Harvard Affiliates Say Social Science Ph.D. Job Prospects Are Improving, But Still Grim

As social science Ph.D. candidates set to complete their programs in 2014 prepare to enter the job market, several Harvard affiliates said that securing social science positions in academia is now easier than it has been since the start of the economic recession, particularly for graduating Harvard Ph.D.s. And although they voiced concerns about a still-competitive job market that they say is made even more compact by current nationwide trends towards reducing tenure-track positions, they say these cuts have not significantly impacted Harvard job seekers.

“[The job market] might have bounced back a bit, but it’s still seriously competitive, and I think it’s going to remain that way for some time, especially if you’re talking in particular about research,” said Kenneth J.D. Allen, a third-year graduate student in the psychology department.

Gabriel Chodorow-Reich, an associate of the economics department who will assume an assistant professor position in 2014, said that the market is “back to being sort of a steady pace,” after acknowledging that the financial crisis had set back hiring for both public and private schools.

Data on job placement rates for recent Ph.D.s at Harvard and nationwide is hard to come by. Most signs indicate, however, that Harvard Ph.D.s are finding jobs—some Harvard social science departments post lists of recent graduate students’ job placements, and Harvard has placed at or near the top in a number of recent rankings of graduate school programs’ Ph.D. placement rates.

“The level of panic that I’ve seen has actually decreased a little bit in the last year or two, at least among my fellow students in the government department,” said Colin M. Brown, a Ph.D. candidate.

But while hiring generally is slowly getting back on track, multiple Harvard social scientists expressed concern that hiring for tenured positions might not be.

“There have been attempts by universities to essentially cut costs and have a more flexible labor force which means for various reasons that they don’t want to always use tenure-track appointments,” said Arthur P. Spirling, an associate professor in the government department. “And there has been quite a lot of discussion in the academe about this kind of movement with many people generally disapproving of it.”

Allen agreed that the increase in non-tenured track positions, including at Harvard, came from the need to be cost-effective.

“They have to meet the needs of their students using non-tenured faculty, which is troubling for graduate students,” he said. “It’s a scary thing.”

According to Margaret T. Frye, a postdoctoral fellow in the sociology department who will cover an assistant professor position at Princeton next academic year, this trend of favoring non-tenure-track hires over tenure-track hires has created a shortage of “the kinds of jobs that are ideal to conduct research.”

According to Spirling, however, Harvard has consistently been able to place its political science Ph.D. graduates in a tenure-track career.

“Whether it will play out the same way for everyone in the quality scale of academia I don’t know, and my sense is that these trends of hiring more and more non-tenure track faculty will continue,” he said.

According to Frye, another reason why social science Ph.D.s struggle to find employment is that they do not receive enough financial support from their institutions. Frye added, however, that Harvard seems to be doing a better job than other universities in supporting its social science Ph.D. candidates.

“My sense is that in terms of financial support for graduate students, Harvard is able to support its students quite well, but the broader issue is that there are just…not that many jobs,” she said.

The competitiveness of the job market is also causing an increasing number of social science graduate students to search for employment outside of academia, social scientists said.

Benjamin Golub, a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows who will become an assistant professor of economics at Harvard in 2015, said that the effects of the recession have altered the type of careers that Ph.D. candidates decide to pursue.

“Mostly [recessions] change the outside options, they change where people would go,” he said. “If consulting firms and finance firms are hiring less, as they do in a recession, then it really makes it more competitive at every level.”

“Some [political science] graduates go off to fulfill roles like data scientists for places like Facebook and Google,” Spirling said. “So those with quantitative skills that they built up during their Ph.D. process have generally found it relatively straightforward to find non-academic employment.”

Brown said that skills like statistical analysis, theoretical development, and modeling, give social science PhDs. an advantage in finding employment in the private sector, particularly in government and business analysis.

—Staff writer Francesca Annicchiarico can be reached at francesca.annicchiarico@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @FRAnnicchiarico.

—Staff writer John P. Finnegan can be reached at finnegan@thecrimson.com. Follow him on Twitter @finneganspake.