Progress and Pitfalls in Monitoring STEM Doctoral Degree Holders Career Paths

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The National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago will conduct a spring 2019 conference and related preparatory tasks focused on how doctoral-granting universities and their doctoral programs can collect and utilize data on STEM PhD career pathways. The overarching objective of the project is to help develop widely-shared standards for the kind of career outcomes that should be measured; the methods for collecting the data; and the ways in which data should be analyzed and findings disseminated to prospective students, faculty, and administrators. Funding will be used to support four main activities: a web-based national survey of graduate deans in fall 2018, a focus group of graduate deans in December 2018, a one-and-a-half-day conference in May or June 2019, and a multi-pronged dissemination of results of the project. A proposed survey of graduate schools will be the first systematic effort to collect data nationwide and across classes of institutions and graduate programs on the various approaches being implemented to consider how they are working. The project has potential to influence knowledge that could be available to students and university doctoral program leaders about career paths followed by recent cohorts of doctoral recipients to enable graduate students to make wiser career choices. The proposed workshop will bring together representatives from higher education institutions who have been developing different approaches to studying career pathways of PhD recipients in the STEM fields as well as social science experts in data collection and utilization. The conference will enable participants to exchange lessons learned to date on challenges and accomplishments in tracking STEM careers, develop strategies for mitigating the challenges, and generate an empirically based understanding of issues surrounding career pathway data collection and utilization. The project team will employ a two-step process in collecting quantitative and qualitative data from approximately 270 institutions that currently engage in a career pathways project, have provided information on PhD graduate career outcomes in a public form, or have not engaged this topic. Prior to the conference, they will conduct an online survey to better understand the barriers to beginning a career pathway data collection process and hold focus groups to present the survey findings. The project will culminate with the conference and dissemination of a monograph that will provide insight and guidance for universities on career pathways data collection and utilization. This project is funded by he EHR Core Research Program (NSF 15-509) under the STEM Professional Workforce Development core theme.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.