Job market
I just got back from attending MathFest 2011 in Lexington, KY, and I feel like this was my most successful trip yet to an MAA meeting. I’ve heard other people talk about going to MAA meetings and getting ideas for projects or Math Club talks, but I think this was the first time I experienced that myself. I especially liked the talks I saw on the Ontario tic-tac-toe lottery game, on epidemiology and zombie plagues, and on an analogue in characteristic 3 of Cardano’s formula for the roots of a cubic polynomial.
But MathFest also got me thinking about my upcoming job search, perhaps because one of my friends let me know his department will be hiring in Algebra this year. And I started to wonder how much a tenure-track job in mathematics, or in any academic field, for that matter, is actually worth. I mean, could you determine an actual dollar value for the worth of a a tenure-track academic position?
Perhaps I’ve been listening to too much Planet Money, Marketplace, and other economics reporting on public radio, or perhaps I’m taking the name ‘job market’ too seriously, but it seems to me that the value of a tenure-track job is whatever an individual would be willing to pay today in order to secure such a position. If you don’t think that fresh and recent PhDs wouldn’t fork over a chunk of change for the opportunity to secure a tenure-track job, then you haven’t been through the academic job application process. (I was going to append the word ‘lately’ to the end of that sentence, but then decided my point was valid without it.)
DISCLAIMER: I am not offering any up-front cash payments in return for a tenure-track job. I just think this is an interesting question.
Now, if I were going to sit down and try to figure out the value of a particular tenure-track position, I suppose I might take a cue from the second semester Applied Calculus course I taught at UVA. I could think of the job as an income stream, and then try to compute the present value of that income stream. Call the present value PV. Perhaps this is the value of the tenure-track position? If you pay the potential employer PV dollars, then they’ll break even over the course of your employment. Financially, it’s a win-win for them. On the other hand, PV is probably quite large, more than a fresh or recent PhD might have on hand. But perhaps a bank would make you a loan so you could secure the tenure-track position. Whatever you ended up paying for the job, you’d want to make sure that the difference between your income and the debt you incur to get the job is still great enough that you have enough money to buy groceries, pay rent, and generally make a living. So perhaps no one in their right mind would pay as much as PV.
Tags: job search
You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.
