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| chart of the Chemistry Faculty Jobs List (search years 2017-2026) data by Chemjobber and Andrew Spaeth, visualization by Andrew Spaeth |
I have always viewed the List as having a dual mandate: to help the tenure-track faculty job seeker in chemistry, as well as to collect data and attempt to deeply understand the nature of the American academic chemistry job market.
Over the years, Andrew Spaeth did a tremendous amount of work for us to understand the patterns of that job market, and allowed us to see that there was a basic pattern - that jobs would begin posting during the summer, would dramatically increase over the fall, and then plateau out in the spring. He also developed a number of very nice data visualizations over the years, the fruit of which is above.
Our first time that we were able to effectively use that data was in the fall 2020-spring 2021 academic search year, where we clearly demonstrated that the market was effectively down by 40% from the previous average. For the jobseeker, this was a statistical confirmation of something that must have been experienced every day - that there were simply fewer jobs available due to circumstances entirely outside of their control.
I tried to keep people abreast of these developments by issuing somewhat monthly "weather reports", where I would track the number of jobs on the List as a means of showing how the market was doing compared to previous years. Sadly, for this current cycle and the past one, the weather is bad.
We now know that the fall 2025-spring 2026 search year (hiring professors to start fall 2026) was the worst job market since the 2020-21 search year. Most specifically, the 25-26 search year had 185 job openings at PhD-granting institutions, which is 104 positions off the average of 289 positions from search years 2022-2025.
Nothing else changed other than the presidential administration and its approach to both higher education funding and the funding agencies themselves. The cruelties inflicted on the NSF and the NIH will be with us for decades to come. There are so many long-term impacts - but the short-term ones are now visible.
I think it's important to spend some time on the direct human costs of the situation. Those 104 missing positions meant 104 additional postdocs that had to spend another year in the cycle, deciding between trying for yet another year, keeping themselves and their families in limbo, thinking about taking a position in industry or perhaps finding refuge at another university in another country. This is so sad and so unnecessary.
It also means 104 laboratories that were not established, 104 new scientific directions that were likely not tried, hundreds of grant applications that were not filed. We will never know the scientific frontiers that were never pushed back because of these 104 missing positions, the materials not made, the cures not developed.
This is a terrible self-inflicted wound on American academia and ultimately our country and it is one of the most grievous long-term mistakes that this president has made and the Congress has allowed to happen. I hope that it will be reversed soon before the bulk of the damage is made permanent.
