English, Foreign Language Job Seekers Face Major Decline in Available Positions
By Kendra Hamilton

There were probably plenty of long faces at the annual convention for professors of English and foreign languages last month, as new data indicated the current crop of job seekers would face the toughest job market since the recession of the early 1990s.

Jobs in English declined 19 percent, from 983 in 2001 to 792 in 2002, while those in foreign languages fell 21 percent, from 675 to 535, according to the most comprehensive listing of available openings in those fields, the Modern Language Association's October 2002 Job Information List.

And while the MLA's executive director, Dr. Rosemary Feal, cautions that the October list is not the final word for job seekers — the hiring cycle actually runs from July 1 to June 30, so the situation may not be as dire as the October figures indicate — she also admits job seekers have few reasons for optimism.

For one, the data collected reflect jobs advertised as of October 2001, but many of those positions have not actually been funded yet. That is to say they'd be vulnerable to freezes or outright elimination if the states' budgetary woes deepen — a prospect that seems likely.

And while there's a patch of blue in this dark sky — less competition for jobs because the number of doctoral recipients fell slightly in 2001, to 977 in English and 619 in foreign languages, down from 1,070 and 641 the previous year — job-seeking pressures remain intense.

For example, tenure-track assistant professorships, the most desirable of the entry-level positions, account for only about half of the jobs posted on the MLA list: 50.6 percent of the positions in English and 52.1 percent of those in foreign languages, to be precise.

Then, too, there's a large backlog of candidates in the job-seeking pipeline. Last year, for example, only 44 percent of the jobs in English and 45 percent of those in foreign languages went to individuals in the 2001-2002 doctoral cohort. The rest of the jobs went to ABDs (all but dissertation) and individuals who had been searching for jobs for up to five years.