Making Strides in Doctoral-Level Career Outcomes Reporting: A Review of Classification and Visualization Methodologies in Graduate Education

Tammy R. L. Collins ^1* Rebekah L. Latyton ^2* Deepti Ramadoss ^3* Jennifer MacDonald ⁴ Ryan Wheeler ⁵ Adriana Bankston ⁶ C. Abby Stayart ⁷ Yi Hao ⁸ Jacqueline Robinson-Hamm ⁹ Melanie Sinche ¹⁰ Scott Burghart ¹¹ Aleshia Carlsen-Bryan ¹² Pallavi Eswara ¹³ Heather Krasna ¹⁴ Hong Xu ¹⁵ Mackenzie Sullivan ¹⁶

• ¹ Burroughs Wellcome Fund, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, United States
• ² University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, United States
• ³ University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States
• ⁴ The New School, New York City, New York, United States
• ⁵ The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, California, United States
• ⁶ Future of Research, Pittsfield, MA, United States
• ⁷ The University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, United States
• ⁸ University of Maryland College Park, College Park, MD, United States
• ⁹ Federation of Societies for Experimental Biology, Rockville, MD, United States
• ¹⁰ University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, United States
• ¹¹ The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, United States
• ¹² Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
• ¹³ Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, United States
• ¹⁴ Columbia College, Columbia University, New York City, New York, United States
• ¹⁵ National Toxicology Program Division, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIH), Durham, North Carolina, United States
• ¹⁶ University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, United States

The recent movement underscoring the importance of career taxonomies has helped usher in a new era of transparency in PhD career outcomes. The convergence of discipline-specific organizational movements, interdisciplinary collaborations, and federal initiatives has helped to increase PhD career outcomes tracking and reporting. Transparent and publicly available PhD career outcomes are being used by institutions to attract top applicants, as prospective graduate students are factoring in these outcomes when deciding on the program and institution in which to enroll for their PhD studies. Given the increasing trend to track PhD career outcomes, the number of institutional efforts and supporting offices for these studies have increased, as has the variety of methods being used to classify and report/visualize outcomes. This report comprehensively synthesizes existing PhD career taxonomy tools, resources, and visualization options to help catalyze and empower institutions to develop and publish their own PhD career outcomes. Similar fields between taxonomies were mapped to create a new crosswalk tool, thereby serving as an empirical review of the career outcome tracking systems available. Moreover, this work spotlights organizations, consortia, and funding agencies that are steering policy changes toward greater transparency in PhD career outcomes reporting. Such transparency not only attracts top talent to universities, but also propels research progress and technological innovation forward. Therefore, university administrators must be wellversed in government policies that may impact their PhD students. Engaging with government relations offices and establishing dialogues with policymakers are crucial steps toward staying informed about relevant legislation and advocating for more resources. For instance, much of the recent science legislation in the U.S. Congress, including the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) and Science Act, significantly impacts federal agency programs influencing universities. To ensure sustained development, it is imperative to support initiatives that enhance transparency, both in terms of legislation and resources. Increased funding for programs supporting transparency will aid legislatures and institutions in staying informed and responsive. Many efforts presented in this publication have received support from federal and state governments or philantrophic sources, underscoring the need for multifaceted support to initiate and perpetuate this level of systemic change.