The myth of the overproduction of academic titles: Part II

In a recent post I showed that, contrary to persistent rumors, there is no large increase in the number of new academic titles in Bulgaria following the 2010 law which allowed universities to promote their own docents and professors. This earlier analysis however relied on only one post-2010 point to make this conclusion. Here is a further analysis based on post-2010 data published by the Bulgarian Academy of Science earlier this year. The source of the data can be found here (in Bulgarian).

First let's compare the years where the database data and the BAS data overlap - the period between 2007 and 2009. As expected the database data falls bellow the BAS data indicating incompleteness in the database. This incompleteness is more notable for the docents (some 200 people more per year) than for the professors. Since no official data exists, it is difficult to trace to source of such a discrepancy.

Even more striking is the difference between the BAS and the Ministry of Education data for 2012 - the difference is a factor of 2. I would have expected that the data will be similar, considering how recent it is. Such a difference casts a certain amount of doubt on both datasets. How difficult could it be to count the number of academic titles in 53 universities? 

The BAS data is quite poorly formatted so the following was done to make it fit for plotting. The BAS report gives data for the folloing periods: Jan - Mar 2011 and Mar 2011 - Mar 2013. Additionally it notes that 666 new docent titles have been received during the Jan - Mar 2013 period. I assume that the fraction of docent for 2013 relative to the full number for the two years - 68.4% - is the same for the professors. I then add the Jan - Mar 2011 data to the 0.316x(Mar 2011 - Mar 2013) to get the total number of titles for 2011 and 2012. Finally I divide this by two assuming the numbers for the two years are equal. Presumably, BAS has the full data on this. Why they chose to present it in this odd way, is unclear to me.

The BAS report makes the point that in the first three months of 2013 there is a dramatic rise of the number of new academic titles, but that rise only comes after a striking dip during the previous two years. During 2011 and 2012, the number of new docents was 3 times lower than prior years. The number of new professors was 20% less. Therefor, it is not surprising to see a clearing of this huge backlog in the beginning of 2013. In order to make up for the dip, 2013 might see over 1100 new docents. The number of new professors is again larger than that of previous year, by a factor of 3, slightly larger but comparable to the conclusion reached with the database.

Another interesting question would be to find out what is the total number of docents and professors as a function of time, because this will show us not just the new hires, but the growth relative to the existing faculty. Unfortunately, I could not find such data. Random Google hits show that in 2008 there were ~1300 professors and that docents were over 10,000.