Modern Language Association Reports Flat Growth for Language Teaching Positions
For anyone hunting a job teaching English or a foreign language, the market remains bleak. The only thing resembling good news is arithmetic: the number of openings is flat this year rather than falling again. After two years of dramatic decline, stability counts as a result.
That is the conclusion of the annual report on job openings from the Modern Language Association, which tracks its own job listings each year as a proxy for the health of the field. The association released its projections for the 2010-11 academic year listings ahead of its annual meeting, which begins Thursday in Los Angeles, where several thousand academics will gather to interview, present papers and quietly compare notes on how few interviews anyone is getting.
Why the MLA numbers matter
Not every opening in English or a foreign language gets listed with the MLA. Some departments advertise elsewhere, some hire quietly, and a growing share of teaching is done by adjuncts whose posts never appear in any formal listing at all. But the MLA figures track the rises and falls of the wider market closely enough to be useful, and they are especially reliable for the category that matters most to people entering the profession: tenure-track assistant professor posts.
Those are the jobs that new PhDs actually want. They come with a salary that supports a household, a path to promotion, and enough security to plan a life. The alternative, an accumulation of adjunct contracts paid by the course with no benefits, is not a career so much as a holding pattern.
A pipeline that never adjusted
The uncomfortable structural fact is that graduate programmes did not shrink when the job market did. Departments kept admitting doctoral students, partly because those students teach undergraduate courses cheaply. The result is a pipeline producing far more qualified candidates than there are posts to fill, and it has been producing them for years.
The maths is brutal. A single tenure-track opening in a well-known department can attract several hundred applications. Search committees respond by filtering on ever narrower criteria, and candidates respond by spending years on the market, moving from one visiting position to the next.
Two years of steep decline followed the financial crisis, as universities froze hiring, cut budgets and left retirements unfilled. Flat is better than falling. It is not recovery.
Foreign languages, squeezed twice
Foreign language departments face a particular problem. When budgets tighten, administrators look at enrolment, and small language programmes are easy to cut. Departments teaching Russian, Italian, German or classics have been closed or merged at institutions across the United States. Each closure removes not just jobs but the pipeline of students who might have gone on to teach.
The irony is hard to miss. Demand for language skills in the wider economy has not fallen. Employers want people who can work across borders, and government agencies compete for speakers of languages they consider strategically important. What has fallen is the willingness of universities to pay for the departments that produce them.
Where the graduates actually go
A growing number of doctoral graduates end up outside academia, and the language services industry is one of the destinations that absorbs them. Someone with a doctorate in comparative literature has exactly the skills that a serious language firm needs: deep subject knowledge, fluency in more than one language, and an editor obsession with getting a sentence right. Agencies offering professional translation services increasingly recruit from precisely this pool, and the pay for a specialist translator with genuine domain expertise compares well with an adjunct salary.
Others move into publishing, localisation, government, secondary teaching or corporate communications. What most of them share is a graduate education that never once mentioned these paths as legitimate outcomes.
- Translation and localisation. Specialist knowledge in law, medicine or engineering commands a premium.
- Secondary and international schools. Steadier demand than universities, and a genuine shortage of qualified foreign language teachers in many districts.
- Government and defence. Persistent demand for less commonly taught languages.
- Publishing and media. Editing, rights, and literary translation, though the pay is famously modest.
What the association can and cannot do
The Modern Language Association has been publishing this report for decades, and publishing it honestly, which is more than some professional bodies manage. Its own guidance to departments has grown steadily blunter about the ethics of admitting doctoral students who have little prospect of an academic job. The association materials on the profession, available through mla.org, now devote real attention to non-academic careers.
What the MLA cannot do is create posts. Hiring decisions sit with university administrators responding to enrolment, endowment returns and state funding. No professional body has leverage over any of that.
The signal in a flat line
Flat listings after two years of collapse mean the bleeding has stopped, not that the patient is well. The pool of candidates has grown throughout the decline, so a stable number of openings still means worse odds this year than last for any individual applicant.
For anyone considering a doctorate in a language field, the report is worth reading in full, along with the wider labour data. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects strong growth for interpreters and translators over the coming decade, which is a striking contrast with the academic market for the very same language skills. The skills are in demand. The job title is the problem.
Advice nobody wants to hear
Graduate students entering the market this year are being told to prepare a plan that does not depend on a tenure-track offer, and to prepare it early rather than after the third failed cycle. That means language certifications, subject specialisms, technical skills and a professional network outside the university. It is unwelcome advice, and the people giving it know that. The alternative is a decade of adjunct contracts and the slow discovery that the flat line in the MLA report was, in fact, the ceiling.