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Getting an academic job with an MA?

In our August "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks: "Is it possible for one to have an academic job (eg. lecturer) with only an MA? How does one go about finding such jobs?" As a reader commented on to follow up, there are basically three ways to get an academic job with only an MA:

  1. Part-time adjunct positions often only require an MA, but are low-paying without full-time benefits.
  2. Some full-time lecturer positions at universities may only require an MA, but appear to be quite rare in philosophy.
  3. Many permanent community college jobs appear to only require an MA.

I suspect that of these three options, the first is the most common (but least attractive of the three), and that if one wants full-time employment with an MA, the third option is probably one's best shot. But I don't know for sure. Anyone with experience on this care to weigh in? 

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7 responses to “Getting an academic job with an MA?”

  1. Sam Duncan

    It’s possible to get a community college job with only an MA, but most community colleges prefer that one have a PhD. So, only having an MA will be a mark against one and I think that anyone who wants to apply competitively for community college jobs in the current market will need to do some things to compensate for that to have a realistic shot at getting a community college job (the CC job market is very much a buyer’s market too). One big thing I think one can do is to get some real experience teaching at community colleges, which from everything I know is a huge thing for community college hiring committees. (In fact, I’d advise anyone who thinks they might want to apply to CC jobs to try to adjunct a CC class or two while in grad school). I’ve a very good friend who got a job at my CC at the same time I did with only an MA, but he had a lot of community college teaching experience and I think some experience teaching high school as well. Another thing that used to be very helpful in landing community college jobs was online teaching experience, but that’s almost certainly no longer a competitive advantage since who doesn’t have online teaching experience these days? Generally speaking any kind of relevant teaching experience counts for a lot at community colleges, especially teaching experience with diverse communities (and I mean diverse in every sense of that term). Any form of relevant teaching experience you have that sets you apart will probably help. But honestly the big practical issue I see here is that most people who leave with an MA in philosophy will have very little teaching experience, and probably wouldn’t be competitive for community college jobs if they had a PhD. So while it’s certainly possible for someone with an MA in philosophy to land a full time CC job these days, it’s hard for me to see how someone with an MA in philosophy could get the experience they’d need to do that without doing a lot of option 1. And option 1 is terrible for all the obvious reasons.

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  2. Guy Crain

    My experience differs slightly from Sam’s comments. I got my CC TT job with only my MA while still in my PhD program. I was later told that many in my division are actually skeptical of applicants with or trying to get a PhD. They tend to view that as a sign that someone doesn’t really want a CC job and is only biding time to get a research gig somewhere else. They wanted to know that this was the type of job I really wanted. One strength for CC job candidates is not only teaching experience, but experience teaching non-traditional college students.

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  3. CC faculty

    I am TT at a CC. The job listings at CCs often say that an MA is the minimum requirement, but a PhD Is preferred. In practice, you’ll be at a large disadvantage without a PhD. With only the MA, your best chances would be at a school that 1) You already have a lengthy and excellent teaching and service record; or 2) is rural such that the school doesn’t attract a high number of applicants; or 3) you uniquely satisfy some other preferred qualification such as having a second MA in another discipline, law degree, etc.
    This is my experience with CCs on the west coast. I personally don’t know of a recent case of an MA getting a TT job. I know one person that came close(making it to the final round), but he had taught at the school for years. CC jobs in desirable locations garner a lot of interest.

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  4. Sam Duncan

    Guy,
    I’m curious when you were hired? I would say 80% of the faculty here who were hired 15 or more years ago were hired with only MAs. But that’s really changed for the more recent hires and now it’s rare (though not unheard of) for people with only MAs to get hired, and when it they do, at least here, they either have scads of teaching experience or some other relevant work experience. I’d completely echo what you said about teaching experience with non-traditional students though and the worry about people only using the CC job as a safe harbor until they can find a research job is definitely one search committees have. That seemed to be the biggest worry my committee had that I had to address.

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  5. Michel

    I’m at a university that was a community college until a little over ten years ago. We have some faculty on staff whose highest degree is the MA. But those days are basically over. Like Sam said above, an MA-holder would only have any kind of chance with solo teaching experience, and that’s pretty rare.
    A PhD candidate could swing it, and it wouldn’t be a big deal if they didn’t go on to earn the PhD. And depending on how pressing the need for a hire is, a PhD-holder without much teaching experience could swing it, too. (That was me when I got the job!)
    There are enough PhD-holders and ABDs in the vicinity, however, that I think it would be pretty unlikely for a fresh MA to get the job. Their best chance would be to snag a single section at some point when we’re absolutely desperate to find someone to teach it, and then hope that there’s enough work around after that for them to get a shot at the contract instructor list. (But even then, they’d have to interview competitively for getting onto the list, and at that point you’re just an adjunct with no guaranteed sections).
    So: it would be doable, but very tough. My sense is that the CC market has gotten quite a lot tougher in the last ten years, thanks to the dearth of jobs at four-year institutions.
    Some kind of admin role at a CC is perhaps a more feasible goal. If you had the training and experience to be a registrar, for example, you’d make bank in this city (IIRC it’s our highest-paid position, and even the assistant registrars do very well). There’s apparently a dearth of those.

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  6. Adjunct

    I was able to teach Intro as an adjunct with only an MA, but I have another career and was not depending on the position for my income. I had previous teaching experience, and that was an absolute prerequisite or the position.

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  7. Guy Crain

    Sam,
    I was hired in 2014 when I was ABD. I beat out several PhD-holding candidates that applied as well. I’m the only full-time phil prof in my division. My division doesn’t discourage faculty from pursuing doctoral degrees (I finished mine 2 years after being hired with lots of vocal support from my dean), but I get the impression that when we hire, external candidates with PhDs are still seen with suspicion. Maybe my division is an outlier in the broader CC philosophy world.
    There is another division on campus that strongly prefers PhD candidates and seems to even let that be a significant deciding factor. However, across my campus in general, PhD-holding faculty are a fairly small minority. (The division that cares the most about PhDs has, to my knowledge, the highest concentration of PhD-holding faculty.) Faculty at my CC (and especially within my division) tend to be MA-level grads from in-state institutions who are already well-networked with current faculty and admin and have already adjuncted for us.
    For the OP,
    I think there’s a more important worry: Even if you managed to get a CC job with only an MA, if for whatever reason you ended up losing that job, your prospects would be very slim. Even when I got the job ABD, I knew it would be crazy not to finish my PhD.

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