With higher education under attack, some faculty members leaving field

Written for the Hechinger Report, this article was also featured in the Boston Globe.

An exodus appears to be under way of Ph.D.s and faculty generally, who are leaving academia in the face of political, financial and enrollment crises. It’s a trend federal data and other sources show began even before Trump returned to the White House.

On top of everything else affecting higher education, this is likely to reduce the quality of education for undergraduates, experts say. Nearly 70 percent of people receiving doctorates were already leaving higher education for industry, government and other sectors, not including those without job offers or those who opted to continue their studies, according to the most recent available figures from the National Science Foundation — up from fewer than 50 percent decades ago.

As for faculty, more than a third of provosts reported higher-than-usual turnover last year, in a survey by Hanover Research and the industry publication Inside Higher Ed. That was before the turmoil of this late winter and spring.

Parents sending children to college in the fall should know that they’ll be taking classes “with a faculty member who is worried about his or her research funding and who doesn’t have the help of graduate student teaching assistants. And that’s really going to impact the quality of your student’s experience,” said Julia Kent, a vice president at the Council of Graduate Schools, who conducts research about Ph.D. career pathways.

“The quality of undergraduate education is at stake here,” Kent said.