The long-term job outlook for a freshly minted science Ph.D. can be pretty grim. After devoting more than a half decade to becoming an independent researcher in the field of their passion, after sacrificing opportunities for better pay and work-life balance, and after writing papers and presenting at who-knows-how-many conferences, graduate students may emerge from the ivory tower only to find that there are no jobs that allow them to do the thing they’ve been training to do.
In 2020, colleges and universities throughout the United States awarded more than 42,000 Ph.D. diplomas for scientists and engineers. In many respects, that’s fantastic news; it represents a giant leap from the fewer than 6,000 degrees awarded in 1958. We have more scientists and engineers than ever before. In a society that thrives on highly skilled workers and that celebrates and respects those workers, many young people are heeding the call to enter the science, technology, engineering, and math disciplines.
And then what happens?
Many universities and colleges do not publish data on the long-term career outcomes of graduate students the way they do for undergraduate students. Why are they ignoring their advanced students? Perhaps it is because if they were to print the realities on their brochures, fewer graduate students would enroll in their programs.
Nevertheless, we can track the progress of the nation’s Ph.D. holders via independent surveys. Around 30 percent of new science Ph.D. graduates who responded to the 2019 Survey of Earned Doctorates, administered by the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, did not immediately have a job or postdoctoral study lined up. Depending on the field, between 20 and 40 percent of respondents reported that they were continuing on the academic path — the vast majority in postdocs, short-term research positions typically lasting one to three years. Tracking the path from postdoc to professorship is difficult, but one 2015 paper noted that “less than 17 percent of new Ph.D.s in science, engineering, and health-related fields find tenure-track positions within three years” of graduating. Many of the rest will land outside of practicing science altogether: The NCSES survey indicated that nearly a third of doctoral scientists and engineers in the U.S. are not employed as scientists or engineers. If the goal of graduate programs is to create highly trained scientists, then these programs are oversupplying the workforce by the hundreds of thousands.
Keep in mind that a graduate student’s life isn’t easy. In a 2019 survey of more than 6,000 graduate students, three-quarters of graduate students reported working more than 40 hours a week, one-third say they sought help for anxiety and depression due to their school experience, and nearly 40 percent reported dissatisfaction with their work-life balance. Still, more than half expressed interest in pursuing a long-term academic career. That’s a lot of blood, sweat, and tears devoted to a career that may not come to fruition.
All this raises the question: What exactly are science and engineering graduate programs for? Are they training grounds for future research scientists? Are they a fun way for students to develop highly valuable skills that they then translate to non-academic and non-science careers? Or are they research-generating factories where senior scientists can exploit cheap labor?
As an astrophysicist who has spent years communicating science and watching scores of young students get excited by the prospects of a career in science, I think we need to critically examine the way we approach science graduate education. Presumably, the goal of Ph.D. programs is to train independent scientists, but many of those students will not actually become scientists — either in academia or in industry.
First, we need to get those fresh Ph.D.s some jobs. Some departments and universities are beginning to build bridges into nonscience career paths by way of firms like the Erdos Institute, which partners with universities and corporations to help prepare Ph.D.s for private sector work and place them in jobs. These programs are a great start, but we need many more of them, and they should be woven into the very fabric of every doctoral program. Every faculty member and department head must recognize that many of their graduate students will not become academic researchers — and it serves no one to pretend they will.
Graduate student advisers must stop looking at their mentees as future professors and start preparing them for a life outside academia. These advisers should engage with industry themselves, to build the connections and networks that can give their students the best chance at success. And department administrators should support faculty in these endeavors. Academic departments obsess over metrics like publication rate and grant awards as barometers of success. Here’s a new one: successful placement of students in jobs, whether in academia, in industry, or just … in a job.
Second, we need to address the imbalance of supply and demand in academic hiring. One option is to dramatically increase the number of tenured professorships and long-term research associate positions, to ensure that postdocs can find a secure home in academia. But another, seemingly harsher approach could be the tough medicine we need: Severely cut the number of available postdocs. Placing junior scientists in temporary positions that have poor odds of leading to a long-term career is unfair to them, especially when departments aren’t transparent about the fruits those labors will bear. If there’s going to be intense competition, it’s better to have it earlier, when people are better able to pivot into new directions. It’s one thing to produce scores of Ph.D.s for every one open position; it’s quite another to delay that cliff until scientists are in their mid-30s.
Lastly, we need honesty. Academic departments need to be frank with incoming students about their career prospects. Departments should be clear about the fact that many of their graduates won’t go on to pursue a lifelong career in academic research, or end up in science at all. Yes, this may impact graduate enrollment numbers, and, yes, that might force universities to find creative ways to continue producing research and teaching undergraduates. But maybe — I’m just putting this out there — the universities can create permanent research affiliate positions instead.
And students may well decide that non-academic careers are a worthy pursuit in their own right. Holders of science Ph.D.s who leave academia generally earn higher salaries, experience less workplace discrimination, and report greater job satisfaction than those who stay. Careers outside of academia — and even outside of science — can be rewarding, challenging, and fun. And that should be printed, in big, bold, glossy font, on the front of every graduate department’s brochure.
Paul M. Sutter is a research professor of astrophysics at the Institute for Advanced Computational Science at Stony Brook University and a guest researcher at the Flatiron Institute in New York City. He is also an author, host, and speaker.
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Not news! Can anyone, in or out of academe fail to notice that employees of graduate schools only know the business of being employees of graduate schools?
I received a doctorate in physics in 1972, and not one of the professors in the department had any industrial, government, or other teaching experience. Worse, there was a definite attitude that the only ‘proper’ job was to be a professor; and the only good professor was one who primarily was heavily cited and capable of obtaining grants by themselves. We knew this was provincial, but the system in which we were enrolled had precise rules.
More recently, as the article notes, the doctorate has become many times more common, but the opportunities to become a tenured employee haven’t expanded. Worse, science is now conflated with something called technology, and success in the latter field is notably obtained by dropouts, entrepreneurs, wildcatters, not hardly by peer recognition.
This makes someone sticking through the conventional BS,MS, Ph.D exercise either dedicated and focused on a career where the credentials are mandatory, or else a dupe.
Now, in some fields, that painfully-attached doctorate is still the only acceptable credential, and in others, interest, talent and luck prove best.
All the symptoms of a failing enterprise. This would be a signal for action, but the entire enterprise is based on no change at all.
Article Disappointing in some ways – lacking in more-thorough analysis. No comments/observations about quality, not just re PhD s but right down thru to MA/MSc and worse Bachelor levels which today are not much better than a high school diploma 5 decades ago. Our problem with post secondary education is that our universities are simply degree factories with little concern for quality + critical thinking skills, an d even in science programs, an undue amount of attention on political correctness. “Science”??? Today that’s a joke.
Tell the Federal granting agencies. They address the national need for academic research but they reward investigators for supporting graduate students and post docs rather than technicians and analysts. Instead of decent careers for graduates, they fund more graduates.
I’m a hospital pharmacist, and during the nationwide shortage of pharmacists about 15 to 20 years ago, I was surprised to see a number of people with PhD’s in science going back to school to get their PharmD’s and become pharmacists. Some said they weren’t happy with working in a lab and wanted a career that had a more immediate impact with regard to helping people. But I got the impression that some just couldn’t find jobs in academia.
Back in the 80’s or 90’s David Goodstein of Caltech said that Physics faculty needed to produce two PhD students in their careers – one to replace them, and one to go to a non-PhD-granting institution. But they produced about 15.
It is a mistake to lump engineering in with science in this article, since most engineering PhDs go to industry and never consider academia. About 10% of our engineering PhD graduates participate in our future faculty seminar.
You’re likely referring to Goodstein’s excellent article “The Big Crunch” from 1994. It was influential to me and good reading for anyone thinking about getting a science PhD.
I always viewed physics (PhD 1999) as career #1. I later went on to career #2 in the tech industry. I don’t regret career #1 for a moment however; it gave me the opportunity to pursue a passion, experience research at the frontier of science, and make lifelong friends. Was a physics PhD a “waste of time”? If one defines the goal narrowly in terms of my lifetime physics research output, perhaps it was. But I also learned a mindset and set of quantitative skills that helped me very much in my later career. To me it was a great experience but I think having realistic expectations and a Plan B in mind were a big part of that.
These problems have been with us for half a century. I’ll one more thing universities need to do: be honest with undergraduates when they are selecting majors. Ask them to think of what they want to do. Many won’t have a clue, but asking the question may get them thinking. I didn’t have much of a clue either, but I did recognize that I didn’t want to go to grad school “forever,” so I chose engineering instead of astronomy. I ended up writing about science and technology. It took me a while to get there, but I realized I had made the right choice when I ran into a college friend who was still doing postdocs 20 years after getting a BS in astronomy. Universities need to be honest about the problems, and by and large they are not.