Some people call the academic job market a “lottery”.  For a random Ph.D. student in most fields, the chances of ever getting a TT job are low. The winners win big: comfortable, fun jobs for life, with six-figure salaries. But one needs to be careful here. Just because some people win big and many people lose, that doesn’t mean that the academy is a lottery.

In a typical lottery, everyone who enters pays a cost. A tiny fraction of the players win, and the top winners win big. Everyone else loses.

A tournament is similar is some respects: Most people who enter lose, and the winners win big.

That’s where the similarities end. One big difference is that in a lottery, winners win at random. In a tournament, winners do not win at random. Rather, they tend to perform better or be more excellent along some dimension.

In academic writing, I’ve mostly seen the academic job market modeled as a kind of tournament. It was less of a tournament in 1930 than it is now. Just why it became a tournament is disputed. However, in the blogosphere, the angry English and philosophy adjuncts I’ve encountered lately tend to describe the market as a lottery. (These aren’t the only two options, of course. The academy might not be a lottery or a tournament.)

One might think there’s some motivated reasoning going on in both sides here. Of course, research-active professors at R1s claim it’s a tournament–this implies that they’re for the most part better researchers than their peers, and that’s why they have their higher status jobs. Of course, professional adjuncts, the unemployed, and the underemployed claim it’s a lottery–this means that for the most part, they’re just as good, talented, and deserving as anyone else, including the people who got TT jobs at Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford.

Perhaps tournament theory will turn out to be a bad model for the academy. (Google “vintage theory”.) There are other competing models. But the lottery view is a non-starter. Consider, Marcus Arvan’s breakdown here of how publications affected placement in last year’s philosophy job market. Or, consider, as Phil Magness shows here, that almost half of adjuncts do not possess a terminal degree. (Caveat: Some of these adjuncts might be currently in pursuit of a terminal degree.)

Or, consider what it’s like to conduct a job search. Our job search last year easily cost the committee 100 working hours. Other job searches are roughly similar. While I’m sure all sorts of biases creep into the process–e.g., a tendency to hire people of similar ideological dispositions–it would be surprising if these searches collectively turned out to allocate jobs randomly, the way a lottery would.*

Academia is not a perfect meritocracy. It might not even be a moderate meritocracy. But it isn’t a lottery, either. There is a significant tendency for those with higher research productivity to land the higher status, better paying, more secure jobs. If you claim the academic job market is a lottery, you have to deny that, and say instead that the distribution of publishing or teaching talent among successful and unsuccessful job applicants is random.

*Suppose someone managed to demonstrate that the the academic job market really does just distribute jobs randomly, with no tendency for the more productive to get the “better” jobs. If so, then one Pareto-superior change would be for job search committees to stop reading dossiers, but instead allocate jobs using a random number generator. By hypothesis, this would cause no systematic change the allocation of talent, but would save tens of thousands of working hours.