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ABSTRACT
In many countries around the world, the number of new doctorate recipients graduating from universities has grown sharply in the past few decades, but the implications of this expansion for the employment situation of doctorate recipients remain largely unexplored in longitudinal studies. In Germany, as in various other countries, the expansion of doctoral education coincided with other changes in higher education that may have had a relevant impact on the careers of doctorate recipients. We explore the labour market outcomes of more than 98,000 doctorate recipients who graduated between 1995 and 2013. Focusing on differences among 19 annual graduation cohorts, we find that, beginning in the mid-2000s, newly graduating doctorate recipients had lower rates of full-time employment and were less likely to earn high incomes than graduates of the 1995–2000 period. At the same time, rates of inter-regional mobility have declined, and more new doctorate recipients remain employed in the academic sector. Differences across cohorts are robust to disaggregation along gender and disciplinary lines and persist for at least five years after graduation. We relate these findings to a stronger socialisation of doctoral students towards academic ‘excellence’, new employment options in university administration and management as well as increasing fixed-term employment in research projects. Our findings indicate that the expansion of doctoral education, as well as potential reforms in the training of doctoral candidates, must be analysed in the context of the respective university system.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Data availability statement
The IIPED dataset used in the empirical analysis includes confidential information from social security records which is subject to strict privacy regulations. The actual record linkage was performed by the Institute for Employment Research (IAB). The authors are not authorised to fully disclose and share these data. To enable replication of the work reported in this study, the authors are willing to provide interested authors with a detailed description of the data as well as the code on which the results reported in this study are based. However, the data can only be accessed on-site at the IAB. Access to the data will require clearance by the German Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs.
Notes
1 It must be noted that after 2015, Germany has experienced a decline in the number of new doctorate recipients. In the U.S., numbers of awarded doctorates have plateaued since 2015.
2 Various special clauses and exemptions exist e.g. for graduates in medicine and parents, among others. In addition, fixed-term employment is also possible beyond the 12-year period if there is third-party funding available. For further details, see the first evaluation of the Wissenschaftszeitvertragsgesetz by Jongmanns (Citation2011) as well as its most recent evaluation from 2022 by Sommer et al. (Citation2022).
3 Dissertation authors with more than 300 namesakes in the IEB dataset were excluded from the record linkage for reasons of data security.
4 The IIPED dataset currently extends to 2015. Since we use information on labour market outcomes at least two years after graduation, the final cohort we can use is 2013.
5 To be precise, the contribution limit is reduced by EUR 2 to account for rounding errors in data collection.
6 We refrain from using Tobit regressions because the contribution limit, and thus the level at which income is censored, varies over time.
7 Interregional migration therefore corresponds to a move across the borders of functional regions comprising several administrative districts (NUTS-3 units) linked by intense commuting. Employees mainly commute within these functional regions.
8 For identification of the academic sector, the public statistic was extended by a record linkage based on the names of all German universities and research institutes.
9 Five years after graduation, these shares are 21 % for the academic sector, 6 % for the non-academic public sector, and 73 % for the private sector. Results reported below are robust to using an alternative classification where we only used employer names (universities and other public research organisations) to delineate the academic employment sector. Results are available from the authors.
10 All values of time-varying controls refer to the last day of the graduation year. To measure work experience, all employment episodes are accumulated up to this day.
11 The declining share of full-time employment among women during the cohorts covered in our analysis is noteworthy because German policy makers have made substantial efforts to expand childcare facilities and make it easier for parents, and women in particular, to have both a family and a career. These efforts do not seem to be reflected in our data.
12 The share of doctorate recipients with a high income is comparatively high compared to the overall population. For example, the same share among full-time employees aged between 20 and 40, was only 6.4 % in 2000.
13 While our data allow us to identify academic employers (universities and research institutes), we cannot reliably distinguish between research and staff positions in university administration and management.