PhD Done! Now What? International Scholars Navigating the U.S. Academic Job Market

• In Event: The American Dream: Cultivating Equitable Workforce Pathways for International Scholars in U.S. Higher Education

Abstract

The current outlook for recent graduates of U.S. doctoral programs who aspire to remain in the country and enter academia is looming. The COVID-19 pandemic has created a standstill for many processes within higher education institutions, including hiring freezes for academic positions. In areas such as the sciences, new faculty positions in the U.S. have dropped 70% in the past year (Langin, 2020). While the number of newly minted PhDs continues to grow, the compound effect of a slow recovery of new opportunities to enter academia will have a devastating impact for a generation of early-career scholars.
Succeeding in an academic career is more than just a matter of increasing enrollment numbers. As previous research has shown, the academic job market is disproportionately inequitable towards Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) (Baez, 2000; Cole, McGowan, & Zerquera, 2017; Johnson, Boss, George Mwangi, & Garcia, 2018; Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2017; Turner, González, & Wood, 2008). This also includes international scholars. Though there has been a decline in their enrollment, they still represent close to 20% of all graduate students within the science, technology, engineering, and math fields (Fisher, 2021). Despite the large number of international students enrolled in U.S. colleges, these students have a lower probability of successfully entering the labor force within their local community (Peri, Basso, & McElmurry, 2016).
In an already highly stratified system, international scholars in the U.S. are facing an uphill battle to enter the realms of academia. One of the main issues that will be discussed during this session is the disconnect between U.S. HEIs to actively recruit graduate students from abroad, yet once they arrive, they are mentored and socialized into the U.S. academic system with the expectation to perform as a ‘U.S. academic’ are common (Lee & Cantwell, 2012), but are promptly reminded of their “outsider status” when attempting to transitioning to the labor market. The myth of academia as a meritocratic system gets dismantled as a fallacy when it is evident that hard work is not enough. In this presentation, I review the effects that academia’s broken promises have on the successful integration of international scholars into the U.S. multicultural higher education system.

Author

• Santiago Castiello-Gutiérrez, Seton Hall University