Full range of career pathways of PhD alumni are known and made transparent to institutions, departments, faculty, current and prospective students, and the campus community.
Problem Statement
For most of the 20th century, conventional wisdom held that the majority of PhD recipients were employed as faculty members following receipt of the PhD. Doctoral programs were structured with that presumption; thus, those who moved to careers beyond academia were often perceived as outliers. Today’s reality is that the majority of PhDs are employed in business, government and non-profit sectors. However, to doctoral students, these career paths are less visible than the path to academic employment. For students and faculty to fully embrace career diversity, they must see the careers that PhD recipients in their field enter and their paths through them.
Making the broad array of PhD career pathways visible requires that institutions and departments be knowledgeable about where PhD alumni are employed, and this information would be shared with current and prospective students, the campus community, and the public. Specifically:
- Making comprehensive employment data (at multiple time points after graduation) be publicly visible at each university and available to each department and program.
- Knowing the employment fates of recent alumni for every department and making their paths visible to current and prospective students. This could include featuring alumni in on-line and paper publications, and invitations to campus to share their experiences and to mentor students.
- Understanding the paths and employment outcomes by discipline and area. This requires partnership with disciplinary societies.