Why Colleges Still Scarcely Track Ph.D.s

Three years ago Stanford University set out to track down about 2,500 of its former Ph.D. students in hopes of answering a simple question: Where were they?

With that information, the university could learn and share more. Did they work in academe, business, government, or at a nonprofit? How many were biding their time in postdocs? How well had their doctoral education prepared them for what they went on to do?

After a year of collecting and crunching data, Stanford published a publicly accessible interactive website. Many former Ph.D. students in the humanities, it shows, have academic careers, while almost half in engineering are employed in business, government, or the nonprofit sector. The occupations of about one-fifth of the alumni in the study are unknown.

The labor-intensive project joined a smattering of similar efforts in recent years by a few other doctoral programs, federal agencies, disciplinary associations, and individual researchers. Yet attempts to collect Ph.D. career information aren’t widespread.

The same colleges that routinely track financial-aid trends, enrollment patterns, and the number and type of degrees conferred tend to fall short when it comes to the whereabouts of their Ph.D.s. Sometimes a lack of staffing is to blame. But the dearth of information may also stem from an unwillingness to shatter the narrative of tenure-track job or bust — by showing how few people land in the former group.

In a survey of graduate deans conducted in 2014 by the Council of Graduate Schools, only one-third said they had an established process for documenting Ph.D. career outcomes. Half of responding deans said their graduate programs collect such information informally, and 13 percent said they didn’t track it at all.

Meanwhile, current and prospective Ph.D. students aren’t the only ones thirsty for comprehensive employment data on career options. As graduate programs grapple with how to help students land academic or nonacademic jobs, the importance of high-quality quantitative and qualitative data has become increasingly clear. And continuing debate over the value of a doctoral degree sets the stage for institutions to capture and share what happens to their students.

Even simple placement studies are few and far between, and those are just the beginning, says L. Maren Wood, founder of Lilli Research Group, which consults with institutions and disciplinary groups and coaches job seekers. Most placement studies of Ph.D. students, she says, don’t “get at the qualitative data that we actually need to have a better sense of how they’re actually using their skill sets.” It’s better to know what Ph.D. alumni are doing with the degree, says Ms. Wood, as opposed to what they’re doing after the Ph.D.

Take It Seriously

Even for graduate programs with good intentions, tracking Ph.D. employment outcomes is often haphazard.

Department chairs or deans, already strapped for time, struggle to squeeze in another responsibility, or to come up with the money to hire someone to find former students whose contact information is often inaccurate. International students who have returned to their home countries can be particularly tough to locate.

Survey fatigue leads to low response rates, and other news of post-Ph.D. employment can be scattered or secondhand. The result is incomplete information that doesn’t reflect the full range of outcomes.

“This is laborious work,” says Ms. Wood, who has helped the American Historical Association track down 2,500 Ph.D.s who graduated over a 12-year period. “It requires skilled researchers, and instead it’s being done by overworked administrators who hire graduate students to get a quick sense of things. It’s not a criticism of the work they’re doing. There’s just a lack of resources dedicated to it.”

That lack of resources played out even at Stanford, says Brian D. Cook, an assessment and program evaluation analyst in its office of Institutional Research and Decision Support. Departments or schools had collected different information on and off, he says. He collaborated with the vice provost for graduate education on the Ph.D. alumni project, with the goal of creating a single, sustainable data source.

Mr. Cook and two doctoral students started by creating a standardized form to fill in with publicly available information. Five undergraduates did the bulk of the online searching, primarily on employer websites (and, as a fallback, LinkedIn). They stayed away from Facebook and Twitter, Mr. Cook says, because “we didn’t want to be invading anyone’s privacy.”

Spending 10 to 15 minutes per person, the team ended up with initial employment information for 75 percent of the 2,420 alumni in the study and current employment data for 82 percent.

“This is interesting information for us, but two data points aren’t a trend,” says Mr. Cook. “We need to know more over time, and there’s a lot of desire to continue the study or update it.”

Among the data the university has collected so far, beyond initial and 2013 employment (the most recent year available at the time the data were collected), is job title, employer, and geographic location for alumni in a range of fields. The data come from two groups of alumni — those five and 10 years post-Ph.D. — and can be sorted by such factors as discipline and employment sector.

“A lot of times anecdotes and individual stories about career paths end up being disproportionately significant,” says Patricia J. Gumport, vice provost for graduate education. “With the research that we’ve done, we were able to draw a lot of conclusions about our alumni and their career trajectories, and we can use what we found to reflect on what we’re offering in our Ph.D. programs.”

Standardized Process

Graduate programs around the country want to know more about Ph.D. career pathways for their students and others, a study by the graduate-school council revealed. Now the group is preparing tools to help. Over the last 18 months, it has been developing two surveys — one for current doctoral students, one for alumni — and a guide for universities on conducting them.

“All of our members in one way or another are trying to figure out a way to start taking a look at what their alums are doing. There’s a real desire for a standard and a commonly used instrument,” says Suzanne T. Ortega, president of the council, which is now seeking funding for the survey effort.

Until there’s consistent, comparable information, efforts to collect it are idiosyncratic.

Scant data drove Carolyn Dicey Jennings to do her own research on her prospects of landing a tenure-track job in philosophy. In the 2011-12 academic year, when she was finishing her Ph.D. at Boston University, she began collecting, reporting, and analyzing placement data for academic jobs in the field — initially with help from anonymous philosophy bloggers.

“It was clear that the community wanted to know this information also,” says Ms. Jennings, who is now an assistant professor of philosophy and cognitive science at University of California at Merced.

Her project has benefited from the work of seven graduate students and two undergraduates over time and is now in its second year of funding from the American Philosophical Association. With information primarily from institutions and a growing database, Ms. Jennings has been able to analyze factors like gender and recently found that women are more likely than men to get a permanent academic job.

This research exists because of Ms. Jennings’s strong personal interest. “Most philosophers would probably get some pushback if they spent any time doing projects like this,” she says. “But people in the discipline are best suited to do this.”

Sometimes the motivation to delve deeper into Ph.D. employment data hits someone outside a field, like Melanie V. Sinche, a graduate career counselor in STEM whose students were clamoring, she says, for a clearer picture of the jobs open to them.

So last year Ms. Sinche started studying the career paths of Ph.D. students who graduated between 2004 and 2014 with degrees in the physical, life, and computational sciences, social sciences, and engineering. She contacted 43 professional groups, which led to her receiving more than 8,000 responses to a survey on job titles, job satisfaction, skills developed during Ph.D. training, and which of those skills were required for the work they ultimately chose.

She was particularly curious to see the results for nonacademic jobs. “I’ve been on the ground for nearly 20 years working with people as a career counselor, and it was frustrating that I couldn’t point to data that showed there were actually jobs outside of academia that people could do,” says Ms. Sinche, director of education for the Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine and author of the forthcoming book Next Gen PhD: A Guide to Career Paths in Science (Harvard University Press, August 2016). “There are so many options for Ph.Ds in science, and people are happy in their jobs.”

Is graduate school worth the investment? Opinions abound. But if students could see the career paths people take afterward, Ms. Sinche says, they — and the institutions that award their degrees — would both benefit.

Audrey Williams June is a senior reporter who writes about the academic workplace, faculty pay, and work-life balance in academe. Contact her at audrey.june@chronicle.com, or follow her on Twitter @chronaudrey.