Is a postdoc becoming mandatory for econ academic jobs? I've been looking at placement records for top 20 30 programs and it feels like the share of graduates going through a postdoc or visiting position before landing tenure track has gone way up in the last 5 6 years. Like, at some programs it seems like more than half the recent cohort did some kind of postdoc before getting a TT offer. Is this actually a structural shift in the market or am I just seeing selection bias in the data? And if it IS the new normal... should we be factoring that into how we think about program length? You're basically looking at 5 6 years for the PhD plus 1 3 years postdoc before you even start the tenure clock. Would love to hear from people who've been on the market recently or are watching this closely.