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Comment by deong | Hacker News Reader

As has been pointed out before, statistics like these "for every five open faculty positions, only one is filled" are incredibly misleading. The reason only one in five is filled is not because there's a shortage of qualified teachers. It's because the thousand faculty searches going on at any one time are only interested in competing for the same hundred people.

Universities aren't trying to hire someone who can teach undergraduate CS courses. They're trying to hire someone who can build a lab capable of bringing in a steady stream of seven-figure grants. You need to have a PhD from a top-five (ish) school, with an excellent publication record, and an existing network of collaborators to be competitive for the vast majority of open positions.

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They should also publish the statistics for number of PhDs looking for a job per faculty position open. That would tell the full story.

I haven't been on a search committee in years, but in the mid 2000s, I think 3-500 was about the norm for a mid-range state school. Not all those people were qualified, but I think you can assume you'll have somewhere on the order of 2-300 qualified applicants for most jobs.

As has been pointed out before, statistics like these "for every five open faculty positions, only one is filled" are incredibly misleading.

Also, still trying to dig up the last article I read about this, but didn't that figure lump pretty much all faculty positions together? I could definitely believe there are lots of contingent faculty positions going unfilled, but the numbers probably look quite different for someone who's not interested in part-time positions, teaching-only positions, soft-money positions, etc.

anecdata from the current hiring season is that CS hiring at less prestigious institutions has become qualitatively different from that in other fields. one faculty described receiving a total of four applications from actual CS PhDs (not just top five) [0].

even at stanford, perhaps. i was astonished to see that a stanford junior is the listed instructor for EE 364A (a PhD level course in convex optimization, aka CS 334).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16482866

Which is why it just makes more sense to hire Indian CS students. American univs are never going to match the volumes the Indian system already produces.

They don't want good teachers, they want teachers who are famous and popular in the US academic community. That was GP's whole point.

And that's not going to change is my point.

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