Opiniatrety

I can't tell if that spam is on topic or not.

Is it completely irrational for PhDs to go slightly "stale"? The average 2008 PhD will be qualified to degree X for a tenure-track job. The average 2008 PhD on the 2009 job market however will presumably be qualified to some lesser degree, because the ones that have been removed from the pool will include many more of the highly qualified ones than the non-highly-qualified ones, and I would guess that the number of new additions to the pool is smaller than this number. Certainly that's the case by the 2010 job market.

However, you're probably right that capricious chance would be less likely to harm someone's career significantly if the hiring committees looked more seriously at slightly older PhDs rather than completely "fresh" ones, and there would also be the added advantage of having more information to go on in making these decisions. But it seems inevitable that the first dynamic is going to win out, absent external regulation or collusion in hiring.

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The average 2008 PhD on the 2009 job market however will presumably be qualified to some lesser degree, because the ones that have been removed from the pool will include many more of the highly qualified ones than the non-highly-qualified ones

There are two issues with this idea. The first is the assumption that qualification, and the evidence for qualification, are innate properties that don't change over time. Somebody who's out for a year may have a more mature research program and more experience teaching; they may also have more papers out which allows the committee to have better evidence by which to assess them.

The second is that when people talk about "PhDs going stale," they mean, I think, that there is a preset bias against people with year-old PhDs just because of the year-old degree. Even if they are in fact equally qualified. There is a certain amount of herd mentality in the hiring process.

In fields that have a lot of postdocs, the dynamic is somewhat different.

Andrew, I deleted the spam comment before I realized you had replied to it. So your comment has gone stale. Now that's on topic!

Anyway, what Ben said about qualifications not remaining constant over time. My impression is that the degree to departments discount stale PhDs is much greater than anything that would be justified by the sort of effect you describe, and that it can even outweigh other more information that ought to be more reliable (like how much you've published in the interim -- the person we made the offer to had a lot of publications and hadn't been snapped up yet).

Also, I think that it'd be really pernicious to downgrade dossiers based on these statistical effects. Realistically, we're talking about how people get culled from the search before their writing sample gets a close look; and it's pretty clear that if you cull everyone from group X because some people from group X can be expected to be on average worse than non-Xers, then even the Xers who are better than non-Xers will get cut out. When the information that would show the stale PhDs to be better is in the dossier all along, in the sample and letters. Of course, people have to cull the application pool somehow; that's the problem. But I think the stale PhD argument gives a bad criterion.

The problem is that if everyone decides that an applicant can't be good, or they'd have a job already, you get an informational cascade based on the results of their first couple of job searches. And given that the job market is less than perfectly efficient, that can be really bad.

Another factor to think about, in light of Leiter's original advice, is that a stale PhD may just mean that your school didn't have the resources to keep you around after your unsuccessful job search.

And about whether it's inevitable that this dynamic will win out -- I think this is what Ben is getting at with the herd mentality, but it seems to me that there are two different equilibria here. If the expectation were that PhDs would do non-tenure-track jobs for a couple of years and accumulate more qualifications before they got hired, then I think that would happen. I have no idea how you'd get to that equilibrium, or even if it would be more desirable, but it would have the advantage that the hole you're in would get shallower rather than deeper as you went along. Up to a certain point, sadly.