subdisciplines of anthropology to track and compare each of them, as well as evaluate the discipline as a whole with respect to job prospects at BA/BS, MA/MS, and PhD institutions in the US. As we outlined in our Archaeology faculty jobs study [1], repeated here to provide context for the current study, the statistics surrounding Anthropology and Archaeology career prospects provided by most outlets are not positive. In 2012, both Kiplinger Business Forecast and Forbes ranked Anthropology and Archaeology “as the worst choice of college majors with an unemployment rate of 10.5% and a median salary of $28,000 for recent college graduates” [2–3]. In their 2016–2017 forecast, Kiplinger ranked Anthropology as the fifth worst college major [4], reporting that 8,255 anthropologists and archaeologists are currently employed in the discipline. This employment estimate is only slightly higher than the 7,700 reported by the 2015 U.S. Department of Labor Outlook Handbook [5]. Kiplinger further reports that there are only approximately 920 job advertisements posted online for Anthropology and Archaeology each year. Overall, job prospects are low for the 12,000 students who successfully complete an undergraduate or graduate degree in anthropology each year. Taken together, these statistics indicate that jobs in anthropology are available for fewer than 8% of new anthropology graduates (PhD, MA/MS, and BA/BS) [4]. The fact that most careers in anthropology require some form of advanced degree further compounds the problem. More students pursue advanced degrees in hopes of improving their career prospects within the discipline, only to find an extremely competitive, over-saturated job market for early career anthropologists. Since 1985, the number of doctoral degrees awarded by US anthropology departments has increased from approximately 350 to about 530 per year (Fig 1) [6–8]. During this same period, the number of female doctorates has increased to a point that now there are two female PhD graduates in anthropology for every male (Fig 1) [6–8]. However, an advanced degree does not necessarily lead to a better job. Those fortunate enough to hold academic positions, not only in anthropology but in other fields also, are cognizant of the fact that few of their own graduate students are likely to obtain a faculty position themselves. In today’s highly competitive academic job market, it is not uncommon to have large numbers of qualified applicants competing for a given position. Of the ca. 13,000 doctorates in anthropology conveyed in the US between 1985 and 2014 [6–8], we estimate that approximately 21% obtained tenure-track faculty positions in anthropology in the US. PPT PowerPoint slide

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larger image TIFF original image Download: Fig 1. US-based PhD anthropology degrees awarded between 1985 and 2014 [ US-based PhD anthropology degrees awarded between 1985 and 2014 [ 6 8 ] showing total degrees conveyed and the gender of recipients. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0202528.g001 A common criticism of such statistics has been that anthropology trains individuals for many sectors and career paths not captured in these numbers. While this is true, the fact remains that a large proportion of graduates who are seeking employment in anthropology will not be able to find employment within the discipline. We, of course, recognize that many programs offer non-academic pathways; however, we argue that most anthropology PhD programs are designed to train and replicate the type of scholarship engaged in by its faculty, which is by definition academic. Students are trained, largely, to be academics [9]. Thus, even when students are provided some degree of choice or training concerning different career paths, many, will choose or attempt to obtain a faculty position—this will, of course, be encouraged by faculty. In fact, encouraging students down an academic path is beneficial to faculty as it raises the overall profile of the department if their students are successful in obtaining positions. Again, we recognize this does not characterize all individuals, programs, and departments, and that there are exceptions. Despite this, however, the numbers point to the fact that there is an inordinate number of candidates—sometimes in the hundreds—for any one academic position advertised, suggesting that there are systemic issues at play. Academic employment challenges are not limited to anthropology. Multiple studies have detailed the issues surrounding employment for the social sciences, humanities, computer sciences, and business [10–13]. In the biological sciences, the outlook is not any better. A recent study by Ghaffarzadegan and colleagues [14] determined that 84% of new PhD graduates in biological and medical sciences are not successful in landing a tenure-track academic position. Simply put, the American academic system generates doctorates at a rate greater than the job market can support [15–18]. The issue is more complex than there simply not being enough departments to hire new tenure-track faculty. The problem is that programs are producing doctorates at levels that are not sustainable. As secondary education institutions have increasingly embraced business management models over the past 30 years, universities, in order to maintain a competitive advantage, have expanded graduate programs. Many programs that used to offer a BA/BS as their highest degree now offer MA/MS degrees. Likewise, a number of programs that previously offered a MA/MS as their highest degree now offer a PhD. At the same time, many colleges and universities have moved toward limiting tenure-track faculty positions and instead use lower paid non-tenure-track faculty (NTTF) such as graduate students, part-time lecturers/instructors on short-term contracts, or full-time NTTF who typically have better job security and salaries higher than their part-time counterparts. It is estimated that NTTF comprise about 70% of the total faculty workforce as of 2011 [19–20]. Concurrent with the increase in NTTF, the numbers of full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty have decreased from approximately 55.8% in 1975 to 29.2% in 2011 [19]. Another important factor that is oftentimes overlooked with respect to the academic job market is the retirement age of tenured faculty. When the 1986 amendments to the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) ended mandatory retirement in most occupations, postsecondary schools were allowed to continue imposing a mandatory retirement age of 70 on tenured faculty. The ADEA exemption ended in December 1993 and had an immediate effect on academic retirement rates. By 2010, the number of tenured professors older than age 65 more than doubled [21]. Currently the median age of college and university faculty surpasses all other occupational groups in the US [21]. The net result is that longer faculty careers directly translate to a reduction in the rate of new hires. Some researchers have estimated a reduction of new assistant-professor hiring rates of 10–20% [14] and have developed models that demonstrate that rather than being a transient issue, the actual number of new faculty hires has been permanently reduced [22]. In principal, for each senior-level faculty retirement, a university should be able to hire at least 1.5 tenure-track assistant professors. However, this is not necessarily the case, as many universities opt to replace tenured faculty lines with less costly NTTF hires, further suppressing the availability of new tenure-track faculty hires. The reality is that recent graduates seeking academic positions often find themselves in lengthy and insecure postdoctoral research positions [23] or a seemingly endless series of NTTF positions—if they are among the fortunate. There is little institutional incentive to replace low-paying, temporary NTTF with higher-paying tenure-track positions [23–24] and it is unlikely that this business model will change. For most recent PhD graduates, the job market—especially the academic job market—is bleak [9]. With more than 110 programs producing anthropology doctorates in the US, it is clear that not all programs are equal. Prospective graduate students must consider many factors in selecting a graduate program, including department rankings and institutional prestige, fit with departmental research interests, and, perhaps most importantly, access to financial support. Here, we examine data from US anthropology departments to: (1) identify and rank doctoral programs whose graduates have obtained tenure-track academic jobs; (2) identify long-term and ongoing market-share trends in the programs producing doctorates; and (3) evaluate gender division in academic anthropology in the US. As our primary source of data, we utilized the 2014–2015 American Anthropological Association AnthroGuide [25] to document the current state of the tenure-track anthropology job market in the US. Data from the AnthroGuide are self-reported by anthropology departments, and include general information about departments, such as degrees offered and program descriptions, as well as more specific information about their faculty. This includes academic rank, specialization, and year and origin of doctorate. Our data clearly demonstrate that a small percentage of anthropology departments hold a majority of the academic market share, which we define as the percentage of tenured/tenure-track positions in US anthropology departments that are attained by graduates of a specific program over a 20-year period of time. We then rank programs in terms of total market-share. In business, market share is determined by calculating the total sales over a given period (e.g., number of tenure-track job placements for a given period for a given program) and dividing the company’s total revenues by the industry’s total sales (e.g., total number of tenure-track anthropology jobs over a given period). Market share reflects the relative competitiveness of a company’s products or services relative to other competitors. Market share is not a measure of the real or perceived quality of goods and services, nor is it a measure of how many individual units a company placed on the market, but is instead a measure of how company sales compare to other companies within the same industry. Likewise, our academic market share rankings are not a measure of the real or perceived quality of a graduate program, nor are they a reflection of how many PhD graduates from a given program entered the tenure-track job market—market share is simply a measure of tenure-track job placement for individuals from a specific university relative to other universities. The idea of ranking programs based on placement is not a new concept. Schmidt and Chingos [26] proposed the idea that a graduate program’s history of placing new scholars into faculty positions is as important of an indicator of departmental quality as the research produced within it. As part of their study, Schmidt and Chingos [26] compared academic job placement for recent political science doctorates to National Research Council (NRC) Q ranking scores. They determined that their per-capita academic placement rankings were fairly strongly correlated (R = 0.871) with the NRC rankings, but that in some cases lower-ranked NRC programs had better per-capita academic job placement than some of the higher ranked NRC programs. The authors concluded that ranking programs using the concept of quality is difficult to measure precisely, but that a program’s placement record reflects both the quality of the students it is able to attract as well as the training they receive. More recently, Speakman and colleagues [1] examined academic tenure-track job placement at BA/BS, MA/MS, and PhD institutions for programs producing anthropological archaeology doctorates in the US and Canada. This study determined that a small number of graduate programs in the US and Canada account for a majority of the total market-share. This work also concluded that for prospective doctoral students, obtaining a degree from the right program could be among the most critical first steps for those who aspire for a tenure-track academic career. In the current paper, we examine market share for anthropology as a discipline. Unlike the Speakman et al. study, which focused on the archaeology and bioarchaeology job market in the US and Canada [1], here we limit our geographical focus to doctoral programs in the US and expand our discussion to include the subdisciplines of sociocultural anthropology and biological anthropology, as well as archaeology. At this point, we feel the need to emphasize several key concepts that are stated in detail in our previous study [1]. First, our program rankings describe only market share in terms of total numbers of graduates who have obtained tenure-track positions in BA/BS, MA/MS, and PhD programs within the US. Our rankings do not reflect the real or perceived quality of a graduate program (although arguably these variables are highly correlated). We do not attempt to, nor can we account for, PhDs working outside of academia in the US (e.g., industry, government, museum, NGO’s, etc.) or anthropology PhDs who are faculty in non-anthropology departments or PhDs who have found academic employment in countries other than the US. Our focus here is solely on tenure-track faculty in anthropology departments in the US who are employed in BA/BS, MA/MS, and PhD programs. Our database only includes individuals listed as “faculty”. Faculty generally hold the title of “assistant,” “associate,” or “full” professor. Information for people classified as anything other than “faculty” is not included in our database. These include categories such as lecturer, staff, post-doc, research staff, adjunct, affiliated, emeritus, museum professional, or anthropologists in other departments. We do not assume that all graduate students entering a PhD program begin with the goal of obtaining a tenure-track position, but arguably many incoming PhD graduate students entertain the idea of completing their degree and entering the tenure-track job market. Finally, our focus on tenure-track employment in BA/BS, MA/MS, and PhD programs is not meant to imply that other career tracks are more or less satisfactory and/or fulfilling—our focus here is simply on the tenure-track job market.

Conclusions The outlook for tenure-track faculty positions in anthropology, as with many other disciplines, is somewhat bleak under our current models of graduate education. In sum, there are several structural components identified here that should make the would-be graduate student with faculty aspirations take pause. First, there is the nature of the job market, coupled with the production of too many PhDs competing for each position. Next, there is the fact that there are extreme disparities in the placement rate of certain programs over others in placing their graduates. Finally, despite some success in mediating gender disparities in hiring practices, these continue to persist throughout anthropology, with some subdisciplines being better than others. While in theory, anthropology is a forward-thinking and progressive discipline, which is certainly reflected in the content that we teach in our graduate seminars, in practice, the numbers point to a conservatism in what is valued in graduate education (i.e., academic success and a tenure-track position). In this way, anthropology is no different from any other discipline. We recognize that these revelations will be perhaps of no surprise to faculty in the trenches of departments everywhere. However, now they are quantified for all to see. Thus, we see this study as anthropology’s call to action, along with other similarly aligned disciplines, to do something about the situation we find our graduates and ourselves in now. The job market has changed dramatically in the last 20 years, and now is the time for the model we use to train future anthropologists to also change.

Materials and methods As described in detail previously [1] and quoted and paraphrased for context for the current study, the American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) AnthroGuide has been published annually since 1962, and it provides information on a broad range of anthropological institutions such as university departments, museums, and non-profit organizations. As each institution is responsible for providing their own information for inclusion in the AnthroGuide, the volume is not an exhaustive survey of all anthropological institutions [32]. However, most BA/BS, MA/MS, and PhD degree-granting US and Canadian institutions are represented in the guide. For the purposes of this study, we analyzed data from degree-granting anthropology, and in rare cases archaeology, programs in the US. We did not include data for Canadian anthropology programs, museums, research institutes, nonprofits, private entities, or other organizations. For each degree-granting institution listed in the AnthroGuide [25], we recorded data for individuals listed as “faculty.” Faculty are considered to be tenure-track individuals who hold the title of “assistant,” “associate,” or “full” professor; however, some departments list individuals in permanent NTTF positions as faculty. In many cases, it appears that these are individuals who graduated from that department or are individuals who received positions via some sort of special hiring consideration (e.g., spousal hires). Information for people classified as anything other than “faculty” was not included in our database. These include categories such as lecturer, staff, post-doc, research staff, adjunct, affiliated, emeritus, museum professional, or anthropologists in other departments. Relevant information for each individual recorded in our database included: first and last name, employment institution, graduate institution, year of graduation, subfield of expertise, apparent gender, highest degree offered by the employing institution, and current academic rank. The subfield of expertise was recorded based on research interests listed in the AnthroGuide [25] and faculty pages when interests in the guide were left blank or if clarification was needed. We classified people into three subfield categories: archaeology, bioanthropology, and sociocultural anthropology. In our previous paper [1] we grouped archaeologists and bioarchaeologists together as a single unit (archaeologist). In the current study, bioarchaeologists are grouped with biological anthropologists which we believe better reflects this subfield. The sociocultural anthropology category includes linguists and anyone who is not an archaeologist or biological anthropologist. Apparent gender was based on our perception of an individual’s first name as it was listed in the AnthroGuide [25], and verified, as necessary, through faculty webpages or other online resources when an individual’s name was gender-neutral or ambiguous. Academic rank categories we recorded included: assistant professor, associate professor, full professor, and “other” when a different title/rank was listed and the individual was listed as a regular faculty member. Individuals with foreign (i.e., non-US) degrees represent a substantial portion of our academic population (ca. 5.5%). Although we recorded the institution, these individuals graduated from, for discussion purposes we classify all non-US derived doctoral degrees as “foreign”. Some colleges and universities have separate anthropology and archaeology programs. We report information for these rare instances for the university as a whole, rather than listing them separately. Additionally, faculty employed within the City University of New York (CUNY) system are oftentimes cross-listed with several CUNY colleges (e.g., Hunter College, John Jay College, and/or Herbert H. Lehman College). For purposes of this study, the entire CUNY system is considered as a single entity. As described in detail in our previous study [1], and quoted and paraphrased here for context for the current study, there are several limitations and inherent assumptions: We can only see the end-result of the hiring process—who was hired, and where. We cannot account for differences in the quality and/or gender of applicants applying for academic positions in US anthropology departments. The nature of our data limits us to a synchronic view of those who held a faculty appointment in a US anthropology department during the 2014–2015 academic year. We do not know how long a person has been employed at that particular department, how long they were on the job market, or how many previous academic positions the individual may (or may not) have had. We do not include data for faculty at two-year colleges and technical schools. We recognize that many such schools employ both PhD and MA/MS-level anthropologists and archaeologists. However, our focus here is on tenure-track anthropology positions at BA/BS, MA/MS, and PhD granting institutions. The number of PhDs produced each year by individual institutions is unknown. Institutions that produce larger numbers of PhDs will potentially have a competitive advantage in terms of market share. The number of PhD students admitted each year that have tenure-track faculty job aspirations is unknown. Institutions that admit and produce large numbers of PhDs who desire this career path with have a competitive advantage in terms of market share. We do not attempt to, nor can we account for, PhDs working outside of tenure-track anthropology programs in the US (e.g., industry, government, museum, NGOs, etc.) or anthropology PhDs who are faculty in non-anthropology departments or PhDs who have found academic employment in countries other than the US. Our focus here is solely on tenure-track faculty positions in US anthropology departments that offer BA/BS, MA/MS, and/or PhD degrees. There is an inherent assumption that anthropology/archaeology faculty have PhDs in anthropology/archaeology. This is not always the case. Some archaeology faculty may have a PhD from a geoscience program, a biology-based program, a humanities-based archeology program, or even a general studies program. These individuals are rare, but it does explain why in a few cases we have listed a university as having produced a PhD when it is apparent that the institution does not have a PhD program in anthropology. Not every academic program in the US and Canada reported data for the 2014–2015 AnthroGuide [25]. We attempted to identify PhD granting departments not listed and add them to our database. Faculty data that have been added to our database using departmental web pages include: Cornell University, Vanderbilt University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Stony Brook University, University of California at Berkeley, University of Illinois at Chicago, University of California Santa Cruz, and the Boston University Archaeology Department.

Acknowledgments Data presented in this paper were generated, in part, via a series of graduate courses co-taught by Thompson and Speakman. We thank Jaxk Reeves for his assistance with the statistics used in the paper. Corbin Kling, April Smith, and Maria Jose Rivera Araya are acknowledged for their help in developing the database. We declare there are no competing interests.