scrubbedexpat091

They don't seem as rare in North America as some other places.

I don't know what academia means but lots of instructors at colleges don't seem to have PhD's, none I have ever had appeared to have one, if they did they certainly did not ask to be called doctor nor ever mentioned having one.

But I have never gone to a University, just colleges.


I recall a story from 2014 where an airline in the US had to close their pilot hiring portal after a very short time as they had received 5,000+ applications for 200 positions.

Even flight attendant position, Delta in 2013 received 44,000 applications for 400 positions, American closed off their portal to applicants after 22,000 applications for 1,200 jobs. US Airways was 16,000 for 450 openings.

Now this is 5 years ago, but Delta in 2010 received 100,000 applications in total for a mere 1,000 positions.


The amount of applicants a company can receive is mind boggling.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articl...-to-applicants

http://jobsearch.about.com/b/2013/08...er-opening.htm


I've had to hire a few times, and even though the pay was a whopping 10.25/hr, I'd get 200 resumes on average for each ad I posted.

sadieb

I have been in the position of receiving hundreds of applications for one position many times. Fortunately only about one in one hundred fitted the criteria.

So out of about 1000 applications roughly ten were worth looking at.

I has one guy who worked in a chip shop and insisted that as he counted the £15 float in copper every night he felt qualified to take on a chartered accountants role paying a six figure salary. He actually wrote on the application that if I did not interview him he would claim discrimination.
Needless to say he was not considered for an interview.

I was referring to PhDs as research was mentioned. It is more common in universities now for lecturers to have a PhD.
I cannot comment on colleges, however I have a few friends who "teach" in colleges in the UK and just scraped 2.2 in their degrees, so I wouldn't want them teaching me anything. One got a third, so 40% correct and 60% wrong not really a good teacher in my opinion.

md95065

Plenty of people with firsts and PhDs are bad teachers.

The skills needed to be a good teacher are different from the ones needed to be able to do original research. Some people have both, some have one but not the other, and many have neither.

sadieb

Totally agree, I have worked with my fair share of academics that cannot string a sentence together.

I have also worked with amazing people who left school with no qualification and were inspirational in both their work and thinking.

scrubbedexpat091

I've never taken academic college classes, just vocational and the teachers were generally people in that profession who have also chosen to teach.


Computers screened at my last job (and several others) the computers only forwarded ones that at least had the right key words to hiring manager, the rest were never seen by a human.

retzie

No, only the better schools get that kind of number; hundreds is more usual for lower-profile universities/colleges. I'm guessing most people here were not in college especially recently. Since 2008, the pressure on the market has been such that positions that would have once been filled with Masters are now being filled with PhDs. Mind you, not all PhD degrees are created equal (no external refereeing -WTF?), which is another rant altogether...

When you factor in the quality of the university, the desirability of its location, and the inherent inertia in the tenure system, then yes, there really are that few positions. You can also expect roughly the same 1500 people to apply at all the best schools, so it's not like we're talking tens of thousands of people. It is also a global job market, so plenty of the applicants and subsequent hires will be internationals :waves:

This. The jobs I'm talking about are the research-focused ones (ie. the ones people want). I can assure you the person Princeton hires out of 1500 applicants will not be chosen for their teaching ability.

caleyjag

What you are overlooking here is that it isn't just American citizens or people already based here that apply for jobs that need a PhD.

When I put out an online job offer for my team, which is in a large pharmaceutical company, we usually get a boatload of speculative applications.......almost all from China and India.

I think many potential immigrants see a PhD as a solid route to moving to the US, so it's perhaps unsurprising that US positions get overwhelmed with applications, especially in the era of the internet.

Come to think of it, that was my strategy and it worked for me!