The project aims to project and assess trends that will determine the condition of the academic labor market, the nature of academic work, and career trajectories, including entry, status changes, and retirement. Significantly, the project will devote a great deal of attention to the rise in the share of faculty employed as adjuncts. The project will make use of a new data set, the most recent faculty survey of the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics' 1999 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty. The survey contains detailed data on the share of faculty employed as adjuncts, both by academic field and institution type, as well as data on the proportion of full-time faculty with fixed-term, as opposed to tenured, appointments. This study should provide very detailed information on the recent past and likely future of the academic labor market.
