The Economic Argument for Tenure

Over the past twenty years, the percentage of exceptionally talented undergraduate students who decide to earn a Ph.D. and enter academia has declined drastically. Increasingly fewer top students feel there is much incentive to become professors. Consider what becoming one requires:

• After graduating from college, it usually takes from seven to ten additional years to earn a Ph.D. By contrast a law or a business degree only takes two or three years.

• During this time graduate students earn from $9,000 to $15,000 a year when they could be earning at least $25,000 to $30,000 dollars in the business world. This usually works out to over $100,000 in lost potential income by the time they earn their degree.

• When you consider that many of these students could have entered professions like law or medicine, or high-level jobs in engineering or science, the amount of money they could have earned elsewhere is much higher.

• Once a Ph.D. is completed, there is not any guarantee of a job. The market for Ph.D.s can change drastically over the seven to ten years it takes to get a degree. The year I was hired by Southern Oregon there were over 500 PhDs competing for the 45 or so jobs in my general field of 19th Century US Literature. [note that in a previous version of this, I had this figure wrong].

• Once the lucky few professors who land a tenure track job are hired, they must wait another five to seven years before finding out if they have the job.

If educational organizations hope to retain a market share of our most talented individuals, they have to offer them incentives above and beyond employments that require less time to prepare for, less of a delay before earning a living wage, and pay much more money. Tenure is one of those incentives. The alternative is mediocre graduate students, mediocre professors, and poorly-trained, mediocre employees.

 Warren Hedges, English Dept., Southern Oregon University, 9/96