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 neoliberal 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 shape is of 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.



Author Information
Gregory Ching, Fu Jen Catholic University, Taiwan
Yueh-Luen Hu, National ChengChi University, Taiwan

Paper Information
Conference: IICEHawaii2021
Stream: Higher education

This paper is part of the IICEHawaii2021 Conference Proceedings (View)
Full Paper
View / Download the full paper in a new tab/window


To cite this article:
Ching G., & Hu Y. (2021) Factors Predicting Doctoral Students’ Future Career Perspectives: An Initial Look into the Role of Academic Identities ISSN: 2189-1036 – The IAFOR International Conference on Education – Hawaii 2021 Official Conference Proceedings https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2189-1036.2021.36
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2189-1036.2021.36


Virtual Presentation


Comments & Feedback

Place a comment using your LinkedIn profile

Comments

Share on activity feed

Powered by WP LinkPress

Share this Research

Posted by James Alexander Gordon