Keeping up with the Max Plancks? Germany’s quest for university excellence and the role of public research institutes in doctoral education

Doctoral education is a crucial stage in the academic socialization of early-career researchers. Prior research has shown that career paths and activities of Ph.D.s are shaped by the universities and departments in which they were trained. To widen this focus, we analyze the role of public research organizations (PROs) and private-sector firms as organizational employment contexts of doctoral education. The empirical context of our study is Germany, where PROs and firms employ large numbers of doctoral candidates and provide the organizational environment for their dissertation research. Utilizing a novel process-generated dataset that covers about 40,000 STEM Ph.D.s who graduated from 1995 to 2011, we find that Ph.D.s employed at PROs during doctoral education are more likely to stay in academia than their university-employed peers. Despite extensive policy efforts that sought to strengthen the research performance of German universities, doctoral candidates employed at basic research-oriented PROs had the strongest cross-cohort increase in their post-graduation academic employment share. This group also experienced the most pronounced fall in the share of high post-graduation income owners. Industry-employed doctoral candidates are unlikely to migrate to the academic sector and have the highest likelihood of obtaining high post-graduation incomes.