The Partner Hire Scorecard: A Tool for Academic Couples

Navigating the academic job market is already a stressful experience. For people who have an academic partner, the job market experience is potentially even more stressful. Couples have to each navigate the long application and interview process while wondering whether they can find positions they each want and still be together geographically.

Universities may contribute to that uncertainty when it is unclear whether or how they accommodate the needs of academic couples. Imagine the situation where you have been offered a coveted tenure-track job only to be told the university does not make partner hires. You then have to choose between the job you spent years training for and your relationship with your partner.

Some universities are much more partner-friendly and have explicit policies and procedures in place to create faculty positions for academic partners or to facilitate other positions on campus. Finding this information is not always easy, however, and even when information exists, it may not always be clear to jobseekers how to avail themselves of dual-career services.

To better assess how institutions handle the needs of dual-career academics and to offer a resource to jobseekers, we created the Partner Hire Scorecard. This research was part of a larger study funded by the National Science Foundation that investigated academics’ perceptions of partner hiring. The study included a national survey of respondents at 100 US-based institutions and an analysis of how institutions manage partner hire requests. The Partner Hire Scorecard is a result of the latter component of the study.

For the Partner Hire Scorecard, we gathered and scored materials from the websites of all 146 R1 universities in the US. Our scorecard ranks all of these institutions using a composite score of how “partner friendly” they are based on our review and evaluation of the services and resources universities offer to dual-career couples. (View details.) The website includes information on each institution with a brief summary of their resources. We first classify institutions based on whether their materials indicate that they create faculty positions for partner hires. We then provide more details about whether these positions can be tenure-track, if research start-up support is provided, and many other elements too.

To make the website helpful for jobseekers, institutions can also be filtered based on their location, whether they are public or private, and whether they offer job-placement services or research start-up to partners. Use the checkboxes at the left to filter, and the search bar near the top to look up specific institutions.

Even at the most accommodating institutions, a faculty position is far from guaranteed for anyone’s partner, but we hope that the Partner Hire Scorecard will help couples make decisions about where to apply while also empowering them to negotiate for partner-hire positions. We also hope that the Partner Hire Scorecard will encourage universities to be more transparent about the resources they offer and to improve their dual-career services, especially by creating tenure-track positions for partners.