Jobs for Historians

Some of you have heard we may be graduating in May and are looking for work. You may ask, "where will you get a job?" The answer is invariably, "wherever we can."

Some don't quite understand just how bad the market is, even for those with doctorates, so I thought I'd share with you these recent images I pirated off the American Historical Association's recent Perspectives on History publication. In figure 1 you can see that the discrepancy between the number of newly minted PhDs and projected job openings is larger than it has been since Richard Nixon was president. Ouch!

Figure 3 (yes, I know that I skipped a figure, and several others as well) shows that in my field--U.S. history--there are about 90 applicants per position. Sadly, that is good news to me since just last week I received a letter from one school thanking me for my application and noting that there were over 480 other applicants.
So if we go with the expectation that there are an average of 90 applicants per job, and if we know I applied for about a dozen jobs, I have about a 10-15% of getting hired someplace. Yippie!

I know, you are thinking, "but Matt, you went to a good school, right?" Well, I didn't show the chart but another one explains that about a third of the applicants come from the top programs, and ASU is only borderline in that group, so I can figure there are about 30 applicants per job who come from a more prestigious university.

So what does all this mean? Move over old lady--I'm the new greeter at Walmart! In a worst case situation I have some part time work already lined up. I'll keep you informed (please don't post any comments encouraging me--I can't bear to read them).