InsideHigherEd/4 de abril de 2016/Por: Scott Jaschik

Resumen: A medida que el número de nuevos doctores se eleva, aumenta
también el porcentaje de personas que culminan un doctorado y no tienen un
empleo. El mercado de trabajo para los nuevos doctores es cada vez más
estrecho. Según una investigación desarrollada en la Universidad de
Chicago, las cifras muestran un crecimiento de ingreso y feliz término de
postgrados en todos los campos desde las ciencias para la vida hasta las
físicas, sociales, ingeniería, educación humanidades en un margen de 10
años, sin embargo, no ocurre lo mismo con los postdoctorados donde las
cifras decaen significativamente. El tema salarial es relativamente en
contraposición a los grados académicos logrados al igual que los beneficios
laborales, lo cual es perjudicial, pues, obtener un doctorado o un
postdoctorado obliga buscar un empleo con una indemnización adecuada debido
a que deben sufragar los niveles de la deuda contraída por estudios. Por
otro lado, las protestas en torno a la contratación de negros, latinos y
mujeres con titulaciones de doctorado y postdoctorados ha obligado a las
universidades ampliar sus objetivos de contratación dirigidos a la
diversidad racial, étnica y de genero presente en las universidades.

As number of new Ph.D.s rises, the percentage of people earning a doctorate
without a job waiting for them is up. While all disciplines face the
problem, some have particularly high debt levels.

American universities awarded 54,070 research doctorates in 2014, the
highest total in the 58 years that the National Science Foundation has
sponsored the Survey of Earned Doctorates, a new edition of which was released Friday.

But while more doctorates are being awarded, the figures also point to
transitions and concerns in graduate education.

Increasingly, the pool of doctoral degrees coming out of American
universities is dominated by science and engineering Ph.D.s. Their numbers
were up 2 percent in 2014, compared to the prior year, while all other
research doctorates were down by 2 percent. With those changes, science and
engineering Ph.D.s make up 75 percent of all doctorates awarded in 2014. In
1974, they made up only 58 percent of the total. And science and
engineering doctoral education remains dependent on non-American talent —
which many view as a sign of success for American higher education but
others worry leaves American universities vulnerable if students opt to
enroll elsewhere.

The job market for new Ph.D.s is ever tighter. While this attracts the most
attention and debate within academe about humanities graduates, there are
signs of a tightening job market across disciplines.

The NSF analysis — based on research by NORC at the University of Chicago
— encourages examining shifts over several-year periods rather than just a
single year, for a better understanding of the trends.

While the number of humanities doctorates fell about five years ago, it is
now higher than it was 10 years ago. The growth in engineering has been
particularly high in the last five years.

Education, which 10 years ago made up 15.8 percent of new doctorates, now
makes up only 8.9 percent of new doctorates. And while humanities
doctorates are up, their share of new doctorates has dropped in 10 years
from 12.4 to 10.1 percent.

The humanities figures tend to draw particular attention because of gloomy
reports about the humanities job market. Consider the latest figures from
the Modern Language Association and the American Historical Association.

But the data in the report on the postdoctorate plans of new Ph.D.s show
that the tightening job market for doctorate holders is by no means unique
to the humanities. Across the board, including STEM disciplines, the
percentage of new Ph.D.s with job commitments (including postdocs) after
they earn their doctorates is dropping.

The disciplines vary widely in terms of the career aspirations and jobs
attained by Ph.D.s. While many humanities disciplines are promoting
nonacademic careers, the vast majority of those entering Ph.D. programs
want academic careers, and that goal leads many of them — if unable to
obtain a tenure-track position — to work off the tenure track, frequently
in positions at relatively low pay and with minimal if any benefits. This
also adds to job market competitiveness, as new Ph.D.s are competing with
not only their own cohort but also those from several years before who
still haven’t landed a good position.

In science and technology fields, and some of the social sciences, many
doctoral students aspire to corporate or government jobs, and many get
those jobs, yet these disciplines also are seeing fewer people earn Ph.D.s
with a firm commitment for employment or postdoc. (Postdocs are much more
common in the physical and life sciences than in the humanities and social
sciences, although they are becoming more common in those fields as well.)

But a key difference among disciplines explains much of the urgency about
this issue in the humanities and social sciences. Not only do humanities
and some social sciences graduate students take longer to earn their
doctorates than those in many STEM fields, but they are graduating with
much more debt — much of it from their time as doctoral students. This
makes the need to find employment with adequate compensation more urgent
than for those graduating without such large debt levels.

The following table shows the cumulative debt upon receiving a Ph.D.,
including undergraduate debt, and the percentage of new Ph.D.s with debt in
excess of $70,000. Education and the social sciences not only have the
highest average debts, but significant numbers with very high debt levels
(more than $70,000).

This year’s data are being released at a time when many minority student
protests have focused attention on the relative lack of racial and ethnic
diversity at many colleges and universities. In trying to resolve some of
those protests, many colleges have pledged to meet certain targets for
hiring black and Latino faculty members by set dates — even as some have
warned that the supply of black and Latino Ph.D.s needs to increase
significantly for colleges to meet their targets.

The news release from the NSF noted many gains in diversifying the new Ph.D. population. The release noted, for
example, that women now account for nearly half (46 percent) of all new
doctorates, and that the rates at which women are earning Ph.D.s are much
higher than those for men.

The NSF also boasted about gains for racial and ethnic minority groups, but
they were generally over the long run. The proportion of doctorates awarded
to African-Americans has increased from 4.1 percent to 6.4 percent between
1994 and 2014. And over the same period, the rate for Hispanics or Latinos
increased from 3.3 percent to 6.5 percent.

But year to year, the numbers are relatively stagnant, and they do not
reflect the overall growth in the Ph.D. population. The number of Latino
Ph.D.s in 2014 was 3,157, up from 3,074 the year before. The number of
black Ph.D.s in 2014 was 2,649, down 10 from the year before. A
disproportionate number (523) of Ph.D.s to black people also continue to be
awarded in education. In many STEM fields, new black Ph.D.s in 2014 were in
single digits: one in nuclear engineering, two in particle physics, one in
robotics and so forth. Those breakdowns may be crucial, as many colleges
have said they want not only to increase the numbers of black and Latino
faculty members, but to do so across disciplines.

Fuente de la noticia e imagen:
www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/04/04/new-data-show-tightening-phd-job-market-across-disciplines