Abstract There is increasing evidence that science & engineering PhD students lose interest in an academic career over the course of graduate training. It is not clear, however, whether this decline reflects students being discouraged from pursuing an academic career by the challenges of obtaining a faculty job or whether it reflects more fundamental changes in students’ career goals for reasons other than the academic labor market. We examine this question using a longitudinal survey that follows a cohort of PhD students from 39 U.S. research universities over the course of graduate training to document changes in career preferences and to explore potential drivers of such changes. We report two main results. First, although the vast majority of students start the PhD interested in an academic research career, over time 55% of all students remain interested while 25% lose interest entirely. In addition, 15% of all students were never interested in an academic career during their PhD program, while 5% become more interested. Thus, the declining interest in an academic career is not a general phenomenon across all PhD students, but rather reflects a divergence between those students who remain highly interested in an academic career and other students who are no longer interested in one. Second, we show that the decline we observe is not driven by expectations of academic job availability, nor by related factors such as postdoctoral requirements or the availability of research funding. Instead, the decline appears partly due to the misalignment between students’ changing preferences for specific job attributes on the one hand, and the nature of the academic research career itself on the other. Changes in students’ perceptions of their own research ability also play a role, while publications do not. We discuss implications for scientific labor markets, PhD career development programs, and science policy.

Citation: Roach M, Sauermann H (2017) The declining interest in an academic career. PLoS ONE 12(9): e0184130. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0184130 Editor: Joshua L. Rosenbloom, Iowa State University, UNITED STATES Received: August 25, 2016; Accepted: August 18, 2017; Published: September 18, 2017 Copyright: © 2017 Roach, Sauermann. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability: The full data set used in this study contains confidential individual respondent data that cannot be made publicly available. A de-identified version of the data is available at http://doi:10.7910/DVN/UHDIXE. Please contact the corresponding author (michael.roach@cornell.edu) with questions regarding the survey or data. Funding: This work was supported by the NSF SciSIP Award 1262270 and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation Junior Faculty Fellowship. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction The number of science and engineering PhD degrees awarded in the U.S. has increased significantly over the last two decades (Fig 1). At the same time, the share of graduates holding tenure-track academic positions has declined, with the majority of science and engineering PhDs eventually taking positions outside of academia [1]. These trends have given rise to concerns that imbalances between the increasing supply of graduates and the limited number of available faculty positions may force many PhDs away from careers in academia [1–3]. On the other hand, recent research shows that many PhDs prefer non-academic careers upon graduation [4, 5], suggesting that labor market imbalances may not be as large as feared. However, it remains unknown whether the declining interest in an academic career is driven primarily by limited faculty job availability or whether it might also reflect substantive changes in career preferences irrespective of labor market conditions. PPT PowerPoint slide

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larger image TIFF original image Download: Fig 1. U.S. trends in life science & engineering doctorates and faculty appointments. Number of doctorate recipients and number of tenure-track faculty appointments 3–5 years after graduation (Data Source: NSF Survey of Doctorate Recipients; number of tenure-track faculty appointments calculated by the authors). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0184130.g001 Using unique panel data from a survey of U.S. PhD students in science and engineering, this paper investigates how and why academic career preferences change over time during graduate training. Unlike prior studies that compare cohorts of students in the cross-section [4, 5], we observe the same PhD students first early in their program and then again three years later, allowing us to distinguish between students who remain interested in an academic career over time and those who lose interest. Moreover, we employ a unique measure that captures students’ career preferences independent from their labor market expectations, thus disentangling their “true” preference for an academic career from how difficult they think it will be to get an academic position. This measure allows us to provide clearer insights into students’ career preferences and the supply side of STEM labor markets. We report two main results. First, the decline in Ph.D. students’ interest in an academic career is not a general phenomenon across all students, but rather is a significant divergence between students who remain highly interested in an academic career and others who lose interest in an academic career entirely. Second, we show that the decline we observe is driven not by expectations about the academic job market, but instead partly reflects changes in students’ preferences for specific aspects of the faculty career, such as performing basic research and having freedom to choose research projects. Although labor market conditions almost certainly prevent some doctoral students who remain interested in an academic career from obtaining a faculty position, our findings suggest that many students turn away from academia for reasons other than the lack of faculty positions. As such, discussions of PhD students’ career goals and career pathways should consider a broad set of market and non-market factors. Our findings also provide urgency to the National Academies’ recent call for better data on students’ career preferences [6], and we present a measure that may be useful in such data collection efforts. Our results suggest the need for greater flexibility in graduate programs and may help faculty advisors, program administrators, and policy makers to improve STEM training experiences. Our findings also have important implications for research on STEM labor markets, universities’ efforts to improve graduate education, and federal efforts to track and manage the STEM labor supply.

Background Before we examine changes in students’ academic interests empirically, it is useful to consider briefly some of the potential reasons for such changes. While this discussion is far from exhaustive, it is meant to introduce some of the market and non-market factors that may be at play. To begin, a common explanation is that PhD students are discouraged from pursuing an academic career because they learn about the limited number of faculty openings and the low likelihood of obtaining a tenure-track position [2, 7, 8]. As such, PhD students’ “true” preference for an academic career may not have changed, but their expectations of being able to obtain a faculty position have. To the extent that stated career preferences are influenced by labor market expectations, they would understate the share of graduates who aspire to an academic career. Students may also lose interest in an academic career for reasons unrelated to labor market conditions. For example, during the course of the PhD program, students may gain deeper insight into the life of a faculty member and realize that this career is not what they expected [9, 10]. Although common stereotypes highlight attractive features such as autonomy, the opportunity to do curiosity-driven research, and inspiring social interactions in an invisible college of peers, the faculty career is not without challenges. For example, funding conditions have deteriorated in many fields and junior faculty in particular face significant difficulties in securing grants to fund their work [7]. As such, faculty members spend significant amounts of time on acquiring and administering resources, which detracts from the time they can spend on research [11]. Moreover, both funding agencies and tenure committees place great emphasis on quantitative measures of research output, increasing the pressure to generate publications and sometimes detracting from curiosity driven discovery [7]. Students may also realize that for faculty members, “doing research” does not always mean hands-on investigation but often involves administrative tasks in managing a lab and conveying research to external audiences [12, 13]. Finally, while autonomy is often highlighted as one of the key benefits of being an academic, success in such an unstructured occupation requires the ability to balance competing demands from teaching, research, and administration. It also requires the willingness to take initiative, the ability to make tough choices regarding which projects to pursue, and good sense for when to persist or give up on a project that seems likely to fail [12, 14]. Although these and other challenges associated with being a faculty member have been highlighted in prior scholarly work and policy discussions, many applicants do not think explicitly about career options when enrolling in a PhD program [15, 16]. Moreover, it is unlikely that the various facets of the faculty career can be understood simply by reading about them: Students are likely to realize what it means to be a faculty member primarily through extended exposure to mentors and peers during graduate training, and through their own involvement in research and teaching [10, 17]. As such, students may gradually re-evaluate the attractiveness of the faculty career over the course of the PhD program or may realize that their own interests are not a fit for this career path. Upon experiencing the highly competitive nature of academia and gaining a better understanding of their own abilities, students may also re-evaluate their chances of success, or the time and effort they would have to commit in order to succeed. Of course, training experiences are not uniform [17], and while some students may realize that the faculty career is not the best fit for them, others may remain highly interested and some may even increase their commitment to this career path.

Materials and methods We examine changes in PhD students’ career interests using a longitudinal survey that followed 854 students over the course of their PhD training in the life sciences (36%), chemistry (12%), physics (18%), engineering (24%), and computer science (10%). Unlike prior studies that compare cohorts of students in the cross-section [4, 5], our longitudinal approach allows us to directly assess changes for a given person and to distinguish between PhD students who remain interested in an academic career and those who lose interest during graduate training. To obtain the initial sample, we identified 39 tier-one U.S. research universities with doctoral programs in science and engineering fields by consulting the National Science Foundation’s reports on earned doctorates [18]. Our selection of universities was based primarily on program size while also ensuring variation in private/public status and geographic region. The 39 universities in our sample produced roughly 40% of the graduating PhDs in science and engineering fields in 2009 [2, 7, 8]. The questionnaire was validated by inviting a select sample of PhD students at the investigators’ universities to complete the survey followed by an exit interview to probe students’ understanding of key questions and to solicit feedback on the instrument. The respective Institutional Review Boards at Cornell University and the Georgia Institute of Technology approved this survey. Participation in the survey was voluntary and subjects consented by completing the survey. Respondents were contacted through email addresses obtained from university department and research lab websites and invited to participate in an online survey regarding their PhD experience and career goals. The first survey was administered in February 2010 to nearly 30,000 PhD students and postdocs at various stages of their training, with a response rate of 30%. As part of the 2010 survey, we asked respondents to provide us with a permanent email address (e.g., a Gmail account), which was used to contact respondents in February 2013 with a follow-up questionnaire. If respondents did not provide an email in the 2010 survey (20% of respondents), we used the original university email address from the 2010 survey. In this study we focus on the subset of 854 respondents who were first or second year PhD students in 2010 and who responded as fourth or fifth year students in 2013, with a 40% response rate for the second survey. To examine potential nonresponse bias in this sample, we regressed response status in 2013 on key characteristics from the 2010 survey. We find that the likelihood of a response to the follow up was higher for respondents who were US citizens and who were in the second (vs. first) year of their PhD studies. Controlling for these factors, we do not find significant differences with respect to career interests. We include the relevant variables as controls in our regression analyses, which are described in detail in the Results section below. S1 Table reports summary statistics. The specific survey questions used in this study are reported in S1 Text.

Discussion We reported a range of complementary analyses that yield a number of key insights. We now summarize these insights and discuss important implications. First, although labor market conditions almost certainly prevent some graduates who are interested in an academic career from obtaining a faculty position, we find that a substantial share of PhD students lose interest in an academic research career for reasons other than labor market conditions. As such, efforts to understand students’ career paths should consider the diversity in career goals and a broad range of factors that shape these goals. In particular, comparisons of the number of graduates with the number of available faculty positions [2, 7, 8] likely overstate the number of PhDs who aspire to a faculty career, thereby exaggerating imbalances in academic labor markets (see also [4]). This insight provides urgency to the National Academies’ recent call for better data on students’ career preferences [6] and we present a measure that may be useful in such data collection efforts. Second, there is considerable heterogeneity in the degree to which career preferences change. While many students remain highly interested in an academic research career, others report a significant decrease in their interest in academia. The large share of students who remain interested alleviates concerns about a potential “drying up” of the pipeline of highly trained scientists pursuing academic careers. While the declining interest in academia among other students may concern observers who believe that all PhDs should aspire to a faculty career, these changes may also be seen as positive to the extent that they result in a better alignment between students’ career preferences and the careers they ultimately enter. Third, a significant share of advanced students– 40% in our study—are not interested in pursuing an academic career. Given that many students report a lack of information about non-academic career options [15] this finding suggest that better information about a variety of career pathways earlier in the PhD may be beneficial [6, 32]. Workshops and information sessions are offered by many institutions [33] but may have a limited ability to truly convey what it means to work in other sectors. Experiential approaches such as internships may be more effective by allowing students to experience non-academic careers first-hand. Moreover, there is the concern that career exploration may be hindered by a lack of support from advisors, who tend to strongly encourage the traditional academic career path [4, 34]. As such, allowing students the time to explore different career options and creating an open culture that acknowledges changing preferences and that values non-academic career paths may be important complements to offering richer information [7, 35]. Students, in turn, should begin to consider their careers early on and take advantage of the career exploration opportunities provided by their advisors and programs. It is well recognized that graduate schools need to prepare PhD students for a variety of academic and non-academic careers [6]. Several innovative initiatives—such as NIH’s BEST program—are important steps towards this goal. Our results suggest that such initiatives need to take a dynamic perspective to accommodate changing career preferences over the course of graduate training. In particular, if students enter PhD programs aspiring to faculty careers, they are unlikely to take advantage of opportunities to explore non-academic options right away. In addition to encouraging students to explore different career options and interests, programs should thus provide students with the flexibility to adjust and modify program components as their career goals change. Finally, future research is needed on whether and how some of the learning that appears to underlie the observed changes in career preferences can be accelerated or even moved prior to students’ enrolling in a PhD program. More explicit assessments of their own interests and abilities, as well as more realistic evaluations of career options may lead some individuals to realize that pursuing a faculty career, and a PhD, is not the best way forward for them. This may allow individuals to take advantage of a growing range of alternative educational options, such as professional science master’s programs, and ultimately result in faster career progress and more satisfying long-term career outcomes.

Acknowledgments This research was supported in part by NSF Scissor Award 1262270 and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. Results and opinions are our own and not necessarily those of the funders. We thank R. Alex Coots, Susan Fitzpatrick, Chris Golde, Rick Kahn, Paula Stephan, Susi Varvayanis, Ken Yancey and especially Shulamit Kahn for helpful comments and suggestions. We also thank the editor, Joshua Rosenbloom, and two reviewers for their valuable feedback on the manuscript.