Cross-posted at PhDinHistory:

There are now only about half a dozen other disciplines in the academy that pay their faculty less then what history faculty are paid. The pay gap for history faculty has been widening since at least the late 1990s. Back then tenured history faculty earned only 2 to 3 percent less than the average tenured faculty in all other disciplines. As of this school year, tenured history faculty earn about 9 to 10 percent less then the average for all tenured faculty in the academy. This means that full professors of history are earning, on average, around $7,000 less per year than the average for full professors in all other disciplines. Assistant professors of history earn 12 percent less than their colleagues in other disciplines. Likewise, the pay disparity for history instructors is about 8 percent.



For more details, see the below chart:

The latest data for faculty salaries can be found here. You can read about my methodology for these calculations and comparisons here. Hat tip.

I have written before about this trend in history faculty salaries. Robert B. Townsend is about the only other person I know who has followed this issue. Why does it seem like nobody else in our profession is talking about this unmistakable downward trend in salaries? Do we really believe that we are powerless to change this situation? Why haven't the major historical associations appointed committees to study this issue? What I fear most is that some of us have started believing that history is somehow less valuable than other disciplines in the academy.

Labels: PhDinHistory

Cross-posted at PhDinHistory:

I think history had a golden age and Richard White disagrees. It guess it all depends on which criteria we use when making this determination. I happen to think historians should be evaluated on how well they connect with the public.



Sam Tanenhaus got us thinking about this issue about a year ago with his claim in the New York Times that, after the death of Arthur Schlesinger, there was not a single "great public historian" left in America. Probably the most direct response to Tanenhaus came from Barbara Weinstein, the president of the AHA, in an essay titled "The Case of the Incredible Shrinking Historians?"

I tried to read the presidential responses from White and Weinstein with an open mind. I think they both make some really great points about how historical scholarship has become a lot more sophisticated over the last several decades. But I found myself wondering if I could trust their claims about history's relationship with the public. I kind of doubt they could have been elected presidents of major historical associations if they had spent most of their career trying to write for the public rather than for other historians.

So I did some more checking. I used WorldCat to determine what proportion of history books published annually by university presses are purchased by at least a thousand libraries. I then combined that data with some stats on bachelors degrees in history that I found in an article by Robert B. Townsend and in the Digest of Education Statistics.

As I combined these two data sets into a chart, I multiplied the proportions for academic history books by three so that it would vertically line up better with the line for degrees. I then shifted the data for history bachelors degrees back by four years, so that it would more accurately represent when the students who received bachelors degrees in history first decided to major in history. The results appear in the below chart.


I was somewhat surprised by the degree of correlation between the lines for history books and history degrees. Apparently there is a relationship between these two things. When academic history books sell well, public interest in history increases, and more students decide to major in history. When the sales of academic history books slump, the public and students become interested in other things. It looks to me like this is evidence that the golden age in history lasted from the early 1950s through the early 1970s.

There could have been another factor at work. Was there something about the activism and movements of the Sixties that made people at the time feel like they were witnessing the unfolding of history? And is that why the public became relatively interested in academic history books at the time?

Then again, the labor market could be the explanation. Maybe a bunch of students got interested in history during the 1960s, a considerable number of them decided to pursue doctorates, and the result was a large surplus of history PhDs on the job market during the 1970s. Maybe they saw the writing on the wall and decided that, in order to be competitive on the job market, they had to write dissertations that were more likely to impress historians and less likely to become books that the public would want to buy. Could this be why the golden age of history ended in the early 1970s?

What do the rest of you think? What did you find useful in the essays by White and Weinstein? Do you share their confidence about the state of history? Do you think history passed through a golden age? Do we need to recapture the interest of the public and of our students? How concerned are you about the apparent nosedive in the sales of academic history books over the last few years?

Labels: books, degrees, PhDinHistory, public, sales, students

Cross-posted at PhDinHistory.

The last time I wrote about this topic, and pointed out that women who had recently earned a bachelors in history were now making more money than their male counterparts, I received the following anonymous comment:

This figure about post-BA salaries is very interesting, since this is NOT the case for women earning PhDs in history, who still make less than their male colleagues in academic jobs. Moreover, as the number of women getting PhDs in history has increased, average salaries for historians in the academy have declined relative to other social science fields (although still higher than other humanities fields). There also seems to be relationship between the sex balance among undergraduate students and prestige/salary levels for faculty who teach them. Basically, the more female students in a field, the lower paid the faculty in that field, both men and women (although the women still earn less than the men).

The author is mistaken about male and female junior faculty in history. According to my analysis of data from the National Study of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF), the base salary of female assistant professors of history exceeded that for male assistant professors by nearly $700 in 2003.

The author is right about the decline of history salaries in relation to other fields. Robert B. Townsend at the AHA and I have both written about this.

I don't buy the argument that the feminization of history has hurt faculty salaries in history. Below you will find a chart I put together with data from the NSOPF, the Digest of Education Statistics, and the IPEDS Dataset Cutting Tool. The chart shows that, over the last two decades, the ups and downs in history faculty salaries, as a percentage of the average salary for all fields, has not really followed the gradual decline in the percentage of history faculty and undergraduate history majors who are men.


I have also figured out a few more reasons that may help us to recruit women into our undergraduate programs. This data comes from IPEDS and the Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study, as I explained in a previous post.

How likely are college graduates to be employed full-time one year after receiving their bachelors degree? Here are the averages for all majors: men (80.4%), women (73.7%), whites (77.6%), and minorities (73.6%). History is one of just a small handful of fields in the academy where this situation is reversed for both women and minorities. In fact, among history majors, women are 2.2% more likely than men and minorities are 2.7% more likely than whites to be employed full-time one year after graduation.

Men with college degrees almost always report more satisfaction with their jobs than their female counterparts. However, there are a few majors in college that lead to jobs where women report higher satisfaction than the men who graduated in the same field. It turns out that women who majored in history reported being 5% more satisfied with their jobs than men who had graduated with the same degree.

Childcare is another area where women who majored in history reap benefits. The average for all fields is that about 17 percent of recent female college graduates report having a Childcare facility or subsidy made available to them through their work. Among women who recently earned a bachelor degree in history, 23 percent--nearly one in every four--say their employer provides a Childcare facility or subsidy. No other major within the social sciences or humanities delivers better childcare benefits for its recent female graduates.

Let me know what you think about these selling points. And feel free to comment if you history is worse off with more female faculty and majors.

Labels: diversity, PhDinHistory, rankings, Salaries, undergraduate, women

As I have compared job ad listings on H-Net and in Perspectives, I find that that in recent years there has been about 1.6 academic history job ads on H-Net for every one that appears in Perspectives. So if there were about 1,030 academic history job ads listed in Perspectives in 2006 and 2007, then there was almost 1,850 job ads listed on H-Net during those years. This got me wondering what proportion of these job searches conduct interviews at the AHA convention. The Chronicle has a new article that reports interviews for about 260 jobs took place in the AHA Job Register Rooms earlier this month. This means that only a fourth of the jobs listed in Perspectives, and only about 14 percent of the jobs listed on H-Net, resulted in interviews at the AHA convention.

You might think these numbers are abysmal, but they are actually an improvement over recent years. For instance, in 2000, there were 193 searches coordinated through the Job Register during the AHA convention. During that same year, there were about 900 academic history job ads in Perspectives. That works out to a one in five ratio, which is actually slightly worse than what happened at the 2008 convention. However, I will point out that the 2007 convention included interviews for 283 out of the 1,030 job ads listed in Perspectives, which is a slightly higher percentage than in 2008.

So what do you think? Do these stats show that history departments have started moving away from using the AHA convention for their interviews? Or are we witnessing a gradual increase in the proportion of job searches which include interviews at the AHA convention? Is the interview process at the AHA convention in need of major reforms? Or are things getting better there? Before you answer these questions, you might want to take a look at the debates that have erupted over at the Chronicle of Higher Education web site.

Labels: AHA, interviews, job market, PhDinHistory

Have you ever wondered about the differences between men and women who earn PhDs in history? Here is a quick summary of the latest data:

There are still 3 men for every 2 women.

Men are overrepresented in African and Asian history.

Women are slightly less likely to be U.S. citizens.

Men are more likely to be married.

Only a little more than half of the women majored in history as undergraduates.

Women were more likely to skip the master's degree and proceed straight to the doctorate.

Women have a slight advantage on the job market.

Men are more likely to obtain government jobs.

Women are more likely to obtain jobs at nonprofits.

Men are slightly older, and have spent more time in coursework, when they receive their doctorate.

For more details, take a look at the below table, which contains new data from the Survey of Earned Doctorates, available at the National Opinion Research Center web site.

Labels: age, bachelor's, citizenship, employment, gender, marital status, master's, PhDinHistory, phds, subfields, women

This post is written in response to the recent article "Confronting a Crisis in the Historical Profession" by George J. Sanchez. Below you will find a list (that you can see more closely when you click on it) of history doctoral programs. These are PhD programs in history that are currently active and that awarded at least twelve doctorates between 1973 and 2005. The data comes from the Survey of Earned Doctorates. These 45 History Doctoral Programs represent 27.1 percent of the 166 current programs in the United States. They granted about 13 percent of the total number of PhDs awarded by history doctoral programs between 1973 and 2005. I hope individuals at these institutions will take the necessary steps to diversify the demographics of their doctoral programs and to recruit more minority students into these programs.

Labels: diversity, doctoral programs, Minorities, PhDinHistory

Cross-posted at PhDinHistory.

Between 1974 and 2005, according to the Survey of Earned Doctorates, 3.11 percent of all history PhDs went to Chicano/Latinos. During that time period, their annual share started out at a low of 0.87 percent in 1974 and then peaked at 5.26 percent in 2001. Between 2002 and 2005, the average was that Chicano/Latinos earned 4.5 percent of the history PhDs. These partial gains were spread quite unevenly from one university to the next.

The entries in the below table are sorted first by the percentage of history PhDs awarded to Chicano/Latinos at a particular school, from 1974 to 2005. The universities that awarded zero percent of their history PhDs to Chicano/Latinos between 1974 and 2005 are sorted by the total number of history PhDs they awarded during this time period. The first forty-seven universities listed in the left column, through University of Massachusetts at Amherst, were above average. The remaining one hundred and twenty universities, starting with University of Illinois at Chicago, were below average in the percentage of history PhDs they have awarded to Chicano/Latinos.

These figures should be read with some caution, since a small percentage of these doctorates were probably self-reported as history PhDs, when in fact they were not awarded by a history department.

For me, this data raises several questions: Why has the percentage of history PhDs being earned by Chicano/Latinos fallen since 2001? What is the ideal percentage? Are Chicano/Latino graduate students in history avoiding certain schools and favoring others? What are the history departments in this list doing to recruit Chicano/Latino graduate students? What are they doing that repels Chicano/Latino graduate students? How much of a correlation is there between history departments with faculty who are either Chicano/Latino and/or who specialize Chicano/Latino history and the percentage of history PhDs they award to Chicano/Latino graduate students?

Labels: diversity, Minorities, PhDinHistory, Programs