The Economist in its Christmas Specials edition makes the case that pursuing a PhD is, at best, irrational. In "The Disposable Academic" (Dec 16th 2010), the author argues that:
".....there seem to be genuine problems with the system that produces research doctorates (the practical “professional doctorates” in fields such as law, business and medicine have a more obvious value). [Re. the latter, you may want to read an interesting article in The Wall Street Journal.] There is an oversupply of PhDs. Although a doctorate is designed as training for a job in academia, the number of PhD positions is unrelated to the number of job openings. Meanwhile, business leaders complain about shortages of high-level skills, suggesting PhDs are not teaching the right things."
It appears that even employed PhD's do not enjoy much of a wage premium over people with a master's degree:
"…..British men with a bachelor’s degree earn 14% more than those who could have gone to university but chose not to. The earnings premium for a PhD is 26%. But the premium for a master’s degree, which can be accomplished in as little as one year, is almost as high, at 23%. In some subjects the premium for a PhD vanishes entirely. ..... Over all subjects, a PhD commands only a 3% premium over a master’s degree."
This is assuming that students complete the PhD once started:
".....drop-out rates suggest that many students become dispirited. In America only 57% of doctoral students will have a Ph.D. ten years after their first date of enrollment. In the humanities, where most students pay for their own Ph.D.'s, the figure is 49%. Worse still, whereas in other subject areas students tend to jump ship in the early years, in the humanities they cling like limpets before eventually falling off. [For Canadian completion rates, see the Completion of Graduate Studies in Canadian Universities report from the Canadian Association for Graduate Studies.] And these students started out as the academic cream of the nation. ..... Poor supervision, bad job prospects or lack of money cause them to run out of steam."
The article concludes that:
"Many of those who embark on a Ph.D. are the smartest in their class and will have been the best at everything they have done. They will have amassed awards and prizes. As this year’s new crop of graduate students bounce into their research, few will be willing to accept that the system they are entering could be designed for the benefit of others, that even hard work and brilliance may well not be enough to succeed, and that they would be better off doing something else. They might use their research skills to look harder at the lot of the disposable academic. Someone should write a thesis about that."
I read these articles with interest and posted some of the links on Twitter, but ultimately the main question always stuck in the back of my mind. Can one extrapolate these statistics from Britain and the United States to doctoral graduates from Canadian Universities? Timely for this blog, the Ministry of Industry yesterday released a research paper by Louise Desjardins (Statistics Canada) and Darren King (Human Resources and Skills Development Canada) entitled Expectations and Labour Market Outcomes of Doctoral Graduates from Canadian Universities. This report examined the outcomes of graduates by drawing from two different data sources that survey similar populations, but at two different points in time. The first is the Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED), which has provided annual data on doctoral graduates at the point of graduation since the 2003/2004 academic year. The second source is the National Graduates Survey (NGS), which interviews a representative sample of graduates from Canadian post-secondary education institutions two years after their graduation. Thus, doctoral graduates in 2005 were interviewed at the time of graduation by the SED and again in 2007 by the NGS.
The data are presented under three headings and since I don't want to write a Mike-like essay, I'll only mention the highlights of each section here. Those who want the exact numbers and percentages will have to download the report by clicking on the link above and read all 60 pages for themselves.
Profile of 2005 doctoral degree graduates two years after graduation. [Two years after graduation, about 3,500 graduates from doctoral programs from the class of 2005 were living in Canada or the United States, representing 83% of the 4,200 doctorate graduates from Canadian universities in 2005.]
- Almost three out of ten doctoral recipients graduated in life sciences.
- Six out of ten women graduated from the life sciences and psychology and social sciences.
- Chinese languages were the third largest mother tongue group.
- More than six out of ten engineering graduates were members of a visible minority group.
- The vast majority of 2005 foreign-born doctoral graduates were naturalized of became landed immigrants by 2007.
- Half of doctoral graduates had a parent whose education was at least a bachelor degree.
- Two graduates out of ten did not hold a master’s degree before they started their doctoral program.
- Almost four out of ten graduates were working before entering their program.
- More than three-quarters of graduates had firm plans at the time of graduation.
Graduates who moved to the United States. [About one fifth of the 2005 doctoral graduates (21%) intended to leave Canada upon completion of their degree and most of them (57%) planned to move to the United States.]
- A much higher proportion of doctoral graduates lived in the United States in 2007 than was the case for graduates at the bachelor and master’s levels.
- About six out of ten doctoral graduates living in the United States in 2007 were Canadian citizens by birth.
- Life sciences and computer, mathematics and physical sciences graduates posted the highest proportions of doctoral graduates who left Canada for the United States.
- Most moved for work-related reasons and a majority were attracted by the quality of research facilities or the commitment to research.
- The vast majority of those who moved for educational reasons intended to take a postdoctoral position after their graduation in 2005.
- A job awaited the doctorate graduates who moved to the United States.
- A majority of movers intended to return to Canada.
Graduates’ labour market outcomes.
- Employment rates varied by field of study. [Excluding PDFs, the unemployment rate was 7% for all graduates. Graduates from the humanities, for example, reported an unemployment rate of 16%, which was twice as high as the next highest field, engineering at 8%. Humanities graduates also showed higher rates of part-time employment compared to graduates in other fields.]
- The median income for doctoral graduates in 2007, two years after graduation, was $65,000. [Humanities graduates who were employed full-time had a median income that was comparable to graduates from other fields of study.]
- There were differences in income between men and women, immigrants and Canadian-born.
- Graduates with postdoctoral intentions earned less in 2007 than those without.
- The majority of graduates were employed in educational services.
- The skill set of doctorate graduates is not being fully utilized as nearly one third of graduates did not require a doctoral degree for the job they were doing two years following graduation.One can only hope that with career progression, these doctorate holders may see the education-job skills match improve over time. This would have implications for both the economy and for the education choices that individuals are making.
Importantly, the addition of information on postdoctoral education to the NGS in the current report may, in part, help to explain why there is not a larger difference observed in the incomes of master’s and doctorate graduates two years after graduation. Finally, the data from the NGS has shown that graduates’ expectations from SED are a poor approximation of actual outcomes as reported in the NGS, which in many cases were better than expected.
Have a good weekend.
Dieter