In 2024-25 the History Graduate Program undertook a project to track the progress of recent Ph.D's within and beyond academia. The attempt here is to get a sense of how our students fare a few years out from the Ph.D, the routes by which they arrive and maintain themselves in academic and non-academic positions and the range of these positions.
We collected employment data for 57 students who graduated between 2017 and 2024. The graphs below represent some of the ways in which we can answer questions about their trajectories and about how our recent students have been faring on academic, academic adjacent and non-academic job markets.
Thanks are due to undergraduate work-study student, Sophie Schwartz who collected the data, our DGSA Matthew Meyer coordinated the data collection and Duke data visualization specialist Eric Monson generated the graphs. As Director of Graduate Studies that year, Dr. Jehangir Malegam supervised the project, including the creation of employment categories, and supplied the analysis.
In these graphs, the graduation year refers to the end of August in every calendar year, since students who defended in the Fall semester (i.e. from Sept 1 onwards) could only enter employment with Ph.D. in hand during the following calendar year.
Note: we will keep refining the dataset as more information comes in.
Broad Categories of Employment
Question: What percentage of our students are in academic, non-academic or academic adjacent positions?
Distribution of Job Types by Graduating Year (as they stand in 2024)
The equivalently colored bar graphs below depict percentage of total alumni by years removed from graduation. The left-most colored bar refers to percentage of total graduates between 2017 and 2024. The grey bars at the bottom represent total numbers for every year out from graduation. The right-most bar has the smallest number of graduates since it represents those who are 7 years out, i.e. the class of 2017.
Note that the overall percentage in academia (around 58%) remains roughly steady through the seven years. There is an increase in the percentage of graduates taking academic adjacent positions 4 or 5 years out. The percentage of graduates in non-academic positions has grown slightly but this may also be because we are still gathering some early employment data on those who graduated in 2017.
The linear versions highlight what the bar graphs show: that the exchange is mostly between academic and adjacent jobs, while non-academic jobs follow an independent trajectory. It looks like those in non-academic jobs generally stay there while those who take academic positions translate these more regularly into academic adjacent positions and vice versa. To verify this, we would need more fine-grained studies.
Positions Beyond the Professoriate
Question: What kind of non-academic and academic adjacent positions have our recent Ph.Ds been taking?
The purpose of this visualization is to display (rather than track) the wide range of options for our Ph.Ds: higher ed administration, education and publishing but also the federal government, law and public history are well represented.
There is not much fluctuation here but the sample size is small so it would be unwise to extrapolate trends at this stage. Despite the small sample size we felt it was important to include the graph to dispel any sense that markets for Duke History Ph.D's are overly narrow, or that the positions out there are disconnected from the skills they have developed as graduate students.
Granulations of Academic Positions
Question: What kind of academic positions are our students taking and how has the percentage varied over the last seven years?
Within the same bar charts as visualization 1 we have subdivided the academic positions. The left-most bar again has the largest number of graduates while the one on the extreme right only has those who graduated in 2017. N/A here refers to non-academic and academic adjacent.
Note that while the overall percentage of postdocs is higher closer to time of graduation, those who are 5-7 years out are now in professorial positions. In most cases, these are tenure-track or long-term positions. There is a category we marked as "unclear" - but this refers to long-term positions at universities abroad. What is unclear is whether these long-term positions are in fact the equivalent of a tenure-track position in the US. The first years after graduation also have more adjunct positions as part of the overall percentage. This percentage fluctuates the further out one gets. It will be interesting to see what happens to graduates after their postdoctoral stints are over: do they move into tenure-track and long-term positions, into adjunct positions or into non-academic or academic adjacent positions.
Where are they now and where have they been?
With each class having only a few students the sample size is not large enough to detect patterns or make comparisons between graduating cohorts but it is useful to compare trends for each cohort since graduation.
This final visualization again offers suggestive patterns for the impact of COVID on classes that went on the market in 2020. For those who went on the market in subsequent years the typical delay in transition from postdoctoral to professorial positions has also been more pronounced. However, performance on the market has improved in 2024 as it has also in 2025 (not graphed here). 2 out of 5 members of the graduating class of 2025 received tenure-track positions, while 2 others received multi-year postdoctoral or VAP positions and 1 graduate has a long-term position in academic higher ed administration. Information is still pending for students who will defend and graduate in the summer.
