It’s not easy to depict in graphic format the available data about academic careers. The Swiss Federal Statistical Office has extensive data about Bachelor, Master and doctoral students and about postdocs and tertiary-level staff. We’ve brought all this data together (see below). | Graphik: Bodara

“If you were to visit education as an alien … I think you’d have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors”, said Ken Robinson, formerly a professor of arts education at the University of Warwick, in one of the most popular TED Talks of all, back in 2006. But his comment is even more applicable to university education, whose whole system is geared towards those at the top of the heap – despite the fact that by far the majority of those who study at a university will not remain there afterwards – regardless of whether they study for a Bachelor, a Master or a doctorate. The same is even true of postdocs.

Many will retain fond memories of their days in lecture halls, seminars, classrooms and laboratories and will be proud of what they’ve achieved. They belong to a privileged sector of the population. And yet this discrepancy between how we organise higher education and the actual jobs that these people will later assume can lead to a great deal of frustration.

Fit for the labour market

The problem: The debate about the benefits of the humanities is one that flares up time after time. Patrick Schellenbauer is the chief economist of the thinktank Avenir Suisse, and in 2017 he wrote in the newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung that there are too many students in these subjects. The problem, he claimed, is not unemployment, but the inadequate ratio of the cost of their education to the wages they earn later on. In 2021, Andrea Franc, a history lecturer at the Universities of Basel and Lucerne, added fuel to the fire, writing in the monthly magazine Schweizer Monat how philosophers and art historians earn less after graduation than nursing assistants, mechanics and tram drivers in Zurich (if one also takes part-time work into account). Jan Blanc, a professor of history and a former Dean of the University of Geneva, has nevertheless offered a vehement defence of degree programmes in the humanities: “Knowing how to express yourself orally and in writing, without making mistakes in your orthography, writing clearly and convincingly, and being able to do so in a short space of time … are all qualities that employers value … and are skills that take time to acquire”.

Unemployment: If you want to get on in the labour market, you should study at a pedagogical university. According to the Swiss Federal Statistical Office, only 0.4 percent of 2020 graduates from these universities didn’t have a job within a year of completing their studies. Graduates in healthcare disciplines from universities of applied sciences are also much in demand, as are doctors and pharmacists from the traditional universities. Master’s graduates in the humanities and social sciences from traditional universities bring up the rear with an unemployment rate of 4.4 percent.

At doctoral level, however, it’s the exact sciences and the natural sciences that lag behind, with 4.7 percent unemployed, while at Bachelor level it’s economics at 7.7 percent. Interestingly enough, economics and law are not officially counted as being among the humanities and social sciences. But the fear of becoming unemployed is pretty much the same across all the disciplines. Graduates in subjects that are counted as services are the exception: nine percent more of them fear being left without a job than is the case for graduates of business, administration and law. In the humanities and social sciences, that figure is less than four percent more.

Wages: If you want to earn a lot, you should study law. In 2020, the highest median salary one year after finishing a doctorate was that of women lawyers, at CHF 110,000 per year. However, law graduates with just a Master are in last place among those with a degree from the traditional universities: CHF 62,000. In the humanities, the highest median salary was CHF 69,000 for those with a Bachelor, CHF 78,000 for those with a Master, and CHF 90,000 for those with a doctorate, which puts them behind business, law and medicine, but ahead of the exact sciences and roughly on the same level as the engineering sciences. The Swiss Federal Statistical Office also measures whether graduates are overqualified (i.e., whether or not there is a discrepancy between their levels of education and employment), and here graduates of the humanities and arts at both universities of applied sciences and traditional universities come off worst, while engineering, manufacturing and construction come off best.

Too many postdocs

The status quo: Not all tertiary institutions have ‘postdoc’ as a personnel category. The Swiss Federal Statistical Office, however, defines postdocs as follows: They are those who have obtained their doctorate in the last five years and are employed on a contract basis, either as research associates or with funding from an appropriate instrument of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). They are responsible for much of the work being undertaken in the fields of research and teaching.

The problem: The ‘postdoc bubble’, #IchBinHannah, the precariousness of non-professorial teaching staff – how you describe it depends on the context, but the fact is that more than 90 percent of assistants and research associates at tertiary institutions have a contract appointment. Postdocs are generally at an age when people want to start a family, so it is especially difficult for them when they have no long-term security to plan their future, especially in a highly hierarchical working environment, at the summit of which stand professors whose jobs are almost impossible to terminate. They are both the line managers of the postdocs, and responsible for assessing the quality of their research. Everyone stands under enormous competitive pressure. “It’s just not normal for a system to be able to generate so much suffering and despair”, says Bernard Voutat, a political scientist at the University of Lausanne who is himself a professor.

The frequent changes in staff that this system brings with it also affect the quality of the work undertaken, says Voutat. Many say that the best students no longer want to do a doctorate, and numerous institutions have produced reports on the problem, such as the OECD, the Swiss Science Council, the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences (SAHS), the SNSF and several universities too. In November 2021, a broad coalition of mid-level faculty associations submitted a petition to parliament that resulted in parliamentary initiatives.

Possible solutions: For Carthage Smith, who helped to write the OECD report, there are two possible solutions: “Either we create many more positions at the top or we think more about those at the bottom”. And since the system won’t be allowed to cost more than it does already, we need to offer alternative careers with permanent positions within the universities, says Smith. The SAHS report proposes a model in which professorships would exist alongside senior, mid-level faculty and a senior management team. One option, which is well-known elsewhere, would be to create tenure-track assistant professorships that have clear rules for ensuring subsequent permanent employment. But how can universities, which are independent institutions, be motivated to undertake such reforms? “One solution would be to make the system much more transparent”, says Smith, “so that young people can inform themselves properly and be able to make a well-founded choice between the most attractive careers at a university”. This could produce pressure from below.

Women are underrepresented

The status quo: According to the Federal Statistical Office in 2021, women are overrepresented among fresher students at university, constituting 54 percent of the total. This figure remains roughly the same during their course of study, but the ratio drops among doctoral students, and only 27 percent of those at professorial and management level are women. A disproportionate number of women break off their academic career. This so-called ‘leaky pipeline’ is especially so in veterinary medicine and psychology, which are the two subjects where women are most overrepresented. In electrical engineering, in contrast, the proportion of women is small at the outset but remains roughly constant throughout the course of their careers. The size of the ‘leak’ also varies from one country to another and among the different universities.

The problem: Whether or not this leaky pipeline needs to be ‘sealed’ is a matter of opinion. Katja Rost, a professor of sociology at the University of Zurich, is convinced that the problem no longer has anything to do with discrimination against women in the application procedures. In fact: “Men are now being discriminated against”. Current studies on the problem leave no doubt about it, she says, adding that the leaky pipeline reveals the impact of gender-specific self-selection that is a result of an academic career being inherently incompatible with becoming a parent. A trend towards the ‘re-traditionalisation’ of families can be observed here.

Nicky Le Feuvre, a professor of sociology at the University of Lausanne, prefers to add a certain nuance to Rost’s pronouncements. The goal is obviously not to achieve a gender balance of 50/50, she says, but rather to achieve a healthy university environment in which the proportion of female professors ought to correspond roughly to the proportion of female students within any particular subject. If we’re going to adopt appropriate measures, she adds, then we have to take the social framework into account, including the non-academic labour market. A doctoral thesis co-supervised by Le Feuvre at the University of Geneva has shown that “[t]he decision to embark on a doctorate after a Master varies according to the professional careers available to both men and women”.

Possible solutions: For Le Feuvre, the university culture in Switzerland isn’t suited to the overall national environment: “We have a relatively conservative gender regime. For example, we have cramped school timetables, whereas the academic ethic requires a high level of on-site availability for work”. Universities can afford to uphold a typically male employment model – one that is not very family-friendly – not least because they remain attractive as employers on the international scene. Rost similarly finds the overall societal situation to be problematic. There’s a lot of pressure on young women, she says, who are expected to juggle careers and motherhood while also fulfilling our ideals of what’s beautiful. Taken together, that’s going to make people unhappy. And it’s why Rost has stopped fighting to fix the leaky pipeline. She’s more concerned about the attractiveness of universities: “The low salaries on offer mean that the most brilliant men and women will leave the universities in any case”.