I want to be a university teacher

There is a piece in the latest number of NYRB about the dire state of the teaching profession in US universities.

Undergraduate numbers

Teacher numbers

The story seems to be that there has been a long squeeze on unit costs - that is to say costs per student - and this has translated (as in other sectors) into higher salaries and standing for senior staff and lower salaries and standing for junior staff, with well over half the latter being on some kind of zero hours contract, scrabbling around to make ends meet.

At the same time, the number of people who want to make careers in universities - either in teaching or research - hugely exceeds the number of jobs available. In my day, the sector was growing rapidly and there were plenty of jobs available for able people who wanted them - but this no longer seems to be true in the US, with recent PhD's from fancy universities chasing jobs all over the country. A problem which particularly afflicts the humanities. I was slightly irritated by the tone of entitlement in this story, as if people with recent PhD's were somehow entitled to comfortable jobs in universities, perhaps after the fashion of the comfortable lives of the fellows of the colleges of Oxbridge, taking tea in their fellows' gardens during long summer afternoons.

While the idea that university is a great leveller up doesn't seem to work either. Posh kids go to fancy universities, while bog-standard kids go to bog-standard universities. Nearly everybody stays in the same social class in which they arrived in the world.

And as an aside, the UK is held up as an example of how things can be even worse, with our obsession with testing and measuring everything in sight. And if it doesn't turn a profit, dump it.

I thought to turn up some statistics to see what support there was there, and in a brief look at the admirable reference 1, I did not find much. Numbers of undergraduates appears to have peaked around 2010, while numbers of faculty have continued to rise, with the proportion of part-timers actually falling. So while the prospects of a university post for someone with a postgraduate degree in Sanskrit Studies probably are dire, maybe we should take the rest of the story with a pinch of salt, pending deeper digger at reference 1.

PS: I think the term 'enrollment' means total student numbers. That is to say, not just the number who enrolled for the first time in the year in question.

Reference 1: https://nces.ed.gov/. The national centre for education statistics.