COMMENTS

  1. What ratio of PhD graduates in STEM fields ultimately end up as

    These data show that less than 0.5% of science PhD students will ever become full professors, while just 3.5% will obtain lower-ranking permanent positions as research staff at universities. For physicists, that 3.5% figure is probably a little low.

  2. How Many Ph.D.'s Actually Get to Become College Professors?

    At the time 53 percent of all Ph.D.'s said they had intended to become professors. As this table (apologies for the awkward angle) showed, only about half of that group had obtained tenure within ...

  3. Huge data set shows 80% of US professors come from just 20% of ...

    So, for example, this follows the Pareto principle or an 80-20 rule, where 80% of US-trained faculty come from only 20.4% of institutions. Another way of looking at that is to say that 1 in 8 US ...

  4. Should I become a professor? Success rate 3%

    Based on data from Belgian universities, I would dare to state: If you are a holder of a doctorate degree (PhD), you have a 30% chance of becoming a postdoc and a 3% chance of becoming a professor. Surprisingly, the available studies on European and U.S. data sets are confusing and difficult to compare.

  5. How Many Ph.D.'s Actually Get to Become College Professors?

    At the time 53 percent of all Ph.D.'s said they had intended to become professors. As this table (apologies for the awkward angle) showed, only about half of that group had obtained tenure within ...

  6. So Many Research Scientists, So Few Openings as Professors

    Many spend years in a holding pattern as postdocs, which are temporary positions, working for a professor and being paid from the professor's research grant. The average pay in 2016 for a ...

  7. New report shows 67% of PhD students want a career in academic ...

    Most PhD students (88%) believe their doctorate will positively impact their career prospects. PhD students are equally more (33%) and less (32%) likely to pursue a research career now than before they started their PhD, with the majority choosing academic research (67%) or research within industry (64%) as a probable career path.

  8. New study finds 80% of faculty trained at 20% of institutions

    Some 80 percent faculty members with Ph.D.s in the U.S. trained at just 20 percent of universities. So found the team behind a new study on faculty hiring and retention patterns at Ph.D.-granting institutions. These researchers warn that academe "is characterized by universally extreme inequality in faculty production.".

  9. PhDs: the tortuous truth

    Nature 's survey of more than 6,000 graduate students reveals the turbulent nature of doctoral research. Getting a PhD is never easy, but it's fair to say that Marina Kovačević had it ...

  10. PhD students should prepare for careers beyond becoming professors

    Students should inform themselves about doctoral job market realities as early as possible — ideally before deciding to start a PhD. They should also be skeptical of any contemporary rosy ...

  11. 80% of professors at Ph.D.-granting universities attended the same

    Researchers studied the educational histories of faculty members who worked at the 386 Ph.D.-granting institutions in the U.S. between 2011 and 2020, representing almost 300,000 people. They found that faculty members tend to be employed at universities considered less prestigious than those that trained them.

  12. PhD Source

    Jobs PhDs going into after graduation. In this graph, you can see the number of PhDs who graduated in 2022 and the respective sector of the economy that their post-PhD job was in. You can see that PhDs found careers in many areas of the economy, ranging from life sciences to psychology, to engineering, education, and humanities.

  13. Data Snapshot: Tenure and Contingency in US Higher Education

    This report summarizes data on patterns of faculty appointments and graduate student employment in US higher education from fall 1987 through fall 2021, ... Over two-thirds (68 percent) of faculty members in US colleges and universities held contingent appointments in fall 2021, compared with about 47 percent in fall 1987.

  14. Too Many PhD Graduates or Too Few Academic Job Openings: The Basic

    If α is the ratio of the number of PhD graduates interested in tenure-track positions to the total number of PhD graduates, and r is the average growth ratio of faculty slots, we should have R 0 ≤ 1 + r T α in order to have enough academic openings for all PhD graduates, where T is the average period of career. 1 For example, given a yearly ...

  15. The Bleak Job Landscape of Adjunctopia for Ph.D.s

    The number of tenured and tenure-track faculty, by contrast, increased by only 9.6 percent, to 436,000. It is not the case, as is sometimes said or implied, that there are fewer tenured college ...

  16. Why are some PhD holders unable to become professors?

    Mar 21, 2019 at 10:44. 6. "a PhD is not a diploma which makes you qualified to be an academic professor" Seventy years ago it was agreed that a PhD did qualify you to be an assistant professor. The required qualifications have increased, not because the job has changed, but because the supply of PhDs has increased.

  17. Most Ph.D.s aren't professors

    Hopefully this list is a useful resource for students and faculty who have the same goal. Education. Research. Research And Development. PhD. Phd Student----1. Follow. Written by Amy J. Ko.

  18. PDF Data Snapshot: Tenure and Contingency in US Higher Education

    The number of graduate student employees increased 44 percent from fall 2002 to fall 2021, compared with a 19 percent increase among both full-time and part-time faculty. FIGURE 5A. Number of graduate student employees and faculty, by employment status, fall 2002 through fall 2021 FIGURE 5B.

  19. graduate school

    As a crude approximation if overall staffing numbers remain stable a professor only needs to create a single replacement over the course of his career, which works out as one out of the average number of successful phds students per professor. ... This also includes people who after their PhD leave academia, so the percentage for those willing ...

  20. Employment trends in academic psychology

    In 2013, approximately 35,300 psychology doctorate recipients were employed full time at four-year educational institutions. 1. Among those who were out of graduate school for 10 or more years, 62 percent were employed as tenured or tenure-track faculty. For psychology doctorates with less than 10 years since doctorate, 44 percent were tenured ...

  21. In a first, U.S. private sector employs nearly as many Ph.D.s as ...

    In 2017, only 23% of these Ph.D.s held a tenured or tenure track position in academia—a drop of 10 percentage points since 1997. Only math and the computer sciences have seen a larger drop, from 49% to 33%. Those 20-year shifts outpace changes in psychology and the social sciences (35% to 30%), engineering (23% to 16%), and the physical and ...

  22. 22% of Tenure-Track Professors Have a Parent With a Ph.D

    According to the study, 22 percent of tenure-track professors in the eight fields studied report that at least one of their parents holds a Ph.D., and 4 percent report both parents have Ph.D.s. Some 52 percent report having at least one parent with a master's degree or Ph.D. In the U.S., on average, fewer than 1 percent of similarly aged ...

  23. Estimate: What percent of Physics PhDs actually end up becoming professors?

    The first report says ~20% of US physics faculty positions are filled by b PhDs that received their degree outside the US. So, let's statistically sin and account for them by inflating US PhDs by 20%, to 2280. Doing that, we get a rough conversion rate of 221/2280 which is ~9.5%. That is a generous upper bound and will be much lower.