The Academic Job Market As An Argument For And Against Interdisciplinary Engineering Graduate Training

Interdisciplinary approaches are often cited as the key to solving important technical research problems. This has been the motivation for interdisciplinary graduate programs such as those funded through IGERT at the U.S. National Science Foundation. However, interdisciplinary training is also cited as a career risk to students who might not be able to find faculty positions if not grounded in a traditional discipline. To explore the legitimacy of these beliefs related to interdisciplinary faculty openings, we analyzed 743 interdisciplinary academic job postings appearing in the Chronicle of Higher Education over a six-month period. We found that overall, less than 7% of all faculty postings are for interdisciplinary positions, but within engineering, 10.7% of the open positions are interdisciplinary (not statistically significant). A higher percentage of postings at senior rank are interdisciplinary than are at junior rank (18% vs. 6%). However, there were ten times as many postings for new assistant professors, and a full 83% of interdisciplinary postings are at the junior rank. Within individual institutions, there is a correlation between the number of engineering and science interdisciplinary positions, but not with humanities and social sciences. We compared these numbers to overall faculty openings and graduation rates from IGERT programs to show that, at least in theory, there are enough positions for graduate of interdisciplinary graduate programs. These results provide important quantitative data to refute claims of career risk as a disincentive for interdisciplinary graduate education.