Search for: All records

Abstract Whether doctoral students are funded primarily by fellowships, research assistantships, or teaching assistantships impacts their degree completion, time to degree, learning outcomes, and short- and long-term career outcomes. Variations in funding patterns have been studied at the broad field level but not comparing engineering sub-disciplines. We addressed two research questions: How do PhD student funding mechanisms vary across engineering sub-disciplines? And how does variation in funding mechanisms across engineering sub-disciplines map onto the larger STEM disciplinary landscape? We analyzed 103,373 engineering and computing responses to the U.S. Survey of Earned Doctorates collected between 2007 and 2016. We conducted analysis of variance with Bonferroni post hoc comparisons to examine variation in funding across sub-disciplines. Then, we conducted a k-means cluster analysis on percentage variables for fellowship, research, and teaching assistantship funding mechanism with STEM sub-discipline as the unit of analysis. A statistically significantly greater percentage of biomedical/biological engineering doctoral students were funded via a fellowship, compared to every other engineering sub-discipline. Consequently, biomedical/biological engineering had significantly lower proportions of students supported via research and teaching assistantships than nearly all other engineering sub-disciplines. We identified five clusters. The majority of engineering sub-disciplines grouped together into a cluster with high research assistantships and low teaching assistantships. Biomedical/biological engineering clustered in the high fellowships grouping with most other biological sciences but no other engineering sub-disciplines. Biomedical/biological engineering behaves much more like biological and life sciences in utilizing fellowships to fund graduate students, far more than other engineering sub-disciplines. Our study provides further evidence of the prevalence of fellowships in life sciences and how it stretches into biomedical/biological engineering. The majority of engineering sub-disciplines relied more on research assistantships to fund graduate study. The lack of uniformity provides an opportunity to diversify student experiences during their graduate programs but also necessitates an awareness to the advantages and disadvantages that different funding portfolios can bestow on students. 

Abstract We summarize national-scale data for Ph.D. earners in engineering or computer science from 2015 to 2019 whose post-graduate school employment is known, highlighting outcomes for biological/biomedical/biosystems engineering students. We use NSF’s Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED), which has collected information from Ph.D. recipients in the USA since 1957. The data are collected at the time of degree completion and constitute a greater than 90% response rate. Compared to all engineering and computer science disciplines, biological/biomedical/biosystems engineering has a higher proportion going to 4yr/med/research institutions (52% vs. 33%) and non-profit (3.6% vs. 2.9%) and lower proportion going to industry (33% vs. 48%), government (4.3% vs. 8.4%), and is similar for non-US positions (6.1% vs. 5.7%). Compared to 2010–2014 biological/biomedical/biosystems engineering Ph.D. recipients, more 2015–2019 recipients are going to industry (25% to 33%) and fewer to 4yr/med/research institutions (59% to 52%) and governmet (5.3% to 4.3%). Across all engineering and computer science disciplines, a smaller proportion of females entered industry (43%) compared to males (49%), while a larger proportion of females entered 4yr/med/research institutions (37%) compared to males (32%). Over half of Asian doctoral recipients entered industry, as compared to 38% of Hispanic doctoral recipients. In contrast, a higher proportion of Hispanic individuals (37%) entered 4yr/med/research institutions after their doctoral programs, as compared to 31% of Asian doctoral recipients. Black doctoral recipients had the highest proportion enter positions in government (14%) and non-profit (4%) sectors. Our results are situated in the broader literature focused on postdoctoral career, training, and employment sectors and trends in STEM. We discuss implications for graduate programs, policymakers, and researchers.