I am resolving in public to spend at least six hours this weekend doing research stuff (hey, it seems to work for vegreville). Here’s my “to do” list through SPSA:

1. Rerun the 1992–2004 NES IRT models and add the slides to the new job talk.
2. Finish up the strategic voting paper revisions, update the results and fancy graphs, and send it out for review (again).
3. Hack together a new draft of the heuristics paper after adding the McCain data analysis Rachna and I worked on over the summer during her independent study at Duke.
4. Put together a submittable draft of the coalition performance paper.
5. Write the paper that goes with the job talk for SPSA and Midwest.
6. Put together a proposal for APSA? (Do I really want to go to APSA? Do I have any new ideas for APSA?)

Items 1–2 should be feasible by Monday. 3 and 4 may get reversed in order. 5 probably needs to get done before both 3 and 4 happen, depending on how busy November ends up being.

Update: I suppose some more job applications should be in that list too.

Advising students is really hard to do without a paper copy of the catalog in front of you.

I’m still waiting for a review copy of Charles Stewart’s Analyzing Congress before deciding on my textbook requests for the Congress class I’m teaching in the spring—like most of my syllabi, this class has been historically heavy on CQ books (Congress and its Members, Congress Reconsidered, and Unorthodox Lawmaking), but teaching my American government class using Kernell and Jacobson’s Logic of American Politics has me in the mood to be a little more explicitly rat-choicey in the Congress class too. Last time I taught the class I also included Jacobson’s The Politics of Congressional Elections, but I’m getting a bit price-sensitive to the reading list so it may disappear. Or maybe I’m just bored with teaching elections stuff, since that’s what I’ve been doing this semester in my upper division seminar.

In other news, one of my loyal(?) readers has apparently taken to posting links to this blog on the various and sundry political science rumor mills out there. I suppose I ought to be flattered, but really the market isn’t about me: just ask any of the upwards of a dozen schools—some I would have given my left arm to teach at, some I would have been more ambivalent about—where I applied but (at least according to the rumor mills) shouldn’t expect to receive phone calls from. As for SLU… let’s just say I’m reasonably confident that the department is entertaining the possibility of hiring other candidates in preference to me, and on some level I’m fine with that; someone whose research and teaching interests didn’t overlap as much with Drs. Warren and/or Puro would probably be preferable to someone with more overlap (like me).

As for the market otherwise, this evening I did my first real cruise around the job listing sites in about a week and found the first genuinely exciting listing I’d seen in several weeks. We’ll see if my enthusiasm for the position translates into interest from the institution; somehow, judging from the past few months, I’m not overly optimistic. But, as they say in the lottery ads, you can’t win if you don’t play.

If there is a recurring fall “theme” here at Signifying Nothing, it’s my belief that the political science job market is fundamentally broken; the only candidates who are well-served by the market appear to be the 3–4 “star” ABDs every year and established scholars (the latter of whom don’t actually participate in the same job market), and the only employers who are well-served are those who ultimately get their pick of the litter from those categories. For everyone else, there’s the obscenely stupid APSA meat market that (except for the earliest-deadline institutions) really doesn’t work except as an impetus for a run on the hotel bar by candidates and search committee members alike.

Unlike political scientists, the economists have actually thought about these problems, and continue to refine their processes. A case in point: Stephen Karlson reports on the new ‘signaling’ mechanism that allows candidates to credibly indicate up to two positions that they are particularly interested in, getting around the problems of both private (every application including the boilerplate “I really want to teach at [Institution mail-merge name here]”) and public signals (the candidate declaring on his/her website what job he/she really wants, which probably doesn’t help the candidate with other job applications)* in cover letters and recommendations. Greg Mankiw and the AEA website explain the details.

Obviously getting political scientists to adopt a similar process would be like herding cats—but there is a strong case to be made that the lower-tier R1s and other schools would be best served by banding together and either getting the APSA to sponsor an AEA-like hiring event, or organizing their own event, in the November-January time frame where more serious interviews could take place than at the APSA meat market and departments would have a clearer idea of their needs and realistic prospects for attracting the top candidates.

Even absent a hiring conference, though, APSA could provide a similar credible signaling system for candidates in eJobs—if it were so inclined. Doing so, while a baby step towards a more useful market, would probably at least help a few candidates get on the shortlists they want to be on as opposed to the ones that departments think the candidates want to be on.

* As for me, I’ve made no real secret of my preferences, but if an R1 wants to pay my salary for a few years on the tenure track while I try to find a good liberal arts college that will take me I’m certainly not going to complain.

I found out today I made the shortlist for at least one other job. More please.

I’m 99.8% sure the department decided on an interview list for “my” job today. Of course if it’s like typical faculty meetings I may be jumping the gun slightly, since the meeting only began an hour and a half ago.

SLU’s computer system still refuses to believe I am teaching classes this semester, so I can’t enter midterm grades for them.

Mind you, I think assigning midterm grades is a waste of everyone’s time—and, from a faculty member’s perspective, counterproductive, as they are by definition imprecise and incomplete yet function as a ready source of student complaints—but I’d at least like the opportunity to abide by the rules and assign them nonetheless.

My visit to New Orleans culminated in more dining and dancing yesterday, along with some DVD viewing and dog-walking. Alas, today I have to go home, and all I have to look forward to is spending Tuesday grading papers and exams so I can submit midterm grades by the end of tomorrow afternoon. But the good news is that I’ll be back in the Crescent City in about ten weeks for SPSA, or possibly sooner if one or more of the local universities are seriously interested in my job applications.

Ilya Somin has a reaction to the discussion of Moneyball hiring in academe sparked by his recent post.

Prof. Karlson posts an initial reaction to the contributions of Eugene Hicock to the debate over the future of higher education in the United States:

Answer me this: why isn’t there a reality show titled Who Wants to Marry a Ph.D? You’d think that casting would be able to identify gold-diggers willing to feign an interest in Proust or obscure varietals to land someone as overpaid and underworked as columns like Mr Hickok’s suggest populate the ranks of the professoriate.

I am not totally unsympathetic with Hicock’s broader interest in assessing the quality of higher education, at least to the extent that taxpayers ought to be entitled to some measurement of the effectiveness of the educations they are subsidizing and the efficiency of use to which those funds are put, but his rhetoric—and factual errors—are hardly recruiting allies in the professoriate.

Your exercise for the day: fisk this piece mercilessly. Here are two whoppers in the space of one paragraph to get you started:

Faculty members decide what they want to teach and when they want to teach, if, indeed, they teach at all. This is particularly true regarding undergraduate instruction, which is something of an afterthought on many campuses. Faculty members typically spend fewer than 200 hours a year in the classroom. That amounts to just five 40-hour weeks.

Let’s see… in my current job, I get to decide exactly a third of what I teach (in previous jobs, it was even less, and I’ve been offered jobs where I would have had no choice whatsoever); nobody asked me when I wanted to teach; and nobody gave me the option of not teaching. I spend well over 200 hours a year in the classroom, time that doesn’t count office hours, responding to student phone calls and emails, class preparation time, research obligations, department meetings, service obligations, and attending co-curricular and extra-curricular student events. I don’t actually get paid for one quarter of the year, during which I am essentially unemployed but am expected to work on research anyway. A whole month’s salary went out the window to pay for my move to Missouri. My future employability is largely determined by whether or not three other individuals’ letters of recommendation say better things about me than other peoples’ letters. It’s really cushy.

I could easily double my salary in private industry, with the sole disadvantage of being stuck behind a desk for an arbitrary number of hours per week. Instead, for some reason I cannot fathom, I have spent the last three years competing with other people who—to a person—have a more prestigious doctorate than I do to find a job that is exactly like the one described in the previous paragraph but has slightly more job security—although not near as much as the typical corporate white collar position, at least for anyone who is at least mildly productive.

The really insane part is that I wouldn’t trade what I do now for the world.

þ: Margaret Soltan.

My presentation on measuring political sophistication with item-response theory models is here; it’s something of a work in progress, as I haven’t put together the pretty graphs for the American NES data yet.

Inspired by the discussion of ‘Moneyball’ hiring in economics at George Mason, we have discussion of whether this is a good way to build a department from Dan Drezner at Open University and one entry in the burgeoning network of political science rumor blogs. I’ll own up to my contribution to the debate:

The commenter on Dan Drezner’s article makes a good point, in that we’re not really talking about “Moneyball” here [in the blog]—Moneyball is taking people that are undervalued by the market at large (like non-top-X PhDs who may have other indicators of strong potential, or top-X PhDs who look weak due to being in a large cohort) and making the most of them while you can until they find greener pastures (in baseball, free agency; in academe, accumulating the publication record to offset their previous undervaluing and get a higher-positioned job), which fits [Southern Illinois University-Carbondale’s political science department] to a tee. Moneyball isn’t bringing people in for lifetime tenure, which is what most people think a “top-X” department should look like.

It’s not entirely a dead-end strategy… if you get enough ex-faculty out there, your department may look comparatively stronger by word of mouth than one that largely retains its initial hires. Certainly SIU gets better WoM than a lot of other non-top-X departments for that very reason, and over the long term that may build SIU vis a vis other low-to-middling tier PhD departments.

As the commenters at Open University note there are some other key differences between baseball and academe (notably the absence of locked-in long-term contracts, which allows for more “free agent” poaching in political science), but I’m not sure they matter much except for the most “movable” prospects—once on the tenure track, the modal number of job changes is either 0 or 1 in political science. That does suggest, however that departments trying to play Moneyball may need to consider intangibles that might reduce candidate mobility, so they can keep people longer than the market would normally allow.

Obligatory disclaimer: I have applied for positions at SIUC in the past, and have zero offers to show for it (else I wouldn’t be sitting here); whether this indicates some lack of Moneyballing skill on their part, or just good taste, is left as an open question.

I’m off tomorrow for a day trip over to Columbia to give a talk on measuring political sophistication… so don’t expect a lot of posting from me while I browbeat R and LaTeX into producing my slides this evening.

And, no, before anyone asks: this isn’t a job talk—just a practice run.

Here is a list of everything I’m trying my hardest not to work on today:

• Grading methods homework and labs. (did that, alas)
• Grading American politics exams.
• My presentation on measuring political sophistication that I have to give on Friday afternoon at Mizzou.
• Converting the LaTeX version of the Damn Impeachment Article™ into Word format to make the editors of PRQ happy.
• Job applications.

A singularly unproductive afternoon, if I do say so myself.

Jeff Gill perceives some salutary changes in the labor market for political methodologists:

Last Fall I counted 51 faculty methods jobs posted in political science. I paid close attention because I was on a relevant search committee. This was particularly interesting because equilibrium in past years was about five or so. Right now there are 39 methods jobs posted (subtracting non-tenure/tenure track positions). Now some of these are listed as multiple fields, but one has to presume that listing the ad on the methods page is a signal.

Apparently we have US News and World Report to thank for fundamentally changing the labor market by making methodology the fifth “official” field of the discipline. A number of (non-methodologist) colleagues believed that I must be exaggerating since an order of magnitude difference seems ridiculous. Actually, it turns out that I was underestimating as Jan Box-Steffensmeier (president of the Society for Political Methodology and the APSA methods section) recently got a count of 61 from the APSA. I think their definition was a little broader than mine (perhaps including formal theory and research methods jobs at undergraduate-only institutions).

So an interesting question is how quickly does supply catch up to demand here? My theory is that it will occur rather slowly since the lead time for methods training seems to be longer than the lead time for other subfields. This is obviously good news for graduate students going on the market soon in this area. I’m curious about other opinions, but I think that this is a real change for the subfield.

I concur in part and dissent in part.

I am less convinced that we can attribute this change to US News (although I’m not one of those academic US News haters) than simply to the broader market: people with superior methods training are more likely to get jobs than those who don’t have it, which means that methods training is more important at the graduate level—and increasingly the undergraduate level too. The booming enrollments at the ICPSR Summer Program, including from top-ranked schools that traditionally considered their own methods training sufficient for graduate students, are indicative of this trend as well.

As far as the supply-demand equilibrium works, I think there is a perception out there (perhaps unfair) of the existence of a methods clique—one, that if it exists, I am decidedly not a part of. Thus far, in-clique supply seems to have been sufficient to satisfy demand; we—and perhaps during this hiring season I—shall see whether this continues to be the case. My perception is that high demand is somewhat illusory; several unfilled methods jobs in the past two years have not reappeared, suggesting that filling these jobs is less of a priority than one might think.

The broader issue is a question of definition: what is a “methodologist”? As someone who generally doesn’t live to maximize my own likelihood functions, I’d self-identify as an applied method0logist at best—and certainly don’t consider methodology my primary field of inquiry; tools are great, but I gravitate toward more substantive questions.

As for why Gill thinks “research methods jobs at undergraduate-only institutions” shouldn’t count, I really wouldn’t hazard a comment. But I do think that if he wants to increase the supply of methodologists, getting more undergraduates (particularly at BA-granting institutions like liberal arts colleges) in the pipeline early so they can do advanced work out of the gate at the graduate level would seem to be a key part of the strategy.

I really didn’t want this blog to become a bastion of academic navel-gazing, but there’s good linkworthy stuff here and there—a few of these are a little old, since I’ve been lazy in clearing out my Google Reader feeds:

• Stephen Karlson reacts to various and sundry articles on such things as public universities attempting to compete for good students with the Harvards of the world, rising standards at California’s community colleges, and reviving intercollegiate football as a carrot for getting male students in the door. One wonders if anyone at SLU (birthplace of the forward pass, running 57–43 in favor of the ladies at last count) looking at the last one…
• Tyler Cowen and Alan Wolfe (via Margaret Soltan) review Michael Bérubé’s What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?: Classroom Politics and “Bias” in Higher Education.
• Richard Vedder says too many kids go to college.
• Finally, the Dean Dad looks at department cutbacks at Florida.

From Stephen Karlson: “By definition faculty without tenure are on the job market all the time.”

I have yet to master the art of being a “non-tenure-track but otherwise nominally co-equal” faculty member, an art being made more problematic by (a) being expected to attend departmental faculty meetings, at which grand and lofty visions are discussed and (b) participation in said vision being contingent on my continued employment, the odds of which are nominally in the 25–33% range, all job candidates being equal—which surely they are not. That’s better than the 0.5–2.5% range that probably exists normally in these searches, but it’s hardly the sort of odds I’d be betting on either.

It’s hard not to become invested in things in a situation like this one, although working on job applications is a relatively mind-numbing distraction from thinking too hard about these things.

For the first time in my teaching career, I got suckered into teaching a class outside today. Of course, the fact the classroom smelled today like a high school gym’s locker room at the height of summer probably contributed to my decision as well.

Craig Newmark notes a Slate Explainer that tries to answer the question, “why are introductory college courses numbered ‘101’?”

Oddly enough, of all the institutions I’ve taught at, only Ole Miss numbered a political science course (in that case, Intro to American Government) as 101. At Millsaps, the same course was 1000; Duke was 91 (or 91D if taught with discussion sections); and here at SLU it’s 110 (we have a “100” but no “101”). Not only that, but all four institutions also use different abbreviations for political science—POL, PLSC, POLSCI (or unofficially PS), and POLS, respectively.

I just found out that the Damn Impeachment Paper™, born circa November 1998, has been accepted for publication in a reasonably prestigious peer-reviewed political science journal, pending some revisions for length. This makes me very happy, although thinking about all the extra work this creates for me is making me very sleepy.

Both Glenn Reynolds and Laura McKenna take note of this op-ed by Tom Lutz that appeared in Monday’s New York Times on the academic lifestyle:

On paper, the academic life looks great. As many as 15 weeks off in the summer, four in the winter, one in the spring, and then, usually, only three days a week on campus the rest of the time. Anybody who tells you this wasn’t part of the lure of a job in higher education is lying. But one finds out right away in graduate school that in fact the typical professor logs an average of 60 hours a week, and the more successful professors work even more — including not just 14-hour days during the school year, but 10-hour days in the summer as well.

Why, then, does there continue to be a glut of fresh Ph.D.’s? It isn’t the pay scale, which, with a few lucky exceptions, offers the lowest years-of-education-to-income ratio possible. It isn’t really the work itself, either. Yes, teaching and research are rewarding, but we face as much drudgery as in any professional job. Once you’ve read 10,000 freshman essays, you’ve read them all.

But we academics do have something few others possess in this postindustrial world: control over our own time. All the surveys point to this as the most common factor in job satisfaction. The jobs in which decisions are made and the pace set by machines provide the least satisfaction, while those, like mine, that foster at least the illusion of control provide the most.

To be honest, if I could find a job that let me make my own hours I’d be sorely tempted to leave academia; I’ve seriously considered a few administrative jobs that would give me some teaching responsibilities (and I have one on my stack of “applications to be sent” at present), but, at a fundamental level, the flexibility to make my own schedule within reason probably is more important to me than the privilege of teaching bright young people.

That said, since said non-academic jobs appear to be largely nonexistent, I suspect I’ll be in the academy for quite a bit longer—so long as anyone will have me, of course.

This afternoon I taught the most enjoyable Intro to American Government class I think I’ve ever had; I don’t know yet whether to attribute it to my new practice of giving quizzes on the readings before class on WebCT (thereby ensuring I have students who have read), having less than 20 students (thereby allowing me to stare down the incommunicado students easily), or letting the first 45 minutes or so be more driven by the class rather than my outline.

Not that the other two classes weren’t fun either—well, to the extent that you can lecture on measuring concepts and make that “fun”—but the intro class really stood out for me today.

In other news, I was challenged by an intermediary to come up for an explanation why I don’t have a tenure-track job yet that isn’t “Duke offered me an obscene amount of money to be a sabbatical replacement, so I turned down some tenure-track interviews,” “the department’s faculty apparently didn’t think I’d move permanently to Wisconsin, unlike the guy they hired who was from there,” or “I didn’t feel like spending the rest of my professional career just teaching intro to American politics and research methods every semester.” Now there’s a toughie…

This New York Times article (þ: Margaret Soltan) probably makes more of the vague trend towards deemphasis of the SAT in college admissions than is probably justified. Then again, I’m one of those weird social scientists who thinks that psychometrics are reliable and valid measures of student abilities, albeit—like all measures—subject to error. The real issue with the SAT is not its psychometric foundations or learning effects from “test prep,” but rather its wide error bounds, which make it too advantageous for students to repeat the exam. The scale of the numbers probably psychologically amplifies this effect; put the score on a range from 1.0 to 4.0, and I suspect you’d see retake rates plummet with absolutely no other changes to the exam.

Even though most admissions committees probably don’t do this in a very sophisticated way (at least, not yet, although one suspects that some of the SAT-optional trend can be attributed to admissions committee innumeracy or hostility towards numeric measures than any real problem with the SAT), the lack of SAT scores can be worked around with some fancy stats: you can just impute the missing data from the information you do have (mean SAT scores, likely available at the school or school district level; GPA; some measure of school quality; grades in math and English classes), albeit with an adjustment to account for an important selection effect: that the SAT score, which is probably known to the student, is more likely to have been reported if it is above the mean imputation (my gut suspicion is that reporting is distributed complementary log-log about the mean SAT score).