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."