Abstract
AbstractCOVID-19 is expected to radically alter higher education in the United States and to further limit the availability of tenure-track academic positions. How has the pandemic and its associated fallout affected doctoral students’ career aspirations and priorities? We investigate this question by comparing responses to a PhD career survey prior to and following significant developments in the pandemic. We find little evidence that the pandemic caused substantial shifts in PhD students’ aspirations and priorities. However, some differences emerge when considering later dates in our survey period, particularly among more senior students who express a greater interest in some non-academic careers and job characteristics. Contrary to expectation, we also find evidence that the pandemic improved some students’ perceptions of their academic departments. In our conclusion, we speculate whether steps taken by the comparatively well-resourced institution that we study helped to mitigate some of the more negative consequences of the pandemic.
Highlights
The coronavirus disease pandemic (COVID-19) is expected to dramatically change higher education in the United States, and not for the better (Greenblatt 2020; Hartocollis 2020; Kelsky 2020)
Should we find that COVID-19 is leading more students to consider non-academic careers, we expect that this should lead to greater dissatisfaction with academic department performance regarding preparation and support for their post-graduate career
We find that the results we report are largely robust to these exercises and results increase our confidence that any changes we document are attributable to COVID-19 and not differences between early and late survey participants, or other differences between 2019 and 2020
Summary
The coronavirus disease pandemic (COVID-19) is expected to dramatically change higher education in the United States, and not for the better (Greenblatt 2020; Hartocollis 2020; Kelsky 2020). While the economic fallout from COVID-19 has exacerbated problems with an alreadyprecarious job market, for many students the crisis has upended their expectations for post-graduate employment opportunities (Carlson 2020b; Cassuto 2020; Kelsky 2020) In accordance with these developments, many are pressing universities to take concrete steps to prepare students for an altered post-pandemic reality, with some arguing that the current crisis should hasten investments in existing efforts such as greater preparation for non-academic careers (Carlson 2020b; Cassuto 2020; Wood 2020). Our study advances a literature on how recessions affect college major choice among college students by considering how a negative job market shock affects a wider range of outcomes, from aspirations to priorities to program satisfaction, among PhD students of different years (Ersoy 2019; Liu Sun and Winters 2019; Shu 2016)
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