Skip to content
ADVERTISEMENT
Sign In
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Events
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle On-The-Road
    • Professional Development
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
  • More
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Events
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle On-The-Road
    • Professional Development
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
    Upcoming Events:
    College Advising
    Serving Higher Ed
    Chronicle Festival 2025
Sign In
The Graduate Adviser

In Search of Hard Data on Nonacademic Careers

By Leonard Cassuto September 3, 2012
11-1-Careers
Brian Taylor for The Chronicle

Discussion of nonfaculty careers for graduate students so easily disintegrates into dueling anecdotes. You have a story about someone who parlayed her Ph.D. into a great business career? Well, here’s one about someone who had to drop his Ph.D. from his résumé in order to get a job at all. Stories cluster around both of those poles in the comments section whenever I’ve written about nonprofessorial career paths.

To continue reading for FREE, please sign in.

Sign In

Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.

Don’t have an account? Sign up now.

A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.

Sign Up

Discussion of nonfaculty careers for graduate students so easily disintegrates into dueling anecdotes. You have a story about someone who parlayed her Ph.D. into a great business career? Well, here’s one about someone who had to drop his Ph.D. from his résumé in order to get a job at all. Stories cluster around both of those poles in the comments section whenever I’ve written about nonprofessorial career paths.

Personal accounts of career successes and disappointments are compelling, of course. They certainly interest me, and I want to keep hearing them. But one reason they lord over the landscape is because statistics are in short supply. Narrators of post-graduate-school stories can all claim to be representative because for years no one has bothered to measure the career outcomes of graduate students who leave academe, whether before or after getting a Ph.D. We simply don’t have enough good data.

That neglect is finally giving way to attention—and activity.

The first serious study of doctoral career outcomes didn’t appear until 1999, and it was limited to Ph.D.'s who had completed degrees between 1983 and 1985. (English was the only humanities field originally surveyed. The other disciplines in the survey were biochemistry, computer science, electrical engineering, mathematics, and political science.)

The narrow scope of the study raised questions: What about A.B.D.'s, for example, let alone graduates from other fields? Still, the report—by investigators Maresi Nerad and Joseph Cerny, both of the University of California at Berkeley—gave quantitative backing to what was already common sense by the late 1990s: Time-to-degree was lengthening, while the holy grail of a tenured professorship had become a more uncertain prospect.

The Council of Graduate Schools published a wider-scoped study this year. “Pathways Through Graduate School and Into Careers” focuses on the transition from graduate school to job. Its findings, based on consultation with students, deans, and employers, are now resonating in an academic culture that remains fixated on the tenure-track outcome.

The council’s study found that professors don’t talk enough to their graduate students about possible jobs outside of academe, even though such nonfaculty positions are “of interest to students.” That lack of guidance is particularly egregious in light of where graduate students actually end up: About half of new Ph.D.'s get their first jobs outside of academe, “in business, government, or nonprofit jobs,” the council’s report said.

The CGS study included a survey but the results have not been published. Incredibly, there has been no significant survey of graduate-student career outcomes since Nerad and Cerny’s—and they limited their sample to Ph.D.'s who had received their degrees nearly 30 years ago now.

So it’s big news that the Scholarly Communication Institute is conducting a new survey of former graduate students who have (or are building) careers outside the professoriate—a career category now commonly called alternative academic, or “alt-ac.” (You can tell how embedded an idea has become when it gets a handle as brief as that.)

At the same time, the institute is building an alt-ac database called “Who We Are,” in which people list their names, employers, and job titles. The database has 200 entries already.

ADVERTISEMENT

The institute’s survey will analyze alt-ac employment data in our post-Great Recession era. Just as important, it will add to the scanty statistics we have on nonprofessorial job placement in general. Katina Rogers, senior research specialist at the institute, designed the survey and is administering it. She describes it as “an exploratory study” that’s intended “to move from anecdote to data in conversations about career preparation in the humanities.” That would be a helpful movement, indeed.

The survey is limited to the humanities (“and allied fields”) for practical reasons, Rogers said. The sciences already offer more varied possibilities of industry employment, so alternative academic careers can look very different in those fields. “The humanities,” she said, “has a longer road to travel toward improved awareness of the variety of career paths available to graduates.”

The survey is aimed at the concerns of two main constituencies: professors and program administrators on one hand, and graduate students themselves on the other. Professors now realize that “graduate students are pursuing a wider array of career paths,” said Rogers. Lots of our graduate students—more than we think—see alt-ac possibilities as viable choices, not doleful consolations to be considered only if the push for a professorship doesn’t work out.

Graduate programs are notoriously slow to change, but they need to acclimate to the fact that not all graduate students will wind up as professors. And “as graduate programs take this into account,” said Rogers, “we want them to have access to a body of data that leaders can point to when they want to make changes in their programs.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Graduate students need help surveying the ground ahead of them, too. “We understand the frustration that they feel,” said Rogers. They know that they have choices, but they often get hazy information on options that lie outside the tenure track. “By increasing transparency and providing actual data,” she said, “we think our work will help graduate students make more informed decisions about their careers.”

Career decision points begin to appear while you’re still in school. Graduate students know that you need to think about your specialties and skills in terms of what you’re hoping to do with them. Is it a good idea to get involved with a particular grant proposal? To teach in that program outside of your department? That depends on what you plan to do afterward.

“The skills that we think are useful in alternative academic careers are useful in academia as well,” Rogers said. “Incorporating them while in graduate school will be a plus regardless of the career path one chooses later on.”

Which skills are those? Rogers identifies “management of both projects and people, collaboration, oral and written communication for varied audiences, and in some cases, technical skills.” But she adds: “This is part of what we hope the survey will reveal. We want to know which skills matter the most, and where.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Here’s the most important piece of news: You can participate in this survey now. All you need, Rogers says, is “graduate training in the humanities and employment outside the professoriate.” There’s also a separate survey for employers who have hired a former graduate student into an alt-ac position. “We welcome participants from anywhere in the world,” says Rogers—but only until the end of September. The survey closes on October 1.

The more participants, the more robust the data will be. So here’s the public service announcement to conclude this month’s column: If you qualify, please take 15 minutes to fill out the survey. If you know someone else who qualifies (as either employer or employee), please share this Web address: http://uvasci.org/current-work/graduate-education.

The link leads to all of the initiatives (employer and employee surveys, and the alt-ac database) that I’ve mentioned here. The data and report will also be available on the same site.

The survey will bring us much-needed numbers, but let’s not forget about the human stories. Unlike the survey, which is anonymous, the institute’s small but growing alt-ac database names names. The database already houses a rich collection of job coordinates and miniature career narratives. (The entries by Kim Cooper and David Wondrich are two of my favorites. Here, too, you are invited to add your own.)

ADVERTISEMENT

If nothing else, this database should provide some opposition to the sort of despairing skepticism that overtakes some former graduate students when they ponder alt-ac careers. “One of the reasons we set up a public database,” Rogers said, “is so that graduate students can get a glimpse of the kinds of careers in which humanities graduates are thriving.”

The stories are compelling. And the forthcoming survey numbers, while less charismatic, ought to prove useful for a long time. Both are long overdue.

We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Tags
Career Preparation
Share
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Email
cassuto_leonard.jpg
About the Author
Leonard Cassuto
Leonard Cassuto is a professor of English at Fordham University who writes regularly for The Chronicle about graduate education. His newest book is Academic Writing as if Readers Matter, from Princeton University Press. He co-wrote, with Robert Weisbuch, The New Ph.D.: How to Build a Better Graduate Education. He welcomes comments and suggestions at cassuto@fordham.edu. Find him on X @LCassuto.
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

More News

Vector illustration of large open scissors  with several workers in seats dangling by white lines
Iced Out
Duke Administrators Accused of Bypassing Shared-Governance Process in Offering Buyouts
Illustration showing money being funnelled into the top of a microscope.
'A New Era'
Higher-Ed Associations Pitch an Alternative to Trump’s Cap on Research Funding
Illustration showing classical columns of various heights, each turning into a stack of coins
Endowment funds
The Nation’s Wealthiest Small Colleges Just Won a Big Tax Exemption
WASHINGTON, DISTICT OF COLUMBIA, UNITED STATES - 2025/04/14: A Pro-Palestinian demonstrator holding a sign with Release Mahmud Khalil written on it, stands in front of the ICE building while joining in a protest. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators rally in front of the ICE building, demanding freedom for Mahmoud Khalil and all those targeted for speaking out against genocide in Palestine. Protesters demand an end to U.S. complicity and solidarity with the resistance in Gaza. (Photo by Probal Rashid/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Campus Activism
An Anonymous Group’s List of Purported Critics of Israel Helped Steer a U.S. Crackdown on Student Activists

From The Review

John T. Scopes as he stood before the judges stand and was sentenced, July 2025.
The Review | Essay
100 Years Ago, the Scopes Monkey Trial Discovered Academic Freedom
By John K. Wilson
Vector illustration of a suited man with a pair of scissors for a tie and an American flag button on his lapel.
The Review | Opinion
A Damaging Endowment Tax Crosses the Finish Line
By Phillip Levine
University of Virginia President Jim Ryan keeps his emotions in check during a news conference, Monday, Nov. 14, 2022 in Charlottesville. Va. Authorities say three people have been killed and two others were wounded in a shooting at the University of Virginia and a student is in custody. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)
The Review | Opinion
Jim Ryan’s Resignation Is a Warning
By Robert Zaretsky

Upcoming Events

07-31-Turbulent-Workday_assets v2_Plain.png
Keeping Your Institution Moving Forward in Turbulent Times
Ascendium_Housing_Plain.png
What It Really Takes to Serve Students’ Basic Needs: Housing
Lead With Insight
  • Explore Content
    • Latest News
    • Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Professional Development
    • Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Chronicle Intelligence
    • Jobs in Higher Education
    • Post a Job
  • Know The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • Vision, Mission, Values
    • DEI at The Chronicle
    • Write for Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • Our Reporting Process
    • Advertise With Us
    • Brand Studio
    • Accessibility Statement
  • Account and Access
    • Manage Your Account
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Group and Institutional Access
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
  • Get Support
    • Contact Us
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • User Agreement
    • Terms and Conditions
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037
© 2025 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education is academe’s most trusted resource for independent journalism, career development, and forward-looking intelligence. Our readers lead, teach, learn, and innovate with insights from The Chronicle.
Follow Us
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • youtube
  • facebook
  • linkedin