The State of the IO Psychologist Academic Workforce

The American Psychological Association released a report in December summarizing the current state of the “academic psychology workforce” based upon the results of the 2015 Survey of Doctorate Recipients, a National Science Foundation project. The APA’s report is intended to give a number of demographic summaries of what people with research PhDs in psychology end up doing in academia.

This sort of reporting has the potential to inform a number of high profile conversations going on right now regarding the relative rates of PhDs graduating versus the number of tenure-track positions available for them. Should psychology graduate fewer PhDs, knowing that there are more limited tenure-track jobs available for them?

Having said that, my impression before reading this report was that IO is a bit unusual in the grand scheme of academic psychologists. Many PhDs graduate with no intention or desire to go into academia, and even those that are considering academia often are attracted by the salaries and other assorted benefits of working in industry. That reduces the supply of research PhDs trying to get academic jobs. And as any IO knows, when the supply of job applicants is small, that generally produces better outcomes for those job applicants – better salaries, better benefits, less competition, and so on.

So, does that prediction pan out? Mostly. Here is a summary of major findings related to IO from the report (which I’d urge you to scan yourself):

• Currently, 29313 people with psychology research PhDs work as faculty, which is roughly 25% of all psychology PhDs. 1131 of those are IOs, meaning IO psychology makes up roughly 3.9% of the American psychology faculty workforce.
• 3798 people with IO psychology PhDs work in other academic positions, meaning that more IOs work in support of academic institutions (e.g., admissions officers, HR offices, soft money researchers) than in faculty roles (77% of IOs are outside of faculty roles; 23% in faculty roles). That’s actually no different in pattern from other areas; for example, 86% of clinical psychologists are in non-faculty academic roles. If you think this is limited to applied positions, not true there either; 55% of academic social psychologists are in non-faculty roles. My suspicion is that IOs are more on the admissions/HR side than the soft money side, and the reverse is true for social, but that’s a guess and not explored in the report.
• Of psychology PhDs in faculty positions, IO is severely underrepresented in two-year/community colleges. In fact, there were so few, that the report does not even report the actual number for IO and was collapsed into “other subfields.” At four-year colleges, we make up 4% of faculty, and at university-affiliated research institutes, we make up 6% of faculty.
• Among faculty roles, 89% are in tenure-track roles, and only 11% are in non-tenure-track roles. This is the highest by subfield, tied with social psychology. Subfields that are more health-oriented are at the opposite end (e.g., counseling psychology is 45% in tenure-track roles). For comparison, 89% is close to the tenure-track rate for other science and engineering fields. 45% is closer to the rates for the humanities.
• Other reported stats were not field-specific, although there are several interesting nuggets. For example, the number of psychology PhD faculty in any institution has increased by almost 1/3 over a 10 year period (2003: 22323 faculty; 2015: 29313 faculty). In 20 years, it’s increased 57% (1995: 18542), suggesting that growth is slowing, but not by much.

Take-homes from this? IO is sitting pretty, at least in relation to other areas of psychology. My suspicion is that the market pressure for IOs, to leave for industry, keeps things a bit nicer for IO faculty than for faculty in other areas.

Having said that, we are also lightly represented in many places. This has subtle effects with big implications; for example, if a four-year institution only has 2 or 3 faculty, and by chance all or most of those faculty decide to change jobs, it’s quite easy for the rest of the department to lobby to take over and eliminate the IO area in a bid to increase their own resources. We’ve actually seen this exact scenario a few times already, where (for example) a social or personality psychology area will “absorb” the IO area once it becomes too small to have the political power to defend itself.

Another issue is that the lack of IOs in community colleges, which serve a lot of students (each year in the US, there are about 10 million four-year students and 6 million two-year students). That means we have limited or perhaps zero exposure to at least a third of the post-secondary students taking psychology courses. This is the situation that led to SIOP conducting so many initiatives to get IO represented in introductory psych courses, but without IOs teaching at the front line, the impact is likely to be limited. Unfortunately, I see no easy solution to that; low pay already drives potential four-year IO faculty to other opportunities, and community colleges typically pay even less. One option would be to promote the fact that it’s relatively easy as a full-time community college faculty member to run a profitable side consulting business, but I don’t know how many people would really pursue that combination.

So, overall, a mixed bag here: IO is doing well where it exists but is underrepresented, and that underrepresentation is likely to harm us long term. There are several ways to address that problem, but it would likely take a concerted effort by SIOP (and/or other IO organizations) to see any real change.