There’s life outside academia – and my friends have found it

We have all read the articles and tweets by academics on their 10th fixed-term contract or 10th year of casual work – brilliant minds who want to be tenured academics but are unable to find a permanent job and are wrestling with the question of when to cut their losses.

Times Higher Education recently ran two such accounts, one titled “Stop telling me I’ll get a permanent job eventually. I know I probably won’t”. Whenever I hear these stories, I think of my friends – let’s call them Andy and Eva – who both said enough was enough but did not wait 10 years to do it.

I met Andy and Eva while we were doing our PhDs at one of Australia’s top universities. I graduated in May 2021, and they graduated soon after. They both assumed at that point that they would become academics, as I have done. They would apply for academic jobs, they would go to interviews and, eventually, a tenured academic position would be bestowed upon them.

So, they applied for academic jobs. Andy applied for 10 months and Eva for 18. But after failing to secure interviews, they started to look elsewhere. Andy is now employed in the private sector, at one of the big four accountancy firms, and Eva in the public sector, working for the federal government. Less than two years out from their PhDs, they are both employed in full-time permanent positions.

One of the jobs for which Andy applied was a postdoctoral position that attracted 150 applicants. That many people vying for one job is just crazy, but it’s not unusual in the modern academy. Eva secured casual teaching work, but it was simply not enough to support herself and her family. With ever-increasing mortgage repayments, she could no longer continue “chasing the dream”.

The pleasures of academia have not entirely been expunged for them by the pleasures of secure full-time employment. Andy plans on working his way up the corporate ladder, but he tells me he’s considering taking on some casual teaching on the side. And Eva would still like an academic position – but she is clear-eyed enough to recognise that if she was unable to secure an entry-level academic position while she had multiple recent publications under her belt, she is likely to find it even harder as the currency of her publications diminishes. Not one to mince her words, Eva puts it this way: “An academic who stops publishing is as good as dead!” – her take on the “publish or perish” adage.

I apprehensively asked Andy and Eva whether, if they had known then what they know now, they would have even started their doctorates. But my worries about adding to the pile of dispiriting articles saying: “Don’t do a PhD – it won’t lead to a job” were misplaced.

For Andy, the answer was an enthusiastic yes; he loved the PhD experience. But with the benefit of hindsight, he would have started thinking about the endgame before he even started his doctorate. “Something no one tells you is that without planning and career structuring, you should not expect to get an academic position,” he said. What Andy means by planning is ensuring you get teaching experience and publish papers as you go along. Don’t expect to walk out of university with just a PhD and expect anyone to give you a job.

Eva’s response was more measured, but it was still positive. “I wanted an academic career, which didn't happen, but I got a job that I like based on my research and analytical skills, demonstrated through my PhD and publications. So still a win/win,” she told me.

These experiences belie the stories you hear about how miserable and stressful the PhD experience is. Most people I know enjoyed it. For Andy, the constant sense of rejection that accompanied being unable to find a job was more emotionally demanding than anything he encountered during his PhD. But when I think about what my friends went through (and the situations so many others are in), it does make me wonder what we should be telling prospective PhD students to expect.

One of the major factors that impeded Andy and Eva’s job searches is that neither were geographically mobile. They both have families and were therefore restricted to jobs in Sydney. To maximise your chances of an academic job, you need to be on the international job market. Or, at the very least, open to relocating. Armidale, the home of the University of New England, where I found a job, is a six-hour drive from Sydney.

But even being flexible with geography might not be enough; there are plenty of stories from academics all over the world about increased casualisation in universities. And, as the recent THE pieces underline, teaching experience and peer-reviewed publications offer no guarantees, either.

Perhaps we need to be more upfront about this. My message to would-be PhD students would be: “You will thoroughly enjoy the PhD experience and it will help prepare you for many jobs – but don’t count on an academic one.”

Michelle de Souza is a lecturer at the University of New England.