Posts from The Ph.D. Placement Project
The Council of Graduate Schools should focus on questions like “Who are the stakeholders who need to be won over?,” writes L. Maren Wood.
Two dozen interviews with students and professors raise the question of whether collecting good data on employment outcomes, even if feasible, will make much of a difference to prospective students.
His professors told him that with a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University, he would have no trouble on the industry job market. That wasn’t the case.
What exactly are they? And how can they help Ph.D.'s looking to leave academe? L. Maren Wood provides some answers.
A history Ph.D. explains her difficult choice to seek nonacademic employment because of the weak tenure-track job market.
If anyone can untangle the knotty problem of Ph.D. placement, it must be academics, writes Alexandra Lord.
Some disciplinary organizations are already trying to track the employment prospects of their Ph.D.'s, and many also have expressed interest in participating in The Chronicle’s project.
The next steps for the Ph.D. Placement Project involve collecting data and making data that already exist more easily accessible and searchable. Readers are welcome to pitch in.
Readers shared ideas about what would be the hardest part of gathering reliable data. High on their lists were concerns about privacy, accuracy, and finding graduates.
Departments provide would-be graduate students with job-placement data ranging from the helpful to the vague to the exaggerated, survey respondents said. But most said departments provide no information at all.
