"… I do not mean to sound arrogant, but if Ph.D.s from MIT are having this kind of trouble finding a job, I suspect that it is hard at other schools as well – of course I could be wrong for many reasons. However, the idea here is that I suspect employment after a Ph.D. is a real problem no matter where you got your Ph.D.
So what do these people do?" …
http://www.inc.com/quora/i-earned-my-phd-but-no-one-will-hire-me.html
Two (somewhat contrary) things:
So, my take on this article is that it is a good wake-up call for people who have sleep-walked through the educational process, just coloring inside the lines and getting the marks to get to the next level- but not examining what they want, what it takes to get there, making the effort to go to the endless networking opportunities available to students at most well-ranked universities (much less MIT!), but just expecting it to happen. Sounds almost like ‘I’m about to get my PhD from MIT- where is the line of people waiting to offer me a job?!’
The job prospects for someone with a PhD vary so widely by field as to make this article useless. Also, I hate to break it to the clown who wrote this, but citing MIT in that way does make him sound arrogant and tone deaf.
The linked article seems to mis-represent the findings of survey. Instead of 40% not finding jobs, the actual percentage of those still looking for work is 11.9%.
In other words, in June of the year (in which a student just earned his or her PhD a few weeks earlier in May), only 11.9 percent are still looking for jobs.
^Which is pretty darn good.
The Survey of Earned Doctorates that the NSF conducts every year has some data on this - they ask you what your postgraduation plans are. (You generally take the survey when you deposit your dissertation. That could be anywhere to before formal graduation to several months after - in my case, I completed the survey when I was already 3 months into my postdoc). For 2015, here’s the percentage in each broad field that was still seeking employment at the time they took the survey:
All fields: 30%
Life sciences: 32%
Physical & earth sciences: 32.5%
Mathematics and computer sciences: 23%
Psychology and social sciences: 25%
Engineering: 34%
Education: 28%
Humanities and arts: 37%
@collegemom3717 - I wholeheartedly agree with your post! One thing I realized when I was doing my PhD is that astonishingly most of my classmates had not done the research and were not aware of the dismal nature of the academic market - or were engaging in some serious magical thinking. To be fair, the professors in my department were the worst about this - they basically encouraged it. The overarching attitude seemed to be “Well, you’re getting your PhD from Columbia - you’ll get a job.” The opinion also seemed to be that you had to choose which one, academia or industry, you were going to pursue very early in your PhD - as opposed to preparing yourself for both eventualities, just in case.
The other part of this is the stigma that going non-academic has. I had an unpleasant meeting with the director of my postdoc when I announced I was leaving the postdoc to take a great research position at Microsoft, in which he implied I might not have been chosen for my postdoc had they known up front I was even considering a non-academic job. I feel like a lot of doctoral students feel like they have to sneak around to do internships or go to career workshops about non-academic careers, lest their advisors find out and think they aren’t “serious” about science, as if the university is the only place you can do science that matters.
I will say that in very recent years I’ve seen a slight shift at some places. I’ve been involved in some initiatives to promote non-academic career preparation and training for both doctoral students and the professors who advise them, some of which are coming directly from the NSF.
Exactly this. It’s one of the reasons why, when people ask me whether they should get a doctoral degree, the first question I ask them is what they want to do and why they want one. And for students already in a doctoral program, my biggest piece of advice is to treat it like an apprenticeship and prepare for a career from Day One. From literally the first day you step on campus you should ALWAYS be looking for opportunities to add to your resume or other career prep - networking, papers, internships, consulting opportunities, organizing conferences or symposia, whatever. And you have to craft your story, too - making it look like purposeful choices driving towards a goal rather than a random collection of things you did. The PhD is so much work precisely because you have to do all of this career prep stuff WHILE you are also doing research and teaching. You can’t just mark time and expect to get a job handed to you at the end.