For a discipline that lies beyond the boundaries of what traditionally has been considered the domain of the humanities, political science has not fared badly at the endowment established to promote humanistic knowledge. However, that is a subjective judgment: One of the dubious charms of the NEH has been its failure, until recently, to implement a data collection and retrieval system that could yield information concerning the magnitude of support received by a given discipline. At long last an ADP system, known to its friends as AUGUSTUS (its enemies call it other things), is undergoing debugging. It is scheduled to be fully operational by the end of the current fiscal year.

Two additional factors make it difficult to isolate grants awarded in political science. The Endowment, unlike the National Science Foundation, divides its workload principally by the type of audiences at which funded projects are aimed—e.g., the general public, research scholars, educators, community groups—rather than by discipline. Thus, just as there is no English program, so there is no political science program at the Endowment. Projects conducted by political scientists are eligible to compete in all of the funding categories administered by the Divisions of Fellowships, Research Grants, Public Programs, and Education Programs. To the extent that they express local or regional interests and involve a general out-of-school public, they may also compete for funds offered by the State Humanities Committees which serve as regrant agencies for the Endowment.

This is the seventh report on the experience of new political scientists looking for jobs. Two years have passed since the last report, which was based upon placement data for 1977. In this report on placement data collected in 1978 and 1979, there are some changes in who succeeds in finding jobs and in what kinds of jobs they find. These changes may be an indication of professional adjustment to the realities of the academic job market.

The 1977 placement report examined the academic job market for political scientists in the next two decades, and pointed out that the projected decline in college enrollments until 1994 means that nearly all of the positions open to new faculty will be generated by the need to replace current faculty who die, retire or move to non-teaching jobs. Since the median age of political scientists is in the mid-30s, we were told that there will be few openings due to retirements until the mid-1990s. And, we were left with the question as to whether, in view of the limited supply of academic job opportunities, the profession will make changes in its graduate curricula and/or its placement strategies. In addressing this question with respect to the 1978 and 1979 placement classes, it is useful to summarize what has remained constant in the placement of political scientists in order to highlight what has changed.