Abstract
Postdoc is a special transitional position for those with a doctoral degree and is usually regarded as an investment to accumulate the additional human and social capital needed to facilitate future job searches or to add to an academic reserve army of unemployed PhDs. Given the prevalence of postdoctoral positions nowadays, it is crucial to explore the role played by postdoctoral participation in the post-PhD labor market. By taking advantage of a comprehensive data set from the National Profiles of Human Resources in Science and Technology in Taiwan, we first explore several characteristics associated with the choice of a postdoctoral position for newly-minted doctoral degree holders, such as age, discipline or the time taken to complete the degree. It is found that older doctorates have a lower probability of taking up a postdoctoral position, and a longer elapsed time to the PhD degree is less likely to result in a postdoctoral position. The postdoctoral engagement also hinges on the field of study, implying that those majoring in Science tend to engage in postdoctoral work more than those majoring in Social Science. The control function approach is utilized to address the possible endogenous decision of postdoctoral experience when estimating the effects of postdoctoral positions on the current career choices between academic and non-academic jobs. The empirical results suggest that engaging in postdoctoral positions could increase the probability of advancing to the academic sector by about 6.1 %. The heterogeneous effects of gender, major and cohort in regard to the postdoctoral experience are also found by splitting the data. In particular, gaining postdoctoral experience does help males engineering majors and older cohorts obtain jobs in academia. Moreover, we experiment with several groupings for the definition of being awarded an academic position and obtain very robust empirical results.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Explore related subjects
Discover the latest articles and news from researchers in related subjects, suggested using machine learning.Notes
For instance, in the 1990s, the Japanese government set a goal of raising the number of postdocs to 10,000 (Cyranoski et al. 2011). Such a policy has been designed to enable the number of PhDs in Japan to catch up with those in Western countries. The provision of grants for running PhD programs has doubled within 4 years in France (Mangematin 2000). In the U.S., academic institutions awarded 48,069 research doctorates in 2010 compared to 41,372 in 2000 (Fiegener 2011). According to a report written by Cyranoski et al. (2011), p. 276, “the number of science doctorates earned each year grew by nearly 40 % between 1998 and 2008, to some 34,000, in countries that are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).”
We focus on the supply side of doctoral holders, rather than on the demand side that is analyzed by Cantwell and Taylor (2013). We note that only about one-quarter of all doctoral degree holders are employed in academic positions after their PhD training (Neumann and Tan 2011). In addition, the opportunities for tenured-track assistant professor positions have declined by 40 % in 10 years in France (Recotillet 2007), implying that it is getting more difficult for PhD graduates to find a job that matches their rigorous academic training. Jackson and Michelson (2014) explore the factors that influenc initial post-graduation job attainment of Australian PhD graduates based on a national survey conducted in 2011 and 2012.
According to Cyranoski et al. (2011), p. 277, “in 1973, 55 % of US doctorates in the biological sciences secured tenure-track positions within six years of completing their PhDs, and only 2 % were in a postdoc or other untenured academic position. By 2006, only 15 % were in tenured positions six years after graduating, with 18 % untenured.”
Igami et al. (2014) indicate that postdoctoral fellows play an important role in scientific research. They could not only shorten the mean citation time lag in the highly cited papers but also produce more highly cited papers compared to normal papers.
Upon the lifting of Martial Law in 1987, higher education in Taiwan entered a period of drastic change alongside the introduction of a market mechanism to the education system in the early ’90s. The passing of the 1994 University Law aimed to reduce the power of the central government by granting academic autonomy and institutional flexibility to universities. Taiwan has since experienced an unprecedented expansion of higher education, reflected by a sharp increase in the number of universities (both undergraduate and graduate programs) as well as student enrollments.
Data source: http://www.edu.tw/statistics/index.aspx.
The most renowned research institute in Taiwan, Academia Sinica, faced a similar trend in the sense that the approval rate for being a postdoctoral fellow in Academia Sinica declined from 86 % (134 out of 156 applicants approved) in 2002 to 29 % (115 out of 391 applicants approved) in 2012.
We have prepared an online supplementary appendix, which contains a series of sensitivity analyses and additional results omitted from the main paper.
A University of Chicago postdoc and one of the founders of the fledgling National Postdoctoral Association. Data source: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/298/5591/40.full.
Among these channels, those who work outside the academic area but collaborate with any researchers in academic institutions funded by government would also be contained in the investigation pool. According to the official report by NPHRST, the returning rate is about 13 %. It is also worth noting that NPHRST only surveyed the PhD holders that stay in Taiwan. For those who studied abroad and worked overseas after receiving their PhD degrees, NPHRST is not able to keep track of them. There may also be a potential selection bias such that those without academic jobs were not inclined to participate in the NPHRST survey. These issues can be regarded as the data limitation of our research and deserve a further exploration.
Since our sample covers a long time span, it may mask significant changes in postsecondary institutions worldwide as underscored by recent developments in postsecondary institutions in Europe triggered by the Bologna Accord (in particular for those receiving the PhD degree from Europe). To alleviate the impact of the Bologna Accord on our results, we re-estimate our model for those graduated after year 2000 and reach very similar conclusions. Please refer to the online supplementary appendix.
Note that we also restrict our definition of “academic jobs” to those in educational institutions only by excluding those people doing research in government for the sensitivity analysis, which leads to a very similar result. Please refer to the online supplementary appendix for more details.
The disciplines in the “services” category include fields of study such as Hotel and Catering, Travel and Tourism, Sports, Sport Science and Technology, Sports and Leisure, Beauty Treatment, Railway Operations, Road Motor Vehicle Operations, Air Crew, Air Traffic Control, Nautical Science, Ship’s Officer, Postal Service, Civil Security, Military, and other services.
ARWU can be accessed at the following website: http://www.arwu.org/index.jsp.
Note that we do not delete those having an elapsed time to a degree (ETTD) of less than 2 years or longer than 10 years, since it is difficult to judge whether the reported ETTD is reasonable or not. However, we have experimented with a series of sensitivity analyses that trim extreme values based on different cut-offs and have found very similar results.
The missing data, for instance, include those failing to report gender, field of study, school type, year of admission, year of graduation, and so on.
Note that this number is obtained by summing 4.4 median years, consisting of the typical 2 years for a master’s degree and 4 years for a bachelor’s degree.
For illustration purposes, our discussion focuses on the coefficient estimattes of Model 1, while Models 2 to 4 lead to similar results.
According to the 2014 report by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics in Taiwan, the unemployment rate was relatively low in most countries before 2010. For example, the unemployment rate in Taiwan was about \(1.7\,\%\) in 1990 and \(3.0\,\%\) in 2000. For the U.S., the unemployment rate was between 5.6 and \(4.0\,\%\) during the period 1990 to 2000. It was between 6.9 and \(5.4\,\%\) for the same period in the U.K. However, in 2010, the unemployment rate rose sharply, e.g., \(5.2\,\%\) in Taiwan, \(9.6\,\%\) in the U.S. and \(7.8\,\%\) in the U.K. See http://www.dgbas.gov.tw/ct_view.asp?xItem=35670&ctNode=3247 for more details.
We thank an anonymous referee for clarifying the link between our empirical results and the competing theories.
The separate regressions can be thought of as a more flexible or less restricted model than that based on the entire sample.
References
Åerlind, G. S. (2009). Postdoctoral research positions as preparation for an academic career. International Journal for Researcher Development, 1(1), 84–96.
Bonnal, L., & Giret, J.-F. (2008). The determinants of delayed entrance into the academic career: The case of France. Maastricht: Labour Markets for Scientists and Engineers: International Workshop at Maastricht University.
Cantwell, B., & Taylor, B. J. (2013). Internationalization of the postdoctorate in the United States: Analyzing the demand for international postdoc labor. High Education, 66, 551–567.
Cantwell, B., & Lee, J. J. (2010). Unseen workers in the academic factory: Perceptions of neoracism among international postdocs in the US and UK. Harvard Educational Review, 80, 490–516.
Collins, R. (1979). The credential society. New York: Academic Press.
Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology (CPST). (2002). Postdocs: What we know and what we would like to learn. In Proceedings of an NSF/CPST Professional Societies Workshop, Washington, DC
Corley, E. A., & Sabharwal, M. (2007). Foreign-born academic scientists and engineers: producing more and getting less than their US-born peers? Research in Higher Education, 48(8), 909–940.
Cyranoski, D., Gilbert, N., Ledford, H., Nayar, A., & Yahia, M. (2011). The PhD factory: The world is producing more PhDs than ever before. Is it time to stop? Nature, 472(7343), 276–279.
Fiegener, M. K. (2011). Numbers of doctorates awarded in the united states declined in 2010,” NSF 12-303, NCSES (National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics).
Ghaffarzadegan, N., Hawley, J., & Desai, A. (2013). Research workforce diversity: The case of balancing national versus international postdocs in US biomedical research. Systems Research and Behavioral Science, 31, 301–315. doi:10.1002/sres.2190.
Goldman, E., & Marshall, E. (2002). NIH grantees: Where have all the young ones gone? Science, 298(4), 40–41.
Hanchane, S. & Recotillet, I. (2003). Academic careers: The effect of participation to post-doctoral program. In 15th SASE Conference, Aix-en-Provence, 26th–28th June.
Hoffer, T. B., Jr, V., Welch, K., Webber, K., Williams, B., Lisek, M., et al. (2006). Doctorate recipients from United States Universities: Summary report 2005. Chicago: National Opinion Research Center.
Horta, H. (2009). Holding a post-doctoral position before becoming a faculty member: Does it bring benefits for the scholarly enterprise? Higher Education, 58, 689–721.
Igami, M., Nagaoka, S., & Walsh, J. P. (2014). Contribution of postdoctoral fellows to fast-moving and competitive scientific research. Journal of Technology Transfer, 40, 723–741. doi:10.1007/s10961-014-9366-7.
Imbens, G. W. & Wooldridge, J. M. (2007). What’s New in Econometrics? In NBER Lecture Notes 6, Summer 2007. http://www.nber.org/minicourse3.html.
Jackson, D., & Michelson, G. (2014). Factors influencing the employment of Australian PhD graduates. Studies in Higher Education,. doi:10.1080/03075079.2014.899344.
Lan, X. (2012). Permanent visas and temporary jobs: evidence from postdoctoral participation of foreign PhDs in the United States. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 31(3), 623–640.
Lin, E. S., & Chiu, S.-Y. (2014). Can a doctoral degree be completed faster overseas than domestically? Evidence from Taiwanese doctorates. Higher Education, 68, 263–283.
McAlpine, L., & Emmioğlu, E. (2014). Navigating careers: The perceptions of sciences doctoral students, Post-PhD researchers, and pre-tenure academics. Studies in Higher Education,. doi:10.1080/03075079.2014.914908.
Mangematin, V. (2000). PhD job market: Professional trajectories and incentives during the PhD. Research Policy, 29, 741–756.
Musselin, C. (2004). Towards a European academic labour market? Some lessons drawn from empirical studies on academic mobility. Higher Education, 48, 55–78.
National Postdoctoral Association (NPA). (2011). Postdoctoral scholars, gender, and the academic career pipeline: A fact sheet. Developed as part of NPA ADVANCE, From Postdoc to Faculty: Transition Issues for Women Scientists Version March 2, 2011. http://www.nationalpostdoc.org/component/rubberdoc/doc/299/raw.
Nerad, M., & Cerny, J. (1999). Postdoctoral patterns, career advancement, and problems. Science, 285, 1533–1535.
Neumann, R., & Tan, K. K. (2011). From PhD to initial employment: The doctorate in a knowledge economy. Studies in Higher Education, 36(5), 601–614.
Picciano, J., Rudd, E., Morrison, E., & Nerad, M. (2008). Does time-to-degree matter? Technical Report, Spotlight on Doctoral Education, 3, CIRGE: University of Washington. WA: Seattle.
Portnoi, L. (2009). To be or not to be an academic: South African graduate students’ vocational choices. International Journal of Educational Development, 29, 406–414.
Recotillet, I. (2007). PhD graduates with post-doctoral qualification in the private sector: Does it pay off? Labour, 21(3), 473–502.
Robin, S., & Cahuzac, E. (2003). Knocking on academia’s doors: An inquiry into the early careers of doctors in life sciences. Labour, 17(1), 1–23.
Sauermann, H., & Roach, M. (2012). Science PhD career preferences: Levels, changes, and advisor encouragement. PLoS One, 7(5), e36307. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0036307.
Schwabe, M. (2011). The career paths of doctoral graduates in Austria. European Journal of Education Part II, 46(1), 153–168.
Siegfried, J. J., & Stock, W. A. (2001). So you want to earn a PhD in economics? How long do you think it will take? The Journal of Human Resources, 36(2), 364–378.
Spence, A. (1973). Job market signaling. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 87(2), 355–374.
Stephan, P., & Ma, J. (2005). The increased frequency and duration of the postdoctorate career stage. American Economic Review, 95(2), 71–75.
Stephan, P. (2009). Tracking the Placement of Students as a Measure of Technology Transfer. Advances in the Study of Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Economic Growth, 19, 113–140.
Stock, W. A., Finegan, T. A., & Siegfried, J. J. (2009). Can you earn a PhD in economics in five years? Economics of Education Review, 28, 523–537.
Su, X. (2013). The impacts of postdoctoral training on scientists. Academic employment. Journal of Higher Education, 84(2), 239–265.
Townsend, R. B. (2012). Who are the new history PhDs? NSF Snapshot from 2010 Provides Insights into Current Trends, American Historical Association, News column of the March 2012 issue of Perspectives on History.
Zumeta, W. (1985). Extending the educational ladder: The changing roles of postdoctoral education in the United States. Springfield: National Technical Information Service.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the Science and Technology Policy Research and Information Center, National Applied Research Laboratories in Taiwan for providing the data. We also wish to acknowledge the very useful and constructive comments and discussions from the editor, the anonymous referees, Yiping Hsu and the seminar participants of the 2013 WEAI International Conference in Seattle, USA. Financial support from the National Science Council of Taiwan in the form of grant NSC 100-2410-H-007-025-MY2 is greatly appreciated.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Electronic supplementary material
Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Lin, E.S., Chiu, SY. Does Holding a Postdoctoral Position Bring Benefits for Advancing to Academia?. Res High Educ 57, 335–362 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-015-9388-5
Received:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-015-9388-5