Competition for good jobs still tough

We recently completed a search for an English instructor at McCook Community College and I was privileged to be on the search team. After posting the position on various educational sites, we had 40 qualified applicants from literally all over the country and over half of them were either in possession of Ph.D's or were completing them, although the minimum educational qualifications was a Master's degree. The four finalists for the position all exceeded the minimum qualifications. Only one person will be hired and the other 39 will continue to search for a full-time college faculty position.

We hear a lot of noise these days about there being plenty of available jobs if people want to work and figuratively that's true. But most of those jobs have entry-level qualifications far below the credentials the job seeker has. Ronald Reagan made the same vacant argument when he was President, saying that the Sunday edition of the Washington Post was full of jobs for people who really wanted to work. Again technically true but practically false because people work for credentials to get a better job, not a worse one.

This has been the story for decades now. I had a good friend at Oklahoma State University who had just completed his Ph.D in history and had been applying for teaching and museum curator positions for over a year when I was hired as an Assistant Professor at Northwestern State University. Some of you may remember the Fotomat shells that were located in shopping malls where you drove in, dropped off your film and came back later to pick up your pictures. My friend was working at one of those when I left Stillwater. He was in possession of the highest academic degree in the world but was working at a job that required only a high school diploma.

I left college teaching for a few years back in the late '80s and early '90s for a position as Educational Coordinator for a mental health agency in Arkansas, not knowing I would miss teaching as much as I did. When I finally decided to start sending out resumés again for college teaching positions, my wife suggested I apply for a management position at Walmart since she didn't want our boys to have to change schools and towns again. Even though she was an educated woman herself, she had a hard time grasping the fact, as many of you do, that I hadn't spent nine years in college getting credentialed for a job that didn't require the credentials I had.

Graduate school was not a piece of cake. The only income we had was the stipend we each received for our teaching assistantships. We lived in married student housing, drove an old car, had no luxuries of any kind, ate the cheapest food we could buy, didn't take vacations, had two boys in diapers and the classes we took were difficult and demanding. We were practicing delayed gratification. We were sacrificing during our graduate programs so that we could get good jobs when we finished, jobs that would make those sacrifices worthwhile.

If push had come to shove and I simply couldn't get hired for a job that utilized my professional qualifications, I certainly would have taken a lesser job because I had an obligation to feed and clothe my family. But a lesser job would have been my last choice, not my first.

That's the challenge facing the 39 applicants for the English position that didn't get hired. They have to keep looking. They have to keep sending out resumes to any college desiring their educational qualifications and continue to hope that they'll get lucky. I use the term lucky because that's what it boils down to when you have far more qualified people than you do jobs. The candidates we interviewed were all qualified and would have been fine additions to McCook Community College, as were many of the candidates we DIDN'T interview. There's no formal, systematic way to hire someone for college teaching. After you've confirmed that they possess the minimum qualifications necessary for the position, everything else is based on nuance. Our committee had disagreements in ranking the candidates, as all committees do. Some candidates had great interviews but only average teaching demonstrations. Other candidates had great teaching demonstrations but only so-so interviews. Maybe if they had appeared before us on a different day or a different week, it would have been different. Maybe they were just having a bad day. There's no way to know because they only got one shot to impress us and if they failed, their job search continues. And, quite possibly, some of them may never get a full-time college teaching position and will have to settle for less, like my wife wanted me to do.

So those of you who have jobs can be smug about it and criticize the ones who don't but job hunting today is a minefield where the slightest misstep gets you eliminated from consideration because there are so many other qualified candidates to choose from.

Yes, there are lazy people in the world who don't want to work and instead choose to live off hand-outs from the government but not nearly as many as you might think.

Most people want to work and most of them want to use the skills and education they've achieved to pursue the American dream. They're entitled to do that until it becomes clear to them that their investment didn't pay off.