Assuming Mouton and colleagues’ survey results are representative, they found that about 53% of all PhD graduates remained with the same employer both before and after graduating. Photo: Supplied
What are the employment prospects for young people who do a doctorate in South Africa today? Evidence suggests that it isn’t very good.
In 2022, researchers at Stellenbosch University led by Johann Mouton published results of a tracer study of PhD graduates from South African universities from 2000 to 2018. They aimed to track the career trajectories of all South African PhD graduates in these years. The study was “of strategic importance given the government’s efforts to ensure optimal employability of all doctoral graduates”. In other words, the government wants PhD graduates to get jobs. But the government also wants more people to get PhDs, and has set a target of 5 000 PhDs a year — up from the 2018 count of about 3 300.
Assuming Mouton and colleagues’ survey results are representative, they found that about 53% of all PhD graduates remained with the same employer both before and after graduating. Most of these people were working in higher education. Another 23% found new employment or changed employers within the first year after graduating, 21% did a postdoctoral fellowship immediately after graduating and another 2.3% could not find work in the first year after graduating.
The survey gives an idea of what each respondent was doing immediately before and after graduating, so one can see what kinds of pre-graduation work situations predict what kind of post-graduation work outcomes. Especially interesting is which PhD graduates ended up in postdoctoral fellowships.
Before graduating, most of the survey respondents (nearly 60%) reported being registered as part-time PhD students. The authors assume that being a part-time student means the candidates were working full-time while studying. Of these part-time PhDs, only a small fraction (about 8%) went on to do a postdoctoral fellowship after graduating.
By contrast, of those who were registered as full-time students during their PhD — those who were not in full-time work — 41% went on to do postdoctoral fellowships after their PhD. These people were a minority of all respondents in the survey (about 40%), but made up about 76% of all reported postdocs.
In other words, the postdoc cohort is mostly made up of people who were full-time students all the way through. This group was also significantly younger at graduation (average age 34) than those who didn’t do a postdoc (average age 42). And more than a quarter of those who did postdocs were in fellowships for more than four years. Also, those registered as full-time students before graduating were three times more likely to be unemployed in their first year post-PhD (1.7%) compared with those who had previously been part-time students (0,6%).
Postdoctoral fellowships aren’t jobs, so they don’t represent “optimal employability”. Postdocs are technically registered as students, who earn stipends (not salaries), even though they already have a PhD and aren’t registered for any degree. Universities do this to avoid income tax. The stipends they pay postdocs are relatively low and stagnant, even though postdocs are required to do academic work — which many permanent academics cannot do, because they don’t have a PhD themselves — such as publishing academic research and supervising PhD students.
It’s unsurprising that a very small number of part-time PhD students went on to do a postdoctoral fellowship after graduating, because this would probably be a demotion from their previous employment.
Mouton and colleagues’ findings give us a crucial insight into the workings of the “academic pipeline”. They suggest that PhD holders do not seem to all have equal chances for good employment after graduation. Rather, there are parallel pipelines, where graduates’ employment trajectories and prospects seem to be much more strongly shaped by what they were doing before they finished their PhD.
The outlook for people who do a full-time PhD have a much higher likelihood — a two in five chance — of ending up in underemployment as a postdoc, even though these people will be more highly qualified than the roughly 50% of permanently employed academics who don’t have a PhD. The way the academic pipeline works punishes early PhD graduates. Yet the government wants to increase the number of PhDs graduating every year.
Academic salaries and working conditions
Mouton and colleagues’ survey doesn’t tell us whether the employed PhDs were in permanent or temporary jobs, or what they earned. But we know from the Council on Higher Education’s annual VitalStats documents that consistently two-thirds of employed academics (with and without PhDs) are in non-permanent jobs. This is another cause for concern when evaluating prospective academics’ career prospects, both because of job insecurity and also because the salaries in temporary jobs are often so much lower than in permanent ones. Universities routinely violate the principle of equal pay for equal work.
I was one of those unfortunates who didn’t find a permanent academic job for many years. I did my PhD as a full-time student and ended up spending five years as a postdoc. I don’t know of any available sector-wide academic salary data, but I can say that what I earned in my 11 years of temporary university work is pretty sad. Here’s a summary of my academic jobs and pay between 2011 and 2022:
2011-2012: Intern research psychologist. I had an honours degree and was registered for a master’s. Salary: R7 000 a month gross in the first year, R7 500 in the second.
Mid 2013-mid-2015: National Research Foundation (NRF) scholarship for full-time PhD study. R100 000 a year (R8 300 a month).
Mid-2015-mid-2016: Research consultant for an ethics research centre (still full-time PhD student). R330 an hour, with variable hours in a month. Monthly take-home ranged from R3 000 to R12 000.
June-November 2016: I applied for a permanent lecturer job, where the advertised salary was about R550 000 a year gross. I didn’t get it but the department asked me to do the work for one semester. I was paid R8 300 a month.
December 2016-December 2019: Postdoctoral fellow. Stipend: R220 000 a year, or R18 300 a month. Graduated with a PhD in 2017. No tax, no annual increases.
January-July 2020: Fixed-term contract lecturer at a university in Norway. Salary: 54 000 Norwegian kroner a month. It was the first time I was paid a proper academic salary.
July 2020-March 2022: Postdoctoral fellow in South Africa. Funded by the NRF and the department of science and innovation. Stipend: R250 000 a year or R21 000 a month. No tax, no annual increases.
April-November 2022: Permanent associate professor at another university in Norway. Again I received a proper associate professor’s salary.
Apart from the jobs in Norway, these salaries are poor for someone with as much tertiary education as me. By way of comparison, intern clinical psychologists with whom I studied were earning more than R20 000 in 2011, in their first jobs in the state psychiatric hospitals.
Looking back now, it seems obvious that my low salaries early on helped enable further underemployment later. A postdoctoral fellowship is not a step up for someone who already had a job that remunerated them appropriately for their master’s qualification.
Based on the information available, plus my own impressions from working in higher education for 12 years, I’d say that choosing the academic career path today does not give young people very good prospects. Secure, well-paid jobs in universities do exist but there is an unacceptably high chance that aspiring entrants will not get them and will end up in long periods of underemployment and job insecurity.
The government seems to have uncritically adopted the ideas of human capital theory, which believes that upskilling the population will lead to economic growth. But this view ignores the sociology and economics of the academic pipeline itself, and fails to answer the obvious question: what will happen to all these PhD graduates if they can’t find good work? Some possible answers are prolonged financial instability, cynicism and heartbreak.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Mail & Guardian.