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| UBC’s study delves deeper into differences between fields and reveals how career paths change over time. Graduates in some fields have much better outcomes than in others. For example, it takes science graduates up to 10 years of working as a postdoctoral researcher before they land a tenure-track job. Photo: (dhavatar/Getty Images/iStockphoto) |
About a third of the humanities grads the
study surveyed found a tenure-track, research-intensive academic job,
but only a fifth of those in engineering chose that path. And while the
overall unemployment rate was less than 2 per cent, 7.5 per cent of
humanities PhDs reported they were looking for work.
The report is based on the labour-market outcomes of almost 4,000 PhD graduates, from 2005 to 2013.
“We
as a society have put massive amounts of energy and resources into
educating graduate students,” said Susan Porter, the dean of graduate
studies at UBC and vice-provost. “Given that the careers we see now are
not what they were many decades ago, are we educating them to be the
best they can be in the world? That was an important question to ask,”
she said.
The study is the latest to
examine what kind of jobs PhD holders pursue, part of a national debate
about whether Canada’s economy is fully capitalizing on the skills and
training of advanced degree holders. The number of people with doctoral
credentials has jumped over the last decade but tenure-track jobs have
not kept pace.
Multiple studies over the past two years have found that a minority of PhDs become professors.
UBC’s
study delves deeper into differences between fields and reveals how
career paths change over time. Graduates in some fields have much better
outcomes than in others. For example, it takes science graduates up to
10 years of working as a postdoctoral researcher before they land a
tenure-track job.
“It’s distressing the
age at which some of these people really settle down to a career – that
is both for themselves and for what they can contribute during their
lifetime,” Dr. Porter said.
Such
findings resonate at McGill University, home to the nationwide Trace
project which has been examining the career outcomes of PhD grads from
many Canadian universities with funding from the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council. Part of the project has been the collection
and online posting of life stories from graduates themselves.
Source: The Globe and Mail
