when to call it quits on an academic career?

[quittah]

I am a tenure track faculty at a place I hate. My students are generally unprepared, my colleagues couldn't care less about their jobs, and the administration is in a serious "please lower your standards so we can graduate more people" push (last year an administrator literally suggested that the history department give up on text books and just have electronic syllabi with links to wikipedia). I stay because of dreams of moving up, and because that moving up is only really likely from an academic position. This is my 3rd year in this position, 2nd on the market, and I have been having a really hard time finding a better job. I have been productive (or at least as productive as you can be with a 4-4), but the bites I've had while on the market have generally either been lateral moves or significant downgrades in some respect (i.e., slightly better job at much worse location).

So I've been thinking of calling it quits. Just going to work in some policy or polling firm. So my question for the faculty who read this board:

- If you are trying to move, when did you successfully manage to do so? I.e., are there people out there who are successful in moving in year 4 or 5? Or is it all early on or bust?
- If you are trying to move, when do you simply give up when you can't?

I have some connections on industry, but my fear is that every year that passes those connections get weaker.

[goforit]

I am in this for the long haul. I have a decent job that pays well at a place I like so I am not speaking from personal experience. However, I can say that I have two close friends who were in similar positions and they both walked away from this life. The first friend was at an R1, had 5-7 publications in top tier journals (one in the big three) and was only in his second year when it dawned on him that this is not the life for him. He didn't like the location of his job, didn't like the politics of academics, and felt most academics were as full of themselves as they were full of (something else). He quit in his third year. The second friend was at a low ranked R1 (going off old Carnegie classification), struggled every year to eke out a living in an expensive part of the country and managed to get about one publication a year because of slightly higher teaching demands and a divided department. He was denied tenure, went on the market two years in a row, only to get a couple of offers from similar institutions. He finally gave it up last year.

Both of them have never been happier. They were able to find jobs in cities they wanted to live in, near family, and in jobs that paid better than academia. Indeed, they quickly realized the so-called benefits of academia (summers off, autonomy, and ability to make your own schedule) were an illusion designed to rationalize the stress and long hours they spent toiling away at the computer to publish one more piece and please their peers. They found the benefits of the 9-5 job far superior to academia (better pay, a clearer boundary between work an home, and opportunities for advancement). Heck, I've noticed that with 6-8 weeks of vacation per year that they seem to take more "real" vacations than I do with Summers and holidays off. Sure they aren't publishing cutting edge results from research read by millions of people (that was a joke) and going to exotic locations for conferences (e.g. Las Vegas or Atlanta in August) but they are using their talents and say their work feels just as rewarding as that first publication.

To get back on track, I would say the friend who left earlier in his career seemed to have an easier transition. However, I would say much of that had to do with the difficulty of "giving up" at a later point for my second friend. I think as long as you keep those connections and have no significant gaps in your work history then it will be just as easy to move in to industry from a job search perspective. The longer you wait, the tougher it may be to leave behind what you have spent so much time preparing for and moving on to a new future. Also, I think one of the problems with academia is that you can linger in this life for a long time before you have absolutely no options. First you start making lateral moves, then you start moving to lower ranked schools, then you lose tenure, then you start adjuncting or visiting professorships, then before you know it you have spent your entire life working your way down the ladder and it is too late to transition. In short, leave now if you know you plan to leave at some point.

[why?]

I agree with the above poster, except for the "working your way down the ladder" scenario. It is not that common to downward spiral to the extent that Goforit suggested. One must be uncommonly stupid or crazy to devolve into that pattern.

[breakfastclub]

goforit,
Do your friends outside of academia have 6-8 week vacations or am I misreading this? I wonder what sort of job.

Because honestly, not the op here, but only reason I keep at this at this point is summer and winter breaks. Being able to have a middle class life style while working 8 months a year is great.

[why?]

Why? again here. Ditto to Breakfast Club. All the way the only reason.

[followup]

goforit, care to share the jobs or industries your friends are now working in?

[cant_even_get_in_the_door_RANT]

falling down, or downgrading is one thing, but theres also the increasingly prevalence of folks who can't even get one step up on the ladder, like myself, and I know of many others. If there is a "falling down" the ladder effect I wonder the extent to which its suffocating those on the ground?

For myself, this is my third go at the market for tenure track jobs. I have a few nice things on my CV that stand out for service in addition to multiple sole and first authored publications in established journals that you would all very much respect, but none of these are in the shiny "elite" top 5-10 small handful anyway (I just don't do the sort of work that tends to populate these journals topic-wise).

Im not even picky about where I land -- Id actually much rather be at some small state school than like Yale or something longer-run if I could choose. I have thus been applying far and wide to quite a range of places all over the world, but I can not get even a Skype interview, not a single one, anywhere (about 70 tenure track apps in this year with 50 confirmed rejects without an interview so far, in addition to somewhere between about 125-150 rejects from the previous years). I don't have the words to describe how disillusioning it is to have accomplished everything you set out to years ago, and get literally nothing in return. How I loathe the motions of filling out your job applications at this juncture is something that can not be understated.

On this lower end of things anyway, getting even a first job for someone in my position is feeling more like trying to win a lottery than anything you can work your way through, and moreover a lottery that can itself feel "rigged" against you in a lot of ways, depending on your position. Ill say from here, its straight up immoral for any of you to continue to advise undergraduates to explore graduate school under any circumstances, to even take on graduate students, and/or especially to train them in line with the old model that dominated this discipline from mid Century up to the early 2000s -- e.g. something always works out/the cream rises/make an impact in fields you have passion for/publish or perish (here, its rather now publish AND perish in a lot of cases). It really is best to prevent people from ruining their lives in this mess in the first place.

Anyway, I'm having increasing difficulty of late writing, and my production is starting to wane in the face of the misery this purgatory brings, which, of course in turn will justify the system itself to some of the more non-reflective folks who have cashed in "winning tickets". I'm so about ready to get out myself, and am excited to leave this behind for a lot of the reasons enumerated above -- e.g. complete shittiness of academic politics.

[Creative Destruction]

The previous post sums up what too many people are going through. I dissuade students from going to graduate school unless they are going into public administration or some field where graduate school will teach them skills and provide them with opportunities for many different jobs instead of going in debt for a lottery.

We need higher education, but this is not a sustainable system. And many bright innovative people in Silicon Valley know it...

[Same]

I couldve written the same thing as the above poster. Extremely well put unfortunately...

[quittah]

OP here. Just to clarify, I am not in a "downward spiral." What I meant is that the bites I've gotten on the market all present one particular drawback or another. E.g., I will get an interview at a university that is better on paper (3-3 with a masters program versus my current 4-4), but the position is in a substantially worse location (e.g., the town is so small and uninteresting that the dinner interview takes place at an applebee's).

Honestly, the only reason I haven't quit yet is pride. My wife teaches high school. She makes more than I do. She mentioned that there was a position in her high school I could apply for. It would pay better, and it is in the discipline I got my BA in (which is not sociology). That is, I could make more money now, and all I would have to do is take a job that my MA and PhD in sociology are totally irrelevant for (other than the small bonus for each degree).

[old]

One thing to keep in mind in a decision like this is that there is a huge amount of recency bias in the academic labor market. More recent graduates will generally have an advantage, regardless of any mitigating factors. That is between the postdoc/1st year professor with a couple of decent publications, and the 5th year professor with 5, no one is going to go "wow, 5 publications while teaching a 4-4, imagine what s/he could do here with a 2-2!" Likewise, the longer you've been out, the more the reputation of your current job matters, and the less of your alma mater. I.e, the longer out you are, the more you will be thought of as "that professor from that no name place" instead of " that grad from that prestigious doctoral institution."

I know this because of personal experience. First time on the market, I had r1 bites, including an interview where I was a runner up after a superstar decided to move for family reasons. That bit of bad luck (of going up against a tenured professor willing to move down both the prestige and tenure ranks for family reasons) meant I got a teaching job. And its been downhill since then, despite being productive (got a search committee to vote for me last year, only to be vetoed by administration - since this was a SLAC, I assume it was because they wanted someone more high profile than professor at directional state school). Now? I'd settle for living at a good location, even if it means a school so small I am the only sociologist on staff (which also means teaching intro forever).