As College seniors look ahead to the world outside Harvard's ivy walls, another set of graduates is also searching for a future--and often not finding what they're looking for.

Post-doctoral students are facing an increasingly tight job market, something that they and their advisers didn't anticipate when the decade began. And lifelong academics are having a difficult time helping their students forge innovative careers.

"Overall, what we hear from the national media and from professional associations is that academic jobs are certainly not as good as they were predicted to be five or six or seven years ago when these folks began working for their degrees," says Russell E. Berg, dean of admissions and financial aid at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS).

Faced with these obstacles to finding academic jobs, more and more doctors--after years of scholarly work--are searching for jobs in the private sector. An Office of Career Services (OCS) report from last year places the "high rate of nonacademic employment" among Ph.D.s at 15 percent.

A graduate student in the social sciences who asked not to be identified says he sees many of his peers job-hunting outside academia.

"I've noticed a lot of students looking into consulting," he says. "Another critical mass of graduate students are looking at law school, and some are trying to connect the work they've done in graduate school to the private sector."

In the late 1980s, when many of Harvard's senior graduate students matriculated, it was thought that a large number of professional academics would soon retire, opening up a huge job market for scholars earning their Ph.D.s in the mid-1990s.

These jobs, however, have not materialized.

"[There have been] predictions about retirements which haven't happened as quickly as thought," Berg says. "More importantly, when people retire, the slots are being rethought."

According to Berg, a tightening economy has led to downsizing in many academic communities. In addition, since mandatory retirement caps have been lifted, aging professors wait longer to leave their positions. When they finally retire, many universities consider replacing them with temporary faculty--or not replacing them at all.

According to the 1994-95 OCS Report on Ph.D. Recipients, this lack of placement opportunities for Ph.D.s is part of a slump that has been going on for several years.

"In general, the patterns from academic year 1993-94 were repeated in the past academic year," wrote Margaret L. Newhouse, OCS assistant director for Ph.D. careers. "Surveys continue to reflect a tight academic market."

But the change is recent enough that many of the students who are today looking for consulting or technical jobs entered the Ph.D. program planning to work in academia, according to Berg.

"The academy is still presented, I think, as a very favorable environment for a job," Berg says. "I think the majority of our students start with the expectation that they will get the Ph.D. and then teach or enter research."

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