If anything, that's wildly optimistic: the M.L.A. got to that figure by comparing the number of tenure-track jobs on its job list (around six hundred) with the number of new graduates (about a thousand).
And in the last three years, the number of tenure-track faculty members dropped 4 percent, while the number of full-time, non-tenure-track faculty members increased 8 percent.
"In the face of the post-2008 cofthection of the academic job market, proposals to reduce the size of graduate education in our fields have been heard," the committee writes: The ostensible goal of such a reduction would be to realign the rate of PhD production with the number of tenure-track openings.
The number of tenure-track positions also fell.
Public funding for academic research was in decline; more importantly, the number of tenure-track faculty positions was also declining.
Nationally, the AAUP figures show, the total number of faculty members has more than doubled since 1975, but the number of tenure-track faculty members has barely budged.
They get jobs, too: The number of tenure-track jobs in physics education research has risen from just five in 1996 to 35 last year.
Still, full professors outnumber assistant and associate professors by about 30%, the report says, suggesting that as older faculty phase out, a healthy number of tenure-track spots will come available.
This means that despite a 30 percent rise in faculty numbers over the past 10 years, the number of tenure-track positions at UNC has dropped by 4 percent.
In fact, with the number of tenure-track faculty positions remaining flat and the number of scientists receiving Ph.D.s steadily rising, obtaining a tenure-track post is almost certainly harder today than it was then.
