I am not the academic 1%, so what now?

Yesterday Twitter was talking again about Vitae's Academia's 1 Percent which once again revisited the idea that what few jobs there are with the academic job market are going to PhD graduates who attended the top 16-18 schools.

I've listed them below.



Now these schools are generally R1 schools, so there's a gap with PhD students who are interested in pursuing jobs at Small Liberal Arts Colleges (SLACs), community colleges or alt-ac.

I can tell you my program is not on here. Which according to the article means I should just quit now as I won't be getting a job.

But a conversation on Twitter with someone who looked at their department webpage, and recent hires got me thinking.

There are 46 English faculty members listed on our webpage. This includes all levels of professors, and lecturers, and visiting professors. Here's the breakdown:

• 33 don't list where they went to school.
• Out of those 33 7 were creative writers, 3 were British and Irish literature, 6 were American Literary Studies, 3 were lecturers with no field association, and 5 were Rhet./Comp.
• Out of the ones that DID list their schools, these were the schools:
• UNM (2 people)
• University of Nevada
• Indiana University of Penn
• Notre Dame (recent hire)
• UC-Berkeley
• Purdue (recent hire)
• Standford (2 people)
• University of Florida
• UCLA (2 people)
• University of Utah
• New Mexico State University
• Arizona State University
• UT- El Paso
• Sarah Lawrence
•  University of Maryland
• Emory
• Brandeis
• University of Minnesota
• Georgia State University

The highlighted schools are the only ones that make U.S News and World Report's top list.
The schools apparently necessary to get a job.
And yet...

So this short look did a couple of things- the first is that as with all things, higher ed is never black and white, it's always shades of grey. The second is that there's hope!

Maybe I will be a unicorn. Time will tell.