The Real Science Gap
miller-mccune.com
miller-mccune.com
1. This is not an article about career opportunities for STEM (science, tech, engineering, math) majors -- of which there are plenty. This is about the very specific problem of there being a massive glut of Ph.D. students aiming for tenure-track academic jobs. The article makes no distinction here.
2. The problem of academia's imploding pyramid scheme is not at all limited to science. It's worse in the soft sciences and humanities -- picture the same situation of tenured professors overseeing teams of cringing graduate students, but without the NSF/NIH/DOD grant money to hire postdocs. Now, where do you go when you graduate? (Hint: you don't, unless you already have a job lined up.)
The article mentions the rules of supply and demand, but not in relation to tenure. Academia's cultural problem of deterring students from any career other than academic research gets a couple paragraphs near the bottom. But that's the problem! Regardless of the field, too many students are pushed into academic careers, but the world just doesn't need that many professors.
Lots of people love their job. It takes the arrogance of a professor to state that everyone should want yours.
3. Visa issues -- smart, talented students come from outside the U.S. to attend grad school on a student visa that prohibits non-academic work. They stay on as postdocs after graduation because every other kind of job is prohibited, unless some benevolent employer wants to lend a hand with the work visa application process, which probably won't happen. If they leave academia, they have to leave the U.S. Market distortion, anyone? Anyone with U.S. citizenship is clearly better off with a Master's or other professional degree; industry misses out on talent while academia suffers a labor glut.
4. Why does all scientific research have to be done by universities? If labs are funded with government money anyway, it's just as efficient (or more) to directly hire lab techs and researchers at government labs... assuming the research really is important. Academic labs are optimized for publishing journal articles, in absence of a better metric. Could we measure progress better by bringing the research work closer to the customer?
There's one big difference, though - the CEOs of Sun Micro, Intel, IBM, and so forth all testified in front of congress that a shortage of science/engineering PhD's endangers US competitiveness, prompting congress to increase supply through visa programs (and PR programs aimed at young Americans). This almost certainly made (and continues to make) the glut worse.
That said, I still think that even the "useful" STEM fields you mentioned are lagging behind the professions that can take (as the article pointed out) 1/4 to 1/6 of the time to completion, which much higher completion rates (and less rigorous prerequisites to boot).
By the way, I remain extremely enthusiastic about majoring in hard science, math, cs, or engineering. These majors set you up really well for entry into the workforce. You can contribute immediately in a high impact way, and I've found this notion that you'll be viewed as "merely a coder" to be greatly overstated. There are all kinds of great directions to go from starting out as a developer (including remaining in development). But PhDs clearly don't pay (not surprisingly, you see a much higher percentage of US citizens in undergrad programs in STEM fields, since this is the economically rational choice - at the grad level, the rational choice is to go to law, medicine, or MBA programs, or just get to work and enjoy a salary).
Indeed. Those who want to know more about this issue should read Louis Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas, which I think I've recommended before on HN: http://jseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-in-the-academy-louis... .
Plus, science students have relatively good options in industry after graduation, and as far as I can tell, more postdoc positions available.
There are also programs like this for science students:
Companies team up with academic labs occasionally, and I think this is great.
But the government does already run its own labs and fund semi-independent research-only institutions. I'd like to see an expansion of these (mainly the latter), as well as Master's programs in science/tech, to help this current glut of graduate students transition to non-academic careers.
(Empirically, a professor doing X will continue doing X until retirement, regardless of the grant situation. But students can still opt out.)
Anyone interested in this subject should read Philip Greenspun's essay Women in Science: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science. Ignore the borderline sexist stuff about women and pay attention to his comments about the structure of science in the United States and the opportunity costs of pursuing a career in science.
<p>As he observes: "Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States." And he's right. And then people wonder why more Americans don't go into science.
As a PhD student myself, one of the attractions was the broad ability to set my own intellectual and scientific course. I think a majority of my colleagues feel that way too. While I think more places like Bell Labs or Janelia Farms are probably a good thing, I think the industrial culture has, by and large, shifted away from that being really feasible, and I'm not sure anyone knows how to shift it back.
The popular mind, and popular journalism, often confuse science and engineering. The training for each path is quite different, and the mindset of the practitioners is also different.
When industry leaders bemoan a lack of science education are they really complaining about how much they have to compensate technical talent?
We're going to have to dispense with telling children that it doesn't matter what they want to be, and start telling them they ought to spend at least a little time thinking about whether it actually bring capturable value to society. (Or, more for their speed, "whether anybody will pay them to do it".)
Of course this involves walking back decades of self-esteem BS, which isn't going to be easy. However, I say that the right way to look at it isn't that you're telling Johnny he shouldn't be a particle physicist; I think the right way is that of all the hundreds or thousands of official college majors and the thousands again subspecialities, Johnny would probably like to do quite a few of them and perhaps Johnny should spend at least five minutes considering whether some of them might deserve more consideration than others based on whether they are actually useful to society. It's not that we're denying Johnny his one true calling, it's that Johnny is an adaptable human who could probably do many things and perhaps he should ponder a bit before making life-crashing decisions.
How many of us truly have only one thing they could possibly imagine doing, ever, and of that set, how many of them found it before college? (If you're inclined to say "me", I'm serious. There's no other job you could ever imagine wanting? I'm spotting you the training, an alternate universe where you have just as much experience there as you have here now, not suddenly switching tomorrow. No other science, math, engineering, humanities, or arts appeals to you that much at all? I'm sure there's a non-zero number here, but I also think that's the exception, and that's enough to carry my point.)
My dream job is composing video game music. There were several other things I could have gotten a degree in. I got a degree in computer science, because I did put some thought into it and it was obvious what the winner was. I have no regrets. I have put my money where my mouth is. I'm tired of looking at my peers who followed their bliss right into staggering debt and worthless degrees. Don't be one of them.
(I'm not saying I chose computer science out of the blue because I thought I could make money. I'm saying of the many things I loved or at least liked, computer science among them, the choice was pretty obvious. The next most interesting thing to me was psychology, but since I would not have wanted to be a therapist I would have been in the academic world and I doubt I'm that spectacular of a psychologist. Probably would have wandered into computational neuroscience anyhow....)
And Wall st would be much better if it just hired accountants instead of all those people who had spent 10years learning all that useless math.
I can assure you that if you are from a top 30-40 university and have PhD in CS,EE,Chem Eng. or other hard core engineering you are near guaranteed a good job (unless you have messed up royally)
However if you are not from top 30-40 University or did your degree in Chemisty, Marine biology, Physics and or some esoteric branch of Maths you are less likely to get an industrial job. Also i sadly see a lot students working in 40+ ranked universities for a PhD E.g. Syracuse U. and future is really bleak for them.
Thus the issue here is grouping of all STEM PhD's together. However if you are from top 40 Schools in resp engg fields then you dont have to worry as much. If you are not and study marine bio (It sounds cool subject) sadly your job prospects are restricted to Academia!
Well, duh. The blindingly obvious thing that you missed is that there's life outside of Google.
"I can assure you that if you are from a top 30-40 university and have PhD in CS,EE,Chem Eng. or other hard core engineering you are near guaranteed a good job (unless you have messed up royally)"
Reality says otherwise.
"If you are not and study marine bio (It sounds cool subject) sadly your job prospects are restricted to Academia!"
I guess you've never heard of NOAA, Woods Hole, among others, then.