1/ There have been lots of threads about the job market and Ivy PhDs recently, one of them discussing why Ivies don't get jobs at 'teaching' schools. The suggestion was that they are considered 'overqualified'. I have some thoughts on this from such a school...

2/ First, let's start with the study from 2012-2015 that looked at over 16k fac at 242 schools. The data found that 25% of schools produced btwn 71-86% of TT/T professors. 8 elite schools accounted for 50% of all TT professors in Hist. https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/02/university-hiring-if-you-didn-t-get-your-ph-d-at-an-elite-university-good-luck-finding-an-academic-job.html

3/ What this means, of course, is that it is absolutely false to say that someone from an Ivy is only getting hired at other Ivies or close elites. The data clearly refutes this. The idea that they are excluded from searches as 'overqualified' at 'teaching' schools is DOA...

4/ The current job market is such that in most fields, but esp in the hum, the number of PhDs produced each year is completely outsized to number of jobs. Years of this means there can be at times 1000s people vying for 100s of jobs (like in History) https://www.historians.org/ahajobsreport2020.

5/ We could probably talk about what types of jobs are getting advertised, of course--who has money post 2008/9, who is going to be able to hire after 2020? Who will replace TT lines instead of adjunctify or simply cut the program? But let's focus on Ivies and 'teaching' schools.

6/Now, who does get excluded from 'teaching' schools? First, this is a question of what you mean by 'teaching' school. Traditionally that means SLAC, Comm Coll, and Cal State system-like school. Are there no Ivy profs at these schools? Statistically, it is impossible...

7/ If more than half of all positions are held by people from 8-12 elite schools, then there are Ivy PhDs all over these schools. But, we do know that SLAC committees, in particular, can be exclusionary. How so? And does this exclude Ivy PhDs? Well...

8/ I teach at a SLAC. I was not hired here until I had been on the job market for 6 years already. I went to all state schools & came out of grad school with 5 years of teaching experience (not TAing). I then taught at other large research schools--no SLAC ever looked at me. Why?

9/ Here is what I learned from being on the personnel comm & on job searches at my current SLAC--until very recently, there was a clause in some of the hiring criteria "Previous SLAC experience preferred." In some cases, this was true but not expressed. What does that mean?

10/ It means that any candidate who attended a SLAC as an undergrad would get preference. It did not matter where the PhD was. But people who went to WIlliams, Kenyon, Hamilton, Grinnell, Skidmore, etc. would have an advantage because there was a presumption that...

11/ ...they understood teaching AT A SLAC better than others. Kids who go to these sorts of elite SLAC schools are the one who tend to go to elite (Ivy) grad programs. So, de facto, there was a lean towards elite PhDs. One dept only interviewed Ivy PhDs until told to not...

12/ So, how did I get a SLAC job when so many of my colleagues are from elite PhD programs? In part because in my penultimate yr on the market, I got hired at a lower-tier SLAC by a recently hired new Chair who came from a state school. He did not carry SLAC prejudices...

13/ But until then, not one SLAC even interviewed me despite my vast teaching exp in small classes of the type they preferred. Not one. While my Ivy PhD friends got those jobs even only having 1-2 classes under their belts, likely because they attended a SLAC in undergrad...

14/ It was 2008. The next year & every year since then, the market has gotten exponentially worse. To say that any person with a PhD from anywhere is not getting hired because they are 'overqualified' or that not getting a TT in the first year out will harm them is misinformed...

15/ THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH TT JOBS IS THE PROBLEM. There is no advice you can give, no justifications one can make to explain why people aren't getting jobs beyond this simple fact. And Ivy PhDs still disproportionately land the few jobs that exist. Even at teaching schools. /end

This thread is an expansion of this tweet: https://twitter.com/kataplexis/status/1302788124037308416?s=20

One more thing to add: Why are Ivy PhDs seemingly all the sudden worried about the market? Because it has gotten so bad that even they are ending up in adjunct hell or out of academia. This has been increasingly so since 2008/9. They expect jobs. There are no jobs.

I do know some Ivy PhDs that never hit TT (married one, even!). But the professors at those schools need to get realistic and quick and stop promising things they cannot and their programs cannot deliver. Their ignorance of the 90% below them is harmful to their students.