In all unis with doctoral programs, one aspect of promotion packages — particularly to full - is mentorship of doctoral students. This drives demand among ambitious faculty to recruit graduate students absent any reasonable market prospects for them post degree.
Many humanities and social science programs should become MA only given hiring prospects. The MA is harmless at worst, and often at least moderately beneficial to degree earners.
As well, it’s cheaper for universities to have PhD students teach courses as part of their funding than have tenured faculty teach them, which has undoubtedly been a motivation for the expansion in graduate programs (which I certainly saw and heard about at McGill while doing my MA and PhD) even as the job prospects within academia grew worse. I’m not sure what can be done about these perverse incentives given how divorced they are from any realistic chance the graduates of most of these programs have of getting a job in their field.
As an old non academic economist I have a few thoughts. In my last job I had a very smart Ph.d intern who became very bitter about her prospects. Seems like she had a point.
Second, in my last job I worked at a company that had many data scientists and a few economists. While the data scientists were good at math, their intuition was often weak. They often did not have an understanding of causality or of the relationships between fields. For example, if 2 fields are highly correlated, you shouldn't predict them independently of each other.
Causal inference actually works, the problem is that the MBAs who run companies don't understand it so using it is an uphill battle.
this overview and analysis excellent - and, yes, consistent/congruent with my own observations....truly rigorous/innovative thinking about economics and econometrics has increasingly been surrounded, supplemented and/or supplanted by the AI/ML/data science and 'business' crowds in ways that make 'classic' and/or 'legacy' economists less valuable.....and, yes, the increased partisanship and politicization of the 'profession' and/or the 'discipline' has also wounded credibility ....ironically, quality 'economic thinking' has likely never been more important or essential to 'real world' model building/training....but i truly wonder what portion of students (and faculty!) bring a coase/stigler/friedman/hart/arrow/samuelson/romerian/ostromian spirit of inquiry and openness and discipline to their work...
I genuinely hope the number drops to zero. We do not need economists. Economists are simply paid tools who generate desirable feedback in support of gambling with the economy by politicians and business leaders in ever more risky and speculative planning with absolutely no benefit that has ever been shown out of any of it. Inflation is speculatively handwaved and fluffed into the air, but we can clearly see inflation as a reactive product of negative reward in commercial activity. We're told that international monetary flows are healthy and prosperous but their purpose should be merely to enable trade, and what they do right now is provide bankers with an income- they get paid merely to juggle money.
Hopefully, the Austrian school and those few economists at the Clairmont Institute will be the only ones to survive.
Most of the economists in government are Keynesian and if you pay any attention to history it is an economic theory that should be thrown in the dust bin and only taught in economics classes as “for heaven’s sake do not use this theory”!!
What about the Austrians do you assume when you suggest they are better than others? What about the Keynesians do you assume that makes them negative? Also, could the assessment that one deals with government (which most schools are) play a role in the decline in job openings?
I wonder if Table 3 is correct? It doesn’t list UVA economics but UVA placed a few 2025 PhD grads in 2025. Everybody got a decent job it seems. https://economics.virginia.edu/placement-history
The AEA's Survey of the Labor Market for New Ph.D. Hires in Economics (2025-2026 edition, covering the 2024-25 market) was sent to 478 organizations, with 145 responding (30.3% response rate).
So lots of schools weren't counted
I updated my wording to make my estimate more conservative
> according to the 2024 NSF Survey of Doctorate Recipients, 1,385 Americans earned economics PhDs in 2024, more than in 2023, more than in 2022, and more than in 2021.
Your table shows 1391 and 1392 for 2022 and 2023 respectfully, both are more than 2024.
Economics graduates should consider shifting to an actuarial Masters program. They may find they have a few skills deficits and will need to study before enrolling in a course, but growth in the actuarial field is projected to be 22% for the next ten years, and unemployment rates are 1%, with 2,300-2,400 job openings a year.
The Maths is really, really hard. People with 1st class degrees in Maths from Cambridge have been known to fail the professional qualifications. At one point, my brother was an actuarial technician studying to qualify as an actuary. He showed me a sample question he was finding hard. The question featured an incomplete equation lacking all the relevant information to solve it. The only way I could think to solve the problem involved using the Texas Instruments graphing calculator approach:) I'll never know whether my intuition was correct.
The past 15 years have been marked by more frequent, but shorter-lived shocks. It's an environment in which actuarial science and other types of toolkits (like data science) thrive.
I teach econ and I am a PhD Candidate in Business Leadership. Many econ programs have much more math than is necessary for real world application. This is a pseudo cartel in action which only admits students with math heavy backgrounds. I remember telling one of my grad professors that the answer I gave on a question did not account for real life, that it was not just simple math. She said the math was correct and I was wrong. Later in the semester, I came across the original paper which had a footnote that used the exact argument I provided, which explained how the math was given in the paper, but did not account for real life! I brought it up to my instructor and she gave me half a grade, but did not take away the other students who were wrong. Math is not economics. Yes, some aspects are needed for extremely difficult and narrow research questions, but for the bulk of the subject basics applied to areas of life are based on theory much more than models. I can see this from two views. If the modeling were removed, would the hiring of econ PhD's have been as prominent in tech? And if this occurred over the last 10-20 years, would this profession be something students were looking to get into? I enjoyed reading the post and I look forward to more in the future. Thanks!
You took the three years of data that made it look like there was a linear trend downwards in positions.
The federal hiring patterns and demographic cliff absolutely are going to make a difference, but economics hiring does swing by large amounts from year to year, generally because the economic factors that affect hiring decisions are correlated across institutions. You don't need to hide this substantial year-to-year variation to appreciate that there are larger trends at work.
If we go beyond the three convenient years you picked, 18-19 (pre-covid) and 19-20 are the lowest levels in the years EJM has data, and 21-22 is in between 24-25 and 23-24. But you knew that already.
As I said, I'm not arguing with the macro explanations for why positions might be lower this year, and why we might expect them to continue to be decline in the future. I just think it's a bit silly to exclude the years of data that illustrate large swings up and down in positions available within the past ten years.
In all unis with doctoral programs, one aspect of promotion packages — particularly to full - is mentorship of doctoral students. This drives demand among ambitious faculty to recruit graduate students absent any reasonable market prospects for them post degree.
https://theprofessorisin.com/2014/01/24/graduate-student-shrimps-on-the-doctoral-barbie-the-view-from-tenure-a-guest-post/
Many humanities and social science programs should become MA only given hiring prospects. The MA is harmless at worst, and often at least moderately beneficial to degree earners.
As well, it’s cheaper for universities to have PhD students teach courses as part of their funding than have tenured faculty teach them, which has undoubtedly been a motivation for the expansion in graduate programs (which I certainly saw and heard about at McGill while doing my MA and PhD) even as the job prospects within academia grew worse. I’m not sure what can be done about these perverse incentives given how divorced they are from any realistic chance the graduates of most of these programs have of getting a job in their field.
ChatGPT got an A on Kaplan’s final a few months later: https://x.com/finmoorhouse/status/1638221410328797186
As an old non academic economist I have a few thoughts. In my last job I had a very smart Ph.d intern who became very bitter about her prospects. Seems like she had a point.
Second, in my last job I worked at a company that had many data scientists and a few economists. While the data scientists were good at math, their intuition was often weak. They often did not have an understanding of causality or of the relationships between fields. For example, if 2 fields are highly correlated, you shouldn't predict them independently of each other.
Causal inference actually works, the problem is that the MBAs who run companies don't understand it so using it is an uphill battle.
this overview and analysis excellent - and, yes, consistent/congruent with my own observations....truly rigorous/innovative thinking about economics and econometrics has increasingly been surrounded, supplemented and/or supplanted by the AI/ML/data science and 'business' crowds in ways that make 'classic' and/or 'legacy' economists less valuable.....and, yes, the increased partisanship and politicization of the 'profession' and/or the 'discipline' has also wounded credibility ....ironically, quality 'economic thinking' has likely never been more important or essential to 'real world' model building/training....but i truly wonder what portion of students (and faculty!) bring a coase/stigler/friedman/hart/arrow/samuelson/romerian/ostromian spirit of inquiry and openness and discipline to their work...
Behold the revolution. More participants in Turchin's intra-elite competition...
I genuinely hope the number drops to zero. We do not need economists. Economists are simply paid tools who generate desirable feedback in support of gambling with the economy by politicians and business leaders in ever more risky and speculative planning with absolutely no benefit that has ever been shown out of any of it. Inflation is speculatively handwaved and fluffed into the air, but we can clearly see inflation as a reactive product of negative reward in commercial activity. We're told that international monetary flows are healthy and prosperous but their purpose should be merely to enable trade, and what they do right now is provide bankers with an income- they get paid merely to juggle money.
Democrats hire economists! My mind breaks!
Hopefully, the Austrian school and those few economists at the Clairmont Institute will be the only ones to survive.
Most of the economists in government are Keynesian and if you pay any attention to history it is an economic theory that should be thrown in the dust bin and only taught in economics classes as “for heaven’s sake do not use this theory”!!
What about the Austrians do you assume when you suggest they are better than others? What about the Keynesians do you assume that makes them negative? Also, could the assessment that one deals with government (which most schools are) play a role in the decline in job openings?
I wonder if Table 3 is correct? It doesn’t list UVA economics but UVA placed a few 2025 PhD grads in 2025. Everybody got a decent job it seems. https://economics.virginia.edu/placement-history
The AEA's Survey of the Labor Market for New Ph.D. Hires in Economics (2025-2026 edition, covering the 2024-25 market) was sent to 478 organizations, with 145 responding (30.3% response rate).
So lots of schools weren't counted
I updated my wording to make my estimate more conservative
Is there similar data for Europe? I wonder if this same tendency is also present beyond the US
https://open.substack.com/pub/tomwatkins12/p/pragmatic-abundance?r=1lq8gw&utm_medium=ios
If you have problem with math, you have problem with intelligence.
Last thing this World needs are more economists with lack of intelligence.
These all ends in governments as buttlicking goons, participating in mindboggling stupid decisions.
> according to the 2024 NSF Survey of Doctorate Recipients, 1,385 Americans earned economics PhDs in 2024, more than in 2023, more than in 2022, and more than in 2021.
Your table shows 1391 and 1392 for 2022 and 2023 respectfully, both are more than 2024.
Economics graduates should consider shifting to an actuarial Masters program. They may find they have a few skills deficits and will need to study before enrolling in a course, but growth in the actuarial field is projected to be 22% for the next ten years, and unemployment rates are 1%, with 2,300-2,400 job openings a year.
The Maths is really, really hard. People with 1st class degrees in Maths from Cambridge have been known to fail the professional qualifications. At one point, my brother was an actuarial technician studying to qualify as an actuary. He showed me a sample question he was finding hard. The question featured an incomplete equation lacking all the relevant information to solve it. The only way I could think to solve the problem involved using the Texas Instruments graphing calculator approach:) I'll never know whether my intuition was correct.
The past 15 years have been marked by more frequent, but shorter-lived shocks. It's an environment in which actuarial science and other types of toolkits (like data science) thrive.
I teach econ and I am a PhD Candidate in Business Leadership. Many econ programs have much more math than is necessary for real world application. This is a pseudo cartel in action which only admits students with math heavy backgrounds. I remember telling one of my grad professors that the answer I gave on a question did not account for real life, that it was not just simple math. She said the math was correct and I was wrong. Later in the semester, I came across the original paper which had a footnote that used the exact argument I provided, which explained how the math was given in the paper, but did not account for real life! I brought it up to my instructor and she gave me half a grade, but did not take away the other students who were wrong. Math is not economics. Yes, some aspects are needed for extremely difficult and narrow research questions, but for the bulk of the subject basics applied to areas of life are based on theory much more than models. I can see this from two views. If the modeling were removed, would the hiring of econ PhD's have been as prominent in tech? And if this occurred over the last 10-20 years, would this profession be something students were looking to get into? I enjoyed reading the post and I look forward to more in the future. Thanks!
You took the three years of data that made it look like there was a linear trend downwards in positions.
The federal hiring patterns and demographic cliff absolutely are going to make a difference, but economics hiring does swing by large amounts from year to year, generally because the economic factors that affect hiring decisions are correlated across institutions. You don't need to hide this substantial year-to-year variation to appreciate that there are larger trends at work.
If we go beyond the three convenient years you picked, 18-19 (pre-covid) and 19-20 are the lowest levels in the years EJM has data, and 21-22 is in between 24-25 and 23-24. But you knew that already.
given that you are now entering your 4th year as a postdoc, i would think you would agree with me more than anyone
the pre-covid market for tenure track jobs is not coming back
As I said, I'm not arguing with the macro explanations for why positions might be lower this year, and why we might expect them to continue to be decline in the future. I just think it's a bit silly to exclude the years of data that illustrate large swings up and down in positions available within the past ten years.