August 28th

I've noticed that I am not the only academic blogger whose activity level has dropped over the past week. Must be something in the water, or could it be the start of the semester? For me, it has been making adjustments to a new text while also coordinating a second section of my main course ... which required that all sorts of things be done by last week that I could normally do during the semester.

But I did need to post one thing today:

A very Happy Birthday to The Thomas.

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Nerd Alert

After reading Chad's blog confession this morning, I could not resist putting this up. It is just so funny ...



... but we need something with legitimately nerdy (astro) interest below the fold ...

... a YouTube video of the Perseid meteor shower from last weekend that I stumbled on while looking for Weird Al.



Full disclosure:
I once spent an August grad school evening on a hammock in the back yard watching a beautiful display.

This time lapse of the Northern Lights shown below reminded me of the time I joined a group of friends for a bike ride on a very dark country road with only the Aurora for illumination and a bar as our destination.

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Students and Professors

An article that profgrrrrl wrote while on vacation started a small whirlwind of discussion, mostly (based on my cursory read) by graduate students who have no idea what faculty do. One student seemed to think that tenured faculty are paid to teach (because that seemed the case at her undergrad school) and seemed oblivious to how a vast research enterprise comes about. Hint: It is entirely the result of the effort of the person whose name is on all of the grants that pay for it. That student did not say if she thought that her major professor got tenured because of teaching, but that would not surprise me either.

I was several years into graduate school before the real situation (not to mention the many ramifications of a job market where several hundred people apply for a single job opening) became clear to me, so I definitely don't think anything less of the students who shard my ignorance. However, I don't want them to stay ignorant of the realities of academic life.

I am not surprised that most students do not know that a faculty member with an excellent record (lets say 60 published papers, a Harvard PhD, a Sloan Fellowship, and enough prominence that I saw him quoted in our newspaper this week) is sometimes denied tenure because that record is not quite up to someone's fantasy of what the perfect professor should be at a top-10 research university, quite irrespective of his/her teaching ability. Simply put, a professor at a research intensive university is there primarily to generate money for the university and increase its reputation, not to teach undergrads or even graduate students.

I started a multi-part series of articles on physics jobs to try to help clarify this situation. (I'll link to the middle one, since it defines the different kinds of careers.) If you enter graduate school with a certain kind of career in mind, it helps to have a sharper idea of what those careers might be. I learned a lot, but not enough, from my mentors and friends - and then only about a few types of institutions. Toward that end, I was really glad to see Dr. Crazy's article on Juggling, listing the many things that faculty do and how those roles are radically different than the grad student version once you become a professor. She is writing from the English Department (I think), yet it could have been about physics. Profgrrrrl's follow up article dealt with some of the same misconceptions from her position in Complexification Studies.

I strongly recommend those comments to anyone who looks at part four, the part about tenure. That article was heavily biased toward the R1 end, because of the physics blogs that motivated me to write it. However, as I went to some lengths to point out in part two, most of the faculty jobs are at "comprehensive" universities that reflect the kinds of teaching load and tenure criteria that Dr. Crazy talked about. Her remarks are a nice counterpoint to mine, showing how the emphasis shifts away from an international research reputation toward a more local one as the nature of the college changes.

One of the comments came from a graduate student in the life sciences who thinks "people who have committed their life to teaching (because if you're a professor, that's really what you've done)". Uh, no. If you are a professor at any of a hundred or so graduate research universities, and quite a few of the several hundred or so colleges and universities that have a significant research emphasis, you became a professor because you committed your life to creating or discovering new knowledge and publishing and publicizing it through seminars and conference presentations. This is a form of teaching, of course, but not what the student meant.

Now it happens that I am in a job where I am paid to teach, and I am committed to it. Enough that I do quite a few teaching-related things during the months when I am literally not paid to do any teaching-related work, although part of the reason is so I can remain sane once the year gets rolling. This year will be a bit more intense than usual, given that I will be dealing with a major service load (I am on a major college-wide governance body) plus the usual challenges of an entirely new textbook.

I am committed enough that I have a virtual office hour every night around 10 pm for e-mail related to on-line homework, despite having to teach an early morning class. That is in addition to the time I am required to be in my office, so it is uncompensated time in our system. (Our salaries are fixed by contract, so there is not even any merit pay if one goes beyond norm, or well below it.) I'll post more about the expectations at a teaching job, and what is needed to get and keep it, when I get to part five of the jobs series. (I'll just say for now that one pleasure of reading Dean Dad is hearing about people with a 5/5/5 load. Sheesh. They are committed to teaching!)


Side Remark:
The life sciences are probably the one area (other than perhaps the humanities) where the job market might possibly be worse than it was in physics in the 1970s. The one thing those professors should be teaching is the reality of that marketplace and what you need to do to succeed, or even just survive, in it. Since they probably won't tell you this, you need to talk to a 35 year old post doc or one of the many research "faculty" about employment options in the life sciences and how to prepare to get what you want.

It is getting too late for me to wrap this up now, but I will add my dos centavos when I get a chance ... between wrapping up four syllabi and updating all of the materials I am responsible for as the coordinator of several classes. High ho, its off to work we go.

Some relevant articles from Inside Higher Ed:

• Transition from PhD student to Professor
• Collected advice on surviving your first year on the tenure track

There is also a lot that can be learned from Ms. Mentor (link is in the sidebar).

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Physics Jobs - Part 4 (Tenure Standards)

The previous article defined the different categories of academic jobs. This one is about preparing to keep one of those jobs.

College is fundamentally different from high school (a detail that is poorly emphasized in freshman orientation), and graduate school is fundamentally different from college (a detail that also comes as a surprise to some students). A post doc, pretty much required for most top-tier faculty jobs, needs to be significantly different from grad school if you want one of those few jobs. Finally, as important as it is to get a good faculty job, getting it is definitely not the same as keeping it.

When you apply for a job as a college professor, the letters of recommendation come from a few faculty that you know really well and who (hopefully) want you to get that job. When you try to keep it, the most important criteria might be whether your competitors think you would be granted tenure at their school, which is probably better than the one you are at.

I'll bet you did not know that. That is why I am writing this article.

There have been a number of good articles recently about earning, and not earning, tenure at various types of institutions. I've put a list of those links at the bottom of this article and strongly recommend that you read them. I am certainly no expert on this subject; no one person can be. My goal here is sort of pedagogical, so I am going to break down the requirements for tenure a bit more narrowly than usual to make my point. In the process, I think I am trying to frame the discussion a bit differently than is the norm.

1. Outside letters of recommendation from non-collaborators, all of whom must be tenured faculty at institutions considered equal or better than the one you are at. You only get to choose a fraction of these people. They will be asked to write about the past quality and future promise of your research from a national and international perspective.
2. Ongoing external (grant) funding for your research.
   
3. Peer-reviewed publications of high quality, measured not only by the number of papers you publish, but by the journals you publish in and the number of citations your articles attract. Some places only want to see your top ten greatest hits, not the full list.
4. Graduating a PhD student or, at minimum, an MS thesis student. Supervising undergraduate research would fall in this category if you are at a BS-only school that emphasizes that experience.
5. Excellence in teaching at the undergraduate and/or graduate level as determined by peer review (other faculty who visit your class) and student evaluations.
6. Service to the department, college, university, and the national physics community (which includes service with professional organizations).

These are listed so the first ones are of greatest importance to a top (or wannabe top) R1 program. Only the last ones matter at a Community College, so that sort of job search gets its own article in Part 5. Note that documenting all of this is your job, and requires a certain amount of record keeping over the 5 or so years that you are working toward tenure. This is something you need to get used to doing early in your research career.

Now lets look at each of these in turn.

1. Letters.

The requirement for outside letters is usually buried in with publications and the quality of your research, but this requirement can be the biggest concern for faculty at top schools. Yes, many of the letters come from a list of people you provide, but even your list has to identify people who have never collaborated with you. It can't just list the 3 people who recommended you for the job. More importantly, it usually cannot list anyone who is not at a "peer" institution, meaning they must be in a department ranked as high or higher than your own. You need to prepare for this from the start if you want to keep a faculty job at a research university.

How do you prepare for this?

First, forewarned is forearmed. This is something you can start working on while in graduate school. In the business world, it is called networking. Good thesis advisors (and often entire research groups) will train you to give good talks from day 1, and then push you out front at meetings. If they don't, find someone who will help you with those skills. But if you have an advisor like the one in this cartoon from Piled Higher and Deeper, there is no reason to go all passive and slide through grad school. There is absolutely no reason why the girl in that cartoon should not put a copy of her papers in the other prof's mailbox with a cover letter saying that her advisor told her about his book and that she thought he might find the articles interesting. Then follow up and make a collaboration happen.

It is your senior colleagues and your friends from grad school and your post-doc school that get you invited to give seminars and colloquia so that more people know what you do. However, it will be your job to be sure that they realize what you do is really important by giving a good talk. Since this section was getting too long, I have moved comments about talks and some related info to the bottom of this article.

Second, get at least one good faculty mentor as soon as you get that job and be sure you understand the policies at that university. This is definitely an area where the details are different at each school, and they vary significantly depending on the ranking of the university or college you are at. Most departments will have some kind of mentoring process in place, because they have invested too much in you (six years of salary, startup funds, not to mention the opportunity cost of lost time if they have to start over) to just ignore you for 6 years and then fire you. However, incompetence at mentoring can be as fatal as actual malice. Denial of tenure is rare, but the risk is far from zero.

Start thinking about where those letters are going to come from before the last year when you put your tenure binder together. Talk to senior colleagues elsewhere and ask for their honest opinion of your research, and what you need to work on to get tenure. (If they are not close collaborators, you might even find someone to put on your list.) If you are at a highly ranked school, they will likely only seek letters from the top 10 or 20 programs in your area. Most 2nd quartile universities want to be in the top quartile and will look there for letters. I know of a few cases where a person had to fight to get a letter from a place that had a quality research program in a specific subfield but was not a top R1 university.

Getting good letters is also one of many places where your choice of grad school can make a difference. Ditto for your choice of post doc school. However, getting a degree with enough fame attached to its name that you can get a great job offer will not guarantee that your name will rate good letters, nor guarantee that you can write a convincing grant proposal. You still have work to do.

2. External research funding (grants).

Not having a grant or three to support your research will be fatal at any R1 (the "very high research activity" Carnegie category). It is no surprise at all when someone is denied tenure at a 2nd quartile program because they do not have adequate external research support. They expect you to pay your grad students, a post doc, buy equipment, cover all travel, and support the college infrastructure through "overhead". My comments on the first item ran way to long to say anything much about overhead, but the sooner you learn how grants are put together, the better. You need to start learning the facts of life in grad school, and you need to do it yourself as a post doc. You must learn to play this game to keep your job.

Among other things, you can never have a shortage of new ideas. You also have to do what you say you were going to do, which means you have to have done enough work on that new idea to know that it is not a crazy one. Enough work that you can sell it as something that can be done ... and that needs to be done. Some faculty save a few projects for a rainy day. If you are going to work on something that will take a few years to pound through, it can't be the only thing you are working on. You can't let a current project eat up so much time that you don't get started on the next one.

You also need to sell your ideas to the people who will evaluate your proposals. Since they are, generally speaking, the same competitors who will be asked to write letters, some of the strategies in the first item will also help you here. People tend to believe your promises if your previous ones came through with flying colors.

3. Publications.

This is what you are supposed to know how to do after a post doc, but there are some details. At top programs, where you publish is as important as how many papers you publish. Similarly, single author papers and work that is identifiably yours (clear enough that all letter writers know it) are important. Some places even have a formal point system assigned to journals (5 for PRL, 4 for PL, 2 for Phys Rev, 1 for the others). Know the rules, and listen to your mentor.

Preparing for this starts in grad school but continues through the post doc years as well. If your thesis advisor does all of the writing, what will you do when you are the thesis advisor? Short answer: find a different job. Learn as much as you can about why certain decisions are made. Learn how to write a good response to a referee's report on your paper. Learn it all.

4. Research students.

You need them, and you need them to succeed, which means you need to come up with ideas with the appropriate scope for an undergrad, 1st year, MS, or PhD project. Good publishable ideas that can be completed in the available time frame. You may have to take the lead in getting the paper written and published. At some point, you will become a writing instructor for your PhD student.

5. Classroom teaching.

This has more importance the further down the ladder you go. We all know cases of poor teachers who are brilliant researchers, but it is less common than you might think. (Good researchers have to have good communication skills, so they can usually teach if they put their mind to it.) However, I do know one person who was utterly unable to communicate with undergrads and barely able to communicate with grad students during the first part of his career. He got tenure on his research, but turned into a very good teacher about twenty years later. That would not happen at a 4-year school where teaching is the life blood of the institution.

Because this topic is so important at Community Colleges, I will say much more about it in part 5, the final installment of this series.

6. Service.

You need to do this, and do it competently. You can't sacrifice the more important items to this particular task, but you also can't alienate the faculty who have the first vote on your tenure by being a jerk or unreliable when some task is given to you. This is how you show that you think of yourself as part of the institution. It can also be where you tell them that everything they know is wrong and that things should be done the way they were done at Xyzzy U. (Do I have to tell you that that is a bad idea?) Undergrad institutions put more emphasis here, particularly when it comes to advising student groups and clubs.

Info related to promoting yourself:

The importance of effective presentations cannot be emphasized enough. Good talks result in a buzz, and more invites to give that talk. One bit of advice I was given was to watch how a particular person put his talk together rather than following the talk itself (which was a variant of an excellent one I had heard before). If you know that a particular person gives a good talk, pay attention to its organization and the level of the material. You might notice that an audience likes to hear a few things that they already know, and see those things used to link together an argument that is plausible even to experts. This is particularly true at a departmental colloquium.

Blogs about tenure decisions

There is more than this, of course, so read the discussions and follow the links in the articles and out of the discussion area to other blogs.

• Chad Orzel on the tenure process from the viewpoint of a liberal arts school, Union College. Chad, an experimental physicist, recently earned tenure and promotion to Assoc. Prof.
• Mark Trodden on the tenure process from the viewpoint of an R1 university, Syracuse. (Syracuse ranks number 56, in the middle of the 2nd quartile.) Mark is a full Professor of theoretical physics.
• Rob Knop on why he was going to be denied tenure at an R1 university, Vanderbilt. (Vanderbilt is ranked number 57, also in the middle of the second quartile.) Rob was, until recently, an Asst. Prof of Astronomy. His PhD degree is from Caltech (ranked number 5).
• Sean Carroll who was dumped by Chicago and took a research job at Caltech in fall 2006. (Chicago is ranked number 7 in physics, Caltech number 5.)

If, like Sean Carroll, you seek tenure at a top 10 physics program, your department is going to ask people at Princeton, MIT, Berkeley, Caltech, Cornell, Illinois, Texas, UCSB, and maybe Yale if you would get tenure at their university. [I left out the number 1 program, Harvard, because that is where he got his degree. Some places will not take letters from your alma mater, others do.] I personally can't see where he ran into trouble, but it could take just one negative letter and one or two faculty at your school who don't like your research program (for any reason) for you to be in trouble.

Updated April 2009:

There was a really good article about the transition from post-doc to professor from Professor in Training that deserves a link here as well as in my March 2009 article about an "advice for a new professor" article in IHE. I gather that PiT is wrapping up the first year of research AND teaching. Quite the perspective. If you go there, don't miss the link to another good article on this general subject (what a post doc doesn't know). There was a lot I did not know as a post doc, which was the main reason I decided to collect things I had learned personally and from friends in this "jobs" series. I've written a bit more today in the blog, and there are a few other related articles (also linked in the "jobs" category) that I posted in March of 2009.

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Grand Canyon Memory

Profgrrrrl is off visiting Las Vegas with a Grand Canyon trip on the side. She posted this picture



of a sunset on her blog this evening, along with a few others. (Go there if you want the link to a larger version.)

That brings back a particularly special memory for me. Let's pluck it out of the Pensieve.

I was at Los Alamos on a multi-week consulting gig. My parents were in California to visit my grandmother. Mother's Day weekend approached, coinciding (as it sometimes does) with my birthday. I heard an ad on the car radio for cheap one-way fares to SFO, no pre-purchase needed.

Idea. Bought a there-and-back pair and made arrangements with my uncle to pick me up at SFO and bring me to the church for Mother's Day Sunday. All secret. Flight left ABQ at dawn. A few balloons were being launched outside town and I settled in for the flight.

Then the pilot called our attention to what was between us and California: the Grand Canyon at dawn from about 10,000 feet up. The entire length of it, lit by the golden light of the rising sun. No photo can do justice to the image of it that still lives in my mind. Immense. Beauty. Orange. Not unlike the photo above, except for the vista that comes from being above it. Changing continuously as the sun pushed the shadows out of the canyon.

That alone would be quite a memory, but it is closely tied to the one of the look of joy on my mother's face when she saw who had just wished her Happy Mother's Day as they walked up to our group by the church. (And then asked if she had his birthday present!) A Mother's Day does not go by that we don't both remember that day.

I don't remember anything about the return trip.

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Mixed Messages

A couple things seen in the last month or so.

False advertising?


Are those "wireless margaritas" free, or do they cost $1.99? Either way, it is a bargain for such a high-tech innovation.


High class town?

From one of those homemade small-town billboards:

Homes of Xyzzy

Buy * Sell * Free Delivery

Something tells me that the housing in this town is more mobile than the population.

He is risen!

Sign in front of a rural church:

Jesus is WAZ UP!

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Physics Jobs - Part 3 (Types of Jobs)

My apologies for the delay, but I have struggled with how to organize this part of the series (preparing for a tenure track job) because there are two very different parts to it. I've decided to separate them.

The issue I've found to be problematic is that there are many different types of institutions with tenure-track jobs available to a person with a PhD in physics, and even some open to someone with an MS. They are so different, particularly as regards the standards for tenure (addressed in part 4), that we need to get these definitions straight.

These definitions are also crucial to understanding the data in the previous article, about demand for physicists in academia.


Types of Institutions

Community Colleges:
These are teaching faculty positions. Publications and research play no role in tenure decisions, only teaching. Research related to teaching is encouraged and useful, but it will not result in tenure being granted if you are a poor teacher. Apart from the usual service duties, the assignment is 100% teaching. As an example, I spend 10 hours per week in a classroom (two calc-based physics classes) and 6 hours per week teaching labs. Some of our labs are taught by adjuncts, who I supervise. I teach a gen-ed class in the summer. The trig-based class is taught by another faculty member. I'll discuss this category of jobs in Part 5. Types of classes taught vary widely depending on the nature of your main transfer school.

Four-year (BS only) Universities:
These are teaching and research positions, often with an emphasis on involving undergraduates in research. Teaching here includes upper division "majors" classes as well as introductory classes, but the majors classes are small. (At the smaller programs, they might be taught every other year just to get 5 students enrolled, but I have seen some outstanding PhD students come from such schools.) Most of the load is in service courses to the rest of the college. Quality teaching is essential for tenure at these schools, but research cannot be neglected. However, the standards for research are not what they are at top-quartile PhD institutions. Because this group includes mid-size state universities and small liberal-arts colleges, there is a lot of diversity. One thing to watch for are the larger, upwardly mobile institutions that want an "R1" faculty member while offering low-rent facilities and support. Conditions may be more predictable at the liberal arts schools.

Universities offering an MS degree:
This small group is a hybrid. Research and small grants are essential to provide appropriate training for students doing an MS thesis, but undergrad teaching cannot be neglected. Some of these schools are trying to move up into the bottom-feeder PhD category, and those will place much greater emphasis on research and grant funding in their tenure decision (much like the bottom half of the PhD departments). A good friend works at one of these, but I won't talk about them in part 4 of this series because they make up such a small group of jobs.

Universities offering a PhD degree:
There is a wider spectrum here than you might imagine, since fully half of physics PhD's are granted by the top 35 universities. Those, or the next group of 37, are the ones you probably know about. Only 25% of PhD holders got degrees from the 110 universities that make up the majority of "research" universities, so most persons getting a PhD are unaware of what those other programs are like or the pressures they operate under - yet these offer 40% of the jobs (about 2000 of 5000) at this level. It is common to hear people refer to the top half of these schools as "R1" institutions. This is the name given to a Carnegie classification that has been renamed "very high research activity". (Details are at the Carnegie Foundation web site, although you might want to read the Wikipeida summary as well.) Faculty at the top schools publish twice as many papers per year as faculty at the bottom schools, and their papers get cited three times as often as those from the lower group. Tenure decisions are made based on research productivity, grant funding, and the national and international reputation of that research. The table below gives you some idea of what is going on across this group of schools.

Summary Table

Data for the PhD-granting institutions is from the National Research Council study published by the National Academy of Sciences. See below for source links. Othere entries are deduced from the AIP data cited in my previous article. Only 146 of the 183 "PhD granting" institutions identified by the AIP are ranked by the NRC study, so I also include an entry for them with values deduced from the (rounded) AIP tables. I put a non-zero value in the PhD column because I know of at least one school not in the group of 146 that does grant 1 or 2 PhD's every year.

Dept class	# Depts	# Faculty	Cites/Fac	PhD/yr
PhD top	35	49	71.5	17.0
PhD 2nd	37	32	47.6	7.7
PhD 3rd	37	22	31.1	4.7
PhD 4th	37	14	23.9	2.2
unranked	36	18?	?	1?
MS only	72	10	?	0
BS only	500	5	?	0
2 year CC	1070	1.2	?	0

You can obtain a copy of Table L-7 in Excel format from this collection of tables in Appendix L. (Please note that this information is all copyright 1995 by the NAS and distributed by them for individual use. Explanations of the tables are in their $81 book.) If you are looking for tables in another format, for other research areas such as the humanities, or the tables that provide a summary across all research areas, start at the index of publicly available materials.

The data in the 1995 study reflect the situation in 1992-93. The previous study was published in 1982 (again based on surveys and data collected a few years earlier), so a new update is likely to appear in the next year or so.


Why the confusion?

I think this subject can confuse graduate students because it is rarely talked about by faculty. I only heard about it over beers with faculty while I was in graduate school, and became more aware of it when I was affiliated with an institution that was trying to move up in the ranks. It is also obscured by the fog of being in a school system that appears rather seamless to a student.

After 12+1 years of being taught by people with a BA degree (maybe a BS, MA, or MS in there somewhere), where the main difference from elementary to high school was the depth of expertise in certain areas, you probably figured that college teachers were pretty much the same thing but with even more knowledge and expertise. Odds are that you were in grad school before you began to realize that the job of a university professor is not teaching and that the real education of a graduate student does not take place in a classroom. That confusion about changing priorities is captured brilliantly in the Piled Higher and Deeper cartoons. Even then you may not realize that there are graduate programs and then there are Graduate Programs. I use the (outdated) term "R1" to describe that second group, the top tier of research universities.

Minimum requirements for a teaching job

I am at an institution accredited by SACS, but the standards are essentially the same in other regions of the country. (The regional structure is mostly just to deal with the numbers: there are 793 accredited colleges and universities in our region alone. That is a lot of work.) I'll use SACS because I am familiar with their organization and there is no point in linking to all of the others. The key document bit of information is their Principles of Accreditation.

The information on faculty credentials is in section 3.7 of the 2001 document, with the main information on page 25, which is page 29 of the pdf file. That same section is on page 13 of the 2007 document, page 16 of the pdf file, but the section on faculty credentials has been moved to a separate policy document. The current policy on credentials is linked from the bottom part of the page with all of SACS' policies.

Updated 2/05/2008:
There is a new Interim 2008 Edition where section 3.7 is found on page 16 of the document, page 20 of the pdf file, with the details about credentials still in a separate document (unchanged since December 2005) as noted above.

You must have an MS or PhD with 18 hours of graduate courses in the teaching discipline to teach any college course that can count towards a bachelor's degree. There are lower standards for "technical" courses that only count for an A.S. (workforce) degree, but those don't concern us here. For a physics job, the MS or PhD does not have to be in physics but the 18 graduate hours must be in physics. That is the minimum requirement for teaching at a CC or a BS-only college. An MS would be acceptable at other schools as long as that person did not teach graduate courses, but this is extremely rare.

You must have a PhD to teach graduate courses (meaning any course that can be counted for credit in an MS or PhD program). That is what makes a PhD the absolute minimum at most universities.

Links added Oct 2007

Chad Orzel wrote a very nice column on what they look for (or look to avoid) when hiring faculty at a small liberal arts college.

• Changing Categories (research to teaching)

I strongly recommend it as a detailed description of what they look for at a school in the BS category described above.

The topic of jobs in the "evergreen" disciplines (history and social science, humanities) and the reasons against going to grad school came up again in Dean Dad's blog, and that led me to some older articles of particular relevance in those fields. Since I sometimes send people in those areas to this blog entry, I thought I should add them here.

• Dean Dad (CC Dean in the Northeast) Stopping the Cycle of Abuse
• Timothy Burke (Swarthmore) Should you go to grad school

FYI, the "cycle of abuse" refers to faculty telling students that they really should enter or continue in grad school for selfish reasons: to have the warm bodies they need to keep their research funded and to publish more papers so they can get promoted or a bigger pay raise. Some will lie about job prospects just to keep students around, while others (like my major professor) will be quite up front about the lack of jobs from the first time they talk to you.

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New Adjunct

This post was motivated by an "Ask My Readers" entry, First Time Teaching at a CC, in Dean Dad's blog today. I started to compose a comment and decided there were enough topics to blog it here instead.

The question came from a person in Psychology, so my comments are more general than if I was talking to someone teaching physics. However, many things (such as grading standards) are fairly universal.

200 level versus 300 level

I'll assume we are talking about Psych 200 (general psychology taken as a required course for nursing and education, as a general education course by anybody, and as a first course by psych majors) and a Psych 301 course (intro to psychology for social science majors). The former would definitely be consistent with the situations raised in the letter to Dean Dad and addressed below. Understanding where both courses fit into the curriculum (who requires it, and why) is also crucial when it comes to grading decisions. That is why I put this first. You need to read the catalog and talk to faculty and students at your university about this issue.

It is entirely plausible to me, in my ignorance, that both classes could cover essentially the same material. This would be especially true if the majors did not explicitly require Psych 200 as a prerequisite for Psych 301. The difference between the classes would be in your expectations, not in the material "covered". The grading standards in the 300 level class would be higher (since a D is unacceptable and even a C might be considered a problem if you need a 2.5 to stay in the program). You would start signaling that they should retain material from test to test and from class to class. Your exam questions would feature more critical thinking and integration of ideas from different parts of the course, but those main ideas would not change very much. You would start to go deeper in the course that has Psych 301 as a prerequisite.

There is also a possibility that the number system is totally artificial and Psych 300 is identical to Psych 200. The university might be saying that this class is mostly taken by juniors (or simply charging upper division fees for it) or flagging it as a required course in the major, while the CC is saying that it is taken by sophomores because they don't have any juniors. Reading the catalog and asking questions will clarify the situation in a few minutes.

These observations have nothing whatever to do with teaching physics, which generally puts a really big step between introductory and majors classes. I must say, to be fair, that physics separates completely the highly mathematical introductory course for engineers and physics majors from the non-mathematical introductory science course for psychology majors. Psychology does not do that. However, even in physics there is some truth in saying that we teach the same material in first semester mechanics, junior mechanics, and graduate mechanics. What changes is the expectations for performance on the same groups of problems (perfection at the higher level), a hope for deeper conceptual understanding, and the introduction of new methods and problems that require greater sophistication to solve them. Students don't usually notice this from "inside" the system if it is done in a seamless fashion so you may need to learn about it as a teacher.

Summer

There was a discussion about teaching summer session in Dean Dad's blog at the end of May. If your current class is in a compressed 6-week session in the second half of the summer, your class could be particularly diverse. Kids fresh out of high school, who might be taking their first college composition class at the same time, will be in there with 3 time losers who just need this class to graduate and excellent students who put off an easy required course until the very end. Talking to people at this particular CC about this particular semester is very important, given that you don't have experience there (or anywhere) to use as a reference point.

CC versus Large Uni versus Selective

Almost anyone can be in your class at a CC, as others noted in the discussion of the original article. However, there is also quite a spectrum at Enormous State University, where I went to school, even though its graduate program is in the top quartile in a number of areas. They are very selective at the grad level but not so selective at the freshman level. Still, you are more likely to find poor performance due to drunken partying every night at your large state university than simply poor reading and writing skills. You will have much more diversity in basic skills in your classroom at either of these kinds of schools than at a highly selective institution. A high cut for minimum SAT scores results also reduces the standard deviation, making the teacher's job a lot easier.

Dean Dad's questioner observed "it is difficult to teach a class when I have some college graduates who have come back to get prereqs for nursing school and some students who barely finished high school." My answer is "yes", and "that is why we get paid the small bucks to teach at a CC." It is also why I don't envy those, like the questioner, who teach a gen ed course that might be taken by a first-term freshman, whether at a CC or a large university. Even a well-prepared HS grad is still thinking they are in a HS classroom.

Back link:
See my comments about orientation for new students, some of which can be used on the first day of a freshman class (since that is where Prof. Zucker first used them at Johns Hopkins).

Your consolation is the realization that your student who "barely finished high school" was above average in motivation and academics in high school. Remember, only about half of HS grads go on to any kind of college, and lots of kids don't make it out of high school. Imagine what it is like teaching 10th grade!

The way high school teachers got that kid to pass their class was by offering, maybe even requiring, extra credit work. That is why you will regularly be asked about what can be done for extra credit in those classes. Be sure you have an answer, and be sure it is offered consistently as part of a fair grading system. (I know one HS teacher who only offers extra credit as a way of passing his required "government" class, but not as a way of raising a C to a B or a B to an A. He will not fail any student who will put in the effort, but has more academic standards for an A.)

Gen Ed versus Core Course

Any general education course poses serious challenges. If, as is usually the case for Psych 200, students think it is an easy class for the first semester because they had a "psychology" class in high school, the challenges get bigger. In a "core" course, your students have passed a year of composition and can write an actual paragraph or three that present a coherent idea. I have the distinct pleasure of teaching students who have not failed an entire series of math classes, including trig and sometimes calculus, but there are still serious challenges.

The biggest challenge freshmen face is the need to learn outside the classroom. They just don't believe you when you say they need to read the book before class and review it after class, because they never had to do this in high school. It was all spoon fed. Even many college classes have a "review sheet" that is really a list of all 50 questions that will be on the test, so all they need to do is cram that subset of information and then go to work (if at a CC) or out drinking (at the university). The only effective way to attack this has to start on day 1, so it is too late to do much about it now. However, you can experiment now and develop some ideas for the next time you teach the class.

Your 300 level core class will likely offer a different challenge: the poor retention of knowledge we all seem to see today. That may be why your mentor teaches the same subject matter as in the 200 class. They didn't remember any of it. And I do mean any of it. I have close ties to faculty at a neighboring university, so I know it is not a problem unique to CC students. [Indeed, one of my minor triumphs has been to convince many of my students that they need to still know some physics next year, with the result that they kick ass after they transfer. The person next to them had no idea physics was required because it would be used in their engineering classes, so they cleared their mind and sold their book as soon as they passed physics.] In my opinion, the cram and forget approach in high school, particularly for "high stakes" graduation tests, is a big contributor to this.

Grading

My first thought when I read "I have a student who sits up front, asks good questions, stayed for the optional review session, and seems to put effort into learning the material. But he is still barely passing." was quite simple. A student who is barely passing is passing, so earns a C. The harder question is "How do I award failing grades for students who look like they are really trying?" but it also has a simple answer. You award them what they earned. What the questioner might really be asking is, How do I know if my standards for a C are correct? That is a different, and very hard question that I will not try to answer here. I featured it in my comment on Dean Dad's blog, for others to talk about.

The zeroth thing you need to know is whether your school has a de facto policy that everyone passes this course if they attend every day and work hard. I don't think I would ever teach at such an institution, but I know they exist. (I know they exist because I have seen the product of such schools transfer into mine, and because we just got what looks like a really excellent "senior" hire who was quite clear that he was leaving his current position - at a 4-year school - because its administration is now pressuring faculty to pass a larger fraction of their students regardless of performance.)

Note added:
Grading criteria and passing regardless of learning was a major issue in a recent story about denial of tenure for a low passing rate. (See my comments posted in May 2008.) The question of whether comparable evaluation methods were used so the poor passing rate resulted from poor teaching remain unclear, as they were not addressed in the materials made public.

The first thing you need to know is what grade constitutes passing. Our system considers a "D" to be a passing grade in that you get college credit for it even as it lowers your GPA. You can, of course, repeat a class where you earned a "D", but you don't have to repeat it. However, although a "D" will count toward graduation if you are in building construction, it might not count if you are in education or psychology. On the other hand, a business or nursing major might consider a "C" to be the worst possible grade in your class and finagle a way to fail. If you need a 3.0 average (or higher) for your major, a "C" could be fatal. It lowers your GPA but cannot be repeated.

The second thing you need to know is what the consequences are if a student "barely" passes your class with a "C". They might be minimal for Psych 200 if it is not core prerequisite course for that major, and might even be minimal if it is required. (With grade inflation being what it is in the social sciences, a "C" might not be enough to get into that major.) In physics, we always ask ourselves if we would want to drive across a bridge designed by that "C" student, just as anatomy instructors ask themselves if they want to wake up in an emergency room with that "C" student standing over them. You might ask yourself if you want that student teaching your kids or taking the 300 level psychology class you are teaching next semester.

One bit of advice is that there is only a minor penalty if you start out with a first test that is a bit too hard and make the next one easier. Students will work harder after that first test (although some will quit), and then feel rewarded on the next test. This is all for the good if you give them positive feedback about the results of studying. They might even keep up those study habits if the third test is in the middle for difficulty. You might even find that this is an ideal approach in a freshman class. The other way, an easy first test followed by a harder test, is a terrible approach that will always backfire.

Finally, you should discuss grading policy with some other faculty at that school. You do have the authority to include subjective criteria to decide that 69.7 is good enough for a C, just as you have the authority to decide that it is not. The important thing is that you give the same consideration to every student who is similarly situated. Ideally, you have this information in the grading section of your syllabus (and if not this time, next time), but no document can cover every possible situation. If you find that the student says useful things in class and can discuss the subject in your office but does badly on tests, you have a sound basis for giving a passing grade (but also counseling them that they need to improve their test taking skills).

Side comment:
You did notice that I said you have the authority to decide grades? Yep, you are now an authority figure. It is a new experience the first time you teach. You really are in charge of your classroom. You have the authority to tell students where to sit during an exam, if you think some arrangements look a bit too cozy. You probably have the authority to tell a student to leave the classroom for answering their cell phone, and the authority to use your cell phone to call the campus police if the student will not leave. You certainly have the authority to deduct points for texting during class. It is quite interesting to be a teacher and a student at the same time if you have a tendency to do things as a student that you don't want to see in your own classroom. Psychoanalyze that!

Mentors

The questioner has one mentor, giving reasonable advice, but needs more. Get a second opinion about the 300 level class from a regular faculty member at your university as well as your thesis adviser. Similarly, chat up someone who teaches your 200 level course at the CC for specific questions on grading policy, but you can also talk to the person who hired you (or even the random odd faculty member wandering the hallways) about the characteristics of students at your school.

The faculty at a CC are committed to teaching, not research, so you will find them much more approachable on this subject than at a university. Just introduce yourself and go from there.

Comments on comments

As Dean Dad and others put it, watering down courses at a CC by offering lots of extra credit options and having a soft grading scale compared to the situation at a likely transfer institution is setting those kids up to fail.

I also like using a journal as a learning and evaluation technique. You might learn that your weak student has a mangled view of what is going on, so it is not just a problem of "testing poorly". Many weak students have poor reading skills, or simply don't read the book at all. Many have spectacularly bad note taking skills. Others just have trouble with the foils on multiple choice tests and can give a reasonable answer on a short answer or essay test or in a journal. You can only find out by trying.

As someone noted, some have true learning disabilities that should be addressed by specialists at your school and accommodated (often by extended testing times) accordingly. It is too late to do much about that now, but it is something to be aware of. Talk to your dean about the college policy on referrals, etc, if you suspect this might be a problem.

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Physics Jobs - Part 2 (Demand)

As in my first article, the main reference for this discussion is a set of statistical reports produced by the American Institute of Physics. I recommend you read them (use the links on the left side to get the summary and full reports) and form your own conclusions, but I hope my comments here will give you some idea of what to pay attention to.

The first lesson one must get from those studies is that, at present, only about one third of all PhD physicists are employed in academia. This may be hard for a student to believe, since you may never have met a physicist working outside of a university in your entire life, but it is one of the cold hard facts you need to appreciate if your goal is to get a job as a faculty member. Nonetheless, since recent blogs have emphasized tenured faculty positions and because my only experience is as an academic (post doc, a dozen or so years as research faculty, about a decade teaching), that is what I will write about.


A word about non-academic jobs:

Some quick remarks on the other two thirds of the jobs you might find. The one advantage that a US citizen with a physics PhD has in any job search is that there are quite a few jobs that require citizenship as one element in getting the relevant security clearance. This is not just for "weapons" work, because anything (particularly aircraft) that might have a military use requires national security in addition to the usual industrial security issues. You get paid more in industry, but might have to change companies if yours loses out on a contract. You might have to move to the company that won the contract, and at least one friend was forced down the entrepreneurial road and became a private contractor.

A key bit of advice is that there is little value in taking a post doc if you plan to go into industry. They usually could care less. The sooner you get out of the ivory tower the better. However, a post doc can be a key step if you want to work in a government research lab.

Academic jobs:

I think the most important lesson is that the majority of students will be employed at an institution below (in the sense of R1, PhD, MS only, BS only, CC) the one they got their degree at. This means the work environment and professional expectations will sometimes be (very) different from what you observe as a graduate student, assuming you were paying attention to what a faculty job entails at your institution. Those will be described in part three.

The graph I made of AIP data is important enough to repeat here. Its relevance to the demand side was driven home yesterday when I ran into a retired faculty member from Wannabe Flagship University. I knew he was from the right generation, so when he mentioned how many years he had been there, I got the crucial detail for this discussion: He got his PhD in 1964 (right on the leading edge of the big peak), went directly to Wannabe Flagship (no post doc), and retired 39 years later in 2003.


That's right: Many in that huge pulse of people who got a PhD between 1960 and 1970 and got hired into a faculty job did not retire until after 2000. That would be one of the explanations for Chad's comment that the job search situation was pretty good when he got out circa 2001. At that time, fully 17% of physics faculty were over the age of 65! [See paper by Czujko linked in Note 3 below.]

But it is not quite as bad as a snake eating an elephant, even if it seemed that way to my generation. There were people hired into faculty jobs from my generation, and some of the more recent openings have been filled with "senior" hires from industry or research labs (that is, from my generation). The hiring pulse circa 1965 has been damped out somewhat, but you can still see a pronounced minimum in demographic data for physics departments. (See the paper by Neuschatz and McFarling, linked from Note 2, for some examples.)

The main thing to take away from that graph is that the current supply of PhD physicists is about 1200 per year and (probably) slowly increasing. Other data indicate that about half of these are foreign students, which might be relevant for some jobs in academia but probably not for the ones at top research universities, which get a large fraction of their faculty from overseas. [Details are in part 3 of this series.] You should assume that everyone is your competition. If in doubt, look at the faculty at your school and where they got their PhD degrees.

Data on Faculty positions:

There are a lot more faculty positions than you might think if your view is limited to the 146 or so institutions classified as Doctoral Research by the National Academy of Sciences. Those are the "PhD" category in the table below, which make up a bit more than half of the tenure-track faculty. If, as is most likely, you attend one of the universities that are classified as "very high" research (what used to be R1) in the Carnegie scheme, you might be ignoring the majority of possible academic jobs.

This table was constructed from the AIP data circa 2004 as described in Footnote 1 at the bottom of this page. All faculty refers to the total of tenured, tenure track, and temporary faculty reported by the university. Temporary faculty could be full time instructors (usually at 4-year schools) or they could be semi-permanent researchers supported by external or internal funds (in PhD programs). These numbers do not include full-time post docs or part-time adjunct instructors, which fall in a different category, but probably include multi-year research positions (glorified post docs) that run for a fixed contract period greater than one year.

Dept type	all Faculty	d/dt	t-t Faculty	d/dt
PhD	5400	+50	4430	+5
MS only	900	+10	730	-3
BS only	2700	+20	2130	+1
2 year CC			1640	-28?

The time rate of change has units of people per year. The striking detail, no surprise to us old timers, is that the total number of faculty is increasing but the number of tenure-track faculty is roughly constant. Universities are shifting resources from permanent positions to temporary ones. The rational reason for this is it gives them flexibility to deal with shifting student demand, federal research support, and student enrollment (when the baby-boom echo comes to an end). The economic reason is that they are cheaper, particularly when we consider part-time faculty at the CC level.

These are all full-time PhD positions, with one exception. The number listed for 2-year schools (community colleges) is the number of tenured faculty, but only 640 of these have a PhD degree. It happens that the data for 2-year schools also tell us the number of part-time adjunct instructors and how many of those have a PhD. The table below (explained in Footnote 2) shows only PhD faculty but includes the 330 part-time CC instructors with a PhD in the "all Faculty" column.

Dept type	all Faculty	d/dt	t-t Faculty	d/dt
PhD	5400	+50	4430	+5
other 4 year	3600	+30	2860	-2
2 year CC	970	?	640	+1?

This snapshot (and the derivative) suggests that there are about 7900 PhD's employed as full time, tenured or tenure-track faculty at colleges or universities. Keeping those positions filled as people retire, die, or leave the country is what generates job openings for newly minted PhDs. There is zero or negative growth in terms of tenurable faculty positions being added to physics departments.

Annual Job Openings

This is much more speculative, but based on pretty consistent trends identified in the AIP studies. See Footnote 3 for an explanation of the numbers shown here, and take this with a big grain of salt. Once you construct estimates from estimates the values get really fuzzy, but the main trends were real as of the period (circa 2003) when these studies were done.

Dept type	openings	US PhD hires
PhD	180	120
other 4 year	200	180
2 year CC	75	70?
Total	455	370?
PhD degrees		1250?

One thing jumps out of the first column: There are more openings in the BS and MS departments (what I incorrectly call "other 4 year" schools) than in the PhD departments, even though the PhD departments have 50% more faculty! Turnover is very low in major PhD programs. (See my example up top of the guy who retired after 39 years. Working for 39 years is easier to pull off if you have a 1/1 teaching load and a modest research program, if any, than if you have a 3/3 or 4/4 load at a 4-year school.) But there are other factors at work.

In the time period of the study, about 1/3 of the faculty hired in PhD departments (but only about 10% for the others) earned their PhD overseas. I used this fact to generate the estimates in the second column, which would be the number hired who earned their PhD in the U.S. (Note that these could be foreign students who earned their degree in the U.S., not just US citizens.) That significantly skews the available jobs away from the top schools.

In addition, almost a third (about 55) of the US PhD hires into universities and maybe 55 or so of the others can be expected to be "senior" hires (persons who got their PhD more than 5 years before being hired). This would reduce the bottom line to 260 (+/- ??) openings for persons who earned a PhD in the US in the past five years.

The market reality:

There are estimated to be about 1300 persons earning a PhD this year, maybe more, maybe less. I'll use 1200 under the assumption that some foreign students (who make up about half of this total) are planning to seek jobs back home. For comparison, there were 200 fewer graduates (under 1100) and probably more job openings when Chad got out.

So, comparing 260 openings to 1200 job seekers, the odds of getting some kind of tenure-track academic job are about 1 in 5 during the first few years after getting your PhD. In the longer run, if you become one of the "senior hires", the odds increase to about 30%, maybe more. Since national surveys show that about 1/3 of all physics PhD jobs are in academia, including research faculty jobs, those odds seem plausible.

However, most of those are not at a research university like the one where you earned (or are working on) your PhD. Comparing 60 to 1200 tells a different story for that part of the market. The odds of a recent PhD getting a job at a research university are only about 1 in 20. The fourth installment of this series, along with info in part 3 will address some of the things you need to pay attention to if you have this as your goal. You need a clear plan to put yourself in the top 5% after 2 or 4 years in a post doc, and be prepared to win the grants and reputation that will earn you tenure. (Getting the job is not the end of the battle!)

On the other hand, if you are an American with an interest in teaching and running a modest research program with undergraduate students, the odds might be as good as 40% (240 openings, 600 candidates) that you can find that job. I will have additional comments about seeking those kinds of jobs in the final installment of this series.

Side comment:
The long odds against getting a t-t job at a research institution are why I started this section by mentioning that most PhD students who enter academia will end up "below" (in the hierarchy of colleges) where they earned their degree. This is inevitable, and can be understood with a simple "Fermi question" analysis. How many PhD's will your major professor produce? Ten? Twenty? Fifty? Only one is needed to "replace" him or her, so all the rest are fighting for that job.



Footnotes:

Note 1.

The AIP faculty workforce reports give the total number of FTE faculty, including t-t, temporary, and research positions (but excluding post docs). The 1994 and 2004 numbers are the source of the derivative calculated over a ten year period.

Dept type	1994	1998	2000	2002	2004
PhD	4900	5000	5000	5100	5400
MS only	800	850	775	900	900
BS only	2500	2500	2600	2800	2700
total	8200	8350	8375	8800	9000

References:

• Workforce 2004
• Workforce 2002
• Workforce 2000
• Workforce 1998

The reports also give the percentage who are in temporary positions (not tabulated here, but you can see them in Table 2 of the reports linked above). From these one can calculate the following for the years 1998 to 2004. I use the two end points to get a 6-year average derivative in my tables, but you can see that these are very noisy data. The derivatives are consistent with zero.

Dept type	1998	2000	2002	2004
PhD	4400	4450	4386	4428
MS only	748	651	729	729
BS only	2125	2106	2184	2133
total	7273	7207	7299	7290

The 2-year data (community colleges) are much cruder. They come from two reports, one about the 2001-2002 statistics and another about 1995-1996 statistics. In 2001-2002, there were 2560 faculty (1640 full time, 920 part time) teaching physics on 1072 campuses, with 39% (or 640) of the full timers and and 36% (or 330) of the part timers holding a PhD degree. In 1995-1996, there were 2592 faculty (1810 full time, 782 part time) teaching physics on 1052 campuses, with about 35% (or 634) of the full timers holding a PhD. In both cases, a few percent of the full time are not "tenure track", while the 1996 report stated that a significant fraction of the PhDs (corresponding to 200 of 633) were in related fields such as engineering or chemistry. I cannot tell from the methodology of the 2002 report if they corrected for the 94% response rate in their final numbers, as I did when quoting the 1996 data. If not, the number of t-t faculty in 2002 increases to 1745 and the derivate drops from -28 to -11, but I doubt if this is the case.

Note 2.

See the two papers referenced above concerning the 2-year college data

• 2001-2002 Report
• 1995-1996 Report

and the discussion of the data above. The increase in PhD faculty from 633 to 640 over 6 years gives a tiny (and, I am sure, statistically insignificant) positive derivative. The other results are directly from the table described in Note 1.

Internal check: This gives a total of 9970 PhD's in academia, compared to the total of 10047 (5801 teaching, 4246 research) given in the Neuschatz and McFarling "Career Outcomes for PhD Physicists ..." paper. This minor undercount is plausible given that both numbers are derived from estimates (the latter extrapolating a longitudinal study of 1850 physicists to a population of 33,729). The "teaching" number is plausible if half of the t-t faculty at PhD institutions reported their job as research rather than teaching, which is what the authors said was likely the case.

Note 3.

The estimate of foreign fraction of new faculty is based on the Czujko paper on Enrollments and Faculty in Physics, which summarizes the fraction of new faculty who got a degree overseas (34% for PhD departments in 2000, 12% in BS departments). Similar data tables can be found in the workforce papers referenced above. [double check] The 50% value for the fraction of new PhD students who are foreign comes from the 2004 AIP Enrollment and Degrees report (54% of 2004 PhD grads were foreign students, up from 45% in 2000).

The Czujko paper is also the source for the statistical data on the fraction of new hires who earned a PhD in the US more than 5 years ago (31% in PhD departments, 28% in BS departments) and within the past 5 years (35% in PhD departments, 60% in BS departments) that is used in the discussion after this table about the hiring odds for relatively recent PhD graduates.

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Physics Jobs - Part 1 (Supply History)

Any discussion of the physics job market has to start with the facts, and the most basic facts are those of supply and demand. When I started grad school in the mid 70s, I was told by my major professor that "there are no jobs". Although this was a bit of an exaggeration, there were only a few tenure track jobs spread over thousands of recent PhD's. My university, which had hired several new faculty every year in the 1960s, only hired one new person during my time in grad school - and he came from overseas to replace someone who left his t-t position for a national lab.

It is not even close to being that bad right now. (More info on demand is in part 2 of this series.) Indeed, I would say the situation is pretty good for people currently in grad school, but the situation still has echoes of that past. I want to start with what you can learn from history about the supply of PhD physicists looking for academic jobs. Fluctuations in that supply, which look like the damped response of an oscillator hit with an impulse, likely reflect the hiring patterns in academia. Until equilibrium returns, job openings due to retirements will come in clusters about 30 to 40 years after a previous cluster was hired. (Filling new positions takes only a tiny fraction of the annual PhD production.)

How did we get where we are today? The following is my analysis of the data.

The figure below was assembled from information given in two figures (fig. 7 and fig. 9) produced by the AIP as part of regular reports on the job situation in physics. (I created my own version of these figures because web links are notoriously unstable, these figures from a 2004 report will be replaced in a few years, and so I could annotate them with some trend lines to make discussion easier.) I strongly recommend that graduate students look over those reports, since they contain far more information than I can write about it a few blog updates.

My figure shows the PhD production in the U.S. from 1900 through 2004 (actual numbers, from fig. 7) and an AIP projection of PhD production from 2005 to 2010 (from fig. 9). The error band on the projection is the light colored band. I won't say much about those projections (they will soon be replaced by real data), but they might be important to students considering the odds of getting certain kinds of jobs. I'll discuss the history reflected in these data in roughly 20 year increments. (Until I sat down to write this, I had not noticed that some underlying trends seem to change on a two-decade time scale.) Click this picture to enlarge it.



The first 20 years, from 1900 to 1920, show a fairly flat rate of PhD production. The start of research and graduate education was modest, producing a roughly constant number (20 to 30) PhD's per year from a small number of departments. Old articles in Physics Today reported that most of these students went into industry, which was a fairly easy transition because the academic research itself was mostly funded by the industries that hired the PhD students.

Things changed in 1920, when we start to see a steady increase in production. The slope (about 6.5 additional grads per year) corresponds to a large percentage growth rate, because the starting level was so small. PhD production more than doubled each decade. Even more interesting to me is that the Great Depression (starting in 1929) does not show up at all. I do not know what drove this growth, although demand for engineers (despite the Depression, this was a period that saw much civil construction) would require more physics faculty and hence more PhD programs across the country.

What does disrupt graduate education is World War II. Anyone who doubts what a big deal that war was need only look at these data. I have put a "line to misguide the eye" across the period from 1940 to 1960 to show that the missing war-time degrees were completed after the war. On average (following my line), the slope increases (to 20 extra grads per year) but the percentage growth rate slows somewhat.

Side comment:
The senior faculty during my time in grad school, including my major professor, came from this group. Many of them left undergrad or grad school to work on the research side of the war effort: radar, aerodynamics, nuclear weapons, computing, and code breaking. (My thesis adviser worked at Bletchley Park "breaking the Enigma" and I knew a person who watched the Hiroshima bomb go off from the observation plane.) Chemistry students also played major roles in these programs. A few PhD theses that were completed during that time were classified. After the war, they returned to college with skills not found in a typical undergrad or grad student today, and experience working in large research groups. They knew how to operate a large, federally-funded research enterprise when the 60s rolled around. They had no ties to industry.

Then comes Sputnik. I put a red arrow at 1957 to indicate that important event. Sputnik resulted in massive amounts of money in support of science and math education and research, from K to PhD. The increased funding for graduate fellowships, coupled with job demand from colleges and NASA, was a boon for physics and the graph reflects that change. Back then, and even in my time, you could save money (not borrow it) on a grad assistant salary if you did not have a family to support. Everyone got a job. Many faculty were hired directly from grad school, without even a post doc. Average was more than good enough, until about 1968 or so, and PhD production almost tripled in that decade. The peak at 1970 is the result.

It was the perfect storm. A decade of lush spending came to an end circa 1968. The NSF budget was cut to pay for Vietnam and to punish the colleges for harboring anti-war protesters. (Nixon was not known as a lover of intellectuals.) The end of the baby boom was in sight (high school grads crested around 1971), so universities did not need to add faculty because student growth was ending and enrollments would soon decline. NASA started to cancel projects and stretch out others, and no longer needed to hire physicists.

Side comment:
Have you ever seen a Saturn moon rocket when touring the Kennedy Space Center, or Huntsville, or the Smithsonian? Those are not models. They are actual Saturn rockets built to go to the moon. The Command Module and LEM at Kennedy are the real thing. Missions were canceled on the fly, after the rockets were built, because Nixon could not afford to launch them and fight a war and increase social welfare spending ... so they were just turned into museum pieces.

It was ugly. I know some really bitter people who got out in 1969 or 1970. Top notch thesis work meant nothing, while a few years earlier you could get a tenured job based on average work. The spike is really sharp because some people rushed their work to completion in hopes of grabbing the last job in 1970, while others simply dropped what they were doing and walked away. Why work two more years and graduate in 1972, if you knew there were no jobs? [One remarkable detail in the historical data is that the number of first year physics graduate students dropped just 1 year before the number of PhD's plummeted. The fraction completing a PhD after 6 years or so went from 40%, if you started in 1964, to 25%, if starting in 1970. See this figure from the AIP grad student report.]

People who went to grad school in the 70s knew (or eventually learned) what you were getting into. I knew some people who lingered and then left ABD, not bothering to write a dissertation when the reality sunk in. However, by 1980 there were a lot fewer people looking for PhD-based jobs. There were plenty of post docs, because the odds of turning one into an academic job were really bad. There were tech jobs to be had, particularly if you were a US citizen (and thus could get a security clearance), although no physics faculty had any clue about them. Faculty were now fully disconnected from industry, except in some areas of condensed matter research.

So the period from 1960 to 1980 was feast and famine. What happened from 1980 to 2000? Why a big peak in 1994? Part of the story is the discovery of quarks in 1974 and the death of the SSC circa 1993. The second peak you see is in 1994, right after the SSC was killed. This was also a time period when rumored demand for retirement replacements did not appear. (Universities shifted open positions from physics to new areas; biophysics is now hotter than nuclear physics and positions planned for the SSC went unfilled.) I think you are seeing a peak as people quickly wrap up their thesis so they can move on, and a drop as people quit. The fact that the AIP data also show a large (200 person) peak in the number of MS degrees exiting PhD institutions (solid yellow curve) in 1994 backs up this opinion. There is no peak from masters institutions. Those are PhD students who saw no point in finishing. I'll bet you would see the same thing in 1970 if those data went back far enough.

The other thing that happened from 1980 to 2000 was an increase in the fraction of foreign students in US universities. Faculty research programs had been built on huge numbers of graduate students and post docs, and there were also labs to be taught. American students would not take those jobs, so foreign students were recruited to take their place. (A graph of PhD's granted to US citizens would look very different from the one shown above.) This, along with immigration of PhD faculty from overseas, complicates the supply side of the academic job picture.

I have put a pair of red "lines to misguide the eye" in this area, reflecting two possible models for the supply situation. One tracks what a nuclear experimentalist would term the "background" below the peaks, while the higher one tries to split the difference and average the production over that period. The top line would be something like a long-term average of actual production, while the bottom line might be the level that could really be sustained. I find it interesting that the line from 1940 to 1960 roughly meets that bottom line around 1980, and that the top line meets the production curve around 1966 (when the faculty market started to saturate) and 1976 (when those who started just before the crash finally graduated). The bottom line might be a sustainable production rate, with the bottom line being the minimum graduation rate under any circumstances.

Demand will be taken up next, followed by issues related to preparing PhD students for the kinds of jobs that are likely to be available.

One consequence of the training and research experience of the current faculty is that major professors at a top R1 school with a 1/1 teaching load are (partially) training students for the only job they know about, which is not likely to be the one the student will take. This was a huge problem in the 1970s, and my impression from the blogs I follow (much like the impression on Usenet a decade earlier) is that it remains a problem today.

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Mendacity from Chertoff?

The following statement was made by Michael Chertoff in video shown on the Situation Room on CNN (video seen on the afternoon of 12 July 2007):

"We don't currently have specific [ahem], credible information about a particular threat against the homeland [ah] in the near future."

This is a classic example of a carefully constructed, pre-spun statement that offers little but plausible deniability to Chertoff. The reporter doing the interview failed to ask Chertoff why he chose his words to not exclude the possibility that the truth is:

"We currently have specific, credible information about an attack within the US a few months from now."


Recited in a calm, soothing voice, Chertoff's handlers expect that most Americans will hear "There are no credible threats against the United States" rather than what those words actually mean to someone who understands logic and its use in rhetoric.

All that Chertoff has excluded is a very narrow group of possible situations. In addition to the version above, his statement leaves open the possibility that

"We have specific, credible information about an attack on American interests overseas in the near future."

or

"We have specific information about a particular threat against the homeland in the near future whose credibility is in question."

Like the Rice mendacity quaver, Chertoff might give away the truth when he pauses at two points in his statement where the qualifiers "specific" and "in the near future" are inserted.

Any of these would lead to a very different reaction in the media, yet the person interviewing him for CNN did not ask any followup question about why he chose his words to avoid excluding these possibilities. My guess is that he was backed into a corner by his earlier remarks and needed a way out that would not help our enemies realize we know what they are up to, and that he did a better job of fooling CNN and the public than he did of fooling Al' Qaeda.

Update:
Proof that he fooled the AP, and through them some American citizens. CNN carries an AP report that "he [Chertoff] and others continue to say they know of no specific, credible information pointing to an attack here." As you can see above, that is not what Chertoff said. What Chertoff said could mean that he knows of specific credible information pointing to an attach here in six months.

If he was forced to obfuscate a mistaken leak, at least Chertoff stayed within the bounds of proper handling of highly classified information, unlike the persons who have allowed Al' Qaeda to rebuild in Pakistan after the US military put them out of business at the end of 2001, the ones who also gave the enemy in Iraq three months warning of our impending "surge" and exposed our anti-proliferation assets in the middle east.

Let's pray that they handle this better than Katrina or "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US".

Presidential Update:

The President added another (rather transparent) example of the half-truth form of mendacity in his press conference today. When pressed about the National Counterterrorism Center's observation that "Al Qaeda better positioned to strike the West", Bush said that Al Qaeda is weaker now than if we had done nothing.

Right but not relevant. They are weaker now than if we had done nothing on 12 September 2001, but his own intelligence agencies are telling him that they are stronger now than if we had continued to fight Al Qaeda in 2003 instead of diverting our resources to Iraq and creating the ultimate recruiting and training tool for bin Laden. As above, we can already see reporters saying the administration is claiming we are safer now than 6 years ago when the real question is whether we are safer than we were 5 years ago, or even 2 years ago.

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Bicycle Power

Enough ranting; back to physics. Today I feel a Cocktail Party Physics-style inspiration from watching the Tour de France. (I love that it is on live every morning with the sprint finish just before lunch. Can get some reading done while it is on in the background, then work on my fall classes in the afternoon.) Towards the bottom of this article, I will give a simple example showing the power required to race up a mountain.

Bicycle racing is about the physics concepts of power and torque. Because these same concepts are important to the design of hybrid cars and in motor racing, I will mention those also.

The quick version is that torque translates into force and is responsible for acceleration (short sprints at the finish) while power is responsible for sustained top speed (whether on the level in a time trial or when climbing).

Physics

This is a bit of an oversimplification because torque and power are not independent of each other: both involve force in their definition. Power is the rate of doing work (work in units of Joules divided by time in units of seconds gives power in units of Watts), and is defined as Work / time, or Force * velocity, or Torque * angular velocity. [Because force is more intuitive than torque to most people, I will use the force version in my examples.] You have to have power in reserve if you want to accelerate while already at high speed (sprints in bicycle racing), but power and force (or torque) can be considered separately in many situations.

(Factoid useful for automobile engines: Power in horsepower = Torque in foot-pounds at an angular velocity of 5252 rpm. Torque and power curves always cross there.)

Two engines (or people) producing the same power can produce a large force, doing a lot of work, in a long time (at a slow speed) ... or a small force, doing a small amount of work, in a short time (at a high speed). Power is about quickness, not brute strength, which is why many sports emphasize "power lifting" training (lifting a given weight 10 or more reps at a time) rather than working on a single lift of a heavier weight. The person who can lift a larger weight than another person in the same time (such as the time needed to sustain a block in football) is more powerful.

Since sport is all about getting there first, power is what usually wins a competition. However, what often matters more is the power to weight ratio, since a heavier person (or car) needs more power to (say) climb a hill at a particular speed.

Tradeoffs

The reason we treat power and force separately (and report both when talking about automobile engines) is that there are physiological and mechanical reasons that the upper limits on power and torque (or force) can vary independently of one another.

Automobiles with a push-rod V-8 have huge amounts of low-end (low rpm) torque. Diesel engines even more so. When you want to pull a trailer or accelerate from a stop light, you need that "grunt" of a large force at a low speed. Hybrid cars get this from the electric motor, which also produces a high torque at low speed. The key design concept of a hybrid is to use the electric motor for torquey things like getting moving, and design the gasoline engine to keep it moving at constant highway speed (where power matters more than torque) as efficiently as possible. Dividing the two functions between two physically separate devices makes the engineering design problem much simpler.

A DOHC (double overhead cam) engine, common on imports and smaller cars as well as high-end race cars, produces the maximum torque at quite high rpm. [My Miata has a torque peak at 5500 rpm.] If you want to get a large starting force from this kind of motor, you need to wind it up (and eat up the clutch) in a way that most people won't do. In my not-so-humble opinion, manufacturers have put bigger motors in "small" cars so that people who don't know how that motor works can get the torque needed to pull into traffic. This comes at the expense of highway mileage because the more powerful motor is less efficient. [My ancient Miata, with its 1.6L engine, got 34 mpg at sustained highway speeds of 77 mph on my last trip. Its top speed of 115 mph is plenty, so it does not need more power.] Again, a hybrid can have a DOHC engine designed only to cruise at 80 mph (100 mph if you are Al Gore) on the highway, letting the electric part deal with acceleration.

Human physiology has similar variability.

Two bike racers with the same mass will exert exactly the same force and do exactly the same work to ride up and over a mountain pass. Same m means same m*g*sin(theta) [force to move against gravity on a slope of angle theta] and same m*g*h [work done to lift you over the pass]. The winner does it faster, which requires more power ... not more force and certainly not more work (or more calories burned). You just have to be able to burn those calories faster, to do the required work faster.

Sprinting, like during the finish of the last few races, is about acceleration. Getting a jump on someone, to increase your speed to a level you can't sustain very long, just long enough to win the race. Competitive riders can get to over 60 mph on a level road, but only for several hundred meters. There is power involved here also, but not sustained power. It is about producing a large force for a short time, and only for a short time. These riders usually cannot climb mountains because they produce extreme amounts of power only in short bursts.

Power still plays a role in sprints, because your top speed occurs when the power you can produce is equal to the power being drained away by friction and air drag. More power translates into a higher top speed, the critical factor in winning an individual event like a time trial. It is also why the finish of a bike race looks a lot like NASCAR, with riders drafting someone until the last moment and then using a "slingshot" move to pass. The most powerful sprinter can only sustain top speed for a few hundred meters, so they time that move to get to the finish line just when they can't do it any more.

Example from today's finish:

I used a stopwatch to time the racers over the last kilometer of Stage 4. They took about 49.5 s, which translates into 20.2 m/s or 45.2 mph. That is the average speed. Since data shown during the previous kilometer indicated the leaders riding at about 34 mph when they started that stretch, the winner (Thor Hushovd of Norway) and the man who almost caught him at the line were probably going in excess of 50 mph as they approached the finish.

I'd really like to know what the computer on his bike said his speed was over the last few hundred meters.

The power demands are huge. The force of air drag increases roughly as the square of the velocity, so the power required increases as the cube of the velocity. You need eight times the power to go twice as fast.

(Side note: This dependence on the cube of the velocity explains why "restrictor plate" NASCAR cars cannot catch up with the draft when coming out of the pits. You asymptotically approach terminal velocity, so it takes more than a lap to pick up those last few mph. You also see this in qualifying, where the second lap on a superspeedway is always faster than the first.)

Example relevant to mountain climbing in the Tour:

The steepness of a road is given in %, which is the slope (rise over run). Thus an 8% grade corresponds to a rise of 8 m in 100 m (horizontal distance), or 100.3 m along the road (the hypotenuse of the triangle). If a bicyclist wants to climb that hill at a constant speed of 15.0 mph (24.1 kph), he has to do the work required to raise his mass (and his bike) 8 m in the time it takes to go 100.3 m at 6.7056 m/s. That work is m*g*h, and it must be done in 14.96 s. The work depends on the mass of the rider, of course.

It is too early to know who will be "King of the Mountain", but some past contenders have masses that range from 61 kg (134 lb) to 73 kg (161 lb). I will use 65 kg as my example, and assume the only other mass involved is the bike (6.8 kg minimum mass). They will also carry some water on longer climbs, because the rules forbid getting any water from a team car during a climb, but nothing extra on short climbs. That value gives us work = (71.8 kg)*(9.807 m/s^2)*(8 m) = 5.63 kJ in 15 s. That is a power output of 376.5 Watts = 0.505 horsepower. Additional power is required to overcome the drag due to the air, the work you need to do when riding that speed on level ground. Thus this is a lower limit on the power needed to climb at that speed.

Note: 1 hp = 746 W, which many top riders can develop for a period of time.

Also note that 1 food Calorie is 4.19 kJ, so they are burning over 5 Calories per minute just overcoming gravity on one of those climbs.

Some bike racing details for wannabe fans:

First, no mention of bike racing would be complete without mentioning the Oscar(R) nominated film, The Triplets of Belleville. Nominated for best animated feature and best original song, it tells a wonderfully strange story of the wildly improbably rescue of a young man who is kidnapped while in a bike race. That said ...

Mountain climbing starts this weekend with Stage 7 on Saturday. The page I linked to defaults to the route, but you can also view the "profile" of the route (showing the elevation changes) and the "passes", which gives the length and grade of each major climb.

Climbs were classified from easiest (4) to hardest (1) before anyone thought someone would be crazy enough to race over ones that are harder than the hardest. (Classification of whitewater rapids uses an open-ended scale with 1 as easiest to avoid this problem.) The H category (haute or high) has since been added to indicate climbs that are basically impossible for normal human beings. Difficulty is a combination of steepness and length, so it is possible for a very long 6% climb (such as the ones out of Val d'Isere on Tuesday's Stage 9) to be rated H while a short climb at 8% (like near the start of Stage 17) would be only a 3.

The really interesting climbs are on days with an H category (or two) in the route. Those include Stage 9 (linked above) on Tuesday, July 17, with two big climbs, Stage 14 on Sunday, 22 July, with two (one is at the finish so a climber will win that stage), Stage 15, with one on 23 July, and Stage 16, on 25 July, with two (again, one at the finish). Stages 14 and 16 may determine who wins the overall title.

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