Factors predicting doctoral students` future career perspectives: An initial look into the role of academic identities

Abstract

Increased competition of universities in Taiwan has promoted the adaptation of neo-liberal management practices within institutions. These changes have altered the career outlook of faculty from a more single focus into a multi-role perspective. This continuing role conflicts have created the misalignment of academic identity and blurring of work ideologies. Within the aspects of doctoral education, currently a decreasing trend in number of enrollments and graduation rates are seen. This is in part caused by the outgoing mobility of graduate students and the perceived difficulties in securing a job for post-graduate degree holders. As doctoral students are crucial to the future of Taiwan academia, understanding how their career perspectives are shaped is of the utmost importance. To analyzed the doctoral students’ career inclination, a survey containing their perceived importance with regards to interactions with their mentor, classmates, course design, and together with their perceived self-efficacies are collected. A total of 94 doctoral students from the two comprehensive universities in Taiwan are surveyed. Regression results show that academic identity inclined towards research only career is highly dependent on doctoral students’ coping facilitations, while teaching only career is best determined by their mentors’ provision of career opportunities, and the teaching and management oriented courses. More important, results show that a dual perspective academic identity is highly significant with the doctoral students’ mentor provision of career opportunities. These findings suggest that doctoral students’ future career are highly shaped by their experiences with their course undertaking and quality of interactions with their mentors.