10.4% of PhDs live abroad. Italia below the European average for share in population

About 96% of those who obtained their PhD degree at an Italia university in 2019 (6 years earlier) and in 2021 (4 years earlier) are employed. 10.4%, despite having obtained both their degree and PhD in Italia, work abroad. Women account for half of the total (50.1%), with considerable differences according to the subject area: 64% of PhD graduates in the "Medical-Health and Pharmaceutical" area, just 27.1% in the "Industrial and Information Engineering" area and less than 20% in the "Computer and ICT Technologies" area. This was reported by Istat in its survey on the professional outlets for PhDs.

ISTAT notes how the high level of specialisation and high-profile skills acquired with a PhD guarantee very high levels of employment: in 2025, 4-6 years after the degree, 96.1% of PhD graduates will be working (2.3 percentage points higher than in 2018 for those who had obtained their degree in 2012 or 2014), 34.4% work on a fixed-term basis, almost 6% work part-time and about a quarter do not carry out research activities. Compared to 2018, the share of PhDs working at a university or research institution increased (49.3% compared to 39.7% in 2018). 10.4% of employed PhDs work abroad.

Italia - Istat goes on to explain - is below the European average in terms of the share of PhDs in the population: in the two cohorts considered (2019 and 2021) just over 16,000 individuals (about 8,000 per year) will obtain a PhD degree. The trend in PhD enrolments and attainments shows the effects of the various regulations that have followed one another over time: enrolments and attainments decrease following Ministerial Decree 45/2013i, which reduced both the number of PhD courses and the number of places financed with a scholarship, and then increase after 2021 following the greater investments linked to the PNRR. Thus if until the early 2000s the number of PhDs grew rapidly, the subsequent trend has been strongly fluctuating and, in 2021, the share of PhDs in the total population is 0.4%, an indicator that puts Italia in 22nd place in the EU27 ranking (0.8% for the average of the EU27 countries, 1.4% in Germany, 0.9% in Spain and 0.7% in France).

The data also show a 'Covid effect' that has led many students to postpone the discussion of their thesis scheduled for 2020. In fact, 27.3% of the graduates obtaining their degrees in 2021 claim to have obtained them one year late (compared to 12.8% observed for the 2019 cohort and 18.7% obtained as an average for the two cohorts of 2012 and 2014), and of these, 70.6% precisely because of the pandemic.

The majority of PhDs (52.6%) obtained their degrees in the Stem (Science, technology, engineering and mathematics) area - in particular in the Scientificoiii group (28.1% of the total) and in Industrial and Information Engineering (15.5%) - followed by the health and agro-veterinary area (18.2%), the economic, legal and social area (16.9%) and the artistic, literary and educational area (12.4%). 14.7% of the degrees awarded are industrial doctorates, which in 72.5% of cases belong to the Stem area.