Several Ph.D.'s I know work in jobs largely unrelated to their qualification and interest simply because there aren't many jobs outside of academia that make good direct use of a humanities Ph.D.; some languished for years in adjunct positions before giving up in hopelessness and frustration. Some work as administrators, however - universities seem to value administrators with Ph.D.'s, and at least you get to work at a university and interact with students occasionally. And you can, uh, still teach as an adjunct on the side. Maybe.
The sad truth is that universities (in the US at least) are almost feudal systems, built on the backs of adjuncts (who do the teaching) and grad students (who do the research.) Yet in spite of an absurdly cheap workforce, tuition is incredibly expensive and universities drink money like water.
Of course we're mostly data scientists now, because only 5% win the faculty lottery.
Data science wasn't a path that existed when we started. I wonder if its existence changes what people going into a Physics PhD expect.
Honestly, the trend I seeing is that weaker students -ie can't find data science or consulting jobs- move on to post-docs.
Although, there are the dedicated few academics that also move on to post-docs as well.
Physics research always involves statistics, cough, 'machine learning' cough so that's how people are selling it these days.
After 5-6 years of making 25k per year and working long hours (which is not bad given the cost-of-living where I was in grad school is low), the salary becomes a very real draw.
This seems like a sad waste of physicists, even if the faculty pyramid scheme is obviously unsustainable. I for one would like to see more actual advances in physics.
Suppose you magically double the number of faculty positions. Within one year all of the new positions could be filled a hundred times over. Now you've back to the exact same scenario, except that now you also have twice as many slots for grad students, too.
/fellow physicist who went into DS