PHD Rankings vs Job security?

[phosphorus]

I am most familiar with humanities academia... in the humanities basically if you don't attend one of the top 10 schools and/or publish something phenomenal out of the gate you become essentially unemployable or trapped in precarity for 10 years without stable work moving from town to town when you contracts expire and you become lay-off.

How important is "pedigree" or attending a well-known and respected university in nursing academia? I'm contemplating a PHD at some point, but part of the reason I went into nursing was to avoid having to move solely for work & make the personal compromises academia forces on people in the humanities. Locally I've seen lower tier universities hiring from comparable schools and even from their own students, whereas in the humanities this is unusual. Even lower ranked schools were hiring from the best schools (there's too many programs and too few jobs).

[UVA Grad Nursing]

Phosphorus:

I think much of it deals with what type of University you hope to teach at after you graduate. In this way it is not that different from PhD hiring practices in the social sciences (my own particular background).

Do you want to be at a research-based university and have your own research program? If yes, where you go does matter. Not as much for the 'name' or cachet, but for your own particular experience working on NIH-funded research teams. My University is a Research Intensive (Carnegie classification), and all tenure-track faculty are expected to bring in research funding (R-01, T-centers, etc). New hires on the tenure-track are expected to either bring in their own funded research already, or have NIH-funding soon.

All of our PHD students are required to submit research proposals externally for their dissertation studies, and over 50% land external funding (ANF, STT, or NINR/HRSA). This track record of externally-funded research on their CVs makes them very attractive when they hit the job markets. Most of our PHD grads who are seeking faculty positions at other research-based schools do quite well (recent grads have ended up at Hopkins, Rochester, Miami, Boston College, West Virginia, etc for their first jobs as newly-minted PhDs).

In nursing research, external funding (especially NIH) is key. This is likely even more important that publications.

If you want to stay close to home and want to be at a school that focuses on teaching, then where you go may not matter as much. But if you want to be on the faculty at a top school, go to a PHD program where you can be mentored to be a researcher.

[czyja, MSN, RN]

Hi -

I am a PhD student at UCSF - the situation here is much like the one described by UVA_Grad above. His posting is spot on and I agree with him complelety.

Another important consideration in choosing a PhD program is your proposed area of research. You will want to be at an institution that has the faculty resources to support and guide you.

I would also add that if one is particularily interested in a teaching career in nursing, then a PhD may not necessarily be the best choice. There is a demand in the a smaller programs (ie not the ten or so big university programs) for curriculum experts, distance learning experts, etc. If teaching were my primary goal, as opposed to research, I would have strongly considered a doctorate in education.

If on the other hand, you want to have a research oriented career, then I think going to one of the universities with a serious track record of NIH funding for its grad students is a good choice.

The demand for nursing faculty is expected to increase dramatically over the next few years, far outpacing the number of grads. I think we will continue to see lower ranked programs (by this I mean their ranking in NIH funding, not their quality) continue to hire from similar institutions. Additionally, I think the average age of a newly minted nursing PhD is about 50, providing for a much shorter career than your average English Lit PhD 28 year old. So the job market in academic nursing is very different from the job market in the humanities. I went to the community college here in San Fransico prior to transfereing to a four year school for my BS. Most of the English, History, Sociology faculty all went to Harvard, Stanford, Cal, etc for their PhDs. This speaks to the disproportionare number of grads compared to the the number of jobs in these fields. Nursing is a very different case.

[Mission]

I agree with the previous posters. I am also a PhD student at a research intensive university, though the nursing school itself is quite small. All of the new faculty and post-docs we have coming in are from similarly research intensive schools.

If you are interested in doing research than finding and adviser with similar research interests and funding for that research as just as critical as the other factors discussed.

[phosphorus]

Thanks you all for the advice, it's helpful and nursing does sound different from the humanities. My true love is teaching. At the same time I would like to do work, but primarily on philosophical, political, and economic theory around nursing (which is all grant weary as I understand it). Empirical quantitative research isn't really my thing.