I started a PhD just over 20 years ago. Back then, people talked about how difficult it was to get a permanent position. Nowadays, it's just about impossible. And the ones who get hired into the vanishingly few tenure-track jobs end up destroying themselves in the pursuit of publications in journals with high impact factors and federal research grants (the funding rate is <20% these days, and in some cases it's <<20%). Gone are the days when you would spend five years developing a kooky new idea that might change everything.
Starting salaries for postdocs are at $42K and top out at $55K in your seventh year and beyond. People can easily end up on the postdoc treadmill for six years, and some even get stuck there for ten.
We have a feudal system with people in their mid-30s earning peanuts. Many are busy paying off student loans and are too broke to buy a house. I'm talking about scientists here, not people with Ph.D.s in English or other supposedly less marketable fields.
Personally, I think we need instead is to re-examine the way our economy works and think about how to get people into good jobs and keep them employed. But I suspect that's not terribly likely to happen, because it will probably cut into profits, and we can't have that.
DeeDee: getting a job in industry is also very difficult for a Ph.D.-level scientist. It's just that industry isn't necessarily the impossible dream, like academia. It took me over a year, and that was nearly 20 years ago. It's worse now.
IMO, we're destroying ourselves with industrial metrics like impact factors that measure "productivity" in a creative endeavor, and the insane competitive arms race that is seen by some as beginning in preschool and that continues in university research labs. I'm amazed that people buy into this and raise the stakes, rather than stopping and asking, "Wait. Why are we doing this to ourselves?"
The only way to win is not to play the game (JonLaw said that once).
