Searching for a New Homeland: How Geography Matters in the College Selection and Career Decisions of Computing and Engineering PhDs

By Ebony O. McGee, Jade T. Mitchell and Junhao Cai

Where do Black and Latin@ STEM doctoral students want to live post-graduation, and what are their criteria for making these decisions? This study explored the decision-making process of doctoral students and graduates with respect to their future career destinations. It investigated the regions most appealing to racially underrepresented minoritized (URM) doctoral students and their white counterparts. We explored the role that racial diversity in URM students’ current program played in their geographical preferences. The paper investigates how perceptions of racial discrimination impacted their decisions regarding the geography they favor. The study analyzed survey questions from The National Survey, a study of 1641 doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers in engineering and computing schools. The research found that while computing and engineering graduate students generally prefer the coastal U.S., URM students weigh other factors into their geographical preferences, including the racial diversity of their current location and past experiences of discrimination.

Various factors are involved in the decision-making of STEM doctoral students when determining where they want to work and live post-PhD. Less understood is the role of geography in the decision-making process. From our qualitative work, we have learned that Black and Latin@ STEM doctoral students incorporate race-conscious considerations into their geographical preferences; for example, they might favor a neighborhood or surrounding area that has a barber shop or hairdresser who works on ethnic hair, a grocery store that has ethnic food, etc. Thus, we embarked on this research on the geographical preference of Black and Latin@ STEM PhDs with some understanding of the importance these students might place on living in proximity to people like themselves and an awareness of the resources they bring to those communities (McGee, 2021). Secondly, we realized that the racialized experiences that Black and Latin@ STEM doctoral students endure during their doctoral training might impact their future living arrangements. Particularly, racial discrimination experienced during their doctoral program has the potential to influence where and how they choose to live after graduation (McGee et al., 2019). There are other factors, such as the geographical profile of specific job concentrations. For example, beyond Silicon Valley, the best cities for tech jobs include Seattle, WA, Washington, DC, Detroit, MI, Denver, CO, and Austin, TX (Harrington, 2020).

This research study investigates the following question: are the regions most appealing to racially underrepresented minoritized (URM) doctoral students also preferred by their white counterparts? What role does their current institutions’ racial diversity (or lack thereof ) play in their geographic preferences? Do perceptions of acute racial discrimination impact their decisions regarding the geographic location they favor? What specific geographic areas are best for certain STEM disciplines for both URM and non-URM STEM doctoral students? We will begin by providing background from the literature on doctoral institution choice; we will then explore the literature on the career decision-making of post-PhD STEMmers.

Read full article: https://jstem.org/jstem/index.php/JSTEM/article/view/2632