All across the country, as college graduates in fields such as computer science and economics are being lured into the workplace with attractive salaries, universities are struggling to find faculty and graduate students to continue teaching these highly popular disciplines.
Yet although the shortage has grown severe at the national level -- covered in both The New York Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education -- Dartmouth remains only slightly affected by a lack of teaching faculty, according to Professor of Computer Science Scot Drysdale.
"Over the last few years we've been fairly lucky compared to other schools," said Drysdale, who has coordinated recruitment efforts and chaired the department in the past, adding that the department had gotten a number of its top choices to fill positions.
However, this past year the department was unable to fill one of its positions, although last year it managed to make two successful hires, Drysdale said.
The market for such positions has involved much turnover and hiring over the past 10 years, he explained.
As the job market fluctuates, the availability of positions and the speed at which they are filled likewise varies, said Drysdale. He added that "last ten years were very successful."
Drysdale continued, however, that "you'd have to ask the individual faculty" why they decided to come here.
He also noted a growing trend among faculty to work first before taking teaching positions.
Drysdale estimated that approximately one quarter of the computer science undergraduate faculty have work experience before they come to Dartmouth, either in research labs or in software firms.
The demand for computer science faculty at Dartmouth has grown dramatically from the late 1980s and early 1990s -- when the College graduated only approximately 30 computer science majors each year -- to recent years -- currently the College graduates over 60 computer science majors every year.
Among these computer science majors, only one half enter academic fields, Drysdale added.
Examining graduate students, while the total number of Ph.D. candidates has remained about the same "[fewer] U.S. students are going on in Ph.D.s," and are being replaced more and more by foreign students, Drysdale said.
He attributed this to the fact that industry work offers competitive salaries, often with less work, although he did say that "more students at Dartmouth are interested in teaching than at most places," attributing this to Dartmouth's good teaching reputation.
All of this could be good news for Ph.D.s looking to work in academia, as colleges will respond to the shortage with higher salaries and more benefits. Currently the pay scale at Dartmouth is determined by the administration, not the individual department, and is based on an industry-wide survey.
Drysdale did add that "salaries have been going up faster than inflation. It's not surprising if we continue to have difficulty hiring ... it's a very competitive market."
This same difficulty has plagued other departments -- such as economics -- for years.
As William Fischel, chair of Dartmouth's economics department, explained, most recent hires have chosen to take the business-sector route before returning to academia.
Of the current economics professors, Fischel estimates that one quarter to one third have work experience.
Most of the hires are recent Ph.D.s, Fischel said.
"The route typically is work and then grad school," he added.
The number of Dartmouth economics majors who go onto graduate school "isn't particularly large," he said.
He estimated that maybe two or three eventually get a degree in some economics field, although many use their economics work in their careers.
Fischel said the proportion of students who get advanced degrees hasn't changed all that much in the past 20 years, but "if anything's changed it's that people who do get advanced degrees go out and work first," adding that it is now uncommon for students to go directly to graduate school.
"Most people work or travel for a year," he said.
Fischel did say that competition from the workplace affects salaries in the department, which "does pay academic economists somewhat higher. Not hugely higher, but enough to clear the market."
