New study casts light on the career outcomes of new doctorates

It is well known that the number of PhD holders is increasing every year, but what is not so well known is the career path they choose. How many of them continue to be a part of academia and how many join the industry, and how much they earn, has remained unclear. To throw light on this, Nikolas Zolas of the U.S. Census Bureau and his co-authors conducted an analysis on the earnings of PhD students from various fields. Their study is part of the UMETRICS project that “links anonymized census data on employment and income to student information from a consortium of universities in and around the Midwestern United States.”

The study included 3000 US PhD students who graduated between 2009 and 2011 from eight universities. According to the team, those who stayed in academia earned lesser than those who took up jobs in industry. Some of the highlights of the study are as follows:

• Of the 40% students who joined industry, doctorates in mathematics, computer sciences, and engineering earned the most, i.e., an average of US$65,000 a year.
• Only 26% of biology graduates opted for industry jobs. However, biology postdocs earn the least, around $36,000 per year.
• Industry graduates tended to end up at large firms, which paid an average salary of more than $90,000.    
• The government absorbed 4.1% of the doctorates.

The study led by economists Julia Lane at New York University and Bruce Weinberg of Ohio State University in Columbus offers interesting insights into the career outcomes of doctorates. Suzanne Ortega, President of the Council of Graduate Schools in Washington DC, says, "That the report suggests that doctoral recipients work in establishments associated with high productivity illustrates how doctoral education probably contributes to economic growth and job creation." There is a clear distinction in the revenue earned by doctorates based on their disciplines. Commenting on the extravagant salaries some fields garner, scientific labor force expert Hal Salzman of Rutgers University, New Jersey, elucidates, “Even in universities, starting salaries for those folks should be more than $65,000, so that suggests [that] a lot are in research, non-tenure track positions.”

While Lane and Weinberg clarify that the study is based on a small sample of doctorates and does not intend to provide any generalized inferences, the study succeeds in providing a clearer picture of the prospects the various fields provide and how some fields are more attractive to industry than others.   

References

Biologists lose out in post-PhD earnings analysis (Accessed December 13, 2015)

New Ph.D. incomes ‘surprisingly’ low (Accessed December 13, 2015)