As we know, the “Academic Pipeline” is a Myth. However, there is one man, who helped to inspire an entire generation of academics to believe in the pipeline. This man was William G. Bown, former president of the Mellon Foundation (1988-2006), and Princeton University (1972-1988). Incidentally, Bowen also founded the database JSTOR in 1994. Bowen had a charmed climb of the academic ladder and used his specialty of economics to make faulty ‘predictions’ of the academic job market.
Millennials Enter College
Millennials (born from 1981-1996) are the offspring of a very large generation in American history, The Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964). Millennials are the so-called “Echo Boom” of this extremely influential generation which weathered major cultural shifts and largely benefitted from relatively low college tuition and a major post-war expansion of college options. Indeed, I am a Millennial and my parents are Boomers, and us Millennials were often raised with the expectation of obtaining a bachelor’s degree—about 39% of American Millennials have a 4-year degree compared to 25% of Boomers.
Thus, the eldest Millennials began entering college in the late 1990s and steadily continued through the 2010s. As a result, there were major increases in American undergraduate enrollment (12.2 million in 1995 to 18.1 million in 2011). By the late 1980s and early 1990s, many college administrators were preparing for this expected ‘surge”. This initially caused excitement among faculty members and theorists about the “Academic Job Market” who predicted that there would be a high demand for newly-minted Ph.D. students in newly created tenure-stream jobs (Patel 2018). Most notably, was the 1989 “Bowen report” entitled Prospects for Faculty in the Arts and Sciences: A Study of Factors affecting Demand and Supply 1987-2012, which predicted an increase in academic jobs in the 1990s, partly due to graduate students “choosing” to leave academia in droves (Bousquet 2008).
Undergraduate and graduate school enrollment soared at U.S. colleges and universities in the ‘90s. Millennials entered college in the late 1990s and continued to the 2010s.
The Bowen report was lauded by many in academia. At the time of publication, the Bowen report received little public pushback except from chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Lynne Cheney (yes Dick Cheney’s wife) who publicly criticized the report in a 1989 editorial in The New York Times entitled “The Phantom Ph.D. Gap”. In this editorial, Cheney argues that they only examine the most recent Ph.D. graduates and not the “39,000 holders of doctorates who are working outside the academy as well as thousands more who now work at colleges and universities part-time” (Cheney 1989, para 7). She also criticized the limited data used for their projections of these “increases”.
Notably, a 1992 letter to the editor to the Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association also criticizes this report and general optimism by stating that “But those who frequent the placement area of APA conventions find these rosy projections difficult to believe” (Hoekema 1992, p4). The writer notes that job positions in philosophy have continued to decline, departments are facing cutbacks and budget crunches due to reduced income from endowment and state funds, resulting in more temporary appointments. Hoekema states that “My colleagues at the Modern Language association, the American Historical Association, and other disciplinary associations confirm that this pattern holds true across many disciplines” (Hoekema 1992, p 4).
Who Was Bowen?
Of course, the Bowen report could not have been more wrong in its prediction of academia’s future. Bowen, himself, however, had a rather quick and stellar rise up the academic ladder.
Born in 1933, William Bowen earned a Ph.D. in economics from Princeton in 1958 and was hired that year as assistant professor by the same university (Roberts 2016), thereby joining “the largest faculty generation in the history of higher education” (Cassuto 2016, para. 11). He was promoted to full professor in 1965, serving as director of graduate studies at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton from 1964-1966 (Roberts 2016). Bowen became provost and then President of Princeton University, and in 1988 became the President of the Mellon Foundation, an important benefactor for higher education (Cassuto 2016, para. 15). Bowen, himself, had quickly and with little “gap years” spent adjuncting or fruitlessly on the job market, ascended the academic ladder along the lines of assistant and full professor and then through administration.
William G. Bowen (1933–2016), president of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (1988-2006), and Princeton University (1972-1988). Bowen also founded JSTOR.
A Google Scholar search of Bowen’s publications reveals his life-long interest in applying economic principles to higher education, with such scintillating topics as alumni giving and football wins (Winning and Giving: Football Results and Alumni Giving at Selective Private Colleges and Universities). He notably co-authored a 1999 paper entitled “The Choice of Major: The Changing and Unchanging Gender Gap”, another study that downplays sexism as a cause for the gender gaps we see in STEM majors. He also co-authored a 1998 book entitled “The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions by William G. Bowen, Derek Bok” which Andrew Hacker reviewed in The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. Hacker’s review points out that the book downplayed the need for affirmative action (“The authors also emphasize that the vast majority of colleges and universities take almost all their applicants, so race-based preferences only figure in a relatively small number of schools. As most students are not affected by affirmative action, they say, the debate over its impact has been overblown”) as well as ignoring social factors on salary gaps in college-educated Black professionals attributing salary gaps to either ‘unfair treatment’ or ‘underperformance’ (“But then they back off by saying "we have no basis for hazarding answers to such thorny questions." This abdication is rather odd, given that Bowen is an eminent economist and Bok a former law professor. Surely their contacts with businesses and the professions would have shown them that ceilings are still set for most black men and women”). Hacker concludes that: “The Shape of the River makes many important contributions; but in the end, it is a frustrating book. Together, its authors can boast 63 years in academic careers, as professors and presidents, before and after the advent of affirmative action. Yet at no point do they dilate on any insights or anxieties they may have personally had during this era. Nor do they recount the role race has played on the campuses they headed. Their book is essentially a statistical study, based on parsing printouts and mathematical models. On the whole, it could have been produced by faceless functionaries at the Rand Corporation or the Hudson Institute.”
Publication standards were also much lower for obtaining tenure in 1965. While a tenure-track candidate currently needs to be a superstar, with dozens of pages on their CV, Bowen likely got away with much less. Scouring Google Scholar and his pet project JSTOR, I found papers he published before 1965:
Today, at an institution like Princeton, a Psychology professor would likely need, according to this “Profile of Assistant Professor Hires in Psychology from top-ranked R1s and SLACs” at least 16 publications, 7 of which were first-authored just to be hired. Admittedly, even though he only has 5 publications before tenure, Bowen’s list here does include top-ranked economic journals, journal rank being another important tenure criteria. One can only imagine the connections and mentorship to get into these journals.
Misplaced Optimism
The Bowen report apparently created an optimistic atmosphere for Ph.D. students in the 1980s and 1990s. Graduate students of the era reported encouragement to enroll in Ph.D. programs. The Bowen Report was highlighted in major outlets such as The Chronicle of Higher Education (D’Arms 1990), The Washington Post (SPRINGTIME FOR DOCTORATES 1989), and the front page of The New York Times (Fiske 1989; Patel 2018). The rosy predictions of Ph.D. demand were also reiterated in Bowen’s follow up book In Pursuit of the PH.D (1992). Those who entered graduate school in the late 1980s and early 1990s are sometimes referred to as the “Bowen Babies” (Alpers 2015). They entered graduate school, relatively optimistic about their job prospects, but ultimately struggled on the academic job market. Later, graduate students would report that they were given a false sense of expectation by mentors. They blamed universities, professors, and administrators for not thinking critically about doctorate admission and “overproduction” and the long-term effects on humanities graduate education (Patel 2018). Bousquet argues that the partially uncritical acceptance of this report suggested “a strong desire by faculty and many graduate students to believe that their work is indeed shaped by market logic” (Bousquet 2008 p187).
However, such “market logic” did pan out. Student college enrollment increased in the 1990s and colleges hired hundreds of thousands of new faculty members. Ultimately, new tuition dollars from these students could have been used to create tenure-track positions. Instead, the number of contingent faculty in the U.S. doubled to 1.1 million while the number of tenure-track faculty increased to 436,000 (9.6% increase), demonstrating how colleges are “merciless actors in the labor market” (Carey 2020, para. 11). Bousquet argues that this phenomenon of “casualization” of academic labor, and such hopes were naïve, even as early as the 1980s, when a 1988 National Study of the Postsecondary Faculty report revealed an increasing number of part-time faculty to full-time faculty ratios since the 1970s (Bousquet 2008) (201). Contingent faculty members were hired instead of tenurable faculty which went from 39% of the academic labor force in 1989 to 23% in 2011 (Patel 2018, para. 34). In 2015, 40% of the academic labor force consisted of part-time faculty, compared to 24% in 1975 (AAUP 2017). When asked about this phenomenon, Bowen admitted later that “We just couldn’t see it coming,” to a Chronicle interview (Cassuto 2016, para. 17).
Ultimately, there was a 78% increase in earned doctorates in all fields between 1985 and 2015. Between 1985 and 2000, there was a 40% increase in engineering doctorates, 48% in life sciences, 17% in physical and earth sciences, 91% in mathematics and computer science, and 60% increase in humanities and art doctorates. Even after the 2008 economic collapse, enrollment continued to increase in doctorate programs with large increases in STEM fields. Between 2005 and 2015, there was a 54% increase in earned engineering doctorates, 34% in life sciences, 36% in physical and earth sciences, 64% in computer sciences and mathematics, and 8% in arts and humanities doctorates (NSF 2017). Increases in engineering and computer science doctorates are interesting, given the supposedly “numerous” entry-level opportunities for engineering B.S. graduates.
Only 68% of new Ph.Ds. had definite postgraduation commitments in 1995-99 compared to 775 in 1970-1974. Those going into industry doubled from 12% in the 1970s to 27% in the late 1990s (Thurgood, Golladay, and Hill 2006). From 2003 and 2013, there were upward trends in the number of contingent faculty across all institutions (Finkelstein, Conley, and Schuster 2016; Hurlburt and McGarrah 2016) (2). By 2013, contingent faculty were at least half of instructional faculty across all type of institutions. During this time, contingent faculty additions outpaced tenure track-faculty positions. However, contingent faculty often receive lower wages, fewer or no benefits, exclusion from resources in the department and institutions, receive little evaluation, have unclear salary and promotion schedules, and are assigned demanding teaching loads (CAW 2012; Hurlburt and McGarrah 2016). Part-time faculty are often paid per course and earn an average of $2,700 per course (Hurlburt and McGarrah 2016).
However, there is evidence that Bowen ignored emerging data and trends that were already showing themselves in the 1980s and cherry-picked data to fit his idealistic view. Even before the report was published, postdocs were becoming more common. The National Research Act of 1974 created the National Research Service Award (NRSA) which funded predoctoral and postdoctoral scholars, with a strong focus on biomedical research. Between 1973 and 1979 the number of postdocs in the workforce doubled from 2000 to 4000 while the number of tenure-track positions remained steady at 22,000 and continued to remain relatively steady for the following decades (Micoli and Wendell 2018). As the number of Ph.D. recipients increased between the 1970s and the 2000s, a bottleneck developed between doctorate recipients and tenure-track positions with the main outlet being the creation of more postdoc positions. The report also didn’t predict that the trend of increasing responsibilities given to graduate students, which started to emerge in the 1980s, would continue. Additionally, state funding for public education declined during the 1987-2012 period. Furthermore, laws mandating retirement at 70 expired in 1994, which resulted in high proportions of older faculty. Bowen also didn’t calculate for increasing costs regarding technology, health services, federal mandate compliance, and the “arms race” of new buildings and competitive hiring salaries (Patel 2018). The Bowen report also ignored the influence of academic labor unions in pressuring universities to increase tenure-track jobs. Overall, Bowen wrongly assumed that universities will hire the “best”, most experienced, most well-qualified candidate for a contract job (i.e., someone with a Ph.D.), but universities are likely to hire the “cheapest” teacher or researcher, someone who is a non-degreed Ph.D. holder, like graduate employees or recent B.A. or M.A. graduates (Bousquet 2008). Furthermore, there was not consideration of sexism or racism. Women and people of color fair worse in the academic job market, more likely being relegated to contingent positions, rather than tenure-track positions.
Conclusion
Today, the Bowen report is considered the beginning of the decline of the humanities. STEM fields were able to obtain foundation grants and private industry grants which staved off this problem for some decades. Humanities fields, which are charged with teaching critical skills like advanced writing and critical thinking, are a bellwether for STEM fields. While STEM likes to distance itself from the humanities and brag about the “value” of their education, in reality, job placement rates and salaries are not much different than humanities fields for graduate degree holders.
Bousquet, Marc. 2008. How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation. New York, London: New York University Press.
CAW. 2012. A Portrait of Part-Time Faculty Members A Summary of Findings on Part-Time Faculty Respondents to the Coalition on the Academic Workforce Survey of Contingent Faculty Members and Instructors EXECUTIVE SUMMARY A Portrait of Part-Time Faculty Members
Finkelstein, Martin J, Valerie Martin Conley, and Jack H Schuster. 2016. Taking the Measure of Faculty Diversity.