A PhD is a research degree. You’ll have coursework for the first two years, but what sets a PhD apart from other graduate programs is the dissertation.

The goal is to produce original research, to transition from a consumer to a producer of scholarship.

Doing well as an undergraduate does not necessarily mean you will do well in graduate school; it’s a fundamentally different task. If you do not have a genuine passion for ideas and an interest in academia, a PhD may not be for you.

You can do very well for yourself with a PhD outside of academia, but you can do well there without one too.

The only profession that requires a PhD is academia, and spending an extra three to four years producing a dissertation that holds little value in the public or private sector is a costly way to gain the wage premium of a PhD over a master’s or bachelor’s degree.

Government and industry jobs will remain open to you with a PhD, but there are less costly ways to get those jobs if you have no interest in the academy.

Economics holds several advantages over other social sciences in academia.

For one, earning a PhD in economics takes less time. While time-to-completion has been trending upward, most PhDs in economics are completed in four to six years.

In 2022, the median time-to-completion was 5.8 years—shorter than any other social science and within half a year of computer science, mathematics, and statistics (see Table 1-12).

However, this figure reflects only the duration of the doctoral program itself and it is not uncommon for students to pursue other graduate degrees before starting a PhD.

The data below compare time-to-completion measured from the start of any graduate program, including cases where students first complete a master’s degree. I discuss master’s programs further in Part 6.

The post-2012 increase is likely due to three factors:

1. Heightened competition for PhD admissions, leading more candidates to complete a master’s degree before entering a doctoral program.
2. Increased demand for candidates to generate and analyze novel data for a job market paper that fully demonstrates their skill set.
3. Delayed graduation due to uncertainty surrounding COVID.

I expect (and hope) the effects of (3) will be temporary, but (1) and (2) will likely persist for some time.

Source: NCSES SED, Table 1-12

Still, time-to-completion remains shorter in economics than in other social sciences, in part because economics rarely requires lab or fieldwork, unlike anthropology, sociology, psychology, or many hard sciences.

Moreover, the discipline has fully transitioned into a journal-based model rather than a book-based one. An economics dissertation typically consists of three article-length papers stapled together—often on different topics but with a common theme—rather than a book-length treatment of a single subject.

As a result, dissertations in economics tend to be much shorter than in other disciplines.

Source: Adapted from data based on dissertations from the University of Minnesota for 2009-2014.

More important than time-to-completion or dissertation length is the strength of the job market.

The unemployment rate for any PhD is low—you will find a job. However, compared to other disciplines, it is even lower in economics, while the median salary is higher.

Source: NSF NCSES Doctorate Recipients, 2023. Unemployment data are from Table 4-1. Median salary data are from Table 69. Academic salaries are calculated as the average of the main discipline category and “Postsecondary teachers” in that discipline.

Given the conclusion in Part 1, an even more important reason to choose economics is that the academic job market is much better.

The National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES) tracks the number of doctorates awarded each year by U.S. institutions across disciplines. This data reflects the majority of the labor supply, or the other PhD graduates you would be competing against for jobs.

The number of economists has steadily increased over time, even as most other disciplines have declined. The only other disciplines with a positive growth trend are the ones economists compete with in the private sector: business, computer science, and statistics.

At first glance, this might not seem like a strong argument for doing a PhD in economics.

But supply is only one side of the equation. If it weren’t already clear from the high median salary and low unemployment rate, demand for economics PhDs has been and remains strong.

The American Economic Association (AEA) has provided a job-listing service for the profession since 1974, aptly named “Job Openings for Economists” (JOE).

What does the demand for PhD economists look like?

Even with growing competition from computer science and statistics, the number of job listings for economists remains nearly three times the number of new PhDs—and the number of academic listings alone is twice as high.

That said, you should only seriously consider a PhD if your interest in academia goes beyond a passing curiosity, even if you're open to other career paths. Which means we need to focus on academic listings.

The problem with these academic numbers is that they don’t distinguish between U.S. and international listings or between tenure-track (TT) and non-tenure-track (NTT) positions. You don’t want to be stuck moving from postdoc to visiting position to adjuncting and back—you want to secure a tenure-track position (and for most people, one in the U.S.).

The archived reports for JOE do not provide more granular breakdowns by position type, but we can use the online JOE postings for further detail. For comparison, the American Political Science Association (APSA) and the American Historical Association (AHA) also report data on recent job postings.

The chart below shows the number of academic postings in the United States suitable for new PhDs, with TT positions shown in full color and NTT positions in a lighter shade. It also includes the number of new PhDs in the three disciplines.

For those interested in the caveats of these data, click here.

1. These discipline-specific services act as central repositories for job postings, but they do not capture every available job in a given field.
2. The JOE and APSA data reflect raw job listings, whereas the AHA data come from year-end reports that track different metrics based on their institutional priorities.
3. The AHA reports the number of jobs per year, while APSA and JOE report the number of job listings per year. A single listing may represent multiple jobs (e.g., when St. Olaf hired two economists at once, there was only one listing).
4. For simplicity, I assume all AHA-reported jobs are in the U.S. and that their NTT classification includes both postdocs and temporary teaching positions.
5. The JOE and APSA classifications are based on employer-submitted data. While useful, these classifications are sometimes inaccurate. As someone who relied on JOE’s downloadable file to track applications when I was on the market—and who missed the deadline for more than one—I can confirm that errors are not infrequent.
6. APSA is fairly consistent in classifying job ranks (e.g., Assistant, Associate, Postdoc, Visiting). However, JOE groups all U.S. full-time tenure-track or tenured positions into a single category. Since my goal is to compare TT and NTT positions available to new PhDs, I have to rely on external criteria beyond the built-in classifiers.
7. To do this, I trained a machine learning model on job titles and full advertisement postings from clearly identifiable TT, NTT, and Associate/Full listings to classify positions without clear labels. The model performs well in distinguishing TT and NTT roles, though its accuracy is lower for Associate/Full positions. Some errors remain.

I greatly respect history as a discipline, but the demand is low, and the supply is high. If you wish to pursue a PhD in history, it’s probably best to treat it as a pure consumption good.

But what about political science? The number of tenure-track jobs there is similar to economics, and the supply of new PhDs is both lower and declining. So why not pursue a PhD in political science instead?

While you shouldn’t do a PhD for the outside options, those options still matter. A strong private and public sector job market reduces the number of candidates competing on the academic side. And on this margin, economics dominates the other social sciences.

According to the most recent Survey of Earned Doctorates (Table 9-13), 61.3% of historians, 61.4% of political scientists, and only 43.6% of economists went into academia. Among those who entered academia, 34.6% of historians, 56.1% of political scientists, and 74.8% of economists secured a tenure-track job. Not bad odds for the economist.

An added bonus: because modern economics is imperialistic, you can capture the rents of an economist while still pursuing whichever research topics interest you:

• Interested in history? Economic History.
• Psychology? Behavioral Economics.
• Politics? Public Economics, Public Choice, and Political Economy.
• Law? Law and Economics.
• Sociology? Applied Microeconomics.

As someone with eclectic interests, this is the biggest perk of doing economics over other disciplines. Thank you, Gary Becker and Ludwig von Mises.

There are two main types of academic placements: research-focused and teaching-focused.

Both require teaching, research, and service, but with different expectations, pressures, and rewards.

At an R1 institution, you'll be paid more and teach fewer classes, but you'll also be expected to be more research-active at a high level. Failing tenure is not uncommon, as publishing well is hard.

At a liberal arts college (LAC), you'll be paid less and teach more, but research requirements are much lower—both in terms of the number of articles and the rank of the journals.

Each is good work if you can get it:

• I technically only work (in the classroom) two days a week for about thirty weeks a year.
• My ‘work’ consists of talking with smart people about interesting ideas.
• I get summers ‘off.’
• I’m paid to travel.
• I don’t have to wear a suit.
  • This isn’t always the case in business departments, but they’re compensated for this ordeal with higher wages.
• I don’t really have a boss.

It’s not all great:

• I work a lot more than just when I’m in the classroom.
• I’m basically always on, constantly thinking about projects and research ideas (this is likely selection rather than treatment).
• Pay could be better.
  • If your goal is money, don’t be an academic.
  • If your goal is to make as much money as possible while being an academic, do a finance PhD instead.
• The other main downside is having little choice in where you live. If you have a strong geographical preference, academia is likely not for you.

The general advice is to attend the highest-ranked program that funds you. Both funding and rank are important.

You should not pay for a PhD; you should be paid. Tuition, healthcare, and a modest stipend are standard, often in exchange for teaching or research assistance.

If a program doesn’t offer these to you, consider going somewhere else. It’s not just that out-of-state tuition is costly—though it is; it is that not being offered funding indicates that the department is not directly invested in your success.

Beyond being funded, you shouldn’t put much weight on how much. The goal isn’t to live well during graduate school—it’s to live well afterwards. For that goal, rank is the more important criterion.

Rank matters for placement—where you get a job—and placement is the goal. Academia is a rank-obsessed profession, and economics is among the most hierarchical.

Hierarchies serve useful functions and provide quick heuristics on quality. Still, the unfortunate reality is that economics’ hierarchy is rigid and takes shape early. If you’re outside a top-10 department, the general rule is that your placement will be roughly 20 to 30 ranks below where you earn your PhD.

Placement in economics follows a heavily skewed distribution: among faculty at the top 96 PhD-granting institutions, 60% earned their PhD from a top-15 department, with the top 6 alone accounting for a third. This ranking game starts even before graduate school—of those who earned their undergraduate degree in the U.S., a third attended a top-15 university.

Source: Jones and Sloan (2024). Note that this represents the faculty at the top 96 PhD-granting institutions, not the full placement outcomes of those programs.

Think of it this way: if each top-5 department has ten students on the market but only hires two, that leaves ten top-5 openings for fifty top-5 candidates. Some will go into industry or government, and occasionally a top-10 candidate will be competitive for those positions, but that still leaves twenty to thirty top-5 candidates competing for placements in the top 20. Students coming from those programs, in turn, hope to get hired by departments in the top 40, and so on. Outside the top 15, landing a top-50 placement is rare, and by the time you reach the top 40 and below, the most likely placement is at a directional school or a liberal arts college.

Put another way, if your goal is to become a professor at Harvard, you’d better get into a top-5 program.

Of the 52 faculty members in Harvard’s economics department, 41 earned their PhD from a top-5 program, three from a top-15 program, three from leading European institutions, and one holds a PhD in mathematics and computer science. The remaining two earned their PhDs from a top-30 department—one was hired in the 1970s, and the other is Roland Fryer.

And if you really want to work at Harvard, your best bet is to earn your PhD from Harvard or MIT. Over 60% of their faculty received their PhD from one of those two programs, with 16 from each.

There are exceptions—and it’s possible to publish well and move up over time (John List comes to mind)—but placements generally follow this distribution.

And so comes the general-advice rule: maximize rank conditional on funding.

The standard reference for rank is the U.S. News and World Report. These rankings aren’t perfect, and after the top 30 or so, overall university prestige tends to outweigh the strength of the economics department.

Rankings also fail to account for field specialization. The University of Minnesota is a strong program with good placements, but its strength is in macroeconomics. If you aren’t interested in dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) macro models, you probably shouldn’t choose UMN just because it’s ranked 18th.

RePEc provides more granular rankings, including by field, but I wouldn’t focus too much on the exact number. Instead, use it as a general guide to a department’s overall range.

Still, rank is a noisy metric, and we can do better than the general-advice rule—especially if you are not competitive for admission at a top 30 program.

Much more important than rank is the department’s actual placement record.

These should be publicly available. If a program does not disclose its placements, consider going somewhere else.

If you’re aiming for an R1, Texas A&M (ranked 38th) might be risky, but it’s still a better bet than George Washington (ranked 61st) or George Mason University (ranked 74th).

Compared to Texas A&M, both Georges place poorly. But Texas A&M outranks each by a good amount.

If we were going by rank maximization, Washington > Mason. However, when we look at placements, it’s a different story.

Compared to George Washington, GMU places really well in academia. Unsurprising for its rank, most of these placements are at primarily undergraduate-serving institutions, but it’s still good work if you can get it—and you are more likely to get it by going to GMU than GWU, even though GWU outranks GMU by a good amount.

Of course, if you prefer the private sector or a place like the IMF or World Bank over a LAC, you should go to GWU over GMU.

This suggests a new rule:

If you wouldn’t be happy with a program’s median placement, don’t go there.

And this new rule has a straightforward implication: depending on your goals, some PhD programs are not worth attending.

What it also means is that between schools where placements are similar, other program features can be factored into your optimal choice.

Or put another way: the marginal value of rank is small if there isn’t a significant difference in placements.

It’s likely worth choosing a program ranked 36th over one ranked 31st if it better aligns with your interests. Is there faculty you’d want to work with? Does the department match your research focus?

I wouldn’t usually recommend choosing a program based on money or geography, but beyond a certain rank, these aren’t the worst factors to consider.

After all, you will be spending nearly six years of your life there.

Graduate admissions depend on four primary factors, with a fifth becoming increasingly relevant: (1) grades, (2) math background, (3) quantitative GRE score, and (4) letters of recommendation. A growing but still not universal expectation is (5) research experience.

(1) Grades: Your grades matter, particularly in math, economics, and statistics. No one really cares if you got a C in poetry, but it would matter if the C was in calculus or micro. Still, you’re competing with others who did well in math and in poetry and grades signal more than just general aptitude.

Poor grades, even in core classes, can sometimes be overlooked if other aspects of your application are strong. But if you want to get into a good graduate program, don’t slack in your classes.

(2) Math background: Math preparedness is often the first screening criterion in admissions. The first year of coursework is largely pure math, and math is hard, especially if you don’t have a solid foundation. The economic intuition behind the math is comparatively easier to learn. For admissions purposes, you’re better off majoring in math than in economics.

This applies to math more than statistics. Statistics will serve you better in the long run unless you plan to be a theorist (which you shouldn’t, but that’s a different discussion). However, statistics won’t help you survive the first-year micro and macro sequence, and we need to keep our rents high somehow.

The AEA provides recommended minimums for math preparedness. Many programs also list their expectations on their admissions sites. For example, the University of Virginia states: “A successful record in courses such as advanced calculus, linear algebra, intermediate microeconomics, intermediate macroeconomics, real analysis, differential equations, and either mathematical statistics (taught in a math department) or econometrics increases an applicant’s chances of admission and subsequent success in the program.”

(3) GRE score: Along with math preparation, the quantitative GRE score is used to narrow the applicant pool to a manageable size. You shouldn’t do poorly on the verbal or writing sections, but they aren’t major factors in admissions. Of course, you’ll be competing with candidates who do well across all sections, but if you’re constrained, maximize your quant score over verbal.

Again, using UVA as an example: “Additionally, most admitted students have GRE quantitative scores near or above the 90th percentile.”

They say nothing about verbal or writing scores. However, if English is not your first language, these may be scrutinized more closely.

(4) Letters of recommendation: With how competitive the application process has become, especially at top departments, most places receive enough applications that they can no longer use GPA and the GRE to distinguish between candidates. And while a candidate’s statement of purpose is important, talk is cheap.

The main way to differentiate between already strong-on-paper candidates is through letters of recommendation. All else equal, the prestige and connections of your letter writer matter, as does their discipline (ceteris paribus, choose economists). More important, though, is that the letter writer actually knows you and can comment on your abilities beyond “they did well in my class.”

A letter from a well-known professor won’t help if all they can say about you is your course grade.

(5) Research experience: Undergraduate research experience is becoming more common, but you shouldn’t worry if you don’t have any by the time you graduate. I expect (and hope) that admissions committees understand that access to research opportunities varies significantly across institutions in ways outside the candidate’s control. Having research experience is undoubtedly a plus, but not having it shouldn’t put you at a disadvantage.

That said, for admissions purposes, the value of research experience comes less from what you produce and more from what it allows your letter writer to include in their recommendation. If you want a strong letter, you should find a way for faculty to get to know you beyond the classroom.

Due to the placement dynamics discussed in Part 4, students at large state schools and other R1s tend to have more access to well-known and well-connected faculty. However, this doesn’t always translate into more research opportunities for undergraduates. These faculty often have graduate students or predocs assisting with research, and many primarily teach graduate courses rather than undergraduate ones. Even when they do teach undergraduates, depending on the subject and class size, their courses may not include a research component.

In contrast, economics majors at St. Olaf must take at least two seminar courses, each requiring a full-length research paper. I also don’t have graduate students or predocs, and there are plenty of projects I could use help with.

But I’m not well-known and have no connections to elite institutions.

Tradeoffs.

You can’t change the past. You can’t go back in time to ensure you get into a top 15 undergraduate program or start taking math courses your freshman year.

But what can you do?

• Take additional math courses if you have room in your schedule.
• If you don’t have room, try to make some.
  • Many St. Olaf students try to double or even triple major, on top of having several minors. A single major is fine, and minors don’t mean much of anything. You’re better off taking more math and more courses with the professors you want letters from.
• Take courses with professors you want a letter from.
• Study for the GRE.

Other than application fees, there’s little harm in applying. Apply to a few programs with your current profile and if you get in with funding, great!

If not, there are two main alternatives, each serving slightly different functions.

The first alternative is a master’s degree.

There are two main types of master’s programs: applied and traditional.

An applied master’s is typically a one-year terminal degree focused on gaining skills for government or private-sector jobs. If your goal is a PhD and academia, I’d avoid these.

A traditional master’s program is usually two years long, with a course sequence similar to a PhD program but at a slightly lower level.

A master’s program provides an opportunity to:

• Take more classes, including math courses.
• Improve your GPA.
• Get letters from economists in a higher-ranked program.
• Come out of a higher-ranked program (e.g., now Harvard is on your CV, not just your undergraduate institution).
• Gain research experience (though not all require it).

There are downsides.

Very few courses will transfer to a PhD program, meaning you’ll essentially take the first-year sequence twice. Additionally, very few master’s programs offer funding, so you’ll likely have to pay out of pocket, often at an out-of-state rate.

Unless you need to improve your GPA, I’d recommend a predoctoral program instead.

A predoc offers similar benefits to a master’s—you gain research experience at a prestigious institution and get a letter from a well-known and connected professor. You can also take courses, though typically to fill gaps rather than boost your GPA.

Most importantly, you are paid rather than having to pay.

Additionally, if you’re on the fence about graduate school, a predoc experience will give you a better sense of what academics actually do compared to taking more classes in a master’s program—though it often involves more of the grunt work.

You should also be aware that predoctoral programs prioritize different skills than master’s or PhD programs.

For a predoc, statistics, data analysis, and coding matter far more than advanced math.

This is intended for PhD candidates who are likely to place at a teaching-focused institution based on their background, skill set, or interests. More specifically, it is primarily for those who are not competitive for any R1 position, rather than those who might simply prefer a top-ranked liberal arts college (LAC) over a lower-ranked R1.

If you have the prestige or research output to be competitive at a research-focused institution, or if you would prefer a government or private-sector job over an academic position primarily serving undergraduates, this may not be especially relevant to you.

That said, because constraints can vary by rank within type, nothing here should be read as a comprehensive account of hiring practices across all teaching-focused institutions, or as advice that applies equally to each of them. A place like Williams College (ranked 1st among LACs) likely shares more in common with an R1 than with St. Olaf College (ranked 50th), even if emphasizing teaching in your cover letter would serve you better at Williams than at a typical R1. Likewise, there may be meaningful differences between a regional public university and a mid-range LAC, even if both primarily serve undergraduates. My experience is only with the latter.

This is also written for PhD candidates in economics. However, because it draws more on institutional constraints than disciplinary norms, I expect it aligns more closely with how my political science colleagues down the hall approach hiring than with how my economics colleagues at an R1 do. Still, disciplinary differences and broader market conditions might make some parts less applicable outside economics.

Finally, this is intended for PhD candidates, not for search committees. It’s not meant to offer guidance on how best to evaluate candidates, nor is it meant to describe how searches should be conducted or to justify any particular hiring practice. Rather, it describes the tradeoffs and constraints that often shape hiring decisions at institutions where undergraduate teaching takes priority over research output, based on my experience on both sides of the market.

The sections that follow expand on those constraints and offer guidance for navigating the teaching-focused job market:

• Part 2 provides background on my experience in academia and why I’m positioned to offer advice for the kind of candidates described above.
• Part 3 lays out the central observations that motivate the need for guidance aimed at securing a position at a teaching-focused institution.
• Part 4 examines how the economics profession has changed over the past few decades and what that means for different segments of the market.
• Part 5 outlines the main constraints we face when hiring at a mid-range liberal arts college.
• Part 6 offers practical advice for candidates hoping to be competitive at institutions that prioritize undergraduate teaching.

I am recently tenured with an endowed chair at a mid-range liberal arts college. In the process of writing my tenure statement, I came to one central conclusion: I stumbled blindly through every stage to get here. I had tremendous help and support from advisors, friends, and loved ones, but it was still mostly blind stumbling.

I wouldn’t call it imposter syndrome, but I certainly feel out of place at times. Compared to many of my colleagues, I suspect the variance in my possible futures was much larger, where small differences could easily have put me on a radically different path.

I was always a good student, but for a host of reasons I dropped out of high school in 11th grade. After a few semesters at a community college, I transferred to a large in-state university to finish my degree. I double-majored in philosophy and economics, choosing the latter more as a means to employment than as an intellectual pursuit. And though that plan worked out—I am, technically, employed as an economist—it was not in the way I initially intended. My intellectual allegiances eventually shifted, but by the time I seriously considered graduate school, I had to stay an extra semester just to meet the minimum level of math preparation recommended by the American Economic Association (AEA)—for a master’s degree, not a PhD.

I still don’t really know what “Real Analysis” is, even as I advise students to take it if they’re considering graduate school.

I entered graduate school without knowing much of anything about academia. I liked ideas, just not the idea of corporate life. That was it. I applied to only two programs, never checked their placement records, and never considered what was supposed to come afterwards.

When my students ask me how I knew I wanted to become a professor, I tell them about the speech course I had to take in community college. I sped-read my five-minute speech in under two, shaking the entire time. As I sat down, a complete stranger moved seats to comfort me.

I dropped the class the next day.

Speaking in front of people for 80 minutes twice a week is the last thing I imagined wanting to do for a living.

I’ve heard George Mason University’s admission strategy compared to Moneyball more than once (which likely explains how I got in despite my atrociously bad quant GRE score). But looking back, what stands out is their implicit placement strategy: they know who they are, what their comparative advantage is, and where their graduates are likely to place.

We were encouraged to teach and to teach often, and to be well-rounded in our interests and knowledge. Unlike many economics programs, we were encouraged to embrace (what I now know to be) a broadly liberal education alongside our technical training.

Peter Boettke repeatedly emphasized the futility of trying to be “MIT South of the Potomac”, reflecting Buchanan’s and later the Hayek Program’s (GMU-Mercatus) motto: dare to be different.

Each is just another way of saying: know your strengths and know the constraints.

I was never in competition with MIT students for an open position at Harvard, let alone any other R1. But I was in competition with some of them, and many others, for positions at places like St. Olaf.

The job market is a two-sided matching process. You only need to stand out from the relevant competition on the margins that matter to your target institutions.

And on those margins, GMU prepared me well.

When I was on the job market in 2017–18, GMU brought in Steve Horwitz and Emily Chamlee-Wright to offer advice on navigating the academic job market for teaching-focused institutions. Steve had spent his career at St. Lawrence University, while Emily had recently become president and CEO of the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) after serving as provost at Washington College and, before that, as associate dean and professor at Beloit College.

They ran mock interviews, helped us refine how we framed our job market papers for a broader audience, and provided practical tips on appealing to LACs. IHS used to run similar workshops, often linked to conferences like the Southern Economic Association (SEA) meetings, which I also attended and found incredibly useful.

Since starting at St. Olaf, I’ve served on nine search committees: six tenure-track, one visiting, and two postdocs. All were in economics or closely related fields (political scientists served on the committees and were part of the candidate pool in the postdoc searches). If our department’s requests are approved, that number will likely be eleven after next year.

Our searches typically draw between 200 and 300 applications, and I make it a point to review at least the CV and cover letter for each one. In total, I’ve evaluated well over 1,800 applications.

I don’t yet have Horwitz’s career longevity at a LAC (may he rest in peace) or Chamlee-Wright’s seniority and breadth of experience. But I believe I have a strong sense of what makes a candidate stand out—not just to me, but to my colleagues—and of the kinds of mistakes that can tank an otherwise strong candidate. I also have a clear sense of the constraints that shape our selection process in ways that aren’t always obvious from the outside.

The advice that follows began as informal guidance for my friends on the market, drawing from my early experience on a search committee. It became more refined as I later shared it with their students and others at GMU, many of whom I didn’t know well but whose placement in the profession I care about nonetheless. I’m now putting it out there more broadly for anyone who might find something of value in it.

The advice in Part 6 builds on two central observations, each explored in more detail in the next two sections. The first is that the academic job market has changed. The second is that teaching-focused institutions face different hiring constraints than R1s. Each observation is straightforward on its own, but it’s how the first has made the second more relevant for a growing number of candidates that is the focus here.

Observation 1: The academic job market has changed.

It is no longer the 1980s, or even the early 2000s. That famous paper from 2005 on your syllabus isn’t just slightly dated; it’s older than most of your students and about twelve difference-in-differences estimators behind.

We’re halfway through the 2020s, and while much of the current academic zeitgeist is focused on the now-here demographic cliff or the potential lasting effects of recent policy shifts and new technologies, my aim here is to highlight the structural changes that have already taken place within the profession and what they imply for many candidates entering the academic job market.

Compared to decades past, the discipline’s hierarchies are more rigid, rank games start earlier, and it has become harder to compensate for perceived deficiencies in any one area through traditional means or strong recommendations.

The problem isn’t that we use strict sorting mechanisms to allocate increasingly scarce positional goods; it’s that, by the time many people realize the nature of the game they’re playing, there is often little they can do to improve their standing within it.

The (further) calcification of the profession has not gone unnoticed, nor is it necessarily unjustified, given the level of competition. But what’s different now is threefold:

1. Relative to other social sciences, the returns to an economics PhD have remained high, even for graduates of lower-ranked programs.
2. PhD production has become increasingly bifurcated, with growth concentrated at both the top and bottom of the rankings.
3. One’s position in the hierarchy is increasingly determined by decisions made a decade or more earlier.

The first point helps explain why many people have responded to increasing barriers at the top by entering the profession through less prestigious programs rather than switching disciplines. The second helps explain why candidates from the lower end of highly ranked programs often find that their only viable path to academia is through a teaching-focused institution—typically at odds with their expectations, training, and aspirations, and on near equal footing with candidates from the lower end of the distribution who often tailor their profile toward those positions from the start. The third helps explain why, by the time they realize this, there may be little they can do to change course.

This situation is compounded by the fact that those best positioned to offer guidance on how to play the game are the ones who won it in the past.

There will always be a lag in advice. But the changes we’ve seen mean that, for a growing number of candidates, more is needed than simply adjusting the standard guidance to account for the fact that it reflects obstacles as they existed twenty years ago. For many, marginal adjustment is irrelevant—they were effectively disqualified from the game long before it began.

I was never much of a sports person, but the analogy is easier there: no matter how much I practice, no matter my commitment and dedication, or how closely I follow the advice of those who were successful before me, I will never be in the NBA—I’m 5'5".

Advice on how to make it in the NBA—even if tailored to someone who’s 6'0" on a good day—doesn’t translate well to what I can do to be successful. And given how the distribution has shifted, it may no longer work for those who are only marginally tall either.

This isn’t to complain about hierarchy, nor is it to lament the existence of constraints (though I’ll happily do either if you want to find me at the SEAs). Rather, it’s advice for those who are—or should be—playing a different game, whether they realize it or not, and regardless of how fair that may seem:

Optimizing for positions outside your opportunity set does little good, especially when relatively small adjustments could help you stand out for the ones that are actually within reach.

If your goal is to stay in academia, it’s worth considering whether you’re closer to the margin than you think. To be frank, anyone earning a PhD outside the top 30 should at least entertain the possibility that they might be. And if you don’t think you are, read through Part 4 before reconsidering.

If you are on the margin, you should be open to making small adjustments to your strategy to better appeal to teaching-focused institutions. To do so, you first need to recognize a basic fact about the academic market:

Observation 2: Teaching-focused institutions face different hiring constraints than R1s.

Because of these differences, what makes someone competitive at a research university does not always translate to a teaching-focused one, and qualities that barely register at an R1 may be central to hiring decisions at institutions where undergraduate teaching is the priority. Yet many candidates are trained primarily to appeal to research-focused institutions, even as that path is becoming less available for a growing number of them.

If your most viable path to academia is likely through a teaching-focused institution, it’s worth learning how mid- and lower-ranked LACs, regional publics, and other teaching-centric schools evaluate candidates—and investing strategically in the margins they care about.

If that describes your situation, the rest of this advice is for you.

Know your strengths. Know the constraints.

One of my favorite papers from graduate school explored judicial independence and constitutional review as mechanisms for securing economic and political freedom. It introduced a novel dataset on constitutional provisions across 71 countries, but otherwise relied on cross-country regressions to test a straightforward theory.

It was also published in the Journal of Political Economy (JPE).

At the time, I didn’t fully grasp what publishing in JPE meant, nor did I recognize the authors’ names beyond having seen them on other papers in the syllabus.

And while that paper made a solid contribution two decades ago, it would likely struggle to make it past the desk at even a C journal today.

That isn’t to say La Porta, López‐de‐Silanes, Pop‐Eleches, or Shleifer aren’t brilliant, or that they don’t deserve their accolades. It also isn’t to suggest that, if they were entering the profession today, they wouldn’t still land in top positions and publish in top journals.

Rather, it’s to say that the competition has intensified, and that the returns to early capital investments have grown alongside it.

Economics today stands as the least socioeconomically diverse graduate field in the academy.

A U.S.-born PhD economist is more likely to have a parent with a PhD (20%) than they are to be first-generation (13%), while nearly two-thirds have at least one parent with a graduate degree of any kind.

This lack of diversity is unsurprising to anyone paying attention, but it warrants exposition nonetheless.

Though it would be self-serving to claim that this disparity reflects the importance of the discipline, I doubt it’s due to well-educated parents uniquely recognizing the value of an economics degree and steering their children accordingly. More likely, it’s because well-educated parents steer their children at all—and success in this discipline requires significant guidance.

Beyond the usual hurdles of elite admissions, gaining entry to a high-ranking PhD program (or really any ranked program) requires recognizing not only that the standard undergraduate coursework in the major isn’t enough, but that the real prerequisites lie elsewhere entirely: in mathematics.

Yet even knowing this isn’t enough. You have to recognize it early enough to act on it, which means having a defined career path by freshman year, if not earlier. And because math is unusually cumulative, both the ability and the willingness to pursue a math-intensive degree often depend on having invested in it consistently well before college. Few programs take GMU’s Moneyball approach to admissions, and few things can compensate for a deficit in math if it exists.

This isn’t the time or place for the pre-doc conversation, but even students who do everything “right” often struggle to break into the top 30 without some form of prestige-network connection.

Where you go to graduate school matters, yet that decision is increasingly shaped by choices made much earlier—often in ignorance, and without the kind of guidance needed to make them well.

It’s no surprise, then, that those who make the right decisions at every stage tend to receive the rewards the system was designed to deliver: a placement at a research-focused institution.

Among economics faculty at the top 96 PhD-granting institutions, 60% earned their degree from a top-15 department, and nearly 15% received theirs from just two schools: MIT and Harvard.

Source: Jones and Sloan (2024). Note that this represents the institutional path of faculty at the top 96 PhD-granting institutions, not the placement outcomes of those programs.

This sorting begins long before graduate school. Among the faculty who earned their undergraduate degrees in the U.S., more than a third did so at a top-15 university.

Students from non-elite undergraduate institutions rarely reach top-ranked PhD programs. And even when they do, their earnings lag behind peers who attended elite institutions at both levels. Catching up is hard to do.

Traditionally, climbing this hierarchy from behind meant out-publishing the competition. But that path is increasingly difficult, and nearly impossible if it has to happen before you hit the market.

Publishing is slow. It’s also hard.

Among economists with a PhD from a top-10 program, nearly 60% fail to publish the equivalent of a single paper in a second-tier field journal within six years, and that’s despite any network advantages or possible biases associated with coming out of a top program.

Journal acceptance rates have continued downward, driven mostly by increased submissions.

Source: Data are from the “Report of the Editor: American Economic Review”, published in the May issue of the American Economic Review through 2018, and in the AEA Papers and Proceedings thereafter.

And it’s not just the top journals.

Source: Data are from the “Editor’s Report”, published in the Southern Economic Journal.

Expecting to outcompete the elite from behind is unrealistic unless you truly underplaced at every step along the way—and can deliver more with far less.

The dynamics of this hierarchy are widely understood, even by those unfamiliar with academia. But its effect on job placement is especially intuitive to anyone familiar with basic arithmetic.

I explain it to my students this way: if each top-5 department has ten candidates on the market but only hires two, that leaves ten openings for fifty candidates. Some will go into industry or government, and occasionally a top-10 candidate will be competitive for one of those openings, but that still leaves twenty to thirty top-5 candidates to fill the openings in the top 20. Graduates from those programs then aim for jobs in the top 40, and so on.

Or, more bluntly: if you want to be a professor at Harvard, you’d better get into a top-5 program.

Of the 52 faculty in Harvard’s economics department, 41 earned their PhD from a top-5 program, five from a top-15 program, three from elite European institutions, and one holds a PhD in mathematics and computer science. The remaining two earned their PhDs from a top-30 department—one was hired in the 1970s, and the other is Roland Fryer.

If you really want to work at Harvard, your best bet is to get a PhD from Harvard or MIT. Over 60% of the department earned their degree from one of those two programs, 16 from each.

This is not to ignore selection effects; it’s to highlight them.

No one joins the faculty at Harvard because they got their PhD there. They earned their PhD from Harvard, likely attended a top-15 for undergrad, and had demonstrated that potential long before, because they were already the type who, with the right guidance and investment, could publish well and eventually join Harvard’s faculty.

To continue the analogy from earlier: they are the ones who are dedicated, who practice, who receive and follow good advice, and who also happen to be well over six feet tall—whether from early investment, natural ability, or both.

For my purposes, it doesn’t matter why differences in “height” exist, only that they do—and that the profession selects on them. (And I have no interest in rehashing the hard work versus ability debate, let alone nature versus nurture.)

This, again, is intuitively understood, but it’s not the point.

The point is that the market has changed, and not evenly across differences in “height”.

Economics has always been a top-heavy discipline. There aren’t just ten students from each top department, there are more like 20 or 30. By my count, there were 158 candidates on the market in 2023–24 from just the top-5 departments (which actually includes seven schools, due to ties in the U.S. News & World Report rankings). Harvard alone had 33.

This number doesn’t include candidates from top-ranked policy or business schools that also place well in economics (like HBS, Kennedy, Booth, or Harris), those coming off post-docs, or those looking to move after underplacing during COVID.

Even if half of these candidates took private- or public-sector jobs, every top-15 department could hire five new faculty members and there would still be a surplus.

But this is not what’s new.

What’s new is where the growth has come from.

In the early 1980s, the top-5 programs collectively produced around 150 PhDs per year, accounting for about 20% of the U.S. economics labor supply. Today, while the top-5 produce only slightly more—around 180 graduates annually—the total number of economics PhDs awarded per year has grown substantially, by roughly 60% since the early 1980s.

Source: NCES.

Nearly 30% of the total increase came from the 20 departments in the top 20. Another 30% came from the 26 departments ranked 21-40. By the time you reach rank 40, you’ve already accounted for nearly 60% of the total increase in economics PhDs since the 1980s.

However, another 30% of the growth is concentrated at the lower end of the distribution, from the programs ranked 60-90.

Source: Doctoral data are from the NCES. Ranking data are from U.S. News & Reports.

More than 500 candidates now come out of the top 25 programs every year. That’s equivalent to the total output of the top 50 departments four decades ago. Meanwhile, departments ranked 61–90 have doubled their output—from about 130 PhDs per year in 1980 to over 260 today.

For a detailed growth table, click here.

Rank	Departments		PhDs Awarded				Market Share				Growth Contribution
			1980s		2020s		1980s		2020s
	Group	Total	Group	Total	Group	Total	Group	Total	Group	Total	Group	Total
Top 5	7	7	154	154	181	181	20%	20%	15%	15%	6%	6%
Top 10	3	10	47	201	70	251	6%	26%	6%	20%	5%	11%
Top 15	7	17	82	283	129	380	11%	37%	10%	31%	10%	21%
Top 20	3	20	27	310	57	437	3%	40%	5%	36%	7%	27%
Top 25	5	25	41	351	64	501	5%	46%	5%	41%	5%	32%
Top 30	8	33	56	407	90	591	7%	53%	7%	48%	7%	40%
Top 35	4	37	36	444	62	652	5%	58%	5%	53%	5%	45%
Top 40	9	46	39	483	89	741	5%	63%	7%	60%	11%	56%
Top 50	5	51	33	516	36	778	4%	67%	3%	63%	1%	57%
Top 55	5	56	13	528	25	802	2%	69%	2%	65%	3%	59%
Top 60	4	60	25	554	30	833	3%	72%	2%	68%	1%	60%
Top 65	10	70	46	600	72	905	6%	78%	6%	74%	6%	66%
Top 75	8	78	13	613	69	974	2%	80%	6%	79%	12%	78%
Top 80	9	87	37	650	53	1027	5%	85%	4%	84%	4%	81%
Top 90	13	100	33	683	69	1096	4%	89%	6%	89%	8%	89%
Top 105	6	106	12	695	20	1116	2%	91%	2%	91%	2%	91%
Top 110	13	119	40	735	58	1174	5%	96%	5%	96%	4%	95%
Top 120	10	129	23	758	32	1206	3%	99%	3%	98%	2%	97%
Top 130	2	131	5	763	4	1210	1%	100%	0%	98%	0%	97%
Top 135	7	138	3	766	19	1229	0%	100%	2%	100%	3%	100%

Supply is just one side of the equation.

The AEA introduced the Job Openings for Economists (JOE) in 1974. Since 1975, the AEA has published a report which lists the number of available positions (advertised through the JOE) distinguished by academic and non-academic positions.

Source: NCES and “Report of the Director of Job Opening for Economists”, AER and AEA P&P.

This doesn’t look too bad—and it is leagues better than some disciplines (see section 2 of my graduate school advice for a comparison to academic market for Political Science and History).

The growth in academic positions have outpaced the growth in new PhDs, and the growth in in public and private sector positions has remained robust since the 1990s. However, this graph doesn’t tell the complete story, for two reasons:

1. The number of academic job listings includes positions at every rank (assistant, associate, and full), every type (tenured, tenure-track, visiting, in-residence, post-docs), and in every country. Meanwhile, the production figures here include only U.S. institutions and only those formally classified as economics. That excludes many foreign PhD recipients who enter the U.S. market, plus adjacent fields (e.g., ag econ, political economy, business) that effectively compete for the same jobs.
2. The distribution of growth by rank and type does not necessarily reflect the same growth in candidates, i.e. there are not necessarily more positions open in the top 100 PhD granting institutions to match positions for the growth in the top 40 candidates.

Data here are less available

Yes, the marginal cost of of those U.S. TT Assistant Professor positions are at places that would likely never hire you, at least not when there is a surplus of top-ranked candidates still looking for a match. While the marginal cost of applying for full professor advertisements at Harvard is low, the chance of landing that position is near zero. Similarly, while GMU has occasionally placed graduates at PhD-granting institutions, and some have published their way up after starting at teaching-focused colleges, the likelihood that an average R1 would consider a sub-top-50 graduate is slim. For most, the realistic opportunity set is far smaller than the total number of U.S. TT Assistant Professor listings in JOE.

If we focus on TT Assistant Professor positions at U.S. institutions, we often find twice as many new PhDs (from U.S. institutions alone) as there are job postings—though offset somewhat by private-sector demand and by those who seek or accept work abroad.

Another complication is that many of these positions would never hire you if your graduate school ranking is below a certain threshold—especially with a surplus of top-50 or top-30 candidates still on the market.

In any given year, there are more candidates on the market from just the top 15 departments than there are open positions in the top 100, and often twice as many candidates from the top 50 as there are top 100 jobs available.

The upside is that you will get a job. Unemployment for economics PhDs remains extremely low. The problem is that it might not be the job you wanted or the one you’ve been advised toward. Students often optimize for positions that are unobtainable to them, sometimes at the expense of jobs they could realistically secure.

I have never been on a hiring committee that could primarily select on research output. I don’t know how research-focused institutions weigh bad teaching, being an asshole, awkwardness, or reluctance to do service against landing another top-5 hit or securing an extra 10% in grant money. I have always had to consider whether a candidate would accept our offer, whether they’d stay, whether we could convince them that the teaching load is reasonable or that our high-quality students compensate somewhat for limited research funding. I have to wonder whether the administration will budge even slightly to offer a more competitive salary, or whether a seemingly great candidate would upend the social and political balance of our nine-person department, where a single vote can significantly shift dynamics. Some of these considerations exist across ranks and institution types, but the tradeoffs and optimization strategies differ.

Unlike R1s with 50+ faculty and lower on-campus expectations, we cannot afford to hire someone who disrupts our department’s dynamics, no matter the traditional compensating differentials. Few candidates are worth considering if there’s any sign they could create conflict. I’d much rather hire a collegial colleague who willingly teaches the courses no one else wants and genuinely cares about student learning than someone publishing in top field journals or above every year.

The central claim of my advice is that if you are only truly competitive for teaching-focused positions, it is in your best interest to be aware of the constraints and considerations they face—rather than the choice dynamics of departments who would discard your application based on graduate school ranking alone.

There are three main stages to candidate selection: deciding who to interview, who to fly out, and who to make an offer to. We select for different things at each stage.

Once a stage is complete, we rarely revisit that decision and return to the larger pool of applicants. You want to craft your written material to pass the first stage, and only worry about the later stages once you advance. A perfectly rehearsed response to an interview question is useless if you don’t get the interview in the first place.

In the first stage, the most important document is the cover letter—not the job market paper, not the teaching or diversity statement, and not even your list of accomplishments on your CV, but the cover letter. This differs from R1s, where the JMP tends to come first.

Elite programs may not put much weight on a cover letter, but we do. Most of my colleagues use it as a primary screening device. There are certainly ways to overcome a weak cover letter, but there are also easy ways to avoid putting yourself in that position.

Why the cover letter? At this stage, you can’t change your background or your research. You can’t pick a different school, focus on a different topic, choose a different advisor, major in math rather than economics in undergrad, or anything else. You can change how you frame your background and what you signal in your letter. That is primarily what I read.

I typically only read a candidate's cover letter and CV before deciding to reject. (I do look at every applicant, which is not as common.) You want to grab my attention with those two documents so that I have a reason to read the rest of your materials.

In the first stage, there will usually be at least two sets of eyes reviewing your materials. The rest of the committee may only glance at your portfolio during the selection discussion, but more weight is given to the assigned reviewers—especially their justifications for why you stood out.

The first reason someone is passed over is usually a poor field fit. The second is a lack of understanding of the liberal arts beyond “small classrooms.”

If we list macroeconomics in our ad and you spend your entire cover letter talking about how much you love microeconomics, you will be put in the rejection pile, no matter what’s on your CV.

If you express enthusiasm for working with our graduate students, collaborating with our business school, or teaching principles in large lecture halls—none of which we have—you’ll land in the rejection pile.

It’s not that these things are inherently bad—everyone should be a microeconomist—but they’re simply not what we’re looking for. Aside from a seminar course, most of my classes fill to around 25-35 students, which isn’t much different from the classes I had or taught at FSU and GMU. There is a lot more to the liberal arts experience than just small classes, and we want to see that you understand this.

Field fit is the dominant selection criterion in the first stage because our ad listings are driven by our teaching needs, not our research priorities. If we need someone to teach econometrics, we will select the most interesting candidates from the pool of econometricians or those who explicitly want to teach econometrics—not from the entire applicant pool. It’s very hard to advocate for a candidate who doesn’t match our field requirements when there are hundreds of other candidates who do.

Teaching matters to us. What you want to teach and how you’d approach it are extremely relevant. If we advertise for econometrics, you should include some discussion of your excitement to teach econometrics and how you would do it. I can’t tell you how many candidates talk only about their own research interests without mentioning the core of what we need taught.

If you’re not from an elite program, the best way to stand out is through teaching. Elite candidates may have top-tier publications, but their short cover letters often reflect a lack of substantive teaching experience. Few programs require—or even encourage—graduate students to teach independently before graduation. At best, these candidates can discuss their TA experience and how they won a “best TA” award (which seems universal). This tells us very little. If you have the opportunity to teach independently, take it. If the only way to gain teaching experience before going on the market is to pick up a class at a local community college, do it. It means far more than a third-tier publication does.

Even if you haven’t taught independently, show that you've at least put serious thought into it. I suspect we place more weight on the teaching and DEI statements than most institutions. That isn’t because we use them as a political litmus test or look for orthodoxy. Rather, we want to see that you’ve really thought about your approach to teaching and how to handle a classroom filled with diverse interests, goals, and backgrounds—rather than just a host of mini-yous. Perhaps unique to my institution, but we don’t (appear to) care about your specific teaching methods or ideology so much as your genuine engagement with the process.

When I was on the market, I had about 15 interviews at various ranked liberal arts colleges, an R2 here or there, and a post-doc. Aside from the generic “tell us about your research” question, the only substantive question I received about my job market paper (JMP) came from the post-doc. At the time, I found it odd—every piece of advice emphasized knowing your JMP inside and out because you’d be grilled on it. And if you’re interviewing at an R1, you will be. But if you’re interviewing at a primarily teaching institution, you’re better off being prepared to answer questions about teaching.

The market is idiosyncratic. A trivial factor might get you knocked off my list but push you to the top of a colleague’s list. The best strategy? Be genuine. There’s not much else you can do.

What about recommendation letters? Unsurprisingly, as the size of the network has grown, the strength of a reputation mechanism has declined. To be frank, unless your advisor is legitimately famous or works on whatever esoteric topic I happen to be interested in that semester, I likely don’t know of them. And even if I did, it’s rarely enough to put much weight in their claims on your quality over anyone else’s claims on their student’s quality. Letters still get used and considered, but at the margin, if you already meet the above criteria.

Pure prestige can carry you a long way, but to be honest, if you’re largely uncompetitive for any R1s in the first place, your school doesn’t have the prestige you may think it does. I may be the odd one out here, but without looking at the actual rankings, I couldn’t tell you which schools are competiting for the top 30 spot compared to the top 40 or top 50. Outside of the top 20 or so, school prestige and quality all blur together and individual candidate attributes much more (which is also the case in general – I don’t care if you’re from Harvard… but some do, and of course, general quality selection is true on average).

My undergraduate epistemology professor once described modern academia as “gunboat philosophy.” Each person builds their boat (argument), sets it afloat (journal submission), and others try to sink it (peer review). What remains aren’t necessarily the best boats, but the ones that survived weak attacks or were launched after others had spent their ammunition.

The selection process is not too dissimilar. Your task as a candidate—at the candidacy stage—is not to build a better boat. It’s too late for that. It is to give me more ammo to take down others without giving my colleagues ammo to take you down.

The goal at this stage is not to be everyone’s favorite. We interview around 20 candidates per position. The last person chosen gets the same consideration as the first. What looks impressive on paper doesn’t always translate to the interview stage, and our internal ranking frequently changes after the first round of interviews.

The real aim is to stand out without being anyone’s least favorite candidate. You can’t afford to be anyone’s least favorite; we have 200-500 other applicants to consider, depending on the field. Even minor issues, some of which are beyond your control, can land you in the reject pile. You want to minimize the chance of that by focusing on the factors you can control.

The process isn’t random, but it is idiosyncratic. What I like in a candidate isn’t always what my colleagues like. Give me enough material to make a strong case for you, while giving my colleagues minimal counterarguments favoring other candidates.

You don’t need to customize your letter for every school, but you do want a strong letter that’s easily adaptable for those positions where you do want to be specific. Other than changing the school name, position title, and listed fields, I would only hyper-customize (e.g., mention specific course titles or unique academic programs) when there is an unusually good field or location fit. Everyone wants to be in a desirable city; few want to be in a small town in a “flyover” state. The same logic applies for signaling your interest.

Whatever field(s) you consider yourself in, frame your work in terms of the job ad.

Be careful not to go too far outside the ad’s confines. With enough preparation, anyone can teach anything, but if we advertised for money and banking and you list law and economics or development as your primary teaching interests, it raises concerns. Do you actually want to teach money and banking? Would you really be happy here if you never got to teach law and economics? Will you leave if you can’t teach it? I have to worry about retention, departmental needs, and whether colleagues will have to sacrifice their courses to keep you engaged. We simply have too many other candidates with clearer field alignment to justify those risks.

Beyond obvious pitfalls—and the single-paragraph “my materials are attached” letter (common among top-10 candidates)—four common mistakes stand out:

1. They waste space.
2. They tell rather than show.
3. They make it about us, not them.
4. They make it about them, not us.

The length and format of your letter don’t matter much, except at the extremes. A one-page letter isn’t necessarily better or worse than two pages. However, a cover letter full of empty prose wastes my time. If a sentence doesn’t provide meaningful information about your fit and qualifications, cut it. If it only restates something easily found on your CV, cut it—or weave it into a bigger point.

Don’t fret about the letter fitting on one page. Convey useful details. I typically sort candidates with their CV and cover letter opened side by side. If there’s enough there to excite me, I’ll read more. If not, I have hundreds of others to get through. If the best story of your teaching excellence is only buried in the teaching statement, I may never see it unless you hint at it in your letter.

It’s wonderful that you use engaging assignments and encourage students to think critically. It’s great that you value mentorship and diversity. However, broad platitudes tell us little beyond your familiarity with teaching buzzwords. Make it concrete. Give tangible examples of assignments or classroom strategies. Show us, don’t just tell us.

Of course, some of these examples or more detailed exposition can appear in the teaching, research, or diversity statements. But remember, I may not read them if your cover letter doesn’t pique my interest—or, worse, if it gives me a reason to pass you over. Your cover letter should highlight a couple of specific teaching-related anecdotes or successes. You can elaborate in the other materials.

Hiring is a two-sided matching game. We need to see why you’re a good match for us, as well as why we’re a good match for you. A letter that flatters us but reveals nothing about you is unhelpful. A letter that praises you but ignores us is equally ineffective.

A letter indistinguishable from one addressed to any other school might not automatically be rejected, but it’s more likely to be. Would we be a good fit for you? Do you really know who we are and what we do? We can’t tell unless you tell us.

On the other hand, there’s a risk in getting too specific. Some candidates who go that route get details wrong or wander into sensitivities they can’t predict (e.g., referencing a defunct center or an ill-favored colleague). The best approach is to demonstrate awareness of the liberal arts ethos and our advertised field needs without pinning yourself too tightly to uncertain specifics.

Few candidates have publications, and even fewer have meaningful teaching experience. The only way to compete with a competitor’s publications is to produce better ones, but almost any teaching experience will differentiate you from someone with none. By all means, mention your research accomplishments—particularly anything not obvious from your CV—but remember that, for us, teaching fit often matters more.

To be frank, most of your accomplishments mean little to me on their own. I don’t get a raise if you publish well; I don’t even get a raise if I publish well. But I care about our students, my colleagues, and the profession. Your letter should give me a sense of how you’d add value in those areas.

That means going beyond simply listing accomplishments. Explain how your background or skill set would benefit the department and students. Perhaps you have data or specific expertise you can use with undergraduates. Perhaps you’re especially enthusiastic about mentoring. Give us some evidence.

I don’t pay close attention to specifics of your research project in the cover letter. I’d love to be in a department that can select based on research quality, but I’m not. Outside the top 10 or so LACs, research is secondary—especially in the first stage. It’s generally better to use your cover letter to showcase what we do select on: teaching. If you address your research, do so in a way that highlights how it contributes to your teaching or to student engagement.

We do still care about your research potential and output, but more so in the later stages—and even then, teaching dominates. Our tenure requirements are reasonable, and we rarely worry about whether someone can meet them. Teaching, by contrast, is more difficult to mentor if someone clearly lacks enthusiasm or views it as a burden.

Keep in mind that any questions we ask about your research usually aren’t about the research itself. We don’t care about the finer points of your estimation strategies. We’re probing your motivations and seeing whether you can inspire students to discover theirs. Can you mentor undergraduates through the research process? A response like, “My advisor does X, so I just added a parameter” tells us next to nothing about how you’d fit here or teach effectively.

Most of our interview questions will be about your teaching. We may ask about your research motivation or how you would involve students, but we rarely want the standard JMP spiel. We want to know who you are as a teacher.

Because we cannot select on research early, lead with teaching in the cover letter. Then bridge into your research only insofar as it’s relevant to your teaching approach or to the potential mentorship of students. If I want a summary of your findings, I’ll read the abstract or the paper itself.

Publishing is hard, and at the same time, the quality of graduate students has improved over time. Admittedly, this is an anecdotal observation, but there seem to be an increasing number of candidates—even outside top departments—with strong publications. Some are co-authored with advisors, but not all. Occasionally, candidates even fail to highlight notable publications in their cover letters. As a teaching-focused institution, we don’t weigh publications heavily, but if you’re otherwise similar to another candidate who does mention a top-tier hit, that might tip the scale in their favor.

Multiple publications in lower-tier journals don’t usually add up to more than one stronger publication—at least not in our hiring decisions. Beyond the first publication (which shows baseline research ability), ceteris paribus, I’d still prefer the candidate who demonstrates teaching strengths or collegiality. Also, with over 3,000 journals on REPEC alone, it’s difficult to distinguish between mid- or low-ranked ones outside of my own field. One unknown journal is the same to me as any other, unless it’s in a field or a journal I personally follow. So, unless your publication is in a journal we recognize, its marginal impact isn’t huge.

Likewise, letters of recommendation matter less here than at R1s—unless your advisor happens to be famous, a personal friend, or someone whose work I track closely. We do read them, but often as a check for red flags rather than a major driver of enthusiasm.

We purposely avoid direct questions about JMPs because we can read. Our tenure standards aren’t herculean; if you’re semi-competent and have a decent work ethic, you’ll be fine. A rote, well-practiced JMP spiel doesn’t tell us anything new. What we don’t know is how you’ll be in the classroom, which is where you can excel—or flub.

You should be prepared to discuss what you’d like to teach and how you’d teach it. You should be ready to explain why a teaching-focused position is right for you, and how you would involve students in your research or bring your research into the classroom. We don’t just want to hear which textbook you’d pick; we want to hear your passion for teaching, how you’d adapt to different skill levels, and how you’d mentor students beyond data-cleaning grunt work.

And for the love of god, please don’t use the “any questions for us?” portion of the interview to imply that you see teaching as a chore or that a LAC is beneath you.

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