Tenure Track Careers for Aerospace Engineering PhDs

Graduate School
1

I was very interested in the recent discussion concerning tenure-track positions for English PhDs. As I have posted, my son is heading to the University of Michigan to start his PhD with Dr. Iain Boyd. Dr. Boyd heads Michigan’s Nonequilibrium Gas and Plasma Dynamics Laboratory in the Department of Aerospace Engineering. My son likes to teach and currently is interested in being a university professor. So, to get some data on PhDs in a technical field from a top university, I thought that I would look into what positions Dr. Boyd’s PhDs have taken.

Dr. Boyd has advised 43 PhDs, six at Cornell, and 37 since he joined Michigan. 17 of these graduates have positions with research laboratories, such as NASA Glenn Research Center, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and various armed forces labs. 16 are in industry positions, such as with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Blue Origin, Samsung, Foxconn, and Blue Origin. Eight are affiliated with universities, but only three of them are in tenure-track positions (Minnesota, Michigan State, and Texas A&M). One is a consultant and one’s position is unknown.

So only about 7% of Dr. Boyd’s graduates are in tenure-track positions. Some of the recent graduates may still pursue professorships, but this is still a low percentage. But I would not draw the conclusion that it was difficult for them to get into traditional academia. First, there have clearly been many options for Dr. Boyd’s graduates. I have no idea at all about how many of them were even interested in being professors. Second, this is a very specialized field, which may not be at all representative of outcomes for other PhDs, even those with technical degrees.

2

7% is actually a pretty high tenure-track appointment rate. I don’t know if the actual statistics even exist, but consider that far fewer than 7% of PhD engineers end up as tenure-track faculty.

Of course, the real measure would be what percent that want a tenure-track job are able to obtain one. Determining that is probably impossible without a concerted survey effort, but consider that a typical tenure-track job opening often receives well over a hundred or more applicants.

3

@boneh3ad - That makes sense. There is no way to know absent an in-depth survey. in 6 to 8 years, we’ll see if my son still wants to be a professor. If I live that long, maybe I’ll report back.

4

It’s hard to predict anything this early. Many people who say they want to be a professor decide it isn’t for them well before they finish their PhD and others who thought they’d never consider it end up being quite interested by the time they are finished.

5

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4309283/ suggests that, over 20 year careers, engineering faculty graduate an average of 7.8 PhDs with aerospace at 9.5. So we should expect only about 1 in 9.5 (10.5%) aerospace engineering PhD graduates to find a tenure track academic job, replacing a retired faculty member in the field, if the number of tenure track jobs remains constant with openings occurring due to retirement.

So it is no surprise that most PhD graduates end up someplace other than tenure track academic jobs. At least there is some industrial demand for engineering PhDs that is better than the industrial demand for PhDs in some other subjects like biology.

6

@ucbalumnus - Thanks, that is a very interesting article. With 43 PhDs graduated over the last 20 years, Dr. Boyd has been extremely “fertile” (Rsub0 = 43). His specialty is not shared by very many professors and applications seem to be growing. I believe that all three of his tenure-track graduates are at universities (Minnesota, Michigan Tech, and Texas A&M) that previously did not have professors researching plasma modeling. For example, Dr. Kentaro Hara graduated from Michigan under Dr. Boyd in 2015, spent a year at Princeton on a post-doc, and then was recruited by Texas A&M in 2016 to head their new Plasma Dynamics Modeling Laboratory. That same year, A&M hired Dr. Christopher Limbach, a 2015 Princeton PhD, to start their Laser Diagnostics and Plasma Devices Lab.

My son was very fortunate that both professors joined Texas A&M at the beginning of his junior year, that he was able to take an aero plasma propulsion class from Dr. Hara, and then able to do research with both professors. He also had a very good professor for his computational fluid dynamics class, who was available for a back up recommendation if needed CFD is fundamental for modeling plasma dynamics.

7

Engineering, I feel, is a lot more difficult to predict/think about than English or another humanities field. As you mentioned, there are so many other options for engineering PhDs outside of the ivory tower. Most of these other options pay significantly more than working in academia. Moreover, engineering PhDs can more easily find an analog to academic work outside of a university. Few institutions other than a research university are going to pay a PhD in English to do scholarship in literature, but there are lots of companies - both private and public, non-profit and for-profit - that will pay an engineering PhD to do work that’s really similar to what they would do in an academic position, probably for more money.

More and more doctoral students these days (across fields - from humanities to engineering) are realizing that tenure-track jobs don’t exist the way that they used to and that they need to have a Plan B. And for some students, non-academic jobs are their Plan A - that’s what they wanted to do when they entered. I suspect that this is far more common for engineering PhDs than English PhDs, though, particularly because of the issues in my first paragraph (more jobs outside of academia).

But one way to look at this is to think about the kind of experience/record/resume someone needs to have to get a job outside of academia and whether it’s similar to getting one inside. What I mean is - the kind of things (cutting-edge research, publications, etc.) that would make a new PhD in engineering appealing to a research laboratory like the NASA Glenn Research Center, Livermore, JPL, etc. are ALSO the kinds of things that would make a new PhD in engineering appealing to R1 university faculty positions. The same is true for research positions at top companies like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Samsung, etc.

However, to draw a parallel to English, I would not say that the same thing is true of the non-academic jobs most of the English students secured after grad school, even the really awesome ones! Consulting at BCG is an awesome job but they don’t really care about your publications the same way that an academic position would. Prestigious K-12 private schools, too, may care a little but are far more concerned about your teaching track record and any experience working with teenagers and/or leading extracurricular activities. Even the kinds of research jobs most literature PhDs will get outside of academia won’t be in literature, so while jobs will be interested in the students’ research skills and background, it’ll be in a far more general way.

The other thing is that engineering departments aren’t closing up shop and losing funding the way humanities and social science departments are. If anything, demand is expanding. So there will be more positions for engineering professors from both positions: More engineering departments are expanding or at least staying the same size; and more PhDs are leaving academia at various points in their career to go chase higher-paying or more interesting (to them) positions outside of academia. I’ve even seen some tenured associate and full professors leave their engineering faculty positions to go do research at Google or whatever. I also believe jumping back and forth between academia and industry is a bit easier in engineering, depending on what you do.

So I propose that that’s a way to think about evaluating a professor’s or department’s tenure-track placement rate if a professorship is your goal:

  1. How often do grads get tenure-track positions in relation to the overall rate in the field? (And remember to look 4-7 years out, not just at immediate graduation, since these days in most fields a TT job out of grad school is rare.)

  2. When grads end up at non-academic jobs, is that likely to be due to choice or market forces (or somewhere in between)? How similar are the non-academic jobs to academic ones, and do they value the same kinds of things? In other words, are the students who ended up outside of academia likely to have been competitive for academic jobs? (Of course, there’s no concrete way to know, but you can make some educated guesses)

  3. Probably just as importantly - if, in the very real and honestly sometimes likely position you don’t end up in a tenure-track job, are the other jobs your proposed PI/department’s grad students are going to the kinds of jobs you’d like as a Plan B?