Repository for astronomy degree and job related data. Based largely on Metcalfe 2008, PASP, 120, 229-234. http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1086/528878
TL;DR version: jobregister_table.csv is a document with all AAS job register data from January 2002 through May 2016. jobregister_table_2019.csv includes June 2016 through May 2019. Informative plots, including supplementary data, are available here: https://github.com/jrka/astrojobs/blob/master/jobregister_plots.pdf
To Add, Ways to Contribute:
- Any way to get astro-specific thesis counts from UMI database? Online support told me you cannot anymore.
Notes on Job Categories:
- In 2008, the job categorization changed.
- Here is how I combine the eight pre-2008 categories with the eight post-2008 categories into six new categories.
| Old Categories | New Categories | This Work |
|---|---|---|
| TT (Tenure-Track) | Faculty Positions (tenure and tenure-track) | TT |
| PostV (Postdoc) & Rsrch (Research) | Post-doctoral Positions and Fellowships | PV |
| Non-Tenure Track (NTT) & Visit (Visiting) | Faculty Positions (visiting and non-tenure) | NTT |
| MngOth & Other | Science Management & Other | MO |
| RsrchSp (Research Support) | Science Engineering & Scientific/Technical Staff | RS |
| Pre-doctoral/Graduate Positions | G |
- This is not a perfect split, especially with matching the previous Research category, though by eyeing through a few of those categorized as "Research," they seem to be along the lines of Postdocs.
Notes on Institution Type:
- The academic years 2016-2018 (June 2016 - May 2019) include the country listed in the job ad.
- Many job ads with foreign countries are not listed in the Foreign category.
- Some of the plots re-categorize these jobs to distinguish those that are US-only.
Scripts:
- (OLD) search_jobregister.py: requires BeautifulSoup for crawling and scraping. If docrawl=True, produces jobregister_urls.txt. If doscrape=True, gather information from each URL in the job register archive. Save in groups of 100 as .pkl files. Read in all the .pkl files and create jobregister_table.csv for further analysis. Not particularly well set up to add incrementally. Not necessary to rerun to use analysis; the .txt and .csv files are in the repo. The AAS job register website has changed, and this no longer works.
- search_jobregister_2019.py: like above, but updated for new job register website. Hard-coded to search a certain date range, June 2016 - May 2019
- search_jobregister_2022.py: enough has changed since 2019 that I just made a new script to add the job data from June 2019 - May 2022.
- plot_jobregister.py: produce some summary tables (see below) and plots (jobregister_plots.pdf). Requires pandas.
Tables Included:
- Produced by search_jobregister.py:
- jobregister_urls.txt
- jobregister_table.csv
- Produced by search_jobregister_2019.py:
- jobregister_urls_2019.txt
- jobregister_table_2019.csv
- Produced by search_jobregister_2019.py:
- jobregister_urls_2022.txt
- jobregister_table_2022.csv
- Update manually:
- degrees.txt: Estimates of astronomy PhDs produced per year via 3 sources, based on Metcalfe 2008 Table 1.
- Metcalfe2008_Table2.txt: To add yearly job register data from 1984-2002.
- funding.txt: Total astronomy, NASA, and NSF research-only obligations by year, in actual dollar amounts, based on Metcalfe 2008 Table 1.
- funding_deflators.txt: Deflators to convert actual dollar amounts to real (currently, 2009) dollars.
- Produced by plot_jobregister.py:
- jobregister_categories_byyear.csv: Number of jobs in each category (see note) by year.
- jobregister_instclass_byyear.csv: Number of jobs in each institution class by year.
- Similarly named plots with _USonly suffix include only those jobs that are both a) NOT listed as Foreign (2003 and beyond distinction) and b) NOT listed with a foreign country in the "Country" field" (2016 and beyond distinction).