NBER ties AI dissertation writing to PhDs picking industry

A working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research finds that US-origin STEM PhDs whose dissertation abstracts were flagged as AI-written were 17% less likely to take academic jobs and 16% more likely to go into industry, Nature reports. The paper analyzed more than 226,000 STEM dissertations filed between January 2019 and May 2026.

AI-generated text was effectively absent in dissertations before 2023, then jumped to around 29% of 2026 abstracts, with mathematical and computer sciences hitting 36%. Use was higher among graduates from non-English-speaking countries, where 41% of abstracts were flagged, versus 23% for English-speaking countries. The analysis relied on the Pangram AI-detection service.

"If our students are only doing half the work and they're dishing the rest to AI, do they really have the depth of understanding" to be effective scientists? asked Daniel P. Gross, the Duke economist who co-authored the paper. Ang Liu, an engineer at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, told Nature that "rigorous research training becomes even more important" when research moves into areas where knowledge is incomplete.

The paper, by Gross with Dror Shvadron and Hansen Zhang, frames the career divergence as a possible displacement of "a potentially important portion of the work through which scientific expertise is developed." The authors do not establish a causal link between AI use and the career choice. Two of the researchers we track flagged the Nature piece the day it ran.