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  • Countercyclical Hiring and Flight Risk

    By Dean Dad February 2, 2010 9:48 pm

    Too many of the arguments I've read and heard for hiring more full-time faculty rely on moralistic appeals. The idea seems to boil down to a simpleminded equation of "market" with "bad" and "tradition" with "good."

    Moralistic arguments don't work because they solve the wrong problem. But there's a perfectly reasonable market-based argument for hiring full-time faculty right now: buy low, sell high. Great people have never been as undervalued as they are now; this is an unprecedented hiring opportunity.

    In normal times, good candidates sometimes get passed over for posing excessive 'flight risk.' The idea is that tenure-track lines don't always get renewed when vacated, so you don't want to waste one on someone who will up and leave in a couple of years. (What this says about the idea of 'market as meritocracy' I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.) Search costs are substantial, and the risk of losing the position to the next round of budget cuts is ever-present, so some places will decide strategically to go for the very-good-but-not-best candidate on the theory that he'll stay if he gets the job. After all, if he leaves, the position may just get adjuncted out.

    When the market is so completely dead, though, the candidate pool gets even stronger, and flight risk diminishes substantially. After all, if nobody else is hiring, where else is the slumming superstar going to go?

    I've seen this on my own campus. We haven't been able to hire much lately, but we have hired for a few scattered positions, and the candidate pools have been off-the-charts amazing. The few new folks we've brought on recently have been absurdly great. I've actually used this as justification to reallocate resources to hiring more faculty, since now we'd have a realistic shot at people who normally would have been gobbled up elsewhere. While the moral argument is constant, the market-opportunity argument is uniquely strong now. If you hire when everyone else does, you're in a war for talent. If you hire when nobody else does, talent is in a war for you. Leaving morality out of it, the time when nobody else is hiring is exactly the time to strike.

    Obviously, well-endowed private colleges have an advantage here. If your college is struggling to meet the payroll it already has, then the argument for countercyclical hiring is of no more than theoretical interest. But if there's any wiggle room at all, this is the time to use it.

    Come to think of it, if more people figure out this strategy, it won't work as well. Humph. Never mind; as you were, everyone. Move along. Nothing to see here...

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Comments on Countercyclical Hiring and Flight Risk

  • Countercyclical hiring
  • Posted by Larry Shillock , Associate Professor of English on February 3, 2010 at 8:45am EST

  • This is a charming, at times offbeat, statement of a well-known fact. Yes, hiring talent down tough economic times is a good bet.(The dean of Augustana College in the Quad Cities made a similar observation a year or so ago.) Here, I trust that the Dean knows that a community college has no business hiring a superstar, unless that person's interests and talents are in keeping with the institution's conception, students, and mission. In other words, the superstar would be a person whose training and interests are directly in line with the important work done by a particular community college and not with the quite different expectations of a Research I institution.

    I'd like to hear more--in a future blog, perhaps--about how the conception of a superstar is correlated to community colleges.

  • You shoot - you score
  • Posted by James Morgan , Associate Professor, CIS on February 3, 2010 at 11:00am EST

  • I would not worry too much about "everybody" doing this. far to many school administrators will only do what they see others doing - it's their substitute for decision-making ability.

  • I've been wondering ...
  • Posted by Junior faculty on February 3, 2010 at 11:30am EST

  • about the flight risk of outstanding junior faculty already on board. Using the same line of reasoning as the dean here, my institution is continuing to hire competitively while freezing our salaries (which were low to begin with) and increasing our service obligations. I am looking elsewhere, as are other faculty members hired in the past couple of years (at least those of us who are competitive candidates in disciplines that have not been hit as hard as others). Is this a calculated risk the administration takes? They must have considered this, right, and just decided we're expendable? I can't imagine they would be so naive to think that our institution is the only one hiring, or that none of us is mobile. Dean?

  • Better to hire based on institutional match
  • Posted , Professor of Journalism at Ohio University on February 3, 2010 at 12:30pm EST

  • How can you argue with "Buy Low, Sell High" as justification for countercyclical hiring? You can't, but I would suggest that institutions who employ this strategy pay very careful attention the the pedigree of the great candidates. Is a truly great (on paper) candidate with a Princeton doctorate, an Ivy-League undergraduate background, and a book and three top journal articles be a better hire at Iowa State University than a truly great (on paper) candidate with a Harvard doctorate, a Missouri undergraduate background, and a book and three top journal articles or a truly great (on paper) candidate with a Wisconsin doctorate, a Minnesota State undergraduate background, and a book and three top journal articles? If I were on the search committee, all aspects of the interviewing and departmental needs being equal, I would probably push for the Wisconsin or Harvard doctorate with background/experience with large public universities. That kind of match between background and hiring institution even justifies going with a very good scholar over a great scholar who will focus only on research and his/her next job while momentarily employed at your institution before jumping to a more "suitable" university when the economy improves.

  • Posted by Rachel on February 3, 2010 at 6:00pm EST

  • I too would like to hear more about "how the conception of a superstar is correlated to community colleges." What is a "good candidate" for a teaching position in a community college and what is "over-the-top"?

    If instructors and professors are or want to be mobile, then tenure does not serve them well except in the case of hedging one's best for continuous employment.

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