The paper finds that, on average, an engineering professor has 7.8 PhD graduates over a 20 year career, though there is variation across different kinds of engineering (civil 2.5, mechanical 5.5, computer science 7.4, electrical/computer 8.7, chemical 9.1, biomedical 13.6, materials 15.4).
What this means is that, if the number of tenure track academic jobs remains constant, with openings coming from retirements, only 1 in 7.8 (12.8%) PhD graduates in engineering will find a tenure track academic job and eventually complete an academic career (including getting tenure).
Of course, in many kinds of engineering, there are non-academic jobs that hire PhD graduates. But for those fields where there is little or no non-academic job demand for PhD graduates, the job market can be very difficult.
The numbers game may be different for other fields in terms of the how many PhD graduates each professor graduates over a career. But if the number is significantly greater than 1.0, prospective PhD students should consider how competitive the academic job market will be and consider whether there will be non-academic demand (industrial, government, or non-profit research) or non-research academic demand (non-research colleges and universities, community colleges, high schools) for their services.
20 years seems short for a tenure track career, assuming a professor gets tenure. I would think 30 years would be closer to normal, so in that sense your estimate is too low.
You are assuming that tenured positions become available at a steady rate. They don’t. There are waves of retirements, like the baby boomer generation retiring in the next few years. Engineering schools grow and shrink, further complicating the picture. In addition, the trend toward hiring more lecturers to teach has also negatively affected tenured positions. Finally , positions in industry, finance, and consulting pay a lot more so the supply of Ph.D.'s who want to go through the hardships of obtaining a tenured position is relatively sparse.
This makes it sound like any PhD is suitable and capable of success in a tenure track position. As with any training process, great, good, mediocre, and pretty close to useless graduates emerge.
I have an Engineering PhD from Stanford, and among my friends from there (say 15 people) not a single one had any desire to go into academia. All have worked either in industry, gov’t labs, or as entrepreneurs. So engineering is not the greatest example. There are plenty of career tracks that have nothing to do with academia.
I don’t think there is a problem in engineering, because of the high demand for Ph.D. engineering outside of university research, coupled with the intent of people pursuing Ph.D.s to go outside of academia once they graduate, from the get-go, as several people have mentioned above.
The authors of the report would have done better to look at theoretical physics, if they wanted to show an academic market mismatch. Many of the people doing Ph.D.s in theoretical physics are interested in academic careers, at least at the outset. A few of them will be interested in teaching in colleges without Ph.D. programs, so they will wind up in academia without counting against the “replacement” number for their Ph.D. advisor. I suspect that most of the theoretical physics Ph.D.s do find employment in their fields, in industry or government labs, if not in academe. Some go into finance. (Now, some start a theoretical physics Ph.D. with the intention of subsequently going into finance.) But friends report that small fractions of the set of Ph.D. candidates who originally wanted to have a university research career actually got one. This is happening, despite the fact that theoretical physicists are not exactly prolific in producing newly-minted Ph.D.s
I believe that there is also a problem in the life/health sciences, in fields where research is supported by the National Institutes of Health. From editorials and articles in Science, this has become a serious concern. In these areas, the research group sizes tend to be much larger than in physics (overall, could vary from institution to institution), and so there are many more people looking for academic jobs than the replacement level.
The point about hiring coming in waves is a valid one. However, I would view claims that there would be high demand for Ph.D.s in academia with some skepticism, if I were embarking on an academic career now. It used to be claimed that there would be many openings in academia once the people who were hired in the late 1960’s started to retire. Most of those faculty members have retired by now. Although academic hiring did ease up a bit, the projected high demand did not materialize.
If one is counting on the retirement of baby boomers to create large numbers of job openings in academia, I think one will be disappointed. Academic hiring was at a low level when the baby boomers entered the university job market. I recall one of my faculty colleagues saying that there were exactly 7 openings at Ph.D.-granting institutions in his field when he entered the market. And by his “field,” he meant about 1/6 to 1/5 of all of the faculty positions within departments, not his research specialization.
Agree that engineering PhDs can relatively easily find non-academic research jobs, whether or not they originally wanted to go into academic research jobs.
Yes, if the numbers game of producing far more PhD graduates than replacement level exists in other fields where the non-academic research job demand is low, graduates in those fields (biology? humanities?) may face an extremely competitive job market for the kinds of jobs that they have been preparing for.
I’m not sure this is true, depending on how you want to define research. How many engineering PhDs publish in peer reviewed journals after entering industry? There’s a lot of engineering PhDs who end up in what I term product development positions.
If you define “research” as what you wrote, maybe not many. But many work at gov’t (say DoD) labs, where they are doing “new stuff” that does not get published; similarly in industry situations, where “trade secrets” preclude publication. That doesn’t mean it can’t be cutting edge, and interesting, and satisfying, to those PhDs who are doing it.
Research is definitely not defined as only writing peer-reviewed academic papers. I am an industry researcher and I have not written a single academic paper in the course of my 2.5 years on the job; my research gets put directly into the development of products and services for my employer. It’s extremely satisfying if you enjoy instant gratification.
Product development isn’t mutually exclusive with research; that’s why they often call those positions “research and development.” In many cases the research actually might be pretty similar to the kinds you’d do as a faculty member, just applied differently (and directly, and immediately)
Trade secrets aside, a lot of industry “research” in engineering isn’t fundamental enough or advance the state of the art enough to meet the threshold for publication in a peer reviewed journal.
I don’t know what it is like at other institutions, but where DH is getting people to retire has become a real issue. There are a lot of tenured people who want to keep their university health insurance.
Apparently it’s sufficiently less good that people don’t want to give it up. And if you can do almost nothing, publish no new papers, do no real teaching and still collect a salary what’s not to love?
I don’t know where your husband works, mathmom, but in our department, there is no one that fits the description you gave in #16. It would not even be possible.
People’s willingness to retire from our university may reflect the fact that health care coverage (beyond Medicate) continues for the retired faculty.
Health care coverage is a major issue for people who would only be covered by Medicare plus the supplemental policies they can afford, in retirement. We pay our daughter’s health insurance premium, and it is huge. I don’t know what our coverage would cost at our ages, but the term “exorbitant” comes to mind.
ucbalumnus wrrote: “Yes, if the numbers game of producing far more PhD graduates than replacement level exists in other fields where the non-academic research job demand is low, graduates in those fields (biology? humanities?) may face an extremely competitive job market for the kinds of jobs that they have been preparing for.”
It is happening now in humanities and social sciences. Another factor is the shift of many academic employers to producing student credit hours (SCH’s) using distance/remote instruction and adjuncts rather than tenure-stream faculty. In my social science field, which I entered a few decades ago, college enrollments were still expanding, remote/online instruction was non-existent, and so the academic career stream was quite open to talent. While in the social sciences there are also many non-academic opportunities for PhD’s (in government, industry, etc.), teaching-research at a PhD-granting institution may well be the most difficult or crowded path.
That being said, as has been mentioned, PhD’s in technical and science fields do have alternative career routes. This has been true for a long time. One of my brothers is a physics PhD (Caltech) who never sought an academic career but had an excellent one at a national lab; published in the major journals; retired with a pension and continues to consult in private economy.