Welcome to the website for the Early Career Doctorates Survey, sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health. The purpose of this survey is to learn about the work experiences and career paths of individuals who earned their first doctoral degree (Ph.D., M.D., Ed.D., etc.) in 2007 or later, hereafter referred to as early career doctorates. Early career doctorates include all position types (postdocs, faculty, staff, etc.) and may hold any type of doctoral degree in any field from any institution.
The work of early career doctorates is critical to the success of the U.S. academic sector and research efforts and will influence U.S. and global scientific markets for years to come. Despite the importance of early career doctorates, current surveys of this population are limited and extant workforce studies are inadequate for tracking and assessing their work patterns and contributions to the U.S. economy.
The key goals of the ECDS are:
- To improve the national statistics on early career doctorates (ECDs), regardless of where they earned their doctoral degree.
- To collect data from ECDs that can be used by funding agencies, policy makers, and other researchers to better understand the labor markets and work experiences of recent doctorate recipients.
- To establish common definitions for different types of ECDs (e.g., postdocs, junior faculty, and other nonfaculty researchers) that can be applied across institutional contexts.