Yes, There Are Jobs for Professors – Business Professors

As I travel around the country to encourage young business professionals and students to consider becoming a college professor of business, I hear a frequent refrain. It goes something like this:

“Life as a professor would be an awesome career choice, except for one thing.”

“And what is that?” I ask, knowing full well what will come next 90 percent of the time.

The person will say: “Everyone knows that college professors can’t find jobs, and they don’t make money if they do.”

Quickly I tell them – and I’m here to tell you – “Well, everyone is wrong.”

In fact if you thought this too, you couldn’t be wronger.

I can’t speak for other disciplines, but after three decades interacting professionally with business schools, and encouraging more than 1,000 individuals to become business professors, I do know this:

New professors of business do get jobs. And they are well-paying jobs, with salaries that start in the low six figures or more, and move up from there.

Business is unlike most other academic disciplines. For a variety of reasons, especially right now, the job market for new professors is very promising.

Of those 1,000 professors I mentioned, 46 of them came on the job market last year in search of full-time tenure-track professor positions. Every one of them was hired by a university. All were underrepresented minorities who participate in our program, The PhD Project – and while I like to think our people are the brightest and the best prepared to succeed, I have no reason to believe that non-participants in our program are struggling to find employment.

Several factors help account for this situation. They include:

• An abundance of openings due to retirements
• A seriously out-of-balance supply and demand situation
• Competition for available talent from overseas business schools
• Requirements for accredited colleges to hire doctorally qualified faculty.

 Chief among the factors is a faculty shortage in the business disciplines, which include accounting, finance, information systems, management and marketing. The demographics worked out so that many Baby Boomer era college graduates chose to enter academia when they were young, and they are now retiring. A good number of them delayed their retirement plans after 2008, when the stock market and their 403(b) portfolios tanked. Those portfolios have now come back, and retirement-age faculty are cashing them in.

Meanwhile, new business schools have opened all over the world in droves over the last few decades. At the same time, there has not been a significant increase in the one supply source of new professors – graduates of university Ph.D. programs in the business disciplines. Most of those graduates come from U.S. universities, and they are helping to populate the global ranks of business professors – meaning the supply for faculty positions in the U.S. is falling far behind the demand.

In the discipline where I am most familiar, accounting, the shortage of doctoral students to earn their Ph.D is so severe that our professional association, the AICPA, has run a program for several years to provide incentives and support for doctoral students.

While it is true that colleges can fill some of their faculty spots by hiring part time adjuncts, often successful practitioners in the business world, there are limits to this: in order to maintain their accreditation, business schools must have a certain amount of Ph.Ds on their faculty. Especially at the universities where research is a priority, hiring doctorally-qualified professors who will go on to seek tenure is a must.

So the faculty shortage isn’t going away any time soon, and the job market will remain vibrant. This is especially so for underrepresented minorities: many colleges and universities, responding to student demands for more attention to be paid to the concerns of minority students, are launching efforts to diversify their faculties. Some of these colleges have committed millions of dollars to such programs.

It is not uncommon among our PhD Project graduates to set very specific standards for the setting in which they aim to find employment: geographic location, type and size of school, specialization in a certain area, etc. – and then find the job they want.

And if that isn’t enough, there are the starting salaries: $125,000, $150,000, $200,000, even $250,000. It’s a good life, and it only gets better: you rarely read about a university going out of business, or relocating to another country, or merging with another institution, do you?

Anyone who is contemplating a career switch to become a professor, but has heard somewhere that jobs are scarce in academia, should know these facts. It’s a good time to make a good career choice.