As the newest academic job season enters its most intense phase, I realized it had been many years since I last really analyzed the job market. I made a post back in 2017 documenting the results of my own job search in the 2016–2017 cycle, and well, a lot has changed since then.
Probably the most disturbing trend is the precipitous drop in TT job postings. In 2016, I applied to 25 tenure-track jobs. But last year, only 10 tenure-track jobs were posted, and 2 of those searches ended without any hire.
Below are some visualizations I thought would interest anyone concerned with the theory job market. Note that this data only includes jobs listed under “Theory Only” in the Music Studies Jobs wiki with institutions in the US or Canada.
Data taken from the Music Studies Jobs Wiki.
Jobs available
Who was hired
Data
This table is wide—scroll horizontally to view more data.
| Job Institution | Job Location | Job Title | Job Type | Status | Hiree | Hiree Degree Institution | Hiree Degree | Hiree Concentration | Hiree Degree Year |
|---|
Process
In 2016, I was using data I had compiled myself by hand as I tracked my own job applications, a process I’ve never been keen to repeat out of simple curiosity.
AI tools made this a lot easier this time around. Here’s the process I went through over the past couple days:
- Paste the “Theory Only” section of the Music Studies Jobs wiki into a .txt file
- Ask Claude (AI) to extract the following data from the wiki and reformat it into a .csv file: Job Institution, job location, position title, position type (tenure-track or non-), Hire Status, Hiree, Hiree’s degree-granting institution, hiree’s degree type (PhD/DMA/etc.) and specialization (theory/comp/etc.), hiree’s degree year.
- Ask Claude to use the ChartJS library to build charts showing:
- The proportion of jobs that were tenure-track and non-tenure-track
- The outcomes of the searches (filled, failed, unknown)
- What degree was held by the hiree, broken down by job type (TT/NTT)
- Whether the degree was completed or the hiree was ABD, broken down by job type (TT/NTT)
- The degree-granting institutions, broken down by job type (TT/NTT)
Hopefully, if I want to post this year’s data in the future, I can just do step 2 again and plug in a new .csv file to get next year’s data visualization.
