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The new generation of scholars differs in many ways from its predecessor of just a few decades ago. Academia once consisted largely of men in traditional single-earner families. Today, men and women fill the doctoral student ranks in nearly equal numbers and most will experience both the benefits and challenges of living in dual-income households. This generation also has new expectations and values, notably the desire for flexibility and balance between careers and other life goals. However, changes to the structure and culture of academia have not kept pace with young scholars' desires for work-family balance.Do Babies Matter?is the first comprehensive examination of the relationship between family formation and the academic careers of men and women. The book begins with graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, moves on to early and mid-career years, and ends with retirement. Individual chapters examine graduate school, how recent PhD recipients get into the academic game, the tenure process, and life after tenure. The authors explore the family sacrifices women often have to make to get ahead in academia and consider how gender and family interact to affect promotion to full professor, salaries, and retirement. Concrete strategies are suggested for transforming the university into a family-friendly environment at every career stage.The book draws on over a decade of research using unprecedented data resources, including the Survey of Doctorate Recipients, a nationally representative panel survey of PhDs in America, and multiple surveys of faculty and graduate students at the ten-campus University of California system..

For several decades, economists have been warning the academic community that graduate training has been too tightly focused on careers in higher education, using the apprenticeship model in which students are trained to become tenure‐track faculty at research‐focused institutions. These jobs are simply not growing at the same rate as graduate admissions. In biomedical research, the mismatch in supply and demand has now been widely recognized. Other disciplines have begun these discussions, but for smaller fields, employment trends are more difficult to identify because they are subsumed in aggregated national statistics. For non‐biomedical biological fields in particular, such as ecology, using biology statistics may be inappropriate since trends within the field may be obscured by the strong signal from biomedical disciplines. Here, we use the 2013 Survey of Doctorate Recipients (SDR) to investigate career paths for ecology Ph.D. recipients in the United States, and present the first fine‐scale national profile of careers in ecology. Our results demonstrate that while involuntary unemployment is low for ecology Ph.D. recipients (3.3%) and job satisfaction is high, the assumptions of the prevailing apprenticeship model are inappropriate: Less than 20% of employed recent ecology Ph.D. graduates are in tenure‐track positions at a Ph.D.‐granting university. Accordingly, proactive steps could be taken to create more realistic expectations about graduate training and preparation for diverse careers. Further, the SDR data provide demographic profiles for ecology. Ethnic diversity has remained low in ecology (7.5% non‐Caucasian for Ph.D. recipients since 2000). Gender balance in career‐track positions appears to have improved by multiple metrics. However, women are overrepresented in non‐tenure‐track academic positions, where access to resources that support professional advancement may be limited relative to tenure‐track jobs, and salary disparities appear for women in private academic institutions. Thus, while there is much good news in these data, we suggest that ecology as a field would benefit from (1) a broad analysis of the training required to make Ph.D.s best prepared for jobs outside of the research‐oriented tenure track and (2) continued attention to increasing diversity and equity.

We examine how the academic labor market is racially segmented along geographic and disciplinary lines. Results from a national survey indicate that black faculty in the sciences and engineering are found disproportionately in Southern, historically black institutions, areas with sizable black populations, and, independent of the black doctoral labor supply, in certain fields.

Using data from the Survey of Earned Doctorates by the National Science Foundation, this study examines factors influencing foreign doctorate recipients' decisions to stay in the United States after they complete their degrees. This study expands the existing literature on human capital theory on migration decision by exploring the variables that appear to be associated with one's migration decision, which takes into account the prestige of degrees and the home country context. The findings suggest that the foreign doctorate recipients with a prestigious doctoral degree were less likely to stay in the United States. The home country's economic conditions relative to those of the United States also significantly influenced one's migration decision. The foreign doctorate recipients' odds of staying in the United States increased when the unemployment rate gap between the home country and the United States widened. Lastly, the country of origin was important in predicting migration decisions for foreign doctorate recipients.