How hard is it to become a professor?

Question

Zippia Team · Accepted Answer

It is exceedingly hard to become a professor. The path to becoming a tenured college professor is arduous and highly competitive. Nowadays, there are many more qualified applicants than there are full-time, college-level teaching positions, making tenure-track jobs in particular highly competitive.

For those interested in becoming a professor, the basic college professor requirements are as follows:

A doctoral degree in the field you want to teach in
Teaching experience
Professional certification (depending on your field)
Publications and prominent academic presence

While a master's degree may be sufficient to qualify to teach in a two-year college, a doctoral degree is required to teach in four-year colleges and universities.

A Ph.D. generally takes four to seven years to complete; after completing two to three years of course work, the graduate student will usually teach classes and write a dissertation, an original piece of research taking about three years to complete, which is the most important element of the search for a first job as a professor.

In addition, post-doctoral experience is an added advantage. For the coveted tenure-track positions, virtually every successful job candidate now boasts at least one and usually two "postdoc" years, and these are necessary to remain competitive, which means gathering a sufficient backlog of publications and writings in progress.

Personal relationships with faculty are also critical in this hunt for a first job, as teaching positions in many areas (particularly the humanities) can be scarce.

While approximately 80% of college jobs are in four-year institutions, about a third of all college faculty are employed part-time or in non-tenure track positions, and this percentage has risen in recent years as colleges attempt to control costs. The reason for this is that not a lot of people leave academia -- once you get tenure, you'll hang around for years.