Re: Job prospects after a PhD in Management..
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05 Apr 2008, 12:31
Even at smaller schools, the numbers can be daunting. Of the 100 or so schools for which I applied last season, one of them, a smaller university of approx 4,000 students, has a perfectly awful HR. Why do I mention their HR? Well, they sent a broadcast email to all applicants and failed to hide the addresses from the recipients, so you had the email addresses of everyone who'd applied (of course, a major HR faux pas). But the upshot of it was that I got to count the applicants (107 in all) and get an idea of the caliber of some of them (one person in particular had an email address that indicated they'd done their graduate work at Stanford!) And this was, as I said, at a small, nondescript university. To say the least, it gave me pause, and helped me to understand why so many schools for which I "perfectly" met the job description failed to give me any consideration.
However, to reiterate what another poster said, the application numbers can be misleading; pretty much the same rules apply as for grad school applications. Even though there might be 100 applications for a single spot in a program, there are mitigating factors:
1). A lot of people who apply aren't near the right fit and are just time-wasters for the selection committees (in the same way that some eternally optimistic 560 GMAT scorers scattershot grad school applications to Ivy League programs);
2). There are many people like me who apply for a great mountain of jobs and drive up the numbers accordingly (last season I applied for over 100 jobs, but of course I needed only one tenure track offer, which I received);
3). One need realize that while they may strike out at 99% of the jobs for which they apply, it only takes one offer at a decent school to make it all worthwhile. My failure rate in the academic job search was tremendous: 1 success vis-a-vis 99 failures. 100 applications, 14 phone interviews, 8 straight finalist interviews without a single offer...and then, an offer for a TT job from one of the largest universities for which I'd applied!
4). There are certain criteria that, while they may disqualify you from most jobs, either by dint of explicit language in the job ad or hidden agendas, may well make you the perfect fit for another (and of course, you only need to stumble into one of these). The one offer I did receive was a situation in which my qualifications academically and experientially surely did not measure up to many who'd applied, but for various reasons, which were pretty clearly spelled out to me by the dean, dept head and selection committee, I met all their criteria that really counted; they were looking for a certain "type", I just happened to be it, and they overlooked all else.
If you get a PhD in Management, Accounting, Finance, Strategy, etc at a legit AACSB university, the odds are extremely high you will land somewhere within two years of graduation. What you do with it after that, whether or not you get tenure, whether or not the bulk of your career is spent at an R1, a mid-tier uni, an SLAC, or a CC, is up to what you do with that career, whether your research skills are up to it. But virtually everyone who gets into a legit doctoral program will get their shot at academia if they want it.