A few years ago, whilst working in an Eastern European country which shall remain nameless, I went to visit the school’s premier school of agriculture to ask them some questions about how their graduates were faring in the labour market.  “Well,” they told me, “we take this very seriously.  We do a lot of surveys of graduates and employers.”

“Really,” I said.  “And what do these surveys tell you?”

“They were very disappointing,” came the reply.  “It turns out that although we are teaching to the highest standards, employers simply aren’t using all the great skills we are teaching our graduates”. Clearly, the thought of universities checking what skills the market needed hadn’t quite reached this former socialist country, I thought to myself. 

For reasons will shortly become apparent, this story came to mind almost immediately last week when reading the Council of Canadian Academies new report Degrees of Success: The Expert Panel on Labour Market Transitions of PhD Graduates.  Now, most of what needs to be said about this report has already been said by my friend and colleague Dan Munro (see here and here) in a couple of blazingly-good twitter threads last week.  But I do want to amplify a couple of his points.  It’s not a bad report, per se.  It’s not wrong.  It just doesn’t add very much to the discussion and doesn’t really answer the hard questions that needed answering.

Let’s just look at the 6 “key messages” from the executive summary (all direct quotes).

1. The number of PhD graduates in Canada is growing while the number of open tenure-track positions is stagnant or declining.
2. Non-academic sectors have not significantly increased their uptake of PhD graduates.
3. The labour market outcomes for PhDs vary significantly by gender and discipline, and the economic return of a PhD is lower for younger graduates compared to PhDs in general.
4. Academic culture can support or hinder the transition of PhDs to the labour market.
5. PhD graduates may not be aware of the skills and abilities they could bring to a future employer, or there may be a mismatch between the capabilities desired by employers and those gained by PhD graduates during their studies.
6. PhD graduates from Canadian institutions are presented with the opportunity, or in some cases necessity, of seeking employment outside Canada following their studies.

Now, with the exception of the second clause of point 3 and the first clause of point 5, I would put all of this under the heading of “no shit, Sherlock” (the point about young graduates in point 3 is generally new, and the idea that PhD graduates “may not be aware” of their skills is an evasion – they know what their skills are, it’s just that many of them have been actively discouraged from working out how they can be applied in a non-academic setting).  This is all stuff we knew already.  In fact, it’s fair to say that knowledge of all these factors was the reason the federal government asked the CCA to look into this in the first place.  It’s great that there is now a literature review about all this, and Ross Finnie’s analysis of PhD holders’ post-graduate income paths showing negative returns to PhDs in both the humanities and the sciences is quite helpful (want to make money on a PhD?  Stick with Business faculties).  But for the most part, it’s still an exercise in re-stating the problem.

The “problem” of graduate “overproduction” has been around for decades.  Melonie Fullick wrote quite a good article on it in the Canadian context in University Affairs a few years ago.  In the American context, Michael Teitelbaum’s book Falling Behind? Boom, Bust and the Global Race for Scientific Talent persuasively makes the point – which somehow eluded the CCA report authors – that the factors governing doctoral program intake (research funding, basically) are completely divorced from those that govern professorial intake (mainly, base funding from the state).  And I think this matters a lot: graduate students are not just students.  In modern universities, they are also a factor of production.  Without their cheap labour, large chunks of the research (in STEM disciplines) and teaching (in Arts) enterprises would be in deep trouble.  And of course, there is a willing supply of people who take those positions, because hey, even a 1-in-4 shot of becoming a professor – every nerd’s dream job, especially at Canadian pay rates – are still pretty attractive odds to many.   Neither of these points ever really gets taken up in the report, despite the fact that you can’t really understand the size of the doctoral student population without taking these two points into account.

The real issues here are i) the absorptive capacity of Canadian universities for new professors, and ii) the absorptive capacity of the Canadian public and private sectors.  Amazingly, the report never even bothers to try to answer the first question; instead of trying to count the number of new hires in Canada (Statscan does not collect this figure but I am pretty sure Canadian universities would have answered a simple survey from CCA), the report handwaves around the shrinking number of assistant professorships in Canada.  And as for the latter, the report seems remarkably incurious.  In fact, it seems most of section 4.2 is an exercise in finger-pointing at the Canadian private sector: “you don’t do as much research as the American private sector does!”, “you don’t value PhDs/hire as many PhDs as the American sector does”.  All of which is true, but unhelpful.  I’m going to wager that a real inquiry into the reasons behind this is probably what ISED wanted when it asked the CCA to answer the question: “What are the main challenges that PhD students in Canada face in transitioning to the labour market”, but this report basically whiffed on that one.

To the extent that the report points to solutions it is in chapter 7, which looks at how to alter graduate training to make the jump to a non-academic life a little bit easier.  It’s a grab-bag of proposals, some good (MITACS is always the best answer because it actually works on the problem from both sides, not just helping grads see careers outside academia but also helping enterprises see the value of research), some pretty meh.  It is, though, suffused with – how can I put this? – a very Universities Canada sensibility, i.e. “look at all the great things universities are already doing to meet this problem!”  The question of how to spread good practice, or perhaps even exploring how federal research institutions could incentivize such change is left unexplored because God forbid there be a national problem in Canadian higher education where the solution involves any collective action that might infringe on institutional autonomy. 

Anyways, like I say, it’s not a bad report.  It recaps a lot of familiar arguments well and adds some useful data in a couple of areas (I suspect everyone will be using those charts on graduate earnings for the next decade or so).  But at the same time, it spends way too much time looking inwardly, at what institutions do, and not nearly enough time looking at labour market demand.  I’d say it was a typically Canadian inwardly-focussed exercise, but then again I told you about that Eastern Europe example about 800 words ago, so maybe it’s a more generalized problem within academia.