KnowBefore

I'm sure many of you know how bad the job market for tenure-track jobs in history is. Still, it can be hard to know, concretely, just how bad. Anecdotally, I'm in a top U.S. history program. Almost no one from our program besides an occasional colonialist (their market is healthier) has gotten a job in years. The placement of other top programs isn't much better. Make sure you ask programs detailed questions about their placement rates: don't just rely on lists of who has gotten a job where in the last year, as these lists often 1) include people who graduated in previous years who just got a job or are moving to a better one, 2) makes it impossible to know how many people did not get jobs. What you want to know is how many people, say, in the last 4 or 5 years in your field have gotten a tt-job vs those who have not. You should also look at the Academic Job Wiki for history (google it), which lists almost every tenure track job by field for the last several years. This can give you a sense of how many jobs you could apply to. Remember that, depending on the school and subfield, many jobs will get between 200-400 applicants. (Hopefully, of course, the job market will get better by the time you'd have a PhD. This is just a snapshot in time.) Best of luck to everyone who is applying.