Dear Ali,
Since your post appeared, I’ve been looking for articles on the employment of PhD graduates in design. While I haven’t been able to find any, I did come across an article that offers is useful method for estimating the job market — and the likelihood of overproduction. See Larson, Ghaffarzadegan, and Xue (2014). [Attached.]
The results of this analysis suggest that many PhD graduates face significant problems in the academic job market, perhaps most. The numbers differ by field and discipline. It is likely that a fine-grained analysis would also show different patterns for leading schools as compared with other schools. In every field, some schools are renowned for the quality of faculty and staff research as well as the quality doctoral programs.
While many factors influence the reputation of a doctoral program, that reputation affects the employment opportunities of the PhD graduates from any given school. It may actually be more significant for recent graduates than the specific academic ability of any given student (see, f.ex., Belavy,Owen, and Livingston 2020). In every other field, the prestige of the school and the department where someone earns a PhD makes a big difference (see, f.ex., Burris 2004). It may only be anecdotal evidence, but something similar seems to affect the employment opportunities of those who graduate with a PhD in design.
You have doubtless read the classic 1958 study on factors affecting academic employment (Caplow and McGee 2017). In today’s difficult world, other factors are taking hold, and the content of many PhD programs has often become a performative credentialing ritual rather than a substantive induction into a research career (see, f.ex., Alvesson 2013). The shrinking number of tenured academic positions began well before the pandemic, and it is getting worse now.
In many cases, the real job value of the PhD involves currently employed academics who seek promotion within ranks at a secure position.
It would be interesting to see any of several kinds of empirical study on these questions. For the moment, I suspect that we produce many more graduated doctors than our field can absorb. This is a factor across many fields, for reasons that Peter Turchin describes. Turchin, a professor of biology and evolutionary ecology who shifted fields to focus on history, argues that our societies are creating many more people with elite credentials than we are creating jobs that can employ those people. While there is some demand in industry and business for designers with a PhD, this demand cannot absorb the vast numbers of PhD graduates we are turning out.
For the design field, those closest relevant article I found is the same one that Carma Gorman found: yours (Kaygan, Ilhan, and Oygur 2020).
These are serious questions in a field that continues to expand the number of PhD programs along with the number of graduates. Across the field as a whole, we have not given these questions deep enough thought. I suspect that the answers will make people uncomfortable.
Yours,
Ken
—
References
Alvesson, Mats. 2013. The Triumph of Emptiness: Consumption Higher Education and Work Organization. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Belavy, Daniel L., Patrick J. Owen, and Patricia M. Livingston. 2020. “Do successful PhD outcomes reflect the research environment rather than academic ability?” PLoS ONE 15(8): e0236327. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0236327
Burris, Val. 2004. “The Academic Caste System: Prestige Hierarchies in PhD Exchange Networks.” American Sociological Review, Vol. 69, April, pp. 239–264.
Caplow, Theodore, and Reece J. McGee. 2017. The Academic Marketplace. Second Edition. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
Helmore, Edward. 2021. “We're on the verge of breakdown: a data scientist's take on Trump and Biden.” The Guardian. Sunday, January 17.
Available at URL:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/17/were-on-the-verge-of-breakdown-a-data-scientists-take-on-trump-and-biden
Accessed February 1.
Kaygan, Pinar, Ali O. Ilhan, and Isil Oygur. 2020. "Change in Industrial Designers’ Jobs: The Case of Turkey, 1984-2018.” The Design Journal, Vol. 3, No. 6, pp. 821-841. DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1080/14606925.2020.1802892
Larson, Richard C., Navid Ghaffarzadegan, and Yi Xue. 2014. “Too Many PhD Graduates or Too Few Academic Job Openings: The Basic Reproductive Number R0 in Academia.” Systems Research and Behavioral Science, Vol. 31, pp. 745–750. Published online 9 September 2013 in Wiley Online Library. DOI: 10.1002/sres.2210
Spinney, Laura. 2019. “History as a giant data set: how analysing the past could help save the future.” The Guardian, Tuesday, November 12. Available at URL:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/12/history-as-a-giant-data-set-how-analysing-the-past-could-help-save-the-future
Accessed February 1.
Wood, Graeme. 2020. “The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse.” [“The Historian Who Sees the Future.”] The Atlantic, December 2020. Available at URL:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/12/can-history-predict-future/616993/
Accessed February 1.
--
Ken Friedman, Ph.D., D.Sc. (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji University in Cooperation with Elsevier | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/
Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| Visiting Professor | Faculty of Engineering | Lund University ||| Email [log in to unmask] | Academia https://tongji.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn
Ali Ilhan wrote:
“In many fields — especially after the exogenous shock that Covid caused — the supply-demand gap for newly minted PhDs in academia is a hot topic. There is a lot of data (I know the US data well) about how academic (industry jobs are different animals) labor market is getting more competitive and how the percentage of tenure track jobs are shrinking (I am attaching a newish piece about the increasing publication requirements for tenure in the US for sociology).
“Does anyone know any empirical assesement of the labor market for design academia for any locale? For example I can compare tenure track job ads for sociology across different years through American Sociological Association job bank, which is pretty comprehensive.”
-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|
