More than 600,000 students were enrolled in PhD programmes in China in 2023.Credit: ChinaImages/Sipa USA via Alamy
The number of doctoral graduates globally has been growing steadily over the past few decades. And in countries such as China and India, those numbers are exploding.
Conventionally, the doctorate was a stepping stone to a lifelong career in academia. But today, the number of PhD graduates vastly exceeds the number of job openings at universities and research institutions. Researchers say that many universities are not preparing graduates for a career outside academia.
“We need to make doctoral education more meaningful, more sustainable and better aligned with the diverse societal and labour-market needs,” says Cláudia Sarrico, the Secretary of State for Higher Education in Portugal who previously worked at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris.
The PhD explosion
Among the 38 countries belonging to the OECD, the number of new doctorate holders almost doubled between 1998 and 20171, and has continued to increase in the years since. (Although several countries, including Australia and Brazil, have seen a dip in PhD enrolments over the past few years, driven in part by high living costs and low stipends.)
In China, the number of doctoral students has doubled — from around 300,000 in 2013 to more than 600,000 students enrolled in PhD programmes in 2023. “The numbers are massive, and they keep growing,” says Hugo Horta, who researches higher-education policy and practice at the University of Hong Kong. There are several factors driving this growth, Horta explains, such as the increasing number of people with bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and the expectation among many in the country that an investment in higher education will provide better economic and social prospects.
But the number of jobs in academia has not kept pace with the growth in PhD holders, says Horta. People coming into these doctoral programmes are, for the most part, training to become academics, so many future graduates are going to face fierce competition for any position, he says.
Great expectations
In countries such as the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom, non-academic jobs are increasingly becoming the norm for people with PhDs. A 2023 study2 of more than 4,500 PhD graduates in the United Kingdom found that over two-thirds of doctoral graduates were employed outside academia.
Such employment can mean graduates taking jobs that aren’t research based or that are outside their area of expertise. In South Africa, out of more than 6,000 PhD graduates who completed a 2020 survey, 18% said that they had had trouble finding jobs related to their expertise. “Even though they do find jobs, it’s not necessarily linked to their PhDs, and it’s not always the jobs that they expected or that they wanted,” says Milandré van Lill, a researcher at Stellenbosch University in South Africa and a co-author of the study. “From my perspective, we have reached saturation point in terms of PhD graduates.” Some graduates who find jobs outside of academia feel overqualified and undervalued, says van Lill.
That isn’t the case everywhere. The 2023 study found that job satisfaction among PhD graduates was generally high, with more than 90% saying they were happy with their career2. Those in science- and technology-related fields were more likely to find research-related roles — which are linked to higher levels of job satisfaction — than were those in the social sciences, arts and humanities.
