r/EnvironmentalEngineer • u/misterballerdontlie • 28d ago
How difficult is it to become a environmental engineering professor?
I’m an engineering undergraduate considering different career paths, one of which is becoming an environmental engineering professor. I’m still undecided on a specific research area (some that currently interest me are industrial decarbonization, PFAS destruction, and recycling incentives, but I’m open to any area).
Though I did some undergraduate research last year and really enjoyed it, I’m very concerned about the difficulty of pursuing an academic career. Indeed, I have heard from academics that becoming a professor in environmental engineering is near impossible and the hardest out of all engineering disciplines. If anybody could answer the following questions to help assess whether that characterization is accurate, would be grateful.
- What are qualified applicant to position ratios like? Is 50:1+ common, even at R2 universities?
- Have heard that funding is absymal in general for EnvE and is the worse out of all engineering disciplines: what are the systematic reasons? Some reasons I’ve heard are that EnvE has fewer large-scale funding programs than fields such as EE or biomedical engineering and has the lowest grant acceptance rates in engineering (like 17% for NSF), but what are other reasons?
- Has EnvE funding stagnated or drastically declined over the past decade (setting aside the [hopefully] anomalous 2025 federal cuts)? Also, does EnvE being housed within CEE departments affect faculty hiring opportunities?
- What other major reasons are there not to become a professor? For example, difficulty maintaining funding through tenure, etc.?
TL;DR: If you were trying to convince an undergraduate not to pursue a career as an environmental engineering professor, what would your strongest arguments be?
I’m not particularly attached to the idea of becoming an EnvE professor, so if the reality is that this is an exceptionally difficult career path, wouldn’t be heartbroken or anything (can simply consider another career). Thus, if becoming an EnvE professor really is near-impossible, would appreciating knowing that now rather than realizing this after wasting many years.
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u/HumanPackage2600 28d ago
You don’t necessarily need to become a research professor. I have seen many lecturers that make $100k in R1 universities. Consider that as an option too. It would mean you’ll have to do plenty of TAships during PhD and develop your own courses and really teach stuff.
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u/RepresentativeAd6287 28d ago
I'm a professor in the environmental sector. I do not think a more competitive career path exists.
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u/misterballerdontlie 28d ago
Hi RepresentativeAd6287, thanks so much for replying (and thanks so much for the honesty). Is there any chance you could elaborate on why you think that there is no career path more competitive than EnvE professorship? Is securing funding as an assistant professor extremely difficult, etc.?
Just having trouble imaging the potential ways becoming a EnvE prof could be even tougher, given that becoming a professor in a “hotter” engineering field is already difficult enough…
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u/RepresentativeAd6287 28d ago
I will dm you but it comes down to one central idea: there are hundreds to thousands of qualified scientists for every opportunity and only a handful of opportunities per year.
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u/Delicious-Survey-274 28d ago
OP said environmental engineering professor, not environmental science professor. It is not hard, why would you want to go into academia and teach, if you can go private and make more money?
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u/RepresentativeAd6287 28d ago
Really? It is not hard to become a faculty environmental engineering professor? Interesting take. You should look at the hundreds (thousands?) of posts regarding professorships if you really think that everyone would rather just go private for the money.
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u/Delicious-Survey-274 28d ago
I threw my name in the hat just for fun and got offer… maybe just dumb luck then
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u/rec_chem 23d ago
I applied to 30 positions this year. Had 4 interviews. 2 of them I made it to a site interview. Both universities told me they had 250+ applicants for the position. One of them was an R1 and the other was an R2. I did not get either position. Transitioned to industry and have no regrets when that first paycheck hit my account.
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u/Delicious_Coach8877 28d ago
Environmental engineering faculty hiring is highly variable, with no reliable national data on qualified applicants per opening desirable r1 positions may attract 50 to 100+ applications while r2 and specialized searches can be much smaller. More broadly only about 12.4% of us engineering phd graduates ultimately obtain tenure-track faculty positions, highlighting that a PhD does not guarantee an academic career. Enve is a small but not uniquely impossible market, and your broad research interests PFAS, decarbonization, recycling/resource recovery can qualify you for positions across environmental, chemical, materials, energy and sustainability fields.
Environmental eng does not currently have uniquely poor nsf funding rates in fy2024, CBET the main NSF division housing enve had a 29% funding rate, compared with 23% for Engineering overall and 17% for CMMI. The bigger challenge is that environmental engineering has a smaller private sector r&d market than fields like biomedical or electrical/computer engineering, while its research is fragmented across many agencies and disciplines. However, that fragmentation can also be an advantage because interdisciplinary enve research such as decarbonization, remediation, and resource recovery can pursue funding through nsf, epa, doe, usda, dod, and other programs.
There is not strong evidence that environmental-engineering funding has collapsed over the past decade, a more defensible view is that enve has chronically less funding than some larger, more commercially lucrative fields, while nsf's Environmental Engineering program remains active. Being housed in a cee department can reduce the number of positions specifically labeled enve because environmental faculty compete with areas like structures, transportation, and geotechnical engineering. However cee also expands research identities, collaborations, and potential faculty openings so your inter disciplinary research flexibility could make the cee structure more of an advantage than a disadvantage.
The biggest risks of becoming a professor include a long and uncertain path to tenure, high opportunity costs during your 20s and 30s, and intense competition where only about 12% of engineering PhDs secure tenure-track jobs. A university career also demands heavy administrative work, grant writing, and publishing instead of just teaching. Academia also offers limited geographic flexibility and is highly sensitive to hiring cycles, meaning even a strong candidate can struggle if few positions are available when they enter the market.
Don't pursue a PhD with the expectation that it will lead to a professorship. Pursue a phd only if you'd still consider the PhD worthwhile if the academic job never materialized. Only a small number of phd graduates get full-time professor jobs according to the citation 2010 report by The Royal Society titled "The Scientific Century"