The effect of trainee career intentions on mentor's interest in the trainee: Experimental evidence from academia
通过审计实验，研究导师是否因博士生职业意向不同（工业界应用研究、学术界基础研究或无说明）而区别对待，发现导师回复率无显著差异，挑战了职业意向不匹配导致指导减少的普遍看法。
In many industries trainees often seek careers different from their mentors. For example, many PhD students seek non-academic careers. Anecdotally, mentors invest less in different-career trainees, but causal evidence is lacking. To fill this gap, we conducted an audit experiment in academia, where a fictitious prospective PhD student emailed immunology and microbiology principal investigators (PIs) about mentorship. The student's career intention was randomly described as “applied research in industry” ( n = 1000), “basic research in academia” ( n = 1000) or no description (control, n = 442). To mitigate concerns about skills and motivation, all emails highlighted the student's great academic record. Contrary to expectations, PIs responded at similar rates across all conditions. Treatment effects showed little heterogeneity based on the PIs' institution prestige, industry connections, and career length. These null findings challenge the widespread belief that mismatched career intentions cause less mentorship (although the two may still be associated) and the mechanisms assumed to drive that effect. Our results call for caution in deploying interventions to fix problems related to advisor-mentee misalignments before clearly establishing their source. • We causally test the connection between a trainee's career interests and mentorship availability • We focus on the academic life sciences in the U.S. • Mentors do not appear to discriminate against industry-leaning prospective PhD students