As has been pointed out before, statistics like these "for every five open faculty positions, only one is filled" are incredibly misleading. The reason only one in five is filled is not because there's a shortage of qualified teachers. It's because the thousand faculty searches going on at any one time are only interested in competing for the same hundred people.
Universities aren't trying to hire someone who can teach undergraduate CS courses. They're trying to hire someone who can build a lab capable of bringing in a steady stream of seven-figure grants. You need to have a PhD from a top-five (ish) school, with an excellent publication record, and an existing network of collaborators to be competitive for the vast majority of open positions.
I haven't been on a search committee in years, but in the mid 2000s, I think 3-500 was about the norm for a mid-range state school. Not all those people were qualified, but I think you can assume you'll have somewhere on the order of 2-300 qualified applicants for most jobs.
As has been pointed out before, statistics like these "for every five open faculty positions, only one is filled" are incredibly misleading.
Also, still trying to dig up the last article I read about this, but didn't that figure lump pretty much all faculty positions together? I could definitely believe there are lots of contingent faculty positions going unfilled, but the numbers probably look quite different for someone who's not interested in part-time positions, teaching-only positions, soft-money positions, etc.
anecdata from the current hiring season is that CS hiring at less prestigious institutions has become qualitatively different from that in other fields. one faculty described receiving a total of four applications from actual CS PhDs (not just top five) [0].
even at stanford, perhaps. i was astonished to see that a stanford junior is the listed instructor for EE 364A (a PhD level course in convex optimization, aka CS 334).
Which is why it just makes more sense to hire Indian CS students. American univs are never going to match the volumes the Indian system already produces.
"RECOMMENDATION 2.1: Institutions experiencing a computer science enrollment surge should seriously consider an increase in resources to address the rising workload on faculty and staff in computer science and related departments, and the limitations arising from inadequate facilities."
"RECOMMENDATION 2.3: Institutional leadership should engage directly with computer science departments or programs to develop appropriate faculty hiring and faculty size targets, and develop strategies to improve faculty retention. Increasing the number and enhancing the role of academic-rank teaching faculty should be given serious consideration."
"RECOMMENDATION 2.4: Larger institutions—in particular, research universities—should reevaluate the organizational placement of the computer science department and other departmental units with a computational mission."
It's hard to fire someone or lower their salary when economic conditions change, so it makes sense for academia to be a bit conservative here. What happens if interest rates rise, VC funding goes down, and there are lots fewer tech jobs in the future? You're stuck with a bunch of high paid professors and low CS enrollment.
There could be a structural change that from here on we'll need a larger number of CS professors, but I can see why the universities are being conservative.
True, but raising assistant professor’s salaries puts pressure on associate professor salaries, and they are tenured.
Not to say the whole lot of them shouldn’t get raises; one thing missed in this discussion is that CS programs are counter-cyclical, when there’s a downturn in the tech industry and it’s hard to find a job, more candidates opt for getting a masters in CS instead of going into industry/finding a new job after a layoff.
There's a stupid amount of variation in academic compensation. I think a lot of it comes down to people early in the pipe having ludicrously low expectations, after many years of PhD stipends turning into a kinda laughable postdoc salary. People coming back from industry (eg, to business schools) know better how to negotiate and have higher expectations. But might have a harder time getting in the door from industry in STEM areas, because it's still pretty easy to get cheap kids from the postdoc pipeline.
Here's 50 prof's in the PROF-AY job with total comp >$450K; lots of them in econ, based on some light perusal. The very-tenured math profs I worked with seem to be in the range of ~$150K total comp, by comparison.
https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?q=PROF-AY...
I would also say that the tech industry desperately needs a better understanding of what constitutes the professional practitioner skill set, and how to teach and measure it.
Many or most of the individual contributing practitioners I've encountered in my varied career across companies big (Microsoft, Google) and small (startups early and mid-stage) consist of individual contributors who either fall up into management or otherwise happily and unwittingly peak out in their skill set.
The typical "high-quality" Senior Engineer is "smart and get things done" (Junior) plus a little bit of experiential knowledge peppered in with cold hard years on the resume.
But there's a craft and skill set to this work that takes (1) a very focussed (presently, self-) training effort and value system and (2) takes years to master, but where the payoff is enormous (i.e, where the 10x/Nx productivity gain is found.)
That last statement is theory only inasmuch as it challenged by those that don't want to believe that they're far from (the, or their) peak; I know it to be true.
As a hint to what that skill set is, it's fairly simple to talk about descriptively...the end result being building systems from composable, contract-based abstractions of course respecting and knowing the current available tools and how to wield them. The problem is able-to-describe and able-to-do are miles apart; it takes many, many years of conscious, directed effort to perfect the craft. The few people I encounter that have that ability had to care about it and muscle through it on their own. We need something closer to an organized pedagogy and training and measurement around this particular skillset to produce much more of it in the industry.
The problem is that any given business rightly has no interest in the kind of long-term investment required. And, at large, academia for many reasons doesn't have the practitioner context/focus/awareness to deliver the skill set, either.
Tenure-track faculty positions are hard to fill in this tech market no doubt. However, with multi-billion endowment at top schools, couldn't they pay competitively at least for part-time lecturers with PhD and some teaching experience, who might be working in the industry, to fill in requisite teaching needs?
I guess if the above is adopted, there could be issues with part-time adjuncts getting higher hourly rate, by some measure, than tenure-track faculty. Thus, a market-based bonus which could fluctuate with market conditions of each field for tenured or tenure-track faculty members should be considered.
Added: By hard-to-fill, I meant hard-to-fill to the qualification threshold of research universities implicitly referred to in the article.
>However, with multi-billion endowment at top schools, couldn't they pay competitively at least for part-time lecturers with PhD and some teaching experience, who might be working in the industry, to fill in requisite teaching needs?
No. That could result in CS people (esp. non-tenured ones) making more money than beginning business professors, and that simply cannot be tolerated. Instead, they need to just keep salaries for CS people low, and then whine to the press about how they can't fill all their CS positions.
Tenure track positions are not at all hard to fill. There are 500 people applying for every one of them, and probably 350-400 of those people are completely qualified to do the job. But only ten of them are desirable, and a hundred other universities have those same ten people on the list.
Paying market rate won't help, because they're not leaving positions unfilled because they can't make an attractive offer. They're leaving positions unfilled because they're unwilling to live in a world where not every team gets Lebron James. It's better to do without than to not get your first choice, so that's what they do. If they were willing to pay $800k to fill a seat with whoever they picked as that "market rate" lecturer, they could have just hired the same guy for $120k -- he applied for the job and you rejected him.
Possible solutions include a program that takes Ph.Ds in other disciplines and runs them through a yearlong course in computer science, which gives them a Master’s degree. That qualifies them to teach CS courses, Roberts explained, and sets them up in a department where the prospect for tenure is greater. “We need more of those,” he added. “Universities are in a bind. Market forces will not solve this problem.”
This is interesting. Depending on admissions standards for that program, I could see a ton of people from other disciplines jumping at it. The issue, of course, is that people would have to have a strong background to be competent to teach any kind of CS in a year. And the people with that background probably aren't the people looking for a career change.
Just thinking about myself for example---I'd probably be better qualified than most people with phds in another discipline for such a thing, since I'm moderately quantitative and semi-decent at coding, but I don't think I would be qualified to teach college-level CS on the basis of a year of transition education.
As someone who could be interested in teaching part-time, how much is the workload (in hours per week) one needs to spend when teaching an undergrad/grad course?
Would a good 4-year university accept an adjunct who holds a Master's degree from a top-10 CS program, but not a PhD, to teach an upper-level course (that does correspond to the person's area of specialty)?
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Added: Thank you for all the ideas and esp detailed explanation from tom_b. It sounds like more work than I can allocate time for in the near term. Perhaps in the future.
I thought up an alternative: Join/organize meetups and occasionally give talks or participate in panel discussions about recent/latest research sounds like more fun and less work than teaching in a formal setting. (Posted here in case someone would like to make use of the idea.)
Yes. I have taught introductory courses to undergraduate and graduate students with only a MS in CS. I think you would probably be able to teach upper-level courses if you could demonstrate expertise in the subject matter.
Workload varies. I preferred project-based assignments and tried to give students freedom to choose projects in a personal area of interest to increase their commitment, but it makes grading terribly time-consuming. I found that even with a well-defined rubric, individual projects cost me somewhere between 30-60 minutes of grading time per student.
I have taught using a provided syllabus and created my own. I was vastly happier when I created my own, but it adds time. With a provided syllabus, I probably spent 3-4 hours reviewing material and slides per lecture. That included reading the course textbook materials and working through most of the textbook problems. Maybe double that time when working from the syllabus I created, making new slides, and prepping for in-class programming work.
Grading sucks. If you teach a required course, you will also have to deal with some number (hopefully small) of unmotivated students. One of my courses was an elective course and I found the students .... happier?
And no matter how much I emphasized not waiting to start programming projects (including by having graded check points), a significant number of students wait until the day before projects are due to start. And then flame out.
Don't teach a course as project-only if it is a programming-oriented course. A meaningful number of my students submitted rather well-done programming projects, but were unable to write a for loop on an open-book exam. I also had students who were suspiciously unable to even use a required editor to demo small programs in one-on-one meetings.
Otherwise, teaching was fun and it's definitely worthwhile. All the warnings you hear about adjunct pay being low are also true.
>Would a good 4-year university accept an adjunct who holds a Master's degree from a top-10 CS program, but not a PhD, to teach an upper-level course (that does correspond to their area of specialty)?
They may, but adjuncts are poorly paid, and often have fewer benefits, than faculty members. Many adjuncts often have no real guarantee they'll have a job the following semester/year. They are the first to get axed when there are budget problems.
And frankly, having spent time in academia, they do have a significant ego problem. Adjuncts will be treated poorly by professors. Many lower level courses will have a "director" who is a professor, and he will usually treat the adjunct poorly. Rarely do adjuncts have freedom in what homework is assigned and what the syllabus will be.
> Many adjuncts often have no real guarantee they'll have a job the following semester/year. They are the first to get axed when there are budget problems.
So pretty much like every job I've ever had in the private sector.
>So pretty much like every job I've ever had in the private sector.
Yes, but with a lot higher pay, and often with better insurance, etc. And your work experience in industry has more weight. I don't know how employable a person is if their only experience is teaching.
Just looked up two of them in a nearby university. 12 month salary is $75-80K. No stocks, bonuses, etc. Both have MS degrees.
It is a decent salary if the job is not stressful, and you are in a dual income family. But job security is likely poorer than in industry.
Might not be as prodigious but could look at picking up a part-time bootcamp instructor role. Definitely a lot different than teaching a CS course but might scratch that teaching itch.
Time required is generally around 15-20hrs / week depending on the course.
So like the supposed STEM shortage? Is there really a lack of qualified candidates? Or is there simply a lack of applicants because the pay is too low or the requirements are too stringent?
So much to unpack here. The STEM label itself is extremely misleading. There are opportunities in TE (technology and engineering) but not in SM (science and math -- well unless you get a PhD, but even then maybe not).
So people hear STEM shortage and go major in chemistry or biology and then find out there are few and poorly paid jobs so they have to accept that or get an advanced degree. Some simplification here, and individual exceptions exist of course.
That's a fair point. I've always heard it in the context of "STEM", but I think it was more referring to the technology area (primarily programmers, etc.). And even then I want to say it was about companies wanting cheap developers or specialists. So there's only a shortage if you're unwilling to pay the common rates.
is it possible for something like this to happen: a huge shortage continues, and the demand for CS goes up, so the salaries for CS professors goes up thus making this position enticing once more?
That's basically how the market works, but how much that happens depends on the extent to which universities are actually willing to pay more for things they think/say they don't have enough of.
Universities aren't trying to hire someone who can teach undergraduate CS courses. They're trying to hire someone who can build a lab capable of bringing in a steady stream of seven-figure grants. You need to have a PhD from a top-five (ish) school, with an excellent publication record, and an existing network of collaborators to be competitive for the vast majority of open positions.