Faculty Retirements, Recruitments Rise

The fabled flood of physics faculty retirements is turning out to be more of a trickle, according to the latest academic workforce survey conducted by the American Institute of Physics. In 1999, the retirement rate topped 3% for the first time; despite increases in deferred retirements, it should continue to increase slowly over the next decade.

Recruitment for physics faculty has also been increasing. An estimated 41% of physics departments were looking to hire tenured or tenure-track faculty for 2001, up from 34% in 1999. Of course, academic recruitment is a complicated business, and positions can take years to fill, or have their funding cut before a suitable candidate is found. Still, the proportion of departments that actually hired new tenured or tenure-track faculty jumped to 35% in 2000, after hovering around 25% in recent years.

Despite the rise in the total number of new hires, the fraction of jobs going to women fell. Only 14% of academic physicists hired in 2000 were women, down from 17% in 1998. What did increase was the number of new hires that earned their PhDs outside the US—they now make up more than a third of the new full-time faculty at PhD-granting departments.

The 2000 Physics Academic Workforce Report is available free from the American Institute of Physics, Statistical Research Center, One Physics Ellipse, College Park, MD 20740-38442; Email: stats@aip.org ; Web: http://www.aip.org/statistics/trends/emptrends.htm .