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What about for jobs where research skills are specifically necessary, like in corporate science and technology labs? Do the bigcorps find more value in hiring an undergrad and providing them training on how to do research?

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For such jobs, big corps do hire PhDs. These jobs are almost always in a research department (i.e. they won't hire a PhD to code). But these jobs are maybe 1% of all jobs in big corps.

Nowhere near 1% in my experience. Also, even in research arms, many masters level students are accepted (though it really depends on how low level the research activity is at that particular company, so this is going to vary wildly among different companies)

So what happens to the rest of the PhD students? Or are there just not many students who go on to get PhDs?

They come to America? For what it's worth, I know several PhDs from Japan working here in the SF Bay Area, all in biotech.

any position that requires phd level math/physics/chemistry etc is extremely rare even in the west.

job descriptions like to say phd level blah blah blah but rarely do they actually require such a theoretical background.

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