Italian doctorate holders in the political and social sciences: career options, job growth and salary

ABSTRACT

We develop a secondary analysis of the data by the Italian National Statistical Institute (ISTAT) by means of two surveys on large samples of PhD graduates who obtained their doctoral degrees from Italian universities in 2004 and 2006 (the first survey) and in 2008 and 2010 (the second survey). We focused on doctorate holders in the political and social sciences. After a descriptive social make-up of the four cohorts, we carried out an analysis to verify the mid-term occupational outcomes of these graduates during a period of academic reforms and economic crisis in Italy. Our analysis underlines relevant differences between the two cohorts of PhD holders that graduated before the economic crisis and the two cohorts that graduated after. The latter have higher chances of obtaining fixed-term contracts and get low salaries; PhDs who graduated in 2008 and 2010 more frequently experience risk of self-employed or non-academic researchers at all. The economic crisis fragmented the terms of contracts, in particular, increasing fixed-term contracts and unemployment and furthermore, polarizing salaries (very high salary or very low salary). Further studies are necessary to understand whether this new condition is a constraint or an opportunity for PhDs in the political and social sciences.

KEYWORDS:

• Doctorate holders
• occupational attainment
• political and social sciences

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Alessandra Decataldo (Ph.D.) is associate professor at University of Milano Bicocca. Her current interests are focused on evaluation of social policy, mixed methods research, use of big data for social sciences, longitudinal analysis, experimental social research, gender-sensitive methodology. Her latest publications are: ‘Non response in web surveys. The role of SMS reminders’ (with E. Sala and C. Respi, in Rassegna italiana di Sociologia, 1/2018), ‘Is Eating in the School Canteen Better to Fight Weight Gain? A Sociological Observational Study on Nutrition in Italian Children’ (with B. Fiore, in Children and Youth Services Review, vol. 94, 2018) and ‘Valutare l’istruzione. Dalla scuola all’università’ (Evaluating education. From school to university, with B. Fiore, Carocci publisher, 2018).

Antonio Fasanella (Ph.D.) is full professor at Sapienza University of Rome. Currently, he is a member of the Research Commission of Sapienza University of Rome, deputy dean of the Department of Communication and Social Research of Sapienza University of Rome, Director of the Communication, social research, marketing Doctoral Programme. He has supervised numerous research on the topics of the evaluation of higher education, scientific research, and the risk communication. He is a member of the scientific committee of journals and series in the field of methodology of social research and evaluative research. He has written essays, papers and books on methodological and social evaluation issues.

Brunella Fiore (Ph.D.) is assistant professor at University of Milano-Bicocca. Her main interests concern: school evaluation, policy evaluation, younger and older generations, primary and secondary education, multilevel analysis, database organization, statistical technique to manage data and high-dimension dataset. She is the author of numerous essays and articles on educational and statistical topics. Her articles in the last years: ‘Improving excellence in schools: Evidence from the Italian OECD-PISA 2012 data, published on the Italian Journal of Sociology of Education’ (2015), ‘Valutare per migliorare le scuole’ (Evaluating to Improve Schools, with T. Pedrizzi eds., Mondadori publisher, 2016) and ‘Valutare l’istruzione. Dalla scuola all’università’ (Evaluating education. From school to university, with A. Decataldo, Carocci publisher, 2018).

ORCID

Alessandra Decataldo http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2748-1903

Antonio Fasanella http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8695-9869

Brunella Fiore http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0906-2270

Notes

1 ISTAT carried out, as from the month of February 2018 until April 2018, a third wave of the Survey on the vocational integration of doctorate holders. The collected information is necessary to know the times and methods of the vocational integration of those who concluded a PhD course in 2012 and 2014 at a distance of 3 and 5 years from the achievement of the degree. The results of the survey will be disseminated during 2019. For detailed information see https://www.istat.it/it/archivio/8555.