Amid national discussion about the lack of job prospects for newly minted Ph.D.’s, just four out of the 95 students who received Dartmouth Ph.D.’s in June still seek employment. Dean of graduate studies Jon Kull wrote in an email that it is not too difficult for Dartmouth Ph.D. recipients to find positions, particularly because Dartmouth only offers science doctorates.
The nationwide unemployment rate for science Ph.D. recipients is around 2 percent, according to the National Science Foundation. The Atlantic reported in July, however, that STEM Ph.D. hiring has stagnated or dropped across fields.
History professor Pamela Kyle Crossley wrote in an email that humanities Ph.D. recipients conventionally face greater challenges when searching for jobs.
The U.S. Survey of Earned Doctorates finds that humanities programs consistently see the lowest rate of graduates reporting a definite job or postdoctoral study, according to the Modern Language Association Office of Research blog.
Dartmouth offers master’s degrees in the humanities, primarily through the Master of Arts and Liberal Studies program, and various humanities and social science departments hire postdoctoral researchers.
The most common areas of employment for Ph.D. graduates are postdoctoral fellowships and faculty positions.
A post-doctoral fellowship like the Society of Fellows — which will bring Ph.D. recipients to Hanover for research, teaching and mentorship — will give graduates time to revise and expand upon their dissertations for publication, preparing a potential second project before beginning to teach and establishing themselves as academics, Society of Fellows director and religion department chair Randall Balmer said.
Kevin Hainline, a postdoctoral researcher in the physics and astronomy department, said that in many fields, postdoctoral students face three waves of applications for academic jobs when deciding what to do after graduation. The first wave consists of fellowship applications, in which students apply for research funding, and the second is for professorships, which are difficult to obtain coming out of graduate school.
Hainline noted the slow pace of hiring in academia. Although plenty of postdoctoral positions exist, he said, noting that postdocs are cheaper to hire and require less of a time commitment, these rarely translate into tenure-track faculty positions.
“The more postdocs you end up taking, the older you’re getting and at some point you’ll have to admit that you’re not going to get an academic job and go into industry or something, which drives many people out of the field,” he said.
There are too few tenure-track jobs to match the amount of Ph.D. graduate interested in academics, according to the MLA. Sarah Henderson, who graduated from Dartmouth with a cognitive neuroscience Ph.D. in 2013 and completed one year of postdoctoral research before leaving for an industry position, attributed the mismatch to reasons like less research funding and higher retirement ages.
Had she stayed in academia, she said she did not think she would have found a stable job until age 45.
Hainline said that while many postdoctoral researchers pursue their own interests, a third option for Ph.D. graduates is assisting faculty with their work, which is what he has been doing for the past two years.
He said one of the reasons humanities Ph.D.’s have more difficulty finding positions after graduation is that there are few postdoctoral positions in the humanities, leading many to change fields or teach in community colleges and overseas. Funding for humanities research was hard hit by the recession and the percentage of humanities graduates who found tenure-track positions saw a sharp drop, according to MLA surveys of Ph.D. placement.
“I feel bad for people who have a degree in something that is not valued by certain slots of industries,” Hainline said.
He said universities continue to produce high numbers of Ph.D. graduates and in a “different world,” institutions should stop accepting people into graduate school.
“Grad school is a five- or six-year commitment and in the end you have this Ph.D.,” Hainline said. “You go into that and sometimes you’re not told, ‘oh, you know there’s no jobs at the end,’ and they should be up front about that information and they should also not accept so many people.”According to a Michigan State University study released in October, overall Ph.D. hiring is anticipated to rise 20 percent this year.
Kull said the College places its Ph.D. recipients in postdoc positions, consulting, teaching or industry.
He said that graduate students receive career advice through the graduate studies office and the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning. Students participate in career development workshops that prepare them for both industrial and academic positions, he said.
Julia Bradley-Cook, a Ph.D. student in ecology and evolutionary biology, wrote in an email that she thinks Dartmouth’s network and name recognition will help her find a position. Bradley-Cook said she is considering a non-academic job, though she acknowledged that this career path is “much less clearly defined.”
Molly Croteau, a fifth-year chemistry Ph.D. student, said that she and other future Ph.D.’s worry about finding a position after graduation, although she will be applying for jobs in industry rather than academia. She said she thinks it is tough to get any job in the current economy, even with a Dartmouth degree.
“Just having a Dartmouth degree won’t get you through the door,” she said, although she added that it might help get resumes a second glance.
Henderson said that to increase the number of academic positions for Ph.D. graduates, institutions should consider making more positions for research scientists.
“Unless people want to go into industry, there is no way to go into academia and just to do research,” she said.
Balmer said an institution’s reputation is important for Ph.D. students after graduation. Dartmouth should encourage more scholarly production in order to boost the reputations of existing faculty and the institution as a whole, he said.
Clarification appended: Oct. 24, 2014
Julia Bradley-Cook said she is considering a non-academic job, but not necessarily an industry position.
