Support the PhD Placement Project

Awhile ago, I posted a short article on PhD and the Job Market, which I referred to one of Chronicle's old article. The numbers given in the article wasn't a big picture of the entire academia in North America. Just a week ago (June 18), Chronicle has announce the PhD Placement Project.

This project will collect as many data as possible to study PhD graduates' job placement statistics. Personally, I believe this is a very important data to have. Here are my reasons:

1. Prospective graduate students should have access to information related after-graduation employment opportunities. My guess is every graduate student at some point have thought of being a professor. It is important for them to know the fact.
2. Knowing the exact number of PhD grads getting academia jobs (or even research jobs) can help universities and colleges to better plan how to modify current graduate programs to help grad students to better position themselves when they graduate.
3. Current graduate students can get to know the job market better and adjust their skill sets to position themselves for those jobs that are more available. This is will avoid the need to struggle hard to do a post-doc and not landing on any academia jobs.

Having these data, I believe it will help graduate students in different area to make wiser decisions. Currently, they have stopped the preliminary survey. You can stay up to date by reading their post here. If you hold a PhD, it would be nice to see how the project is progress. Otherwise, if know any friends who do hold one, then please share the existence of this project with them. Together, we can help create a better prospective for the future graduate students.