Since this is happening for the second year in a row, I guess we can call it a trend.

Sydni Dunn of the Chronicle of Higher Education reported.

History Jobs Dip for a Second Consecutive Year

It’s hard out there for a historian. Once again, there were far fewer employment opportunities for history Ph.D.’s last academic year than the number of doctorates earned in the field, according to a report released on Wednesday by the American Historical Association.

It may not seem like a surprise; after all, the academic job market hasn’t exactly been sparkling in recent years. But after promising growth in the 2010-11 and 2011-12 academic years, the number of positions advertised through the association took a downturn, and hasn’t yet recovered.

In fact, the newest report, published in the association’s newsmagazine, Perspectives on History, shows the number of advertised jobs has dropped for the second consecutive year. The data for 2013-14 show a 7-percent decrease from the previous year, and about a 14-percent decrease from 2011-12. (The numbers are far from the prerecession peak of 1,064 positions advertised in 2007-8.)

“This decline is especially disconcerting when we consider that the overall economy has been improving and the U.S. jobless rate declining,” Allen Mikaelian, editor of Perspectives on History, wrote in the report. “It raises the possibility that this downturn in academic positions for historians is not entirely attributable to the recession, but may be with us for some time.”

It’s not just the association’s job bank that’s revealing a trend. Starting in January, the association expanded its analysis of job listings to include positions for historians that were listed on H-Net, an interdisciplinary online forum for scholars in the humanities and social sciences. In the new report, the association continued the experiment, including jobs that were not advertised through the AHA but that were “directed at historians or open to historians.”