Professor Van Ry

Fall is here, which means graduate students and early-career scholars are about to enter another brutal job-market cycle. Many of us are facing difficult financial and family choices. Where am I willing to move, and how far? Should I take more visiting positions? Can I afford another year or two of adjuncting? Some of us are even wondering whether academe is still a viable career option at all.

Given the tenure-track market, many Ph.D.’s are considering nonacademic careers more seriously than ever. However, there is another option, one that doesn’t involve leaving academe: Teach abroad, particularly in the developing world. The international academic job market is bigger than just Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, or the occasional postdoctoral fellowship in northern Europe or Japan.

Some Western universities—particularly British and American—have begun opening branch campuses, founding colleges, or licensing programs in places like China, Turkey, Russia, Kazakhstan, Singapore, South Korea, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. But anyone watching academic job listings in the usual places over the past several years will have observed a steadily increasing trickle of postdoctoral and permanent vacancies in those countries at local higher-education institutions rather than just at branch campuses of Western ones. <Read more.>

Via Sandy Ross and Christopher Stroop, The Chronicle of Higher Education.