How research experience moderates doctoral students’ career aspiration-choice relationship

Doctoral career entry is often understood as a process of sorting by labour-market competition and accumulated academic capital, making resource-rich training a presumed ‘safe harbour’ for aspiring academics. Yet graduates with strong institutional advantages also leave academia, while students who begin doctoral study with similar academic aspirations reach different career destinations. Existing research generally treats aspirations, accumulated capital and research conditions as separate predictors, leaving unclear whether students’ experience of doctoral research conditions the correspondence between initial aspirations and eventual employment. Using data from 10,428 doctoral graduates across 359 Chinese institutions, this study estimates robust logistic regression models for humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and engineering. Academic aspiration at enrolment strongly predicted academic career entry (OR = 12.85), but this association was conditional: a more favourable subjective research experience, encompassing supervisory support, intellectual alignment and protected scholarly time, strengthened the aspiration–choice relationship (interaction OR = 1.12). The interaction was positive across all four disciplines and statistically significant in social sciences, natural sciences and engineering; the positive estimate for the smaller humanities subgroup remained uncertain. These findings reposition subjective research experience from an additional predictor of career choice to a statistical boundary condition on the aspiration–choice relationship, thereby connecting the cognitive and affective dimensions of doctoral socialisation in explaining career differentiation.