2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The purpose of this extended abstract roundtable session is to explore the viewpoints of college and university postdoctoral affairs office directors on the ways in which they seek to support postdoctoral scholars at their institutions. The National Postdoctoral Association (NPA, 2023) provides a toolkit for postdoctoral affairs offices that includes guidance on inclusive and effective policies and programs, such as providing an orientation to welcome new postdoctoral scholars, establishing communication channels to share institutional benefits, policies, and opportunities, and offering professional development and career counseling services. However, the literature suggests that little of this programming is occurring (Burke et al., 2019; Cutright et al., 2018; Van Benthem, 2020; Yadav et al., 2020). Proudfoot and Hoffer (2016) argue that a need exists for a comprehensive strategy to properly support, inspire, and equip postdoctoral scholars for institutional and career success, which should begin with postdoctoral affairs offices. Yet, postdoctoral affairs offices notoriously operate with limited resources and often need to be creative in supporting the success of postdoctoral scholars, which often means relying on postdoctoral scholars themselves for programming (Costello, 2018). Thus, postdoctoral affairs offices may represent an institutional structure that fails to properly support postdoctoral scholars in their institutions or their next career step. This is an important avenue to investigate in engineering academia since postdoctoral appointments are a stepping-stone to faculty positions.

An instrumental case study (Stake, 1995) investigates how postdoctoral affairs office directors implement best practices from the NPA postdoctoral affairs office toolkit to support postdoctoral scholars at their institutions. Twenty directors from public and private colleges and universities across the US were recruited for this study via email. Most directors were in part-time staff positions, and some held dual faculty roles. The number of postdoctoral scholars working at these institutions ranged from 400 to 1000. Nearly all the postdoctoral scholars were in STEM fields and half were from abroad. The 20 interviews were analyzed deductively (Stake, 1995) using perceived behavioral control (PBC; Ajzen, 2002). This conceptual framework focuses on one’s ability to perform a particular behavior and includes two distinct components: perceived self-efficacy (ease or difficulty of performing a behavior) and controllability (presence of adequate resources and ability to control the barriers in performing the behavior) (Ajzen, 2002; Hardin-Fanning & Ricks, 2017). Data analysis findings revealed three themes regarding postdoctoral affairs offices' implementation of best practices from the NPA: (1) firm commitment to utilizing NPA best practices; (2) insufficient staff and authority; and (3) overreliance on postdoctoral scholars to assist office efforts. These findings reveal that colleges and universities invest too little in postdoctoral affairs offices to support postdoctoral scholars effectively.

This instrumental case study underpinned by PBC (Ajzen, 2002) provides a deeper understanding of the viewpoints of college and university postdoctoral affairs office directors on how they seek to support postdoctoral scholars at their institutions. Data analysis of the interviews resulted in three main themes: (1) firm commitment to utilizing NPA best practices; (2) insufficient staff and authority; and (3) overreliance on postdoctoral scholars to assist office efforts. These findings reveal that colleges and universities invest too little in postdoctoral affairs offices, which mirrors the literature (Burke et al., 2019; Cutright et al., 2018; Van Benthem, 2020; Yadav et al., 2020). While directors' perceived self-efficacy is high, they share little controllability about supporting postdoctoral scholars effectively. While postdoctoral scholars play a large role in the research arm of higher education institutions (National Institute of Health Advisory Committee, 2023), their professional and personal needs are largely unfulfilled through the existing institutional structure of postdoctoral affairs offices. This research calls for re-envisioning such structures and renewing a pledge to enhance the postdoctoral training environment to best support postdoctoral scholars and their career trajectories.