Job market for business professors?

Question

I will be a college senior in the fall, and I want to apply to business programs (probably PhD in finance). Anyway, my undergraduate background is in engineering.

When I am finished my graduate program, I would like to try and get an academic position at a college. What is the job market like for business professors at the momement, and what do you think that it will be like in the next 4-6 years or so?

Answer 1

I've got good news, bad news and in-between news for you.

First the good news:

The job market for Finance Professors is good.  You do not have to do a post-doc.  And finance professors make about twice as much as liberal arts professors.  There are two reasons for this.  Finance PhDs have an alternative -- they can go to Wall Street.  The second is that the top B-Schools limit the number of PhDs that they produce.

Now for the bad news.  

If you want to teach at a top school, you have to get a PhD at a top school.  This will be very hard to do with a BS.  It is exceptionally hard to get into a Business PhD program at a top school -- and finance is the hardest area to get into.  For example, when I go into Berkeley's PhD program in finance, there were over 250 applicants, and only nine were accepted.  The next year, applications were up -- and only four were accepted.  The same is true at all of the top Finance programs.  Wharton gets 350-400 applications a year and admits about four or five students per year.  The majority of those accepted already have graduate degrees.  About a third of the Finance PhD students at Berkeley already had a PhD in another field.  You will need high grades, a GRE math score in the 790-800 range, and you will need to have gone to a highly regarded undergraduate university.  Even so, the odds are against you.

Now for the in-between news.

If you can get into a top Finance PhD program, the odds are good that you will make it through.  They make it hard to get in -- but it isn't hard to stay.  

The other in-between news is that there is an alternative to getting a PhD in Finance.  You can get a PhD in Economics with a field in Finance.  It is much easier to get into a top Economics program than a top Finance program (Berkeley accepts about 60 Econ students per year).  You take the Finance classes through the B-School and have both Finance and Economics professors on your committee.  The degrees really are equivalent.  Econ programs are easier to get in -- but harder to stay in.