Employment Trends Among Public Health Doctoral Graduates

It is commendable that AJPH addressed employment outcomes among doctoral graduates in public health in “No Room for Complacency: Employment Trends of Recent Public Health Doctoral Graduates”¹ and “Employment Trends Among Public Health Doctoral Recipients, 2003–2015”²; however, there are a few points amiss in both the analyses and conclusions of these articles.

First, as noted in the limitations section of “Employment Trends,” the data were not collected at an ideal time. Employment outcomes do indeed vary dramatically in the period between graduation and six to 12 months after graduation. In my own experience in gathering employment outcome data among graduates of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, unemployment rates by the December after graduation are extremely low, approximately 15.5 times lower than upon graduation. This is why the national standards for collection of data on employment outcomes promulgated by the National Association of Colleges and Employers,³ including data for doctoral graduates, suggest that employment information be gathered in the December after graduation for the previous year’s graduating class.

Second, there is now another useful source of data on public health graduate employment. The Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health (ASPPH) has collected data on employment outcomes from member schools and programs, including information on doctoral graduates, for the last three years.⁴ These data, collected within approximately one year after graduation, pertain only to graduates of ASPPH member schools and programs of public health, unlike those included in the National Science Foundation’s Survey of Earned Doctorates.

The most recent ASPPH data show that, for academic year 2015–2016, 50 ASPPH member institutions reported outcomes for 869 doctoral graduates (an 80% response rate for this cohort). Of these 869 doctoral graduates, 90% were employed (73% in jobs and 17% in fellowships), 1.8% were pursuing further study, 1.6% were unemployed, and 0.8% were not seeking a job by choice or were engaged in volunteer programs; information on employment status was not available for 5.9% of the graduates. These data paint a different picture than the 22% unemployment rate reflected in the article.

In “No Room for Complacency,” Meschke notes that “the increased unemployment of recent public health graduates coincides with a time when 25% of the…public health workforce intended to retire by 2020.”^1(p1131) However, among the 631 employed doctoral graduates in the recent ASPPH data, only 14.9% found jobs in government agencies. The breakdown of other categories was as follows: academia, 38.7%; for-profit corporations, 13.5%; health care, 13.3%; nonprofit organizations, 8.4%; self-employment, 2.2%; other sectors, 0.8%; and unknown, 8.2%. My own research on employment trends among Mailman School graduates shows that government hiring has remained stable and at a relatively low proportion of hiring for several years, whereas other sectors are hiring much more rapidly.

It is likely that unemployment rates among doctoral graduates are not as high as the authors of these two articles have found and that there is not as great a disconnect between graduates’ outcomes and their employment in the public health field, especially if nongovernmental public health roles are included.