Still Teaching At 96

I have a colleague who is sixty nine years old. He just finished his 39th year teaching, and last year he was awarded the researcher of the year award by my college. I've always been impressed by his passion, energy, and enjoyment at being an academic going into his fifth decade in the university. Now I know why - compared to his father in law, he's still a relative rookie.

The New York Times has an interview with said father-in-law - Professor Ernest Kurnow. of New York University. At ninety six years of age he still teaches a class or so a year at NYU. That's right - at ninety-six. I'm not that ambitious - I only plan on doing this gig for another twenty five years or so.

Then I'll retire at the relatively tender age of seventy five.

Rankings of Finance Doctoral Programs

Because I'm one of the few bloggers who regularly write about the life of a finance professor, I get about a dozen questions a month from people considering a PhD in finance (Note: if you're interested, you can read about a finance professor's typical day here and here, and about what's involved in getting a PhD in finance here).

The emails are one of the more surprising and most enjoyable things about writing the blog, and at least a couple of the folks who've sent me questions are currently in PhD programs. I look forward to seeing how their careers progress, knowing I may have played some small part it them.

Some of the most frequent questions I get are along the lines of "How do I find out how well respected University X's finance doctoral program is?" or alternately, "Where can a get a list of rankings of finance doctoral programs?"

I should have done this some time ago, but I'm a bit slow at times. But, since Unknown Daughter and She Who Must Be Obeyed are out to a classmate's birthday party, and Unknown Son is entranced by a Harry Potter movie, this seems like a good time to spent a little time on the Almighty Google. Here are the results:

• Karolyis and Silvestrini have a piece on SSRN titled "Comparing the Research Productivity of Finance PhD Program Graduates" here
• Jean Heck has a similar piece titled "Establishing a Pecking Order for Finance Academics: Ranking of U.S. Finance Doctoral Programs here. Both it and the Karolyi/Silvestrini piece analyze productivity on the basis of the author's doctoral-granting program, but this one lists a few more doctoral programs than the other piece. So, it might yield some possibilities for those looking for less selective programs.
• Finally, Arizona State has a ranking of finance departments (which may or may not have doctoral programs) here, while EconPhD has a similar one covering several finance areas here.

Updated 3/18: A regular reader of the blog (thanks, Jeff) submitted a couple other rankings

• Chan, Lung and Wolfe have a ranking of finance departments based on "citations" (in case you're not familiar with the term, a citation occurs when one author references another in his work). So, citation counts are often used as a measure of the impact a person's work has in the larger academic community.
• The University of Texas-Dallas has a ranking of business schools (not finance departments) based on publications in a pretty wide number of journals across all business disciplines.
  

Hopefully, these will prove useful. If any of you are aware of any other rankings that are relatively recent (i.e. done in the last 4-5 years or so), let me know and I'll update the list.

What NOT To Do On A Job Interview

Once you get to a certain age, most people have at made at least one blunder interview. However, here's hoping you've never done one of these whoppers listed by CareerBuilder in their annual survey of hiring managers. My personal favorites are:

• Candidate told the interviewer he wouldn’t be able to stay with the job long because he thought he might get an inheritance if his uncle died - and his uncle wasn’t "looking too good"
• Candidate flushed the toilet while talking to interviewer during phone interview.
  

Read the whole thing Here.

It also lists the more common (and easily avoidable) mistakes candidates make that turf their chances, so it's not just a humorous diversion - it's actually worth reading.

Finance Profesors' Salaries?

One of the most common questions people email me is "how much do finance professors make?

The Annual AACSB salary survey is the definitive source for business school faculty salaries. Here's the most important table from the report - it shows the mean salaries for new doctorates for the major business disciplines



The figures above are for 9-month salaries. At research schools, summer research support can add another 10-20% to that, and there are also opportunities to pick up additional $$ teaching over the summer. However, at teaching oriented schools, there typically isn't summer support, and summer teaching money is also much lower.

For years, Finance professors got the highest salaries across all business disciplines. That's changed in the last few years, with accounting salaries pulling ahead. The increase in accounting new-hire salaries is likely due to smaller numbers of accounting PhD's being graduated and a lot of retirements in their field. But still, $120K isn't bad.

Click here for the free executive summary (you can also get the full report, but it'll cost you).

The Academic Finance Job Market

I recently saw this analysis of the job market for econ Ph.D.s on the Economist's Free Exchange site:

On the debit side, much attention focused on the fact that the AEA-run website, where potential employers of PhD economists advertise their positions, has added a new section called "Suspended or Cancelled Listings". Here it is noted that a "non-trivial economic downturn" has forced some employers to suspend or cancel job searches. As of December 28th, a week before the actual interviews, 84 previously advertised searches had been called off, representing 5% of the number of jobs available by the reckoning of the director of the AEA, John Siegfried.

Read the whole thing here.

Since the Financial Rounds readership includes a pretty good number of finance academics, I thought I'd share some observations on the Academic Finance job market. Unlike the Econ one (which takes place pretty much at the AEA meeting), the Finance market is 2-tiered. The first part takes place at the Financial Management Association (FMA) annual meeting in early October, and the second part happens at the American Finance Association (AFA) annual meeting that takes place in conjunction with the AEA meeting in early January.

The very top schools (the top-20 or so) tend to interview only at the AFA (there are a few exceptions, but only a few). But the 2nd-tier and third-tier schools for the most part attend only the FMA meeting (the upper-tier of these schools will also interview at the AFA). Most of the following observations are based on the FMA market. Here are a few themes I've seen or heard about from colleagues, job-seekers, or friends (either at Unknown University or at other schools).

1. Like in the econ market, there have been more canceled searches than usual. My sense is that between 5% and 10% of searches have been canceled due toi funding for the position getting yanked.
   
2. Probably as a reaction to #1, it seems like there are more schools this year who got their acts together and scheduled fly-outs early than in previous years. This makes sense, since there's a distinct possibility of a search being pulled as budgets deteriorate. So, the "smart" schools worked harder to bring out candidates and "seal the deal" while they still had funding (once a position is accepted the school almost never pulls the position). I know of several doctoral students (one here at Unseen University and two more at the Unseen Alma Mater) that had multiple flyouts by December 1.
   
3. Likewise, job candidates seem more risk-averse than in previous years and much more likely to accept early offers. Both "our" student and the two at my Alma Mater had accepted positions by mid-December.
4. Putting this all together, is seems like a larger than usual portion of the FMA market seems to have cleared by December.
   

I do see a couple of common characteristics for students who've done well at FMA. As far as scoring interviews goes, the most important factors seemed to be:

1. They have completed, polished working papers. If they're shooting for research schools, it's not that important how many they have, but it's critical that they are well polished and have the potential to be published in good journals (i.e. they ask an interesting question and have good results). If they're shooting more for balanced schools, the level of the potential publishing outlets isn't as important as at research schools. But here, numbers seem to help, too.
   
2. They have very strong good recommendations from their advisors. In addition, they typically had advisors (or other faculty) who "beat the bushes" for them - made phone calls, called in favors, etc...).
3. Credible evidence that they would be finished with their dissertations when they show up to teach next year. Schools are very leery of hiring someone for a tenure track position who will be wasting their first year finishing their dissertation. In effect, that person would have one less year to do the work necessary for tenure.
   

For those who got interviews, the next step was converting them into campus visits (no one ever got hired off a conference interview). Converting seemed higher for:

1. Candidates who had a good grasp of their topic: during the interview, they could not only discuss their dissertation in "academese", but also in plain language with good illustrations, analogies, and so on. In addition, when they were asked a question, they could answer it with good linkages to the literature in their field.
   
2. Candidates who were comfortable with the interview process. There's an old joke that an extroverted academic is one who looks at YOUR shoes when he talks to you. So, the bar isn't that high - it's not necessary to be the "life of the party". In fact, that would be a bad image to give out. But being able to talk comfortably with interviewers helps them to picture you as the guy in the next office over.
3. Those that could present a good reason why they were interviewing with the particular school. This often comes down to "I think I'd be a good fit with your faculty because you have Professors X, Y, and Z who work in this area", or "Your applied focus fits well with my industry experience in A, B, and C". After all, a school doesn't want to wast an interview on a candidate that they doubt would be interested in the school if offered a position.
   

These things might seem painfully obvious, but I was on the hiring committee that interviewed candidates at the 2007 FMA meeting. It was surprising how many candidates made obvious errors, had no clue how to write a cover letter, how to discuss their research, or knew almost nothing about Unknown University.

I got the sense that many of these students either hadn't been prepped well by their advisors, or simply hadn't listened to the advice they'd received. So have the faculty at your schools put you through the wringer before you go on the job market, and research your schools - it'll pay off.

Remember - you want to be like Stuart Smalley - good enough that you have a high probability of eventually getting tenure (i.e. they should see you as a capable researcher), smart enough to contribute to others' work (you should seem to be interested in others' research and good at commenting on it/working with others) and people should like you (after all, they might have you in the next office over for the next 20 years). Just remember that Smalley is a spoof and not a real person.

If any of my readers have other insights or observations about the FMA market, feel free to chime in.

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Stopping the Tenure Clock

Most people have misconceptions about stopping the tenure clock due to extraordinary circumstances (what does it involve, when can you do it, etc...).

I know I did - it's not something that people talk about often, and some people view it as a weakness or failure. Luckily, Inside Higher education recently published a pretty good article titled Ignorance About "Stop the Clock" Policies that touches on a lot of the major issues.

In a nutshell, stopping the clock merely means that a tenure track faculty that would have to go up for tenure five years after starting would be held to the same standards of research (and teaching), but would have six years to make the grade. In other words, if a school required five articles in :good" journal to be published in five years' time, the faculty member would then have six years to publish the five articles.

It was particularly timely for me because I've been thinking about stopping mine for the year as I deal with the Unknown Son's cancer treatment. For a while, I was trying to convince myself that I could handle it all (teaching research, and my family). But sometimes you just can't. So this week, I went to my Dean, and he had no problem stopping my clock for the year. I told him I'll still teach my classes, since that actually serves a good break from the medical stuff. And in fact (though I didn't tell him this), I'll likely get as much (if not more) research done as last year. But now there's a lot less stress, and I can take whatever time I need to spend on my son without having to worry about whether or not it'll affect my tenure.