An Academic Job Slump is Making Graduate Students Depressed

by Akane Otani
11:46 AM EDT
April 24, 2015

An unforgiving job market and insufficient emotional support can make graduate school a tough slog—so much so that, at the University of California at Berkeley, 47 percent of Ph.D. students and 37 percent of master's students appear to be depressed, according to a new report.

For the study (pdf), released by Berkeley's Graduate Division and Graduate Assembly this week, researchers surveyed 790 graduate students on their academic progress, satisfaction with life, and mental health. They found the top predictor of students' well-being was how they felt about their job prospects.

"Students who feel upbeat about their career prospects are significantly happier and less depressed than students who don't," the report said.

Pessimism about the job search—which one student described as "tremendously uncertain, and thus fear-inducing"—colored many of the anonymous responses recorded in the report. Another reported feeling lost in a system that offers little support to graduates pursuing careers outside academia, and a third felt wholly unprepared to take on an academic job after graduation.

"I think that in some sense it is a failure of both my adviser and the graduate system to even admit people like me into Ph.D. programs," the student said.

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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-24/an-academic-job-slump-is-making-graduate-students-depressed