Taulbee In-Depth: Employment of New PhDs Outside North America

By Betsy Bizot, Director of Statistics, CRA

Taulbee In-Depth: Employment of New PhDs Outside North America

By Betsy Bizot, Director of Statistics, CRA

Since 2006, the CRA Taulbee Survey has collected data on PhD recipients in a way that allows us to look at patterns in their employment and demographics.  This article considers PhDs who take employment outside North America: where do they go, who goes, and what kind of employment do they take? The analysis uses data from the 2006 – 2011 Taulbee Surveys from US and Canadian Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and (since 2008) Information departments on 10,452 PhDs.  Table 1 shows the distribution of employment location for these new PhDs, indicating that 88.8% of those whose location is known remain in North America. During the six years included in this analysis, the percentages remaining in North America vary from 87.9 to 90.6 with no discernible trend, and therefore results for all years are combined.

Table 1. PhD Employment Location, Overall and by Gender/Ethnicity/Citizenship, CRA Taulbee 2006-2011

Table 1 also shows the employment destination for six demographic subgroups: male and female for each of the three citizenship/ethnicity categories of foreign students (nonresident aliens or temporary visa holders), US/Canadian citizen and permanent resident underrepresented minorities (URM; includes African-American, Native American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander, and Hispanic), and US/Canadian citizen and permanent resident majority (Asian, White). On average, foreign students are more likely to choose employment outside of North America than citizens and permanent residents, but they are still highly likely to remain in North America.

The percentage of new PhDs taking international employment according to Taulbee data is comparable to that found by the Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED).  The SED is sent annually by NSF to all individuals completing PhDs at US institutions.  SED results therefore summarize employment data (including location) as reported by the new PhDs themselves, a different source from the department-provided data used by Taulbee. Not surprisingly, the SED shows a very small number of new PhDs with “location unknown,” but their numbers agree well with the Taulbee results for Taulbee’s known locations.  The 2011 SED report on Doctorate Recipients From U.S. Universities: 2011  (http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/sed/2011/start.cfm) shows that 87.8% of all those who received PhDs in Computer Sciences in that academic year were remaining in the US after graduation (table 59); of temporary visa holders who had definite postgraduate commitments, 81.2% were remaining in the US (table 52).

The remaining comparisons will combine the United States and Canada into “North America.” PhDs whose employment location was not known will be omitted; PhDs for whom the other variable in question is not known (e.g. employment type or specialty area) will also be omitted.

Employment Location by Specialty Area

What specialty areas are particularly prevalent in employment of US and Canadian PhDs outside of North America?

Among the 20 specialty areas included in Taulbee, the areas with the highest percentages of new PhDs going outside North America (compared to 12.1% overall) are Networks, 19%, and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Theory and Algorithms, both 15%.

The areas with the highest percentage of new PhDs remaining in North America (compared to 88.8% overall) are Informatics, 94%; and Human-Computer Interaction, High-Performance Computing, Information Science, and Software Engineering, all 92%.

Employment Location by Employment Type

Taulbee employment types are those in academia (tenure-track, non-tenure-track teaching, or non-tenure-track research in a PhD-granting department; any type of position in a non-PhD computing department; or postdoctorates ). Non-academic positions include those with industry and those with government, most often government research labs.

Table 2. PhD Employment Location by Employment Type, CRA Taulbee 2006-2011.

Table 2 shows that by far the largest single group are those taking industry employment in North America (4,201; 58% of those employed in North America over the six years from 2006-2011).  Industry is also the largest employment type for those employed in India (65%). By contrast, in China and in Other, the largest percentages are going to tenure-track academic positions in PhD-granting departments (40% and 33% respectively), and of those going to the EU, 45% are going for a postdoc. The most popular specialty areas for postdocs in the EU are Theory and Algorithms (20%), Artificial Intelligence (14%), and Robotics and Vision (13%).

For the past six years, employment outside of North America has been holding constant at about 12% of new PhDs. This review sheds some light on who they are, where they go, and what kinds of employment they take.