Doctoral labour market returns in Switzerland – 14 October 2026
Date:
Location:
Online
As doctoral graduates increasingly pursue careers both within and beyond academia, understanding their labour market outcomes is relevant for higher education research and policy. The next EHESO online research seminar will examine how the earnings of PhD and Master’s graduates compare across academia, industry research, the public sector and private services.
The analysis finds a broadly consistent pattern across these different destinations, with earnings differences of around 17–20% between PhD and Master’s graduates working in the same broad area. The seminar will discuss these findings and what they can – and cannot – tell us about the labour market value of doctoral education.
The presentation will be followed by a discussion with a designated discussant and an open exchange with participants. The seminar is organised with the involvement of the EHESO user group on graduate tracking data, bringing together policymakers, researchers and practitioners interested in the analysis and use of graduate outcomes data in Europe.
Practical information
- Title: Doctoral labour market returns in Switzerland
- Date: 14 October 2026
- Time: 12:30 p.m. - 14:00 p.m. (CEST)
- Format: Online Research Seminar (MS Teams)
- Presenter: Kevin Schönholzer, Università della Svizzera Italiana (co-authored with Benedetto Lepori)
- Discussant: Petra Sauer, University of Fribourg
- Registration (until 12 October)
Abstract
Most doctoral graduates do not enter or stay in academic positions, despite a sustained policy concern about doctoral overproduction (Skakni et al., 2025; OECD, 2023). Existing evidence on the labour-market returns to the doctorate is dominated by pooled Master-versus-PhD wage comparisons and by STEM-heavy register studies. Neither approach can examine within-destination earnings differentials, and ISCO classifications further obscure the picture because they encode professional field rather than work content and contain no research-occupation code. Here we use the Swiss Graduate Survey (EHA) for four cohorts surveyed between 2017 and 2023 to estimate within-destination PhD-Master wage gaps across four labour-market segments.
The regression-adjusted gap falls in a 17 to 20 percent band: Academic 18.0 percent, Industry-research 16.7 percent, Public-non-research 19.7 percent, Private services 19.1 percent. None of the PhD-by-destination interactions reaches conventional significance, and the 95 percent confidence intervals overlap, so the data do not reject equal within-destination gaps. The PhD median sits at the 68th, 67th, 86th, and 71st percentile of same-destination Masters. The within-destination band exceeds the pooled t+5 PhD premium of 14.5 percent because PhDs are over-represented in Academic, where the Master comparison group is depressed by Gymnasium teachers on part-time pensums. To compute these comparisons we construct a research-occupation indicator from EHA self-reports that shows convergent agreement across independent classifiers. The analysis is observational and the within-destination gap admits credentialist, productivity-selection, and non-cognitive-trait selection readings that the data cannot arbitrate.
