By Vimal Patel, January 22, 2015

Due in part to a weakening academic job market, some colleges and higher-education groups are scrambling to collect data on what sorts of jobs Ph.D.’s are getting. The American Historical Association recently pinpointed where 2,500 history Ph.D. recipients were working, while many university departments and individual researchers conduct formal and informal tracking projects of their own.

But those efforts, while lauded for shedding at least some light on Ph.D. employment outcomes, offer only disparate snapshots of the labor market and ultimately do not allow for comparisons because of a lack of uniform data.

Now the Council of Graduate Schools is organizing a new effort to create a set of standards for what information to collect about Ph.D.’s and how to collect it. If the project goes well, it could be the first step toward establishing a national clearinghouse for Ph.D. jobs that would potentially allow prospective students to compare career outcomes for different programs.

“As students consider pursuing a graduate degree,” said Suzanne Ortega, the council’s president, “they need to have a very clear notion of the full range of career opportunities that are likely to be available to them upon degree completion.”

In recent months the council has begun to garner support for a national tracking effort, making it a key topic at a meeting last September and exploring the idea in a report, “Understanding Ph.D. Career Pathways for Program Improvement.” The report was paid for by the Andrew W. Mellon and Alfred P. Sloan Foundations.

Ms. Ortega said that before the study reached its conclusion—that reliable, comparable data on Ph.D. careers could be a valuable resource for colleges—the council was “agnostic and completely objective about whether a national effort was needed.” The September meeting found “strong calls” from graduate deans and others for the council to take on a greater role and devise a survey and standards to track Ph.D. career paths, the report stated.

Ms. Ortega said the next step would be meeting with survey experts and researchers already tracking alumni to create such standards.

While there appears to be a growing consensus that some kind of national-level tracking is needed, many obstacles exist. Even the council’s more immediate and modest goal of creating a shared set of standards on data collection faces a variety of hurdles.

Here are five issues any college that wants to track doctorate recipients must consider:

Tight Resources. One reason for creating a set of national standards would be to cut down on the costs and inefficiency of individual universities’ spending time and resources to create their own surveys and methodologies. But collecting data for a comprehensive survey would involve considerable staff time.

A couple of years ago, John A. Stevenson, dean of the University of Colorado at Boulder’s graduate school, conducted a “quick and dirty” survey of several departments to find out where Ph.D. students were five and 10 years after earning their doctorates. “What I would need to do something more ambitious,” he said, “is staff support that I currently don’t have.”

Deciding What to Collect. Data that indicate an economics Ph.D. is now working in government, for example, could mean he or she is with a city budget agency or the Federal Reserve. So how granular must the data be to be useful? Similarly, how should such an effort account for differences among and within disciplines?

A survey of where history Ph.D.’s work might have a checkbox for employment at a nonprofit organization, but some historians wonder whether that should be further divided into libraries, museums, or other types of nonprofit groups. For art-history Ph.D.’s, a “museums” category might need to be broken down even further. The challenge is maintaining the flexibility to accommodate disciplinary differences while still having set categories that would allow for national comparisons.

James R. Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, likened the process to mapping out a reference book. “The hardest and most interesting part of creating a reference book is deciding what your conceptual categories are,” he said. “Once you have your categories, and once you’ve gotten all of your institutions to participate, I think the research part is not that difficult.”

Data Fatigue. At a time when federal and state governments are demanding more data collection by colleges through often-burdensome rules, some question whether universities will want to saddle themselves with more.

Professors are already wary of many data-collection efforts that have been imposed on colleges on the undergraduate side, said Bruce Weinberg, a labor economist at Ohio State University who has tracked Ph.D. students. “There’s some reluctance to see the same kind of dynamic happening at the graduate and postdoctoral level.”

Privacy Concerns. Advocates of Ph.D. tracking haven’t solved thorny privacy questions. In small programs with only a handful of doctoral recipients, how can administrators ensure their former students’ privacy? Should it even be an obligation for the university to not post information that could identify individual Ph.D. recipients, even if that information is publicly available elsewhere?

“It’s sticky,” said Melanie V. Sinche, a senior research associate at Harvard Law School who supports a national-level tracking effort. “It needs to be thought through carefully, but I don’t think it’s intractable.” She said one way to make individual students less identifiable would be to report aggregated data over several years.

Lack of Consensus. Though Ph.D.-tracking efforts have gained steam in recent years, it’s unclear how broad the support is. Just one of three graduate deans who responded to a council survey released this month indicated that their institutions have formal tracking efforts. (The survey was sent to 271 graduate deans, and 44 percent responded.)

Ohio State’s Mr. Weinberg said that it’s clear to him there is a “very palpable sense” on campuses that more needs to be done to track Ph.D.’s, but that there are disagreements about how to go about it. “If an effort to collect this data fails,” he said, “and you were to ask me why it fails, I would say it would die the death of a thousand paper cuts rather than because of visible, vocal opposition.”

Vimal Patel covers graduate education. Follow him on Twitter @vimalpatel232, or write to him at [email protected].