How do you accommodate that? So, research positions in industry, at least in the US and I believe this is true in Europe, have not been growing. Even if the focus of the PhD was to go back to training people for research positions, do you still think that the metric of publications is a good thing?
I mean it makes people think short-term, it makes people try to get things out the door very quickly, it just has very strange incentives built into it. What do you think would be a more appropriate metric, output, whatever you want to call it, by which we could measure and assess researchers?
Is it good if an institution trains a lot of PhDs to go into research positions, whether in academia or outside academia, and is it bad if institutions are putting a lot of researchers through their training schemes that are not ending up in research positions? Now, whatever your view of the current PhD system is, it is clear that there are changes to be made, and that there are many conversations being had about what those changes should look like.
So, over the next few episodes, the Nature Careers podcast team will be exploring what the future of the PhD might look like and how PhD researchers can navigate this change. I think people need to be really clear about why they want to go into a PhD and do a bit of research in relation to what they personally want out of it.
Increasingly, institutions have put together doctoral training colleges which are massively supportive. Academia is hard, of course it is, and making progress in that is never going to be entirely straightforward, but neither is any career in many ways, and I think the issue is to speak up when you find that problems are or issues are challenging and find ways in which your voice can be heard much more widely.
Thanks for listening. University of Washington UW. Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily. Advanced search. Skip to main content Thank you for visiting nature. I know in our department, job searches that we've done over the last few years, we've had more and more applicants for one job, and so it seems like there are more PhDs on the market for jobs than ever and fewer jobs out there for them to get.
Dorsky: Well, from the top down. NIH has instituted requirements for career training that involves alternative careers besides academic research for students funded by training grants. The graduate programs at the U and at other places have instituted much more serious emphasis on alternative career training, and really with an idea of getting students to think about what they really want to do with their careers and whether it requires a PhD.
We in the Neuroscience Program and other programs require students to put together an individual career development plan, which is a way to get them to focus on what their career goals are and to see if their current training is meeting those goals. Interviewer: Do you see anything wrong with having students go into a PhD program basically knowing that they're not going to end up in academia on the first place?
Dorsky: Well, the stated goals of the NIH-funded training grants and of our program, I would say, are to place students in research science. It doesn't have to be in academia, it doesn't have to be primarily in a research institution, but we want them to stay in science whether it's in writing, editing, or biotech. So any of those outcomes we feel are acceptable results of PhD level training, especially if the jobs that they're obtaining require a PhD.
What we would be more concerned with is students who go on to careers that don't require PhD, such as maybe primary or secondary school education which while a worthwhile career, seems that it doesn't require the level of training or scientific research training that we offer in a PhD program. Interviewer: Of course, I've also heard the argument that having a PhD is going to help you no matter where you go, that having that knowledge and kind of in-depth perspective can enrich any sort of career.
Dorsky: I think that's true about education in general. I guess the question we would ask students is whether they want to devote five or six years of their life to that outcome, when they could get on with their life and get a job much sooner and get the training on the job.
Dorsky: So that's an interesting side effect of this whole process, which is that many research labs on our campus and other campuses, and especially labs of more junior investigators, operate primarily through the labor of PhD graduate students who complete thesis projects, write papers, produce preliminary data for grants. And with the current system, there's no clear replacement for those people. Postdocs and technicians serve different roles in laboratories, and without graduate research the system would have to be organized in a very different way.
To better understand the challenges PhD students face in transitioning to the labour market, the Council of Canadian Academies convened a member expert panel in headed by Dr. The resulting page report, Degrees of Success , was released on January PhD programs cost money for governments, universities and students.
Students invest not just financially, but also in terms of their time, putting in four to six years on average to complete their programs. Yet, after graduation, they often end up as part-time instructors vying for limited tenure-track positions, unsure of how to market their skills in the non-academic job market. He notes that the PhD has been around for centuries and has managed to stay the same in many ways while also shifting over time — and may need to change again to stay relevant.
The number of people graduating with PhDs in Canada has been increasing at a fairly steady rate since In that year, according to Statistics Canada, 3, students graduated from PhD or equivalent programs across the country.
By the number had more than doubled, reaching nearly 8, Yet the number of tenure-stream professors in Canada has remained relatively constant since , at around 41, in any given year. The combination of increased PhD holders and a declining number of new tenure-track positions has led to greater competition for fewer jobs. According to the report, about 19 percent of PhD holders working in Canada hold tenured or tenure-track faculty jobs.
The rest end up in a range of positions. They sometimes serve as contract lecturers, a modestly paid and precarious career path. The same is not the case in other countries, she says, notably Australia and the U. In Canada, graduate supervisors may discourage their students from exploring jobs outside universities. They know a lot about the academic labour market, but not much about jobs outside universities. Some PhD programs link well to non-academic jobs, the panel notes.
Business PhDs are the top earners five years after graduation. They are followed by PhD graduates in engineering, mathematics and computer science, health, and education, all of whom have similar earnings. The lowest earners are PhD graduates in humanities and sciences. The differences in earnings are significant, the report notes, with PhD graduates in business earning over 80 percent more than those in humanities and sciences at the five-year mark.
Benjamin says that some sectors embrace PhD graduates because the employers in these sectors understand the value of their skills. Physics grads often get scooped up by Bay Street firms keen to utilize their complex math skills.
Discrimination and unconscious bias also can impact PhD holders. Men earn 19 percent more than women five years after finishing their doctoral degrees, while woman are more likely to be unemployed or working part-time. There are fewer racialized students at the highest levels of education — those with disabilities also struggle — with few mentors and colleagues facing similar challenges, leading to feelings of isolation.
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