Universities Are Failing the Next Generation of Scientists

[marmar]

Universities Are Failing the Next Generation of Scientists
In a tight academic job market, graduate schools owe it to students to be transparent about their career prospects.

BY PAUL M. SUTTER 03.24.2022


THE LONG-TERM JOB outlook for a freshly minted science Ph.D. can be pretty grim. After devoting more than a half decade to becoming an independent researcher in the field of their passion, after sacrificing opportunities for better pay and work-life balance, and after writing papers and presenting at who-knows-how-many conferences, graduate students may emerge from the ivory tower only to find that there are no jobs that allow them to do the thing they’ve been training to do.

In 2020, colleges and universities throughout the United States awarded more than 42,000 Ph.D. diplomas for scientists and engineers. In many respects, that’s fantastic news; it represents a giant leap from the fewer than 6,000 degrees awarded in 1958. We have more scientists and engineers than ever before. In a society that thrives on highly skilled workers and that celebrates and respects those workers, many young people are heeding the call to enter the science, technology, engineering, and math disciplines.

And then what happens?

Many universities and colleges do not publish data on the long-term career outcomes of graduate students the way they do for undergraduate students. Why are they ignoring their advanced students? Perhaps it is because if they were to print the realities on their brochures, fewer graduate students would enroll in their programs.

Nevertheless, we can track the progress of the nation’s Ph.D. holders via independent surveys. Around 30 percent of new science Ph.D. graduates who responded to the 2019 Survey of Earned Doctorates, administered by the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, did not immediately have a job or postdoctoral study lined up. Depending on the field, between 20 and 40 percent of respondents reported that they were continuing on the academic path — the vast majority in postdocs, short-term research positions typically lasting one to three years. Tracking the path from postdoc to professorship is difficult, but one 2015 paper noted that “less than 17 percent of new Ph.D.s in science, engineering, and health-related fields find tenure-track positions within three years” of graduating. Many of the rest will land outside of practicing science altogether: The NCSES survey indicated that nearly a third of doctoral scientists and engineers in the U.S. are not employed as scientists or engineers. If the goal of graduate programs is to create highly trained scientists, then these programs are oversupplying the workforce by the hundreds of thousands. ..............(more)

https://undark.org/2022/03/24/universities-are-failing-the-next-generation-of-scientists/

[Hoyt]

1. Admire anyone who goes after what they want to do. But unless you have an endowment,

better research the employment situation before going after it.

[OldBaldy1701E]

5. Yeah... unless that 'want' doesn't make one rich, then it is a 'waste of time'. (n/t)

[old as dirt]

2. William Rowan Hamilton (Science YouTuber Collab) A Capella Science

"Strolling with Helen when new inspiration calls him, add another letter, see him now as he scrawls in stone of a bridge like a revolution: i j k equals negative one."

[drray23]

3. Its not new unfortunately.

In my field (nuclear physics) we always had that issue. The usual trajectory is phD followed by one or even two postdocs. If you are good and you also happen to work for a research group that is well known with a renowned professor, then you stand a chance to grab a position as an assistant professor somewhere. From there, you still have to climb the ladder until you make it to tenure.

Years ago many of the physics students who did not end up getting a position in academia would find jobs in the private sector relatively easily in the burgeoning field that was artificial intelligence and data science.
At some point, Wallstreet was hiring lots of physicists and mathematicians for building data models for quantitative trading. I had quite a few friends who ended there.

Physicists , as part of their training manipulate and process lots of data so that was appreciated in the private sector. Nowadays, with the development of data science programs in universities, this is no longer such an asset.

[Igel]

4. This wronged a lot of students.

At the same time, if you think you'll need 50 top-notch experts in a field you don't admit just 50 students.

Some drop out because life or something distracts them. During their grad career but also after graduation.

Some drop out or are failed out because of bad grades.

Those that make it across that PhD finish line aren't all equally good. Even average students can still graduate, but you don't want them in positions that require exceptional people.

My grad program in the '90s was already teetering under the weight of trying to train new grad students and get them up to the level that entering grad students had been at in the '70s. And they were flat-out honest--That 4.0 from a college or university in 1995 was *not* a 4.0 from 1975. They aimed for a certain number of people finishing and those that would take too much time and work to bring up to par they weeded out by not funding them. When grad students unionized even funding was a difficult tool to use for this, and so they had to run the risk of offending students by openly failing them instead of giving them Bs and no funding.


Had a friend that went to CalTech, physics major/econ minor. Chucked physics entirely, decided just to go into econometrics. Retired at age 35, returned to work out of boredom maybe 5, 6 years later.

[OldBaldy1701E]

6. Well, when they are mostly concerned with profit as opposed to education... (n/t)