Colleges Can’t — or Won’t — Track Where Ph.D.s Land Jobs. Should Disciplinary Associations?

Colleges are bad at collecting data on where Ph.D. recipients end up working. In addition to the logistical challenges of tracking their alums, graduate programs often want to forget about those who didn’t become professors. Attitudes have started to change in recent years, but not landing a tenure-track job is still viewed in some circles as a failure for both student and program.

An ambitious new effort aims to erode that narrative. The American Historical Association last week released a comprehensive snapshot of the entire discipline’s Ph.D. recipients. The project, Where Historians Work, tries to track where all of the 8,500 people who earned a doctorate from 2004 to 2013 landed jobs. About 7 percent of the recipients could not be found.

The data set comes at at time when Ph.D. programs, especially in the humanities, are under withering criticism for strapping doctoral students with record student-loan debt and poor prospects for landing a secure academic job. The programs lack accountability, critics say, operating like fiefdoms not subject to the centralized data-collection requirements common in undergraduate education.

Critics of the value of a history Ph.D. may find fodder in the history association’s project. Hover over some of the tiniest bubbles on an interactive slide, those representing just a single person, and you’ll see examples of people who may not have needed their Ph.D. for their current jobs: a rental-car clerk. A maintenance worker. An actor. A postal worker.

But the biggest bubbles tell a more hopeful story about the utility of a history Ph.D. The data show that those who earned history Ph.D.s in that time include 174 chief executives, 363 higher-education administrators, 320 nonprofessors doing history, 57 curators, and 82 editors. The point: History Ph.D.s don’t just stay in academe. They are everywhere.

To James Grossman, the history association’s executive director, the project makes an argument about the value of a history Ph.D. and sends a clear message to current and prospective graduate students — along with the professors who run graduate programs — that nonacademic jobs shouldn’t be looked down on as they historically have been.

The data set provides a snapshot of where the discipline’s Ph.D. recipients are at a moment in time. But individual graduate programs, which are better positioned to collect and publish more granular data about their own students, are still for the most part unable or unwilling to do so.

There are many reasons for this. Keeping track of graduates costs a lot of money. The history association estimates that it takes up to 10 minutes to track down each person using online resources like Google, LinkedIn, and other social media. That’s without counting the time it takes to clean up the data and make it presentable. For a university with thousands of graduate students, that would be a huge investment.

But there’s also a “cultural inertia” that poses challenges, says Emily Swafford, director of academic and professional affairs at the history association. Ph.D. programs that have tracked careers data, she says, typically would only pay attention to people landing tenure-track jobs at four-year colleges.

“They tracked people who looked, quote, successful,” Swafford says. “They weren’t tracking everyone else. That’s obviously something we’re trying to change. This data puts everyone all together.”

‘Information That Just Exists’

In the absence of university efforts to track and publish career data about Ph.D. recipients, should disciplinary associations follow in the AHA’s footsteps and pick up the slack?

Karen Stamm, director of the Center for Workforce Studies at the American Psychological Association, says the group is “tentatively” planning to use Where Historians Work as a model for its own effort.

But each discipline would have to overcome its unique hurdles. Psychology is a big discipline, bestowing far more doctorates a year than history does, she says. The group used to send a survey to recent psychology-doctorate recipients that provided an employment snapshot, but that was discontinued in recent years. The response rate was subpar.

“Departments and graduates want to be able to look at their programs specifically, and they want to do comparisons with other institutions,” Stamm says. “If there’s a way we could do institution or program-level data while preserving people’s privacy and confidentiality, we’d love to do that.”

The APA faces the same challenge that so many disciplines do: a lack of quality and uniform data collection in graduate education. The discipline, Stamm says, has “overlapping, incomplete data sources. There isn’t one source I can think of that includes everyone.”

That’s partly why she’s a supporter of the AHA effort. “It’s really making use of the digitization of modern life,” Stamm says. “There’s all this information that just exists. It doesn’t necessarily exist for research, but you can use it for research, and you can use it in ways that don’t require running a survey.”

Transparency for current and prospective graduate students isn’t the only reason for keeping careers data. It can also help a program or discipline sharpen how it thinks about its curriculum.

The AHA data, for example, show just how few Ph.D. recipients are working on the tenure track at research universities.

About three in five of the 8,500 history Ph.D. recipients in the association’s study are faculty members, the data show. About three-quarters of them are on the tenure track, and only about half are at research universities. The rest are on the tenure track at bachelor’s, master’s, and associate institutions, or off the tenure track.

“Many of their students are working in teaching-intensive institutions,” Swafford says of Ph.D. programs. “They may want to think about how they’re training their students to teach.”

Vimal Patel covers graduate education. Follow him on Twitter @vimalpatel232, or write to him at vimal.patel@chronicle.com.