Getting a tenure-track faculty position is often the primary goal for doctoral students, but the odds of landing one are notoriously low. A recent analysis of the political science job market suggests that while the prestige of a candidate’s university is linked to the type of academic institution they end up at, it does not actually predict whether they will secure a professorship. The research, published in PS: Political Science & Politics, indicates that having a strong publication record, studying a high-demand field, and being a female or an underrepresented minority candidate are stronger predictors of finding a tenure-track academic job.
A tenure-track professorship is a university teaching and research position that can eventually lead to a permanent, lifelong appointment. In many academic fields, the competition for these roles is intense, with far more new graduates than available openings.
Past research analyzing this system has pointed to a rigid prestige hierarchy. For instance, a 2022 study of faculty hiring across the United States found that a small minority of elite universities supply the vast majority of professors. Similarly, a 2025 analysis of political science departments indicated that the top 20 percent of programs produced 75 percent of tenure-track faculty at U.S. doctoral departments, while the bottom half produced less than 5 percent.
These past studies tend to imply that graduating from a top-tier university is the only reliable way to get a job in academia. But that approach relies on looking backward at the people who already secured positions at major research universities. This method can introduce bias.
First, it ignores the fact that elite universities often have much larger graduate programs, meaning they naturally produce more job applicants. Second, it overlooks professorships at the thousands of colleges and universities that only offer bachelor’s or master’s degrees. About 17,000 people teach political science in the United States, but only about 3,000 work at doctoral departments, meaning studies that look only at those departments miss more than 80 percent of faculty jobs.
“Existing work has claimed that where one earns the PhD is critical to whether they find a professor job, and some even suggested closing more than half of PhD programs,” Scott W. Desposato, the Simón Bolívar Chair of Latin American Studies and a professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, told PsyPost.
“But this body of work assesses placements by looking at professors at PhD-granting programs. Thus, they don’t control for the size of the PhD program (bigger programs should have more placements, even if their training is the same as smaller programs) and they ignore the many professor jobs at small liberal arts colleges, community colleges, and other universities that don’t have phD programs.”
“As I write in the paper, it’s like studying fitness by seeing which country won the most medals in the Olympics and concluding that the best way to be healthy is to move to that country,” Desposato continued. “That would be a crazy way to study fitness, and it’s the wrong way to study the academic labor market.”
“Faculty are full of advice about what students should do to succeed on the job market,” he said. “But their recommendations are based on anecdotal observations. We try to be systematic and scientific in our research – so why wouldn’t we want some real evidence from which to make recommendations to our PhD students?”
To get a more accurate picture of how hiring works, Desposato identified a group of active job seekers and checked on their outcomes a year later. The researcher collected data on 413 political science candidates who were actively on the academic job market during the 2023 to 2024 hiring cycle. The candidates were identified from the “Job Market Candidate” pages on various university websites in the fall of 2023. The sample only included candidates who were either finalizing their dissertations or had recently graduated, excluding anyone who already held a tenure-track job or had graduated before 2023.
Using the candidates’ websites and resumes, the researcher recorded a variety of details. These included the rank of their university, their specific field of study, their teaching experience, any awards they had won, and their publication record. To assess publications, the study tracked both the number of articles and the prestige of the journals in which they were published.
The researcher also coded the candidates’ perceived gender and underrepresented minority (URM) status based on names, pronouns, identity-specific awards, personal statements, and appearance. Candidates perceived as Black, Latino, or Native American were classified as URM, a measure meant to approximate how hiring committees might see them.
In the fall of 2024, the researcher checked back to see what types of jobs the candidates had secured. By that time, about 26 percent of the candidates had accepted tenure-track professorships. Surprisingly, the prestige of the university where a candidate earned their degree had virtually no bearing on whether they secured one of these positions.
Placement rates showed no consistent pattern by rank: the top 10 departments placed 25 percent of their candidates, while departments ranked 71st or lower placed 35 percent. The results suggest that graduating from an elite institution does not guarantee a job, nor does graduating from a lower-ranked program automatically disqualify a candidate. However, lower-ranked programs were thinly represented in the data, as only 13 of the 60 lower-ranked departments listed candidates online. The lowest-ranked group’s 35 percent placement rate largely reflected the University of Missouri, which placed nine of its 16 candidates; the rest of that group placed just five of 24 candidates.
While institutional rank did not predict if a candidate got a job, it did predict what kind of job they got. Candidates from top-ranked programs were much more likely to secure postdoctoral fellowships, which are temporary research positions that often serve as stepping stones to tenure-track jobs. When elite candidates did land tenure-track roles, they mostly went to universities that also grant doctoral degrees. By contrast, candidates from lower-ranked programs were more likely to find tenure-track positions at smaller colleges and universities that do not have doctoral programs, or they took temporary teaching positions.
More than 70 percent of candidates held some kind of academic job a year later. Among candidates who were already postdoctoral fellows when the study began, 30 percent landed tenure-track jobs, compared with 15 percent of those working as visiting lecturers.
Publishing was among the strongest predictors of landing a tenure-track job. Candidates without any published research had a placement rate of just 16 percent, compared with 32 percent for those with one to three publications. In statistical models, the researcher compared hypothetical candidates to a baseline: a non-minority man studying American politics at the 30th-ranked department who had not yet finished his degree and had no publications. That baseline candidate had an estimated 27 percent probability of landing a professorship.
If that same candidate had co-authored an article in the American Political Science Review, a top journal, the probability rose to 41 percent. A solo-authored article in that journal was associated with a probability of roughly 52 percent, nearly double the baseline, though this estimate was less statistically certain. Only about 5 percent of candidates had published in a top journal at all. Teaching experience, on the other hand, did not seem to help: candidates with seven or more teaching roles had a lower placement rate of 18 percent.
The candidate’s field of study and demographic identity were also linked to their job market outcomes. Applicants specializing in American politics were the most successful, with nearly 40 percent finding a tenure-track position, compared with 20 to 24 percent in other fields. That year, there were about as many job listings in American politics (118) as American politics candidates (118), whereas comparative politics had 189 candidates for 71 listings.
When looking at demographics, the study found no evidence that female or URM candidates faced hiring disadvantages. In fact, these identities were associated with higher placement rates. The raw placement rates for tenure-track jobs were 19 percent for non-minority men, 32 percent for non-minority women, 36 percent for URM women, and 39 percent for URM men. In the researcher’s statistical models, a baseline non-minority male candidate had a 27 percent probability of securing a tenure-track job.
By comparison, a URM male candidate had a 47 percent probability, and female candidates sat at roughly 44 percent. However, this advantage only appeared for positions at doctoral universities; for jobs at colleges without doctoral programs, gender and minority status were not significantly linked to placement. These findings are in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2024, which found that women applying for tenure-track faculty positions in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines experienced hiring equality or advantages compared to men with matching qualifications. Desposato’s own analysis of the American Political Science Association’s placement survey data from 2017 to 2025 found the same advantages for female, minority, and American politics candidates.
“The effect sizes for URM/female were particularly large,” Desposato pointed out. “Members of those identities had a much higher placement rate than white/Asian males.”
“The most striking finding was that departmental rank had so little effect on placements, whereas both female gender and minority status had such large effects compared to the other predictors,” Artur Nilsson, a professor of personality psychology at the University of Bergen who was not involved in the study, told PsyPost. “That publications and research topics matter too is not surprising.”
There are a few things to keep in mind when interpreting these findings. The study provides an observational snapshot of a single hiring cycle, meaning it cannot demonstrate that specific factors directly caused people to be hired. For example, a strong publication record might improve a candidate’s chances by impressing a search committee, or it might simply be a byproduct of writing a very good dissertation, which the committee also recognizes.
The models accounted for broad subfields, such as American or comparative politics, but not for narrower research specialties that might have been in higher demand. “These are observational data with tons of selection issues,” the researcher explained. “For example, why are URM candidates placed at double the rate of non-URM males? This might simply be that those candidates were studying more popular fields.”
“Or, it may be that non-URM candidates have better alternatives to academia and are leaving for those positions,” he continued. “Or, it may be that there is discrimination based on identity. It could be all of these! This is just one year’s worth of data, from a unique moment of racial reckoning, but it deserves some consideration.”
There are also many unmeasured variables that influence hiring decisions, such as a candidate’s interview skills, the strength of their recommendation letters, and the overall quality of their research. Additionally, the data collection relied on which candidates academic departments chose to list on their public websites. This means some job seekers were likely missed, especially those from programs outside the United States or those whose departments do not maintain such directories.
It is also unclear whether the hiring trends apply to other countries or disciplines. “The main caveat is that these findings represent a specific job market at a particular point in time, subject to the idiosyncrasies of the U.S. system,” Nilsson said. “Their generalizability is difficult to estimate.”
Because the academic job search often takes several years, tracking outcomes after a single year may not capture the full trajectory of a candidate’s career. Looking ahead, Desposato hopes to apply the same approach to other fields and follow candidates for several years. He noted that upcoming experimental studies on hiring by other scholars will also help address these limitations.
He argued that graduate programs should release hard numbers on how their students fare, since many advertise an “excellent placement record” to prospective students without backing it up. “It’s not clear what ‘excellent placement record’ can mean when 75% of candidates did not have professor jobs after a year on the job market,” he added. “We owe it to our PhD students and prospective students to be honest about the job market and what they are signing up for when they start a PhD program, and we should make sure there are non-academic pathways for our PhD students.”
“This is especially true given demographic change,” Desposato concluded. “Many small colleges are going to close as enrollments decline. Most of those colleges offer political science or government as a major, and those professor jobs just won’t exist anymore. I expect a difficult academic job market for PhD candidates for the foreseeable future.”
The study, “Where You Go, What You Do, Who You Are: Predictors of Political Science Job-Market Outcomes, 2023–2024,” was authored by Scott W. Desposato.