Universities Are Offering Doctorates but Few Jobs
June 4th, 2010Via: Los Angeles Times:
Graduates frustrated by the lack of tenure-track positions available amid budget cuts are looking off campus. Many find work that wouldn’t have cost them years in school or put them deep in debt.
As they walk in hooded robes to the strains of “Pomp and Circumstance,” many students getting their doctorates this spring dream of heading to another university to begin their careers as tenure-track professors.
But when Elena Stover finished her doctorate in September, she headed to the poker tables. Frustrated with the limited opportunities and grueling lifestyle of academia, Stover, 29, decided to eschew a career in cognitive neuroscience for one playing online poker. She got the idea from a UCLA career counselor, who was trying to help her find employment.
“The job market is abysmal, especially within the academic system,” said Stover, who spent six years getting her doctorate at UCLA.
It has never been easy to find a tenure-track teaching job. But this year, dwindling endowments and shrinking state budgets — especially in California — have made that goal more elusive than ever. Now, many graduates with doctoral degrees are finding themselves looking for jobs outside universities — jobs they probably could have gotten without five to six years of intense schooling and tens of thousands of dollars of education debt.
“That’s one of the weird things — after all this training, you should really have these career options, but in reality, it’s really scarce,” said Stover, who moved to Oakland, got a poker coach and says she’s making enough to pay the bills.
Budget cuts are plaguing California’s once-admired higher education system. The California State University system lost 10% of its teaching force over the last year, which is the equivalent of 1,230 full-time posts. The University of California’s share of state general fund revenue of $2.6 billion in the 2009-10 fiscal year was 20% less than it was two years earlier.
Many universities are cutting costs by reducing full-time staff and hiring adjunct or part-time professors. The number of full-time faculty members at universities was around 51% in 2007, down from 78% in 1970, said Jack Schuster, a senior research fellow at Claremont Graduate University. That leaves many doctoral degree candidates stuck with adjunct work, which can pay as little as $2,000 a semester.
Research Credit: Becky
I can personaly testify of the reality of this news. Although I don’t leave in the U-S, the same reality apply here too. It is extremely difficult to find a job related to your doctoral degree.