A PhD leads to meaningful employment but seldom in jobs for which they were meant, reports find

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“So, if the PhD no longer fills the purpose for which it was meant for, now what? For Dr. Nelson, the answer cannot be reducing grad spots.”

There was no compelling reason given why ‘reducing grad spots’ is not an answer. The researcher interviewed just pivoted to another issue. Why SHOULDN’T there be less grad students, besides the obvious reason that PIs want the almost-free labour that graduate students provide?

@Newsbrowser, there are a few different answers to your question, but one of the most compelling comes from Katina Rogers’ “Putting the Humanities PhD to Work.” She writes:

“instituting blanket reductions in program size is likely to reinforce conservative decision-making in the admissions process, leading committees to compete over the prospective students with the greatest pedigree and most traditionally legible CV. Measures of selectivity, even if they are thought to be neutral, tend to reward students from wealthy and highly educated families. This means that if graduate programs focus on becoming more selective, the result will likely be a whiter, wealthier student body and a reduction in diversity of all kinds. This in turn will narrow the overall breadth of creativity and vision in new scholarship.”

Rogers also scribes two other reasons “why a push to reduce the size of doctoral programs is problematic”: first, “reducing a graduate program’s size can actually perpetuate the increased use of adjuncts, because it may reduce the resources a program receives from the institution”; and, finally, “faculty careers are not the only measure of success for PhD holders.”

All these quotations come from p. 33 of Rogers’ excellent book. While the focus of her work is the humanities, I see no reason why these points wouldn’t also apply in non-humanities disciplines.

You have raised a very important point, Newsbrowser. We are producing very expensive, well-educated members of the workforce who may never use that very expensive education to its fullest capacity.

I do agree completelky to that.
I have a PH.D in literature and no job in the academics. I have to admit that at the first time I didn’t think of an academic position advocacing for women in the social field.

Now I regretted all the sacrifices such as separation with my family from overseas and no benefice at all today.

PhD does not mean a job in the academic

As it is the case for bachelor’s and master’s degrees, there is an over-production of PhD degrees. The remedy is not to water down the requirements for the PhD degree, it is to reduce the number produced. The same remedy needs be applied to bachelor’s and master’s degrees. There is no merit or benefit in producing people with degrees that are not needed. Misled and allured by invalid statistics, false advertisements and mis-representations, people waste time and money in acquiring these unnecessary degrees, and then spend a life time of frustration doing work that they are over- and/or ill-qualified.

What are the grounds for arguing that there are too many baccalaureate, masters and doctoral graduates? Higher education has far broader rationales and benefits than fitting graduates for specific jobs.

Tell that to the countless young engineers, economists, computer scientists, etc. with $40K debt and no job years after graduation, and no prospect for the future.

“Universities can’t convince employers en masse of the value of the PhD.”
-Wow. This is simple statement shows that even universities don’t believe there’s value in the PhD, because they are unwilling to convince anyone else of it, or think they can’t do it. Further, the article states that universities rely heavily on paying PhD’s very low salaries. Again showing that they do not value them.
-A message to the PhDs: you have Tremendous value. Your degree is the golden ticket: you can be paid generous salaries and be valued in your work at the same time. Change your belief system, don’t allow any academic to tell you there’s no opportunity for you outside of academia, because there are. Seek advice outside of academia.

Not correct. A PhD is a curse for employers and employees alike, because practically zero percent of jobs require a PhD. No company wants to hire a PhD because PhDs are highly overqualified for the positions. As a result, if they are hired they become a liability for the company and for themselves because they are always dissatisfied and frustrated. A PhD has value where it is needed, not where it is superfluous.

When you look at the work produced by tenured PhDs, you see the prolific publishing they do. In my mind from Master’s up one should no longer be looking for a job but producing publications through further research to defend or promote realities, discoveries and realizations through valid research a postdoc might arrive at.

Especially at the doctoral level, one should no longer be looking for a “job” but a position, and what better “position” is one in to produce this “position” ???

I would imagine that much education should be for someone looking to start something or join something of like mind.

The PhD is an an above line leadership entity and those who view this entity as anything less has waited their time.

It is my hope we do not dumb down the PhD program, I’d rather we inform would be PhDs to go elsewhere if they are hoping for a “job”… The PhD is for someone looking to start something not “get” something. To begin something not receive something.

At this point in their journey, should they be looking for a “job” they are either unaware of how far they have come or they forgot their original reasons for trekking this far….!

Exactly…tenured PhDs have the job security (or “employment” security if you don’t want to use the word “job”) to publish prolifically. That’s part of their position, and they are paid handsomely for it. Unfortunately, there is a mismatch between the number of such positions available to be filled and the number of new PhDs seeking work. You can’t produce work and publish when you don’t have an income. There’s a dangerous denigration of “jobs” and income in academia that brainwashes students and grads and leads them to suffer needlessly in postdocs and adjunct positions, racking up debt and mental health issues.

How about universities stop pretending that teaching isn’t a proper job and start offering more salaried positions, especially to lecturers who have full time workloads but are classed as “contract”? And yes – closing grad programs IS the answer. We need them to be closed for several years to compensate for lack of proper academic positions being offered.

I think there are some problems with some of the statements here. Firstly, who decides that “the PhD no longer fills the purpose for which it was meant”? I think it is just plain wrong to think that the only purpose of a PhD programme is to funnel graduates into another job teaching PhDs who will then teach PhDs, ad infinitum. I have worked in industry, academia, the civil service and currently am working in an environmental institute that does research, policy and advocacy around the world. There are many opportunities available, not just tenure-track academia.

The article says 20 to 30 percent found employment as academics and another 20-30% found jobs in industry. It also says most grads “stay in higher education in a mix of positions: full-time profs, administrative roles and part-time instructors.” So it tells me that a majority of PhDs stay in higher education jobs or in industry. This study hasn’t asked what jobs people were looking for. I know a number of PhDs who went into administrative jobs doing things like research facilitation, legal work, and HE management and those were the jobs they wanted rather than a traditional teaching/research/admin type faculty position. Others I know have gone into advocacy and charity roles where they have done amazing work at a high level, so it would be wrong to say those are not “PhD level” jobs.

That is not to say that there aren’t those who struggle to find the job in an area that they want at the level they want or that we don’t need to think more about how to make PhD programmes better, including more mentoring and professional development. I just think that this article makes it sound like getting a PhD isn’t “worth it” if you don’t get a traditional, academic job at the end which I think is definitely wrong.

Another approach we are considering is to have students define success for themselves. Rather than a PhD program declaring that a student needs to publish three papers in order to graduate, students can decide their own fate following a course of wayfinding in first year. Annually, students would stating their objectives (i.e. publications, patents, spin-off companies), why they are worth pursuing, where they plan to be next year, where they are now, and how that compares to what they said previously. Students will choose their own criteria to define success or failure. They will be responsible for explaining their progress and their pivots along the way, in a supportive environment. Individual supervisory committees will guide how much progress is enough to graduate, but the program would enforce clarity and self-assessment.

That sounds more QA PhD program in the US or Europe. They vary, of course, but you can have a lot more flexibility of projects than just producing papers. You need to demonstrate original work and advancement in the area, but I have known PhDs where the main output is a film, a tutoring system, a new lab method, designing better environments for zoo animals. We need more innovation and creativity in grad programs to address the big issues around the world. And also to NOT push the idea that if you don’t go into academia that you have “failed”. There are a lot of exciting opportunities out there.

Lots of social sciences PhDs in consultancy – definitely not a prerequisite qualification but I’ve found a PhD from a business school really useful for my career (I did it mid career). And being well linked into interdisciplinary areas of academia as an affiliate has let me bring knowledge and ideas over to the business world and contribute back, do joint papers etc. And I feel really confident about doing proper user and social research. It’s definitely given me further skills over the MBA. But I do agree that tailoring a doctoral level qualification for a career track outside of academia would potentially be more valuable and set better expectations – DBAs and other professional doctorates don’t seem to have fully caught on. On the other hand I really enjoyed the freedom to explore some left field ideas in my PhD programme.

Quote: “The reports show that most grads stay in higher education but in a mix of positions: full-time profs, administrative roles and part-time instructors. Business grads were most likely to land coveted tenure jobs. Women fared worse in getting tenure jobs, had lower incomes and more often worked part-time.”

Go figure then why there are not enough woman – its definitely not lack of talent or competence but the glass ceiling and misogynist attitudes that bar them