The Quantitative Imbalance between Supply and Demand in the Academic Teaching Profession : outcomes of forecasting for the next ten years in the areas of the humanities and social sciences

This paper discusses the quantitative situation of demand and supply in the academic teaching profession. Following three different scenarios, the author forecasts the future demands of the profession. In the first scenario, the enrollment ratio is held constant at 56.3%, the value in 2007, until the year 2017; in the second it is allowed to increase to 61.7 %, following the logistic curve of the past 10 years; and in the third it is allowed to rise to 64.7%, using a multivariate regression by including as variables the average household income and the number of new entrants in the previous year. The reason why the number of new entrants in the previous year is taken as a variable is that each university attempts to maintain the same number of new entrants to avoid changing the admission policy from the financial view point. As the supply sources of the academic profession the author identifies four sources: (1) fresh graduates from PhD courses; (2) potential candidates who remain registered in PhD courses while seeking jobs; (3) transfer from employment in non-academic teaching; (4) those who are seeking employment as unemployed graduates doing part-time non-academic teaching jobs. The trend of last thirty years shows that recruitment from non-academic teaching jobs has been increasing, while recruitment of fresh graduates from PhD courses has diminished. The increase of "hybrid academic teaching staff" seems to come from the belief that higher education administration needs more "mature teaching staff" who teach new subjects such as "career guidance", and from recruitment experts who have more personal contact with high schools, and other organisations. The matching of supply and demand reveals a possible oversupply in the fields of humanities and social sciences. This outcome suggests that PhD graduates in these fields need to find jobs outside the academic teaching profession, and it indicates that training in the PhD course should become sufficiently flexible to equip graduates for non-academic careers