Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums GT Research Glut of PhDs means less chance of a job

NPR Article, "A Glut of Ph.Ds Means Long Odds of Getting Jobs" http://www.npr.org/blogs/ed/2015/02/27/388443923/a-glut-of-ph-d-s-means-long-odds-of-getting-jobs

Personally, I find it very depressing that "adjuncts and other nontenured faculty now make up three-quarters of college and university teachers" with usually no benefits either. Not a good prospect for the future here.

They are construing "a job" rather narrowly as "an academic job" in this piece.

Yes. And then the overwhelming amount of PhD's will work as part-time adjuncts to produce....an overwhelming amount of PhD's.

Reading things like this is quite depressing....I feel like just hiding in a closet sometimes. :'(

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).

All the cool people are doing it.

Don't you want to be cool?

Most of the people I know with PhD's did them while working many years after leaving university. I don'think I have met anyone who got a PhD to become an academic. No that's wrong I know of one person who got her PhD in film studies who did.

I know a lot of people who got a PhD to become an academic and did so right after their BA degree. That is partly to do with the company I keep. Most of those are people who have had tenure track positions for over 20 years. Good jobs in academic really are becoming harder and harder to get.

It is also probably a country difference and the area I work in.

Well, in a former life (ie. before I had my son), I was working on a PhD in history - ten years ago. But I had to withdraw from the program partly due to my son and his special needs (no idea about 2e/gifted then), partly due to my advisor switching universities and the department collapsing, partly due to the lack of future job prospects, etc.

Before I had my son, I taught as an adjunct for a few years. I think I would have earned more money flipping burgers. And that was then. Still, I don't regret my adjunct experience or my PhD work. I actually use a lot of the skills from the research and history degree on a daily level with un/homeschooling my son.

I just find it a bit sticky when my son says that he wants to get a PhD and become an academic but he's still young and things will be different for him.

DD would make a perfect academic. Sadly, she's going to be in a generation for whom such a thing is akin to winning the lotto.

Not exactly a good "life plan."

I possibly know more people with PhDs than without. All academics following the traditional route. And I'm very glad I am not one of them!

The PP who said people are postdocs for seven years is possibly in some sort of biology? The field I'm most familiar with you get two post docs/four years to prove yourself. If you don't have a tenure track job by then you need to bail. But it's one of those fields where (as I understand it) it's very clear who is good and who is not good enough, and anyone who is merely mediocre doesn't get that far. I can only think of think two post docs I've known well who don't have jobs. Not necessarily in the sort of place they'd choose to live, but employed nonetheless.

I don't think it always has to based on how many and to what caliber degrees you have. My sister has a BD in Conservation Biology and makes very little in that area. I barely made it through highschool and no college degree yet I make good money in finance and mortgage working for the biggest bank there is. Its not all gloom...you can make it without years in post education you just work hard with common sense.

I have spent a great deal of time looking for better ways to support research training (I do a lot of work for health research funders). While individual results may vary, the above article is, if anything, a somewhat rosy portrait as far as health/ life sciences go.

Canada and the US are producing PhDs by the bucketload, with limited skills to make it in modern uber-competitive academia, almost none to go anywhere else, and thoroughly indoctrinated in the belief that "anywhere else" is failure for second-rate scientists - despite it being where 90% go. To add insult to injury, a life sciences PhD will get you a salary cut around here.

The horrific part is that increasingly, people scramble through 8, 10, even 12 years of post-docs, providing the barely-paid labor necessary to keep the grant mill productive and NIH grants cheap. And no chance in there to pursue an original idea during their creative years, and mostly, there's no actual training going on. Then finally the candidate scrapes up a soft-funded adjunct role and a first grant - on a super-conservative, low-risk idea, of course. And only THEN, after all that, they don't get renewed and get the boot out of academia. After 20-something years invested in creating an academic career that was never going to exist for 90% of them. (Double the attrition rate if you're female).

Of course there are exceptions - but the data is clear and this trend has been inexorably ramping up for 40 years. Unfortunately, there's huge incentives for funders, universities and profs to encourage more doctorates/ PDFs. Everybody wins - except the trainees.

It's broken and unethical.

Michelle, it also cuts out the job market for people with a plain bachelors who in other systems would be employed as research assistants. And with no job prospects after their first graduation they are funnelled into grad school. They'd be better off treating themselves as post docs and emigrating then and there to somewhere they can get a job.

I agree with you.

My kids are 16 and 13 now. Whenever the topic of work comes up, I tell them to pick something that they would enjoy doing for a long time.

But I also tell them that there are many things they would likely enjoy, and it is far easier to succeed in some fields than in others, both professionally and financially. If they still want to become a professor, I will strongly encourage them to have a Plan B and Plan C.

Well-stated, Michelle. It is unethical.

Great thread! The Economic Policy Institute writes about this problem all the time. I come from a family of college professors, so I know how hard it is to secure research grants in Science just to hold on to your job. The jobs are scarce.

The media perpetuated the myth that engineering is the best most solid career. It's not. High school and colleges are pumping out STEM students. The majority of these students will not get a job on their field, or will have a very unstable career path, with lay offs etc. it's frightening.

I dropped out of a PhD psychology program and switched programs because I didn't WANT to be an academic (not to mention the terrible job market for that), yet there was no training in the program for other kinds of careers. I went into the wrong kind of psych program. It was basically "social psychology." The whole thing was a big mistake. I always wonder how many of my classmates "made it" and ended up with the kind of academic job they wanted.

My brother did end up with an academic/research/teaching job in physics, and he started as an associate professor right after graduating, but I don't think it was easy. It wasn't clear to me from the article if the academic job market is like this in all/most areas. A very large number of his classmates came from other countries, so if there are already so many applicants, why are colleges recruiting from other countries? Are they really that much more qualified? I think even with the program I was in, the large majority of applicants are rejected. Many people did not get teaching/research assistantships.

So for those of us with math/science/computer "geeks", I wonder what a good career path is? My kids are 8/9 so things will change a lot, but I'd still like to get an idea.

Not all degrees provide proportional financial return.

College Board offers a web page on " Matching Careers to Degrees ".

Parents and students can check the Occupational Outlook Handbook ( OOH ) of the U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, as part of their college and career planning. This can be an important and valuable resource.

Things have changed, but there are still some good outlooks for math/computing students. An MS in applied mathematics, statistics, software engineering, or machine learning will open a lot of doors, even these days, in industry/ business/ biotech/ government (particularly with a background in a relevant field like biology or business). Academia is getting worse in those fields, though, and some of the academic friends of mine have left academia for industry. No reason to slave under a low salary and long hours of a faint chance of tenure when industry will pay top dollar and let you work from home half your week... Even without a PhD or even an MS, a good amount of BS's in applied math are finding solid employment (actuary, statistician, business analyst, data scientist, database engineer).

Biology, social sciences, and humanities, however... To be fair, a lot of the more recent PhDs I know have found something, just not in academia (private high school, community college lecturer, pharm/biotech).

I just have to give a plug for my field, which is roughly two-thirds master's/specialist, and one-third doctoral-level, working predominantly in schools, but with good opportunities for academic jobs, if one wants them:

http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/school-psychologist

Unemployment rate = 0.2%

Not all social sciences are the same. We had a hard time hiring this year for a new Econ ph.d. Starting salary seems to be 120k for research university, think tank and government. Consulting pays 160k.

Confirming that the job market for economists is pretty good:

Is the economics job market worth it?
by Tyler Cowen
November 12, 2014

I read newsletters announcing papers by economists and have noticed that many economists are writing about education, studying things such as the "value added" by a good teacher. Many economists are studying topics beyond the traditional ones (monetary policy, unemployment, financial markets etc.).

More like $200k+ when you consider signing bonus and variable pay for a first year associate/consultant at a major consultancy.