Figure 1. Students judging a career “extremely attractive” by field and stage in program.

Respondents rated the attractiveness of each career on a 5-point scale (and were instructed to ignore job availability). The scale anchors ranged from 1 (extremely unattractive) to 3 (neither attractive nor unattractive) to 5 (extremely attractive). Figure 1 shows the share of respondents who gave a rating of 5 (“extremely attractive”) to a particular career. Data are shown separately for respondents in the early stages of the PhD program (prior to completion of qualifying exams or similar milestones) and in the late stages of the PhD program (looking for a job at the time of the survey or planning to do so within the next year).