One-third of respondents to Nature’s 2022 global graduate-student survey are lukewarm about the value of their current programme. Sixty-six per cent of the PhD and masters’ students who responded think that their degree will “substantially” or “dramatically” improve their job prospects, but the rest see little or no benefit. Less than one-third agree that they expect to find a permanent job within one year of graduating, or that their programme is leaving them well prepared to eventually find a satisfying career.
“I don’t think a PhD degree will do me much good,” says survey respondent Joshua Caley, a master’s student at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, a country where the impacts of COVID‑19 and economic uncertainty continue to cloud job prospects. Caley plans to pursue a PhD after his master’s, mainly to spend more time studying his topic — the biochemical basis of age-related disease — but he doesn’t have any expectation that an advanced degree will help him to advance his career. “I have a lot of friends and colleagues who did a PhD,” he says, “and it didn’t really help them out”.
More than 3,200 self-selected respondents from around the world took part in the questionnaire (see ‘Nature’s graduate student survey’). It was the journal’s first such survey since the start of the pandemic, and the first to include master’s as well as PhD students. The results point to widespread uncertainty about career paths and the value of advanced degrees (see ‘Career concerns’).