During its recent search for a full-time English lecturer, the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) received 75 applications in just a couple weeks.
Dr. Jessica Berman, the chair of the UMBC English Department, noted that the university would have received twice the number of applications if it had placed the job posting on its regular mailing lists. She said that, even though the job required only a master’s degree, a number of candidates with Ph.D’s applied.
“Certainly we have had many overqualified candidates apply for our jobs over the last several years,” Berman said, noting that candidates whose credentials might be more than what a job posting asks for are applying for whatever they can get in a tight academic market.
But four-year colleges such as UMBC are not the primary beneficiaries of an overqualified applicant pool. Instead, community and junior colleges are seeing a substantial increase in the number of job seekers who in other years might have opted for higher-profile opportunities.
While community and junior colleges, many of which have seen dramatic increases in enrollment over the last few years, have always emphasized teaching-oriented faculty, some institutions are receiving job queries from candidates with substantial research backgrounds as well. Some community college representatives acknowledge that the poor economy has bolstered applicant pools but added that their expanded recruitment efforts have helped as well.
For example, Delaware County (Pa.) Community College, which had traditionally recruited from a base in the mid-Atlantic region, has seen job applications from all over the country since posting vacancies on nationally circulated mailing lists and Web sites. Connie McCalla, vice president of human resources at the college, said that, as a result, the faculty hiring pool is more ethnically and regionally diverse and, in some cases, overqualified.
