Higher Education and Employment in Russia: Recent Ph.D.s on the national and international labor markets

Anna Smolentseva

Over recent decades Russian higher education including its doctoral level has experienced significant change. An increasing number of new PhDs are not employed in traditional academic sector, that definitely needs new academic staff, and tend to work for business companies. It can be supposed that the PhD degree is changing its status in contemporary Russia: under massification of graduate and postgraduate education, it is ceasing to be a privilege of academic community and possibly is becoming a mass phenomenon of "knowledge society". High status of the degree featured in the Soviet time and then lost, currently is restoring, especially in certain social groups (e.g. officiary). However, the issue of the degree in its various dimensions is still little examined. The goal of the project is to study the social status of PhD degree under conditions of changing labor market of Post-Soviet Russia. The research is focused on recent PhDs, who obtained their degrees in the period of 2000-2002. During the project, it is planned to accomplish the following: to compose a social portrait of new generation of PhD holders by studying their demographic and social characteristics; to analyze motivation and attitudes of recent PhDs towards degree attainment, and the process of study; to estimate an influence of PhD degree (including factor of field) on the study-to-work transition, career achievements and income, as well as current job satisfaction; to examine the structure of PhDs' employment (the ratios of the academic and non-academic employment, national and international labor markets). A complex of quantitative and qualitative methods of data collection and analysis will be employed.

About Anna Smolentseva

Anna Smolentseva is Research Fellow at the Center for Sociological Studies at Moscow State University, Russia. She holds a doctorate (candidate of sciences) in sociology from Moscow State University (1998). Her scholarly interests are in the field of sociology of education, especially higher education, and involve the process of transformation of Russian higher education, relationships between higher education and labor market, and organizational change in higher education.