The PhD Placement Project

By Jonathan Thon. Last week Dave wrote a post on how universities can begin keeping track of graduate student and postdoctoral fellow outcomes. With blogs such as “100 reasons not to go to graduate school” popping up online, as well as many articles increasingly critical of the state of higher education, it warrants that prospective students think long and hard about pursuing a career in academia. It is therefore imperative that accurate and unbiased information be available for each stage of academic career advancement for every field. One solution with which I wholly agree is that academics publicly disclose the career progression of their former trainees online, and pursuant to this theme I wanted to make our readers aware of a fact-finding survey by the Chronicle of Higher Education titled the Ph.D. Placement Project. Read more...