^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.