Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion The Myth of STEM Labor Shortages

I started my PhD almost 20 years ago, and even then, people would say things like "Joey found a permanent position" as though Joey had won the lottery. I don't know why they keep pushing the idea that we need more scientists.

It's not just finding a job that's difficult. Once someone gets an academic position, he has to start writing grant applications. Many of NIH programs fund ~10-15% of their applications. It's even harder than that if you're a new investigator. And don't even get me started about how conservative they are. The joke among scientists is that you have to have done the work before they'll fund it. Back in the 70s, they funded around a third of their applications.

Part of the problem can be blamed on the government for not putting enough into research, but IMO, the more serious problem is that when the NIH budget doubled in the 90s, the universities responded with building and hiring sprees. IMO, the federal government also allows too much in indirect costs (50% or more of a grant).

Oh. That's a joke?

Huh. I had no idea.


Yeah-- what Val said.

If scientists spend a decade after their PhDs earning $40K a year in five jobs that last 2 years each, that may be good for society, if those scientists do important research. It stinks for the scientists themselves, of course. I started this thread because I don't want young people to be deceived.

Perhaps I should have said, "Bitter, mirthless joke."


How is it good for society? Most of them end up working outside their fields, which is a huge waste of their education. Worse, postdocs are only semi-independent and generally have to stick to areas that their bosses are interested in. This approach stifles innovative research by relative newcomers and discourages the truly risky work that fails much of the time but yields the critical breakthroughs that are essential for true scientific progress.

A bit OT, but the whole publish-or-perish and get-grants-or-perish system discourages risky work. Risky work takes time: you can't publish three papers a year if you're doing something that takes five to seven years to develop. You will never get tenure if you are five years in and haven't published a single paper.

Academic science in the US (and elsewhere) is currently focused almost exclusively on incremental work (with no guarantees that the increments are meaningful). In the past, there was a balance between the quirky visionary types and the people who could take a good theory, crank through it and develop it well. Not these days: quirky types who take a while to develop an offbeat idea aren't really part of universities now. They can't compete with the incremental types when judged with today's industrial metrics of science: impact factors, number of citations per paper, number of annual publications, etc.

If your grant application isn't highly likely to generate two to three papers in three years, you won't get funded. Again, this shuts out risky science, keeps those postdocs cranking out data, and ensures that science is incremental.

Part IV of The Trouble with Physics makes this point very eloquently.

This is absurdly misleading, due to sample size. The article takes a very small portion of the overall STEM workforce and acts as if it represents the larger whole.

1) What percentage of STEM workers pursue and attain a PhD?
2) Of those, what percentage are in these "lab-bound" roles discussed?

Well, it's hardly irrelevent or misleading to people who are interested in pursuing terminal degrees in those disciplines.

Which, by the way, fuel the "T" in STEM; without basic research (the incremental or quirky sort) there is little scientific innovation to become technology.

I think that one component of this discussion not yet mentioned-- and perhaps largely invisible to most people, both in and out of the STEM occupations is that there has been a shift over the past 30 years in how research is funded.

Yes, government granting has always funded, and continues to fund, what it sees as "basic" (as opposed to 'applied') research. The understanding being that 'applied' research has generally got commercial applications which are obvious (at least to the people who are making decisions it should be) and will have commercial/financial incentives to drive them. So there was, up until the late 1990's, a gentleman's agreement of sorts that understood that there was this firewall between the academy and the military/govt. and private industry. Most people in science stayed (for their careers) on one side or the other-- and this is still mostly true, at least in those classic "lab" (ha ha... how quaint, by the way) disciplines.

The problem here is exactly the same one driving very high rates of unemployment in recent college grads. Companies have shifted costs away from themselves to such a degree that they are not INTERESTED in doing "science" research anymore. Only development of already-fairly mature science. They don't want "unskilled" workers, and they don't want "immature" scientific/technological ideas, either. Both cost too much in up-front spending and don't pay off immediately, or predictably in the short term.

Where does that science come from, though?

Oh, well, there is no longer much funding for THAT. Because in the academy, there is no longer so much funding for it, either. And it's not just in one discipline or field. This is speaking across molecular biology, pharm/tox, analytical instrumentation, materials development, and the like, with which my DH and I have personal, relevent experience. My DH and I have both seen this evolution happen, since we were in the right places (and disciplines) at the right times.

Pharmaceutical companies have got very little in the pipeline for antibiotic resistance or vaccine technology improvements. Frighteningly little, in fact. Why? Because it doesn't pay off right away. Why pay for that when someone else WILL? Oh-- well, surely there are ideas coming out in publications from the Academy that will allow for cherry-picking of new ideas, right? (Well, for a while, anyway... this was the idea behind the academic push toward "technology transfer" initiatives in the past ten years, too, by the way. It was about MONEY; more specifically what made the quickest bucks.)

Corporate ways of forcing profit leveraging into how science is conducted are at the bottom of at least some of this. It's a 'next quarter' or 'this biennium' outlook in an area that requires MUCH more long-range thinking.

We do need more people in science. But, um, we aren't going to actually have jobs for them, since it doesn't "pay" to do science. Even though we need it. Er-- or will when the well runs dry for Tech in about ten to twenty years.

JMO, of course-- but one shared by a fair number of other terminally-degreed scientists that I know. Are we just bitter? Oh, I don't think so. We're by and large a group of HG+ people. We're concerned as much for the future as we are for our own hides.

The unemployment rate was 4.7% as recently as November 2007 http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000 , so a long-term shift in corporate attitudes is unlikely to be the main reason for high current unemployment.

Arguably the most famous corporate research lab, Bell Labs, was funded by AT&T when it had an effective monopoly on phone service. When companies are in a more competitive environment, which I think is better overall for the nation's standard of living (remember when long-distance phone calls cost serious money?), they have less freedom to make investments in fundamental research that have negative expected value for their shareholders.

Unemployment is actually pretty low right now considering that we just recently went through creating history's largest ever (fraud-saturated) credit bubble.

Bostonian, sorry-- my statement was reflecting the high rates of unemployment in those with (recent)college degrees but who lack work experience, and yes, there does seem to be a similar cost-shifting trend behind it.

Applicants are expected to already have the skills necessary to peform any job that they are applying for. Not the "potential" for them. Employers expect previous training to have taken care of those up-front investments in time and money.

Similar driving force behind it, I suspect. Which is in line (entirely) with your second statement.

The era of industrial R&D as it existed in the 1960's-1980's is completely long-gone. (As my DH could tell you with a great deal of cynicism, by the way, as he works for one of the companies that was once a powerhouse there and now cares only about the quickest route to a quick buck or protectable intellectual property.)

That same driving force is present in modern pharmaceutical
R&D; a quick examination of patent patterns there reveals this. Why go to the trouble of screening an entire library of compounds when you can just do a single tweak of a fully-characterized compound and have another five or ten years of patent on it?

Which is a disaster for gifties and any others who thrive on learning.

I suppose the short-term gain is that you get someone who can "hit the ground running." But I suspect that there's a moderate or long-term loss when people get bored and move on. There's probably also a hidden cost of reduced enthusiasm for work.