Meredith Slopen, a postdoctoral scholar who joined the Stone Center in 2023, will start a tenure-track position at the start of the 2025 academic year at Stony Brook University’s School of Social Welfare, where she will continue her research on work and labor market policies as a social determinant of health and economic security. Slopen has a Ph.D. in social welfare and policy analysis from Columbia University and more than a decade of experience working for New York City’s health department.
She recently spoke to the Stone Center about her new position; the reality of the current academic, public health, and social services job markets; and how to help other researchers who have faced professional upheaval in recent months.
What are you most looking forward as you prepare to start your new position?
Slopen: I am excited to be joining the faculty at the Stony Brook School of Social Welfare, and to work with social work students. I’ve really enjoyed teaching in the past and I can’t wait to get started. Stony Brook has BSW, MSW, and doctoral programs in social work. I’m looking forward to teaching across the program.
I’m also really excited about the opportunity to continue to conduct research on workplace and labor market policies and their impact on the health and economic well-being of working families. I plan to continue to build my research agenda on work across the life course, and on how different policies can support workers at different points where they might encounter barriers or challenges to staying employed.
When you announced your new position on Bluesky and LinkedIn, you discussed the role of luck in the job search process. Why do you see luck as playing a major role?
Slopen: I guess I want to start take a step back and say that the sectors that I’ve worked in throughout my life — public health, social service, public service — have all been under a huge amount of stress and dismantling from the policies of the federal government.
Because of that, we’re experiencing an avalanche of job loss across research and government sectors. It’s not just that there’s insecurity in the market for academic jobs, but there’s also a lot of insecurity for other types of research jobs that hire recent graduates. For example, there are many research firms that do work that’s quite similar to the work that I do, where I could see myself making a strong contribution, that have historically received federal funding to evaluate federal programs. Those firms are also finding themselves in crisis and experiencing layoffs. Students who are graduating from public policy programs, economics, education, and social work Ph.D. programs often find themselves working in the public sector — many of those jobs no longer exist, and the people who have worked in those agencies are also looking for work in the small pool of available jobs. And the number of living-wage, family-supporting academic jobs have been shrinking for years for a whole host of other reasons, which have to do with the increased use of adjuncts in academia and the lack of replacement of retiring workers. It is a very challenging time to be looking for work.
Most days I talk to at least one person who has either lost their long-time job, who is about to graduate and can’t find work, or who was very far along in a search and then the job disappeared because they lost the grant that they were going to use. Or a student who lost their research assistantship, or somebody who had been working in a government agency for more than a decade who no longer has a job. In particular, people who have worked in government have traded some amount of income for an understanding that they will continue to be employed, that they can stay in those jobs. There’s real job stability and security built into public sector jobs, and the experiences of job loss among these workers is going to be differently destabilizing. And their experience of sudden job loss will have implications for long-term planning for their families, for their housing, for their children, for their retirement readiness. That’s the broader employment context right now.
All of these people I talk to who are looking for work — whether they are early career or experiencing recent job loss — are exceptionally good at what they do. That’s why I think luck really plays a role. There’s a lot of randomness in who is being impacted, or the timing of being impacted. Of course it’s not just luck. I am so lucky to have a huge number of people who have supported me throughout the time that I’ve been looking for work. I have strong mentors who have given me excellent advice, have written letters, have gone to bat for me in conversations, and I am not to dismiss their contributions and the role that they play. I owe them so much. That’s not luck. But when we’re talking about this small set of available jobs receiving hundreds of applications? Everybody’s very good. And that’s why I think luck plays a role.
It’s luck if your grant wasn’t canceled. It’s luck if the universities that you are interviewing at feel felt confident enough to make the offer. It’s easy, I think, for people, especially early career people, to think that they did something wrong in this moment, and that’s why they have been unable to find a position. But this isn’t an individual problem; it’s a sector-wide problem.
You also had suggestions for how to help researchers who are looking for positions.
Slopen: First of all, I want to be clear that I don’t think people with Ph.D.’s are the most impacted by what’s happening economically in the United States right now, and I don’t want to privilege this experience over the experiences of other families who are facing unemployment. But these impacts are something that I’m seeing across my professional communities.
One of the things that really weighed on me when it looked like I might not have a permanent position in academia was that all of a sudden I would just disappear from my professional circles. I would no longer be at conferences and people would say, “Oh, Meredith, where did she go? What happened to her?”
There’s a whole literature about career scarring. What happens to people when their careers are interrupted by external events? For example, there have been studies on the impact of graduating in a recession and what that means for people’s long-term earnings trajectories. Both the pandemic and this mass unemployment event that we’re experiencing in this sector are what I would consider to be scarring events that people will write papers about later.
To help people, we should be looking to partner with people who have lost their jobs to support them to stay engaged and keep building careers — writing people into grants as consultants and finding ways to share resources. I’m really proud to see that professional associations like APPAM are offering funding support for conferences and for memberships to people who have recently lost their jobs. I think that grant opportunities that are specifically targeted to people who have lost grants are very thoughtful: these are approved projects that many others have already decided were worth doing, and finding ways to support their completion is a way to avoid losing what has been created. It is a great time to hire right now if you can: there are great people looking. Those are all things that I think we really need. Private philanthropy can’t replace the role of federal funding for research, but I do think that we all have a responsibility to stabilize people as much as we can.
How have you found your two years at the Stone Center?
Slopen: I’ve been really grateful to have this time at the Stone Center. It’s been a huge privilege to have the time and space to develop my research agenda post dissertation. I’ve initiated and formed new collaborations. I’ve been able to expand on my previous work around transitions to parenting, and to have a new focus that looks at the experiences of older workers as they move towards retirement, which has been really fruitful. The Stone Center has provided the time and space to do that work in an intellectually stimulating space with great colleagues. I really value the time I’ve been able to spend here at the Graduate Center, and I look forward to continuing to collaborate with the Stone Center in the future.
Read More: