More psychologists are exploring alternative careers outside of academia

[This article is part of the 2023 Trends Report]

Molly Metz, PhD, an assistant teaching professor of psychology at the University of Toronto in Canada, worked tirelessly throughout the Covid-19 pandemic to adapt to online learning and to support students who were struggling with Covid-related stressors. In June 2022, she took a few weeks off for the first time since the onset of the pandemic, “but a few weeks doesn’t compensate for two years of working beyond my limits,” said Metz. Metz feels burned out, but admitting this to colleagues and leaders at the university feels risky because burnout in academic circles is often viewed as an acknowledgment of failure. “Burnout is a systemic problem in universities with individual consequences, so the solution cannot be solely on the individual,” Metz said.

Conversations on campuses and social media suggest that increasing numbers of graduate students and faculty are feeling similarly disenchanted by the academic career path and reevaluating whether their jobs are worth the high cost to their personal well-being. They are less willing to continue in positions with oversized workloads, salaries that do not keep up with inflation, and inflexible policies.

In a national survey of more than 170 provosts, 48% reported that faculty turnover was significantly higher or somewhat higher in 2022 compared with previous years (2022 Survey of College and University Chief Academic Officersopens in new window, Inside Higher Ed and Hanover Research). In the same survey, 83% of provosts reported that they believe faculty at their institution would say they do not have the right resources and tools to feel supported, engaged, and connected. Membership in social media groups for professionals who are leaving higher education is swelling, including Facebook’s The Professor Is Out group. Formed in 2020, the group is growing daily and now has more than 26,000 members.

Although the statistics of faculty turnover are sobering, psychologist June Gruber, PhD, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Colorado Boulder, hopes that the escalating sense of discontent will build momentum to instigate long-overdue reforms in higher education. “Faculty burnout is a significant problem, and it is an ideal time to address this issue,” she said. “We need to redirect the narrative of how faculty are supported on campus if we hope to retain them and help them thrive.”

In the case of Gabrielle Filip-Crawford, PhD, her university’s response to faculty concerns during the pandemic soured her experience so much that she left her tenured position as an assistant professor of psychology. “It felt like the work we were doing was not being seen or valued,” she said. Faculty wanted to be included in the administration’s discussions about policies related to enrollment, curriculum, and salaries, but she felt that faculty input was unwelcome. In the spring of 2022, she resigned after nearly six years at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, Minnesota, but she quickly confronted another problem. “Being an academic is an identity, and it was a very isolating process to reconceptualize who I was,” she said. “There is a widespread perception that you only leave if you are not good enough to make it.”

To connect with others who were in a similar situation, she started Recovering Academics, a private social media support group for people interested in transitioning out of higher education. She now works as a research manager at Benefits Data Trust, a national nonprofit organization based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, that is increasing access to health and food benefits for vulnerable populations. She helps to develop assessments and evaluations to test the effectiveness of the organization’s programs. She enjoys the job and the value placed on work-life balance by her new employer. All employees stop receiving internal notifications after 6 p.m., are encouraged to take vacations, and have opportunities to share input with senior leaders.

For professors who are staying in their jobs, some are sharing that their experiences during the pandemic have changed the way they approach work. Dana Leighton, PhD, a professor of psychology at Texas A&M University–Texarkana, closed his research lab in fall 2022 because the administration was not addressing faculty concerns, such as low student graduation rates and plummeting faculty morale. “I was exhausted and starting to lose a sense of meaning and purpose in my work,” he said. “I needed to cut back somewhere, and the lab was the only viable option because I needed to continue teaching.” He had opened the lab in 2018 to help undergraduates learn to conduct research, but this work was voluntary and not a required part of his job.

Leighton’s main source of stress during the pandemic was feeling ill-equipped to support students who approached him for help when they confronted difficulties. Many were low-income, first-generation students who were struggling in class because family members were ill, childcare options were limited, and many had Covid. “I could refer them to resources for mental health support, but I was not convinced that they were getting what they needed from the university,” Leighton said. “I felt a responsibility to pick up the slack.”

To begin to understand the mental health needs of the University of Colorado Boulder faculty, Gruber recently joined the university’s Center for Teaching and Learning as a fellow. She is developing a survey with colleagues at the center to assess faculty mental health and provide guidance for professors about how to support students who are experiencing mental health issues.

To better support educators, universities and colleges also need to create environments that welcome openness about mental health within departments, said Sarah Victor, PhD, a clinical psychology professor at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. She noticed that professors and students were often passionate about breaking down stigma related to mental illness in the public, but the subject was somewhat taboo within psychology departments. “There has been a belief that people who have these struggles may not be in a position to help others,” she said. “There is a fear of judgment.”

Victor reviewed the literature and discovered a striking lack of research on mental health difficulties among applied psychologists. In 2021, she surveyed 1,700 faculty and graduate students in clinical, counseling, and school psychology programs in the United States and Canada, and 89% of graduate students and 71% of faculty reported experiencing a mental health difficulty. Depression, generalized anxiety disorder, and suicidal thoughts or behaviors were the most commonly reported difficulties (Perspectives on Psychological Science, Vol. 17, No. 6, 2022opens in new window).

After Victor began the study, graduate students started talking to her more frequently about their struggles. One of the problems they faced was lack of access to affordable mental health care that could guarantee anonymity. The students did not feel comfortable seeking help because local clinics were often training sites or were staffed by alumni.

Doctoral students and faculty who were parents during the pandemic also confronted untenable demands for research and publishing, said Jessica Leveto, PhD, whose Facebook group PhD Mamas grew from 2,000 members before the pandemic to more than 16,000 members in recent months. Leveto, an associate professor of sociology and criminology at Kent State University in Ohio, surveyed hundreds of academic parents and caregivers in 2020 and 2021, and in 2022 she started interviewing study participants. “Graduate students are making conscious decisions not to go into academia because they saw how difficult and inflexible systems were during the pandemic,” Leveto said. “It is still largely a publish or perish world in higher education.”

Funding expectations have also been a source of extreme stress among faculty. Luna Muñoz, PhD, was a deputy director of research in clinical psychology at a university in the United Kingdom when she began experiencing work burnout in 2020. She started skipping meals and becoming angry with family members more frequently as she worked long hours to continue submitting grants, teaching classes, and training more than 20 new graduate students during the pandemic. An administrator at the university informed Muñoz that she needed to be more involved in leadership activities to be promoted to a professor, which prompted Muñoz to launch new diversity and inclusion programs within the psychology department. Several months later, she received a notice that the university would be laying off faculty who were not securing enough grant money, and she was in that category. “I was disillusioned because the administrators were doing this after we had sacrificed so many hours to keep the university going during the pandemic,” she said.

She began questioning her leadership and grant-writing abilities, and Muñoz struggled with suicidal ideation. Then she saw a post on Facebook about a 4-week course on burnout led by a professor who had exited academia. During the course, she was relieved to discover that she was not alone in feeling exasperated, inadequate, and defeated. Muñoz resigned from her role at the university in summer 2021, and now she coaches people—including many academics—who are in life transitions.

To reduce the risk of increasing faculty resignations and decreasing morale among those who stay in their jobs, psychology researchers urge institutions to question long-standing systems of doing work and business—rather than defining the problem as a personal issue that employees are expected to resolve on their own. “The causes of burnout are usually chronic job stressors,” said researcher Christina Maslach, PhD, a professor emerita of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.

According to the World Health Organizationopens in new window, occupational burnout is characterized by three dimensions: feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion, feelings of cynicism or detachment from the job, and a sense of ineffectiveness. Maslach has found that people who report high levels of all three dimensions, or high levels of cynicism in particular, experience the greatest mismatch with their jobs in the areas that lead to engagement and well-being at work (Burnout Research, Vol. 3, No. 4, 2016opens in new window). The six areas of a work environment that support psychological health and job satisfaction are sustainable workload, sense of control, reward (positive feedback), supportive workplace community, fairness, and values (the meaning of work) (The Burnout Challenge: Managing People’s Relationships With Their Jobsopens in new window, Harvard University Press, 2022).

Although some people experience high levels of all three dimensions of burnout, most people in an organization are usually high in one or maybe two, said Maslach. If this holds true for academic institutions, then there are likely many faculty who are not completely burned out but are still struggling. “Improving the work environment will help everyone, not just those who are experiencing full burnout,” Maslach said.

And academics are voicing common themes in their ideas about how to improve the work environment. Many agree that governance needs to include more faculty voices so they can advocate for increased access to subsidized childcare on campus, affordable housing and health care for graduate students, leave policies that are more flexible, and other changes.

Envisioning and implementing changes will require time, money, collaboration, and persistence, but the cost of continuing the status quo is too high, said Metz, who is continuing in her role at the university. “The number of amazingly skilled and talented people we have leaving academia at all career stages is going to be devastating to academic life and scientific development,” she said. “Research has shown that people are more motivated, creative, and productive when their psychological and material needs are met, and it’s time to be more responsive to the needs of the people in higher education.”