Data Bank: Career Paths for Science Grads

As Chris Mooney points out in today’s column, many science graduates are choosing career paths that lie outside academia. This is in part because the career paths within academic science are narrowing, but it is also because the importance of science to many other fields of work is increasing. But how well are we keeping track of what those students do with their scientific knowledge?

His focus on the UCSF survey data featured in SP advisory board member Bruce Alberts’s editorial in Science is an indication that from a policy perspective, the government could expand how it keeps tabs on this.

The National Science Foundation keeps extensive data on all facets of science and engineering in the U.S. and around the world, including information on career paths of science graduates. But the breakdowns aren’t extensive, as they currently track three broad sectors: education, government, and business/industry, as you can see in this chart after the jump:

(Source: National Science Foundation/Division of Science Resources Statistics, National Survey of Recent College Graduates, 2006.)

If we know more about the fields these students are considering outside of academia (Alberts points to “public policy, government, precollege education, industry, or law”), then students themselves will better understand the power and possibilities of a science education, and we can design better policy to support them in pursuit of these myriad careers.

Image: AP/Mahesh Kumar A

Tags: STEM Education

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