Research Intensive a careers blog for university researchers

How many PhD students become lecturers?

I tend to use the data from What do researchers do when I want to illustrate to PhD students that not all of them end up as university lecturers. But thinking about it, the data in this document is far from being perfect and poses some interpretation issues.

First, a little whinge. Have a look at how it is presented graphically. I find myself rotating these graphs again and again because the originals do not show clearly the most relevant information: the sectors.

A little exercise for neck can't do any harm

Second, the document presents PhD destinations graphically as a pie chart. Indeed very interesting if you want to know that 3.5% of Arts and Humanities PhD holders ended up as 'business and financial professionals and other associate professionals' whatever that means. (not very useful if you are colour blind, though).

Notice how the most interesting information for PhD students, namely how many ended up as full-time university lecturers, is not presented graphically anywhere! No, the Education Sector doesn't capture this information because it includes all kinds of teaching positions from school teachers to temporary tutors.

I therefore had to revisit the report myself and extract the relevant bits. In the following image you can see how many Art and Humanities PhD holders, according to Vitae, ended up as lecturers, how many work in HE but are not as full time lecturers, and how many are post-doc researchers/fellows. PhD students are interested exactly in this and couldn't care less about how 'other' breaks down.

my graph. isn't it beautiful! the red bit represents research staff. feel free to use with reference or link.

But there is another problem with the numbers themselves. Do they really represent how many PhD holders would end up as lecturers? In science, a typical path takes PhD holders through 2-3 fixed-term research jobs before they become full time lecturers. In the humanities, it may take a few years as well until you publish enough. What we really need is the leavers data for those who finished their PhD courses 5-10 years ago. The data available in this document is from 2003 to 2007 and represent data collected in the first year after graduation.

To illustrate this, the fact that only 1% of physics PhD holders ended up as lecturers means that unknown percentage is still in post-doc positions, and may (or may not) become lecturers in a few years time.

Anyone knows of a longitutde study of this kind?