PhDs who leave UK more likely to stay in academia, study finds

Doctoral graduates who leave the UK after completing their PhDs are significantly more likely to remain employed in academia, a study suggests.

Using the Higher Education Statistics Agency’s Destination of Leavers from Higher Education (DLHE) survey, researchers tracked the careers of almost 30,000 doctoral graduates who left UK universities over a four-year period to assess how many remained in academic research or teaching, both in the UK and outside it.

According to the study published in the journal Higher Education, just under 8 per cent of the 28,535 PhD graduates who took their qualifications between 2013 and 2017 went abroad, with Europe (900 PhDs), North America (740) and Oceania (170) the most popular destinations.

Of those leavers, 75 per cent of PhD graduates who were based overseas six months after graduation but had returned to the UK after three-and-a-half years were academically employed.

That compares to 56 per cent who remained in the UK for these two milestones, indicating a clear “mover’s advantage” for aspiring academics, says the study by Alice Dias Lopes, from the University of Edinburgh, and Sally Hancock, from the University of York.

For those who had left the UK six months after their PhD and stayed overseas, the figure was 63 per cent, the study adds. For those who were UK-based after six months but based overseas three years later, it was 67 per cent.

Those who moved abroad did not earn significantly more than those who stayed in the UK after six months but they were much more likely to have a postdoctoral contract – 72 per cent more likely – and were 16 per cent more likely to have a teaching and research contract, explains the paper.

PhD graduates who received funding for their doctoral studies are more likely to be internationally mobile, although only by 1.1 percentage point above those who were self-funded, the paper also says.

Women are 2.4 percentage points less likely to move abroad than men, while STEM graduates are also more likely to be mobile, the paper continues.

A much bigger factor regarding international mobility is whether PhD graduates went to the universities of Cambridge or Oxford – with graduates from the UK’s oldest universities nearly 5 percentage points more likely to go abroad than post-92 PhD graduates.

Dr Dias Lopes told Times Higher Education that the decision by Oxbridge PhDs to leave the country was likely to “stem from a deliberate choice regarding their career trajectories rather than out of necessity, as they could easily secure jobs within the UK”.

“Additionally, their academic prestige allows them to find positions in other [European Union] countries,” she added. 

For other Russell Group institutions keen to ensure their PhD graduates could compete in the academic labour market, “cultivating and making partnerships with EU institutions [was] essential”, Dr Dias Lopes advised.

On why PhD mobility might offer a “mover’s advantage”, the authors speculate that “international mobility may also act as a positive signal of productive capability, particularly in relation to the traits sought and rewarded by global science: intercultural competence, an international network, collaborative working”.

“If international experience remains a relatively exclusive experience among UK-domiciled doctoral graduates, its potential for creating distinction in the academic labour market – and the conceptual insights afforded by human capital and signalling theory, will persist,” they state.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com