The Negative Impact of Early Offer Deadlines

Contributed by Evan Peck, evan.peck@bucknell.edu

Biography

Evan Peck is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Bucknell University. While broadly active in research surrounding HCI, Visualization, and CS ethics education, he has also curated and published lists of hiring ads at research-active PUIs for the past three years.

Proposal

Over the past decade, there has been a significant shift towards earlier offer deadlines among liberal arts colleges. In a sampling of ads from the 2019/2020 hiring season, 20 out of 24 institutions that list deadlines required applications to be submitted on November 1st or earlier (mostly highly selective liberal arts colleges). These early application deadlines often lead to hiring processes that conclude before Winter Break, providing little-to-no overlap with processes in research institutions.

This shift is likely a response to the highly competitive market for CS Ph.Ds, which can become even more competitive among liberal arts colleges. While early offers allow institutions to aggressively compete for top candidates, I believe they negatively impact both candidates and departments:

• Candidates are forced to choose between PUIs and R1s before exploring the job market (since PUI offers will expire before R1 interviews). This is harmful to candidate decision-making by implicitly obscuring information about the academic landscape, and likely limits departmental applicant pools for candidates who are unsure at the time of early deadlines.
• Candidates who are in programs that are more familiar with R1 timelines can be unaware of early deadlines that might precede R1 processes by months. Relying on insider knowledge disadvantages many candidates and could strip them of resources that are aligned with more commonplace CS hiring deadlines (which varies from workshops to mentorship expectations to graduation timelines).
• Early deadlines limit competing offers. Stripping negotiating power is harmful to candidates in terms of leverage and calibration and more likely to amplify existing negotiation disparities (for example, between genders).

I suggest that early offer deadlines manipulate the power dynamic in hiring to favor the institution and disadvantage candidates. I fear that there are unseen consequences with respect to both diversity and retention.

A half-baked proposal: Changing timelines is challenging. Departments are highly incentivized to act in their own interest. One possible solution is for departments to commit to action only if a critical mass of departments also commits. For example:

• A joint statement among liberal arts colleges advocates for later offer deadlines in order to increase equity, improve candidate wellbeing, and reflect the values of our institutions. It proposes a no-earlier-than offer date.
• Departments commit to shifting their timeline only if X% of highly-selective liberal arts colleges commit.
• The statement is highly publicized and included in job ads. Colleges that sign the statement are given priority in informal ad listings, such as https://cs-pui.github.io/

While it’s naive to think that all institutions will shift to a later schedule, I believe that it’s important to challenge the structures we have built around hiring that disadvantage the very people we hope to support as faculty member.