CHE article: Your Doctorate Does Not Prepare You

[polly_mer]

In 2012, L. Maren Wood wrote "What Doors Does a Ph.D. in History Open?" (https://www.chronicle.com/article/What-Doors-Does-a-PhD-in/135448 )

The same author this week published "Odds Are, Your Doctorate Will Not Prepare You for a Profession Outside Academe" (https://www.chronicle.com/article/Odds-Are-Your-Doctorate-Will/246613 ).

As someone in a field where few people with doctorates like mine go into academia, I was interested to see the message switch from

"Humanities Ph.D.'s could make the transition to alternative careers faster if they had more support from their departments on how to translate their knowledge and skills into nonacademic careers." (2012 article)

to

"For midlevel positions in any profession, employers want someone with direct linear work experience. For entry-level jobs, they prefer someone with a bachelor's degree, a bit of work experience, and a willingness to learn on the job. Applicants with a doctorate — especially those who've spent years as adjuncts or postdocs — find themselves over-credentialed and under-experienced." (2019 article)

since the second message has been very clear for decades in reading first-person articles by those who successfully went on to other careers after earning a doctorate.

Thoughts?

[ciao_yall]

In 2012, L. Maren Wood wrote "What Doors Does a Ph.D. in History Open?" (https://www.chronicle.com/article/What-Doors-Does-a-PhD-in/135448 )

The same author this week published "Odds Are, Your Doctorate Will Not Prepare You for a Profession Outside Academe" (https://www.chronicle.com/article/Odds-Are-Your-Doctorate-Will/246613 ).

As someone in a field where few people with doctorates like mine go into academia, I was interested to see the message switch from

"Humanities Ph.D.'s could make the transition to alternative careers faster if they had more support from their departments on how to translate their knowledge and skills into nonacademic careers." (2012 article)

to

"For midlevel positions in any profession, employers want someone with direct linear work experience. For entry-level jobs, they prefer someone with a bachelor's degree, a bit of work experience, and a willingness to learn on the job. Applicants with a doctorate — especially those who've spent years as adjuncts or postdocs — find themselves over-credentialed and under-experienced." (2019 article)

since the second message has been very clear for decades in reading first-person articles by those who successfully went on to other careers after earning a doctorate.

Thoughts?

Interesting.

Yes, being willing to learn is important for any job. At the risk of sounding ageist, when someone of a certain age comes into a new job and claims to be "not a techie millenial type" or all about "not being able to do what they used to" then that person isn't sending a message they are willing to learn.

As far as teaching goes, after dot-bomb I picked up a few teaching gigs to pay a few bills and keep busy. It was very hard to shake that "professorial" air once I went back into corporate life.

[lightning]

Interesting.

Yes, being willing to learn is important for any job. At the risk of sounding ageist, when someone of a certain age comes into a new job and claims to be "not a techie millenial type" or all about "not being able to do what they used to" then that person isn't sending a message they are willing to learn.

As far as teaching goes, after dot-bomb I picked up a few teaching gigs to pay a few bills and keep busy. It was very hard to shake that "professorial" air once I went back into corporate life.

Regardless of age, anyone with an attitude like that of which you describe, one where someone self-identifies acceptable incompetency through off-loading required competencies to the "other," and one where past greatness is enough to compensate for lack of ability in the current, is someone that is not employable and is someone that should not have a first day on the job at any new job. I couldn't trust this kind of person to mow my lawn, because they probably couldn't figure out how to start the lawn mower, and would probably blame the lawn mower manufacturer for making a non-intuitive lawn mower.

[marshwiggle]

The same author this week published "Odds Are, Your Doctorate Will Not Prepare You for a Profession Outside Academe" (https://www.chronicle.com/article/Odds-Are-Your-Doctorate-Will/246613 ).

Heresy alert, from the 2nd article:

Those of us who have made a successful career transition out of academe have learned that the "transferable skills" we "developed in graduate school" are transferable precisely because they are the same skills that other professionals — equally smart and capable — are developing on the job in industry, foundations, or government agencies. Critical thinking, program and project management, qualitative and quantitative research, synthesizing evidence and data, data-informed decision making — none of those are unique to academe.

If many academics read this, he'll be burned at the stake.

[Durchlässigkeitsbeiwert]

As someone in a field where few people with doctorates like mine go into academia, I was interested to see the message switch from

"Humanities Ph.D.'s could make the transition to alternative careers faster if they had more support from their departments on how to translate their knowledge and skills into nonacademic careers." (2012 article)

to

"For midlevel positions in any profession, employers want someone with direct linear work experience. For entry-level jobs, they prefer someone with a bachelor's degree, a bit of work experience, and a willingness to learn on the job. Applicants with a doctorate — especially those who've spent years as adjuncts or postdocs — find themselves over-credentialed and under-experienced." (2019 article)

It looks like a transition from negotiation to depression.
I am wondering how acceptance would look like

At the same time, changing mood may reflect transformation of the labour market.
In my earth-sciencey sub-field freshly-minted phd used to get mid-level positions merely a decade ago.
Now its entry level instead. So, it may be that employers are less willing to pay extra for surplus credential (to the detriment of my pay cheque).

[fast_and_bulbous]

If many academics read this, he'll be burned at the stake.

As if most academics regularly practice critical thinking in the first place.

I'm becoming less convinced that you can actually teach someone how to think. The spark has to come from within. You can only provide examples and hope they get it. Many academics eat confirmation bias for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

[polly_mer]

On the CHE fora, someone asked once how many people are really affected by the adjunctification of Higher Ed (a fairly even-handed article outlining the adjunctification situation is https://www.chronicle.com/article/Straight-Talk-About/150881).

I love to run the numbers, so I'll run some here.  For perspective, I have selected some broad categories and some fine categories of reporting.  The full data set is at https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf19301/data, table 13:

Field	# of PhDs awarded in 2008	# of PhDs awarded in 2017
US total for all fields	48 777	54 664

Agricultural sciences and natural resources	1 198	1 606
Anthropology	483	455
Bioengineering and biomedical engineering	762	1 041
Biological and biomedical sciences	7 797	8 477
Business management and administration	1 421	1 522
Chemical engineering	873	936
Chemistry	2 246	2 697
Computer Science	1 499	1 587
Economics	1 091	1 587
Education administration	2 238	1 023
Education research	2 640	2 405
Electrical, electronics, and comm engineering	1 888	1 900
Engineering, total	7 864	9 843
Foreign languages and literature	627	624
Geosciences, atmospheric and ocean sciences	865	1 165
Health sciences	2 091	2 509
History	971	1 066
Humanities and arts, total	4 736	5 290
Letters (English, classics, and related)	1 420	1 465
Materials science engineering	636	958
Mathematics and statistics	1 400	1 856
Mechanical engineering	1 082	1 409
Neurosciences, neurobiology	883	985
Physics and astronomy	1 835	2 219
Political science and government	628	752
Psychology	3 357	3 960
Social Sciences, total	4 278	5 119
Sociology	601	689

That table taken as a whole doesn't seem to indicate a huge problem with the US not valuing doctoral education; that table looks a lot more like the humanities being about 10% of the overall picture and yet taking up an inordinate amount of bandwidth during discussions of doctoral education.  Even expanding to humanities and social sciences means we're looking at about 20% of the overall picture.

To change gears a little back to the ongoing adjunctification discussions, the data are older now, but http://www.academicworkforce.org/CAW_portrait_2012.pdf (table 8) indicates 44% (i.e., almost half) of courses taught by part-time adjuncts are in the humanities.  Yet this table indicates that only about 10% of PhDs awarded every year are in the humanities.  Data indicate that about 60% of part-time adjuncts have a degree other than a PhD or JD/MD/MBA (http://www.academicworkforce.org/CAW_portrait_2012.pdf, table 9).  Why does that matter?  Well, perhaps the adjunct problem is much more of the required general education courses being covered by part-time faculty for a pittance instead of either cutting back on general education that doesn't really benefit people forced marched through it or one of the solutions related to having more full-time faculty covering general education requirements.

I haven't encountered too many first-person accounts regarding death-marching computer science folks or indeed most of the fields on this table.  To be fair, I have encountered hundreds of articles bemoaning the lack of academic jobs for biology PhD holders who tend to get stuck in a postdoc trap and then leave for some other job--the message for decades has been don't go into biology expecting to get an academic job.  However, those folks tend to get middle-class jobs with benefits when they do leave.

[kaysixteen]

Without commenting yet about this writer's article, she is someone who is running a business aimed at young? PhDs seeking to transition out of academia.  Does anyone have any actual first or even second-hand experience with her firm?

[polly_mer]

Without commenting yet about this writer's article, she is someone who is running a business aimed at young? PhDs seeking to transition out of academia.  Does anyone have any actual first or even second-hand experience with her firm?

I know nothing about her firm.  I have, though, spent enough time inside and outside of academia to confirm some of the main points in the recent article.

• Career transitions for graduate students cannot be mapped. A career path that a Ph.D. alumnus follows is particular to that person; it may or may not work for you. The education you gain is personal, and how you decide to leverage it is also personal.
• They entered a new profession thanks to internships, unpaid work, volunteering, or entry-level jobs.
• Yes, you will have to start out at the entry level or as an unpaid intern, but unlike adjunct positions, these temporary gigs actually do lead to career advancement in the professional world.
• In championing the doctorate as an "all purpose degree," academics are, in effect, dismissing the expertise acquired on the job in other highly specialized professions.

The biggest message is no clear, well-beaten path exists to a great career using a humanities doctorate exists that isn't already as competitive as a TT academic job.  Instead, people will have to use those fabulous critical thinking skills and research abilities to find something that works for them and put in the hard work to get enough experience in that field for people to take them seriously.

I encounter people with various backgrounds doing interesting things in good paying jobs daily.  However, what got them there was usually a willingness to learn new things and invest effort to become proficient in something for which others will pay good money. 

I also cannot emphasize enough finding out what other professions value as expertise and getting directly related expertise.  The term "Do you have 10 years experience or one year experience ten times?" comes immediately to mind.  That's usually dismissive of people who don't learn new things as a natural course of living their life.  A third option of "I have several 2-4 year chunks of experience in very different professional areas" tends to work very well to help convince employers to take a chance on someone who isn't fresh out of school, but will take full advantage of the entry-level position or internships not tied to undergraduate concurrent enrollment.

As I've stated elsewhere in various forms, working the front register in fast food doesn't impress anyone even if you are employee of the month; becoming assistant store manager may be an important stepping stone to either middle management in the same company or a mid-level job in a different industry that has a similar expectations of managerial skill sets (i.e., related experience).

A key step for those trying to transition to new job types is getting over the idea that already invested grunt work in an academic setting somehow does or even should count as paying dues for another job type.  It doesn't.  Instead, you'll start at basically the bottom of some other career ladder, but it's possible to move up more quickly that someone who is fresh out of school if you use all those "soft" skills to learn the power structure, use the knowledge of the human factors in addition to the written rules, and invest in what others find important enough to fund.

[ciao_yall]

I haven't encountered too many first-person accounts regarding death-marching computer science folks or indeed most of the fields on this table. To be fair, I have encountered hundreds of articles bemoaning the lack of academic jobs for biology PhD holders who tend to get stuck in a postdoc trap and then leave for some other job--the message for decades has been don't go into biology expecting to get an academic job.  However, those folks tend to get middle-class jobs with benefits when they do leave.

There are a lot of direct career paths in STEM with a PhD outside of academia. One can work in research in the private sector, foundations, and so forth. They might migrate into product management or other functions, making use of internal connections at the organization and those "transferable skills."

For humanities PhDs, now we are talking about relying on those "transferable skills" from the get-go, with no transitional job or internal connections to ease that transition.

[biop_grad]

I haven't encountered too many first-person accounts regarding death-marching computer science folks or indeed most of the fields on this table.  To be fair, I have encountered hundreds of articles bemoaning the lack of academic jobs for biology PhD holders who tend to get stuck in a postdoc trap and then leave for some other job--the message for decades has been don't go into biology expecting to get an academic job.  However, those folks tend to get middle-class jobs with benefits when they do leave.

What I've seen more of are people (often immobile for various reasons) in the adjunct trap, particularly after sequestration led to layoffs of civilian contractors from DOD related positions.

[pigou]

It strikes me that attempts to get PhD programs to prepare students for non-academic careers outside of the natural sciences are doing (or did) a huge disservice to students: they miss the entire point of specialization.

If you want to get a tenure track position, you really need to put 110% of your energy into optimizing for an academic career. If you do anything less than that, you won't be competitive with the people who do just that. It's those people who will then take all the available positions. It's pretty close to a "winner-take-all" environment and there's little reward for being the second best applicant everywhere you apply.

When you have a PhD and you're eyeing "entry-level" positions, something went horrendously wrong. Saying you have "critical thinking" skills is pretty worthless without some concrete evidence of having solved problems creatively.

What somewhat surprises me, though, is how few humanities PhDs seem to go into consulting. If there's an industry that depends on quickly processing and synthesizing a lot of information (and fast writing), then it's that one.

[Hibush]

What somewhat surprises me, though, is how few humanities PhDs seem to go into consulting. If there's an industry that depends on quickly processing and synthesizing a lot of information (and fast writing), then it's that one.

Good point. 

Consulting firms seem to burn through people fairly fast. The travel and intense engagement take a toll after a few years.

That turnover means that there are constantly openings. The work experience creates lots of business connections that can turn into post-consulting employment.

[ciao_yall]

What somewhat surprises me, though, is how few humanities PhDs seem to go into consulting. If there's an industry that depends on quickly processing and synthesizing a lot of information (and fast writing), then it's that one.

Consulting requires domain-specific expertise, or at least a credible interest in that domain whether it's Finance, Healthcare, Strategic Planning, whatever.

Walking out with a PhD in 18th-century literature or whatever doesn't convey that interest.

[spork]

What somewhat surprises me, though, is how few humanities PhDs seem to go into consulting. If there's an industry that depends on quickly processing and synthesizing a lot of information (and fast writing), then it's that one.

Good point. 

Consulting firms seem to burn through people fairly fast. The travel and intense engagement take a toll after a few years.

That turnover means that there are constantly openings. The work experience creates lots of business connections that can turn into post-consulting employment.

When I was a wee lad, management consulting firms were gobbling up many of my college friends who did not want to immediately pursue graduate school in engineering, chemistry, math, etc. These were top of the line consulting firms like BCG, Bain, McKinsey, and Andersen. The deal was work like a dog for a couple years and one's employer paid the employee's way to an MBA. MBA in hand, they would quit the management consulting treadmill and go to work for defense contractors, tech firms, etc., often in junior middle management positions (in contrast to doing pure engineering or bench research in corporate labs). A few years later more of them started gravitating to Wall Street firms that wanted people with quant skills -- starting salaries and bonuses were much higher than in management consulting. Back then, none of these people had PhDs.

If you poke around the websites of big name consulting firms today, you mainly see people who interned after getting MBAs at places like Wharton and Chicago and were then hired as associates/consultants. Partners, directors, and VPs are often in their 30s and 40s. None of these people have humanities PhDs. There are some firms, like Abt Associates and RAND, that do have some staff with PhDs, but in fields like economics and public policy.