Employment rates for STEM Ph.D.s are down or stagnant across the board
slate.com
slate.com
It was then I realized that doing a Ph.D. in STEM is a pretty piss poor proposition. I would highly discourage most people from doing it, unless you really love research, don't care about job prospects or money, and that's all you want to do in life.
It seems like a waste to spend 5+ years on a PhD and 3-5 years on postdocs just to get a tenured position at the #200 ranked university or to be a permanent-adjunct.
Also hard to find a job, especially one that uses your work, unless you work in number theory, in this case you have a job at the NSA.
So I don't think there is no hope in research. Also I admit this whole citation, publication and plagiarism hunt is a toxic bullshit.
It turned out there were plenty of others smarter than me, but I held my own, which was enough for me. From what I can tell, smart PhD holders and/or dropouts (which I fall under the latter) can fall in many fields. My brother (a PhD graduate from Johns Hopkins in Chemistry) has been recruited for HR and data scientist positions. I have also been recruited for data scientist positions, especially once I proved my excellence in software engineering. I have also been recruited for sales positions in the past.
There are still some organizations/companies out there that recognize the value of pure intelligence over specialty. In some ways, I also look more favorably if someone shows great indicators of this when I am hiring.
The recommendation you hear a lot on that board is that if you are doing a maths degree you should also study something else somewhat complementary (comp sci is a popular choice) and hope to find employment in that field. I had honestly at some point considered doing a Ph.D in Maths but upon further consideration - and realizing then that my future would likely involve low pay, excessive travel, low job stability, and a crushing amount of work - it just seemed like a very sad proposition.
Step 1: Acquire STEM Ph.D.
Step 2: Get a job with a DoD contractor.
Step 3: Profit!
A short look at job options in academia disabused me of pursuing that option. Working twice as hard for half the pay? No thanks.
Step 1.5: Drop ethics.
No on industry. I'm on other math forums, and judging by the constant reposts of "Finding a job with a math degree", I really believe that it's tough finding a job in private industry as well.
Personally, I decided not to do a pure maths degree but instead concentrate on statistics. The job prospects in industry are much better in that field. And, my goal was to teach at community colleges. From my discussion with CC faculty, their most popular math courses are statistics. So, they often look for people who have strong stats backgrounds. My plan is to find work as a statistician and work as an adjunct until I can land a permanent TT job at the community colleges. I just got certified as a SAS programmer, and there are lots of jobs at there I can do remotely.
Well clearly it takes someone going to the best math departments in order to realize that within a hierarchical organizations wherein tenured employees can supervise a lot of grad students in the span of their career, only a few of those grad students can really get a job similar to their supervisor. Was this really a revelation?
You were bashing on schools like, "USC, UCSC, UCSB, UC Davis, UCI, UCR, and, god, I must be missing some. Oh yeah, UC San Diego." and calling the mediocre? HA!
You go to SJSU and are calling those UC's mediocre?? I don't know how you got to the top of HN, but you need a HUGE perspective change dude...
Research, where you need PhDs, has been cut savagely, because of the short time horizon Wall Street demands that is totally incompatible with the realities of research.
Back in the early 2000's organic chemistry PhDs were in very high demand. Salaries went from ~$70K/yr to start to over $100K/yr by 2005 or so.
Since 2005 two things have happened: (1) as mentioned above, a lot of off-shoring of basic research has happened, particularly to China and India (not saying this is good or bad) and (2) a shift by the biotech industry away from small molecule drugs to biologic drugs (antibodies and other proteins).
The result is that organic chemistry PhDs have been hit pretty hard while PhDs with knowledge areas that support biologic drug development have done pretty well.
That being said, I've heard that wages for PhDs in China and India have gone up from 30% of that in the US to 70-80%. Combine that with the hassle of outsourcing (knowledge transfer, etc) it's become less advantageous than it was 10 years ago.
Companies that sacrifice long term for short term profits will, assuredly, do poorly long term. Their stock price will decline. Investors will see this and will short the stock. The stock will have low P/E ratios.
On the other hand, companies that sacrifice for the short term and invest for the long term will see high P/E ratios, as investors see that and go long on the stock. Amazon is a prime example.
I don't believe that investors (Wall Street) are too dumb to know the difference.
We see this play out right now. Facebook and Google offer faster return on investment than Merck and Pfizer, and that's why stock prices are where they are.
But when you shut down a research facility you instantly lose decades of institutional knowledge, something that you can't buy for all the money in the world. At some point society has to ask what it wants: more targeted advertising, or antibiotics that actually work.
Your argument is a logical fallacy that I see a lot, but doesn't have a fancy Latin name. It is a combination of appeal to authority and circular reasoning so I'll give it a name right now: the Authority Circle. It has the form of:
"I believe X person/company/country is doing something dumb/bad/foolish."
"If it wasn't a good idea, they wouldn't be doing it."
This assumes that person X is smarter than you, therefore the fact that they are choosing to take an action is evidence that it is good. This is a lazy and unconstructive argument and you should be ashamed of yourself. (Unless you are a Wall Street shill doing PR spin. In that case, well done.)
So logically your argument is not well formed; what about factually? The behavior we see in investors is incredibly focused on short term gains and why not? There is no benefit to long term success to a public investor. Once the company (a small percentage of) their money is invested in flames out, they can simply invest in another company and drain them dry until it is time to bleed another one. (Hopefully unloading their stock to chumps along the way at the right time, before anyone realizes they are being sold a sick cow.) We know from history that unless government regulates the stock market, it is a short matter of time until the house of cards collapses. Today, the most long-lived publicly-held corporations are the ones where the CEO has the power to say "no" to intense investor demand for short-term gain. (We are waiting to see how long Apple can survive this now that Jobs is gone.) Everything we know tells us "yes, investors are indeed that stupid."
You have offered no new or useful facts or reasoning to this discussion. I give your comment a 0/10 for your unhelpful waste of everyone's time.
I said investors, not an individual. There are a lot of professional investors who full time investigate a company, in fact Wall Street is full of them. Do I really believe that you (or I) am better informed about a company's future prospects? Why do you believe you are smarter than they are?
Consider (again) Amazon. Why does it have such a high P/E? That is hardly evidence of short term thinking. Why did Microsoft, for the last 10 years, have increasing profits and a shrinking P/E? I submit that investors were pricing the stock based on their estimation of the long term value of the stock.
A CEO once told me he was organizing his company around short term results, because "that's what Wall Street wants". The stock cratered shortly afterwards. He fooled nobody but himself.
Let's put it this way. Give us a list of stocks you believe are overvalued because foolish investors have bid the price up because of long term sacrifice for short term results. Eventually, the chickens must come to roost and the stock must collapse. So I must ask, have you shorted those stocks? Are you willing to bet your own money on being smarter than Wall Street?
Your second paragraph sticks with the same nonsense as your previous post i.e. investors are smarter than us so they have to be right.
Now you try some new stuff so thanks for that. You made a good example of Amazon but since I already claimed that strong CEOs can resist short-term investor pressures and Bezos clearly falls into this category I invalidated this argument before you even wrote it down. It makes me think you aren't really paying attention.
I am not sure what point you are trying to make with the next paragraph but whatever it is there is not enough information there to draw any sort of conclusion. Stocks tank for many reasons including bad luck so one tale of a data point isn't useful.
Your last paragraph is well done. Unlike your other points it took a little thought to deduce why it is incorrect. I do believe there are many overvalued stocks but I am not going to short them. Bubbles can live a very, very long time and shorting them is a bet on when the bubble will pop, not on how big the bubble is, and I claim no special insight or information on the exact time any particular ponzi pyramid will inevitably implode.
Much improved: 2/10 (earned in the last paragraph only.)
Amazon's P/E is currently 503. The P/E for the S&P 500 is around 19. The "investor pressures" are strongly supporting Bezos.
I'm one of them. I'm long on AMZN, with my own money on the line, and it's done well for me. I plan on staying pat.
Whether I'm right or wrong about AMZN's future is irrelevant - what is relevant is that a high P/E is a sure sign of investors betting on the long term future of a company, and not being obsessed with the next quarter. The CEO doesn't set the P/E, the investors do.
If you can work as a postdoc forever, can you do this with confidence? Which is to say, what are the odds that you'll wind up washed up at age 34, or 44, or 54, driving the mid-21st-century equivalent of a taxicab, after your PI's grants dry up and you can't find any other PIs who need your possibly-quite-esoteric research skills?
Tenure would help, of course. What's the ratio of assistant-professor openings to Ph.D.-level graduates in your field?
Getting your own grants might help. In your field, do people who have done, say, five postdocs in a row routinely get awarded grants in their own names?
(Full disclosure: I did a postdoc for fun, once. It was fun. There are many worse ways to spend three years of your life. But it was an expensive detour from my eventual career.)
If you want to do research in a field like math and you can't get a professorship, you need to have an outside income that still allows 30 hours a week to think. If you want to do research in math and you can get a professorship, you need to protect your time fiercely even if you're at a research school and you're close to doomed if you are teaching 3-3 or 4-4. (I've seen some people do it.) So that dream of working on things that interest you with very little oversight is temporary pretty much no matter what.
Yes, it does increase over time, to about 2x salary. It also plateaus there quickly.
My question to you: assuming you are in this "certain subset of people," do you think that a string of postdocs is healthy for your career path? Of the dozen or so hiring managers and recruiters I've chatted with over the last year, any more than 2 podstdocs is a serious red flag.
But realistically, I'm not talking "earning potential", I'm talking about "spending your twenties making $10/hour as a graduate student and shafting yourself come retirement." Nobody becomes an academic to get rich, but I worry about the mid-life financial health of today's postdocs versus that of their mentors' at the same age.
And so I was forced to change careers. Doing research was fun, but if you want to do it (or make pottery or be in a band) professionally, then I recommend your spouse has a real job.
> I recommend your spouse has a real job
It seems the spouse thing was what screwed it for you, not sure why you are suggesting it to others.
Nobody will care about what you do if this is your goal. On the other hand, if you can tell people "I want to make your life easier by: filling a market gap, changing an industry for the better, making X easier to use, making Y more affordable" then people will care. Thinking more about others than yourself is also probably a good way to actually find a good business!
I have a Masters in Chemistry, my girlfriend has a PhD in Chemistry. Neither of us, for the past year, have come remotely close to gaining employment that uses those skills (in Australia).
As an Australian who didn't go to university, I had the warnings growing up that getting a piece of paper doesn't guarantee you a job but I didn't know things were that hard for someone holding a masters.
I don't think it's therefore a particularly useful analysis. There are a lot of issues with the STEM-PhD job market, but significant risk of unemployment isn't really one of them. Bigger issues are things like whether the opportunity cost is worth it, and the fact that people who go into a STEM PhD really wanting to do research are often disappointed (there are plenty of industry jobs, but many don't really involve scientific research).
The reasons the numbers are different is the article focuses on new PhDs, and the 2% figure is all PhDs in the market (new and not-new).
There used to be BA-level research jobs. There still are. They're just now filled by PhDs. Basic research is pretty much gone.
Pedigree bigotry is the natural reaction of a society or subculture in decline. When the future is hopeless and the present is uninspiring, people obsess about the past. PhD Bigotry is a way for the brilliant but passed-over (through no fault of their own) to reminisce about the days when they were young and clueless and thought society-at-large gave a shit about anything other than crass commercialism.
Personally, I prefer to bet on the future. Simply due to resource limitations, we'll need to reinvest in basic research if we don't want human extinction (or at least the collapse of civilization). But that is a bet, and we're going to have to demolish some entrenched players in order to have one.
Universities will continue to exist, and will do great research, along with being an excellent babysitter for 18-30 year olds who have the means to purchase a babysitter while they focus on their academics (or not). But more and more research will happen outside of the Academy, because research is useful. And for many kinds of research, there are easier ways to get it done than getting a PhD. And that trend will increase.
And the University will lose its place as the de-facto spot for kids and researchers to go.
Don't look down on those "just want a job" people. When you don't have an income, the need to get one consumes you. Working "for passion" is a luxury of trust-fund kids and people who pulled off their exits before the Valley became a scam.
The idea that it's dishonorable to work for money is classism. Most people have no other choice.
But more and more research will happen outside of the Academy, because research is useful.
Sadly, we see the opposite trend. Research inside and outside of academia is melting down. Companies use the results of R&D (open-source software is an R&D effort) and buy "innovation" out of a rigged R&D-ish system (the VC-funded Valley) but no one is paying for it, which means that very little of quality is being built at scale.
Something will bring it back, but it will probably start outside of the US. It will probably involve competition at an international level. I'd love to see it take a friendly form: an all-information-shared (the objective being prestige, not dominance over others) 21st-century moon-shot race between North America, Europe, and Asia on curing cancer. Sadly, history shows that it's just as likely to involve war, because humans are perilously stupid.
Until that happens, I feel like technical excellence is such a nonpriority in this country that it shouldn't surprise anyone that Stanford threw its weight behind Clinkle and Snapchat.
The prestige competition between universities may have had that effect at one time, but now they compete on stupid shit like pampering rich douchebags, overpaying top administrators, and funding idiotic startups like Clinkle as a way of selling "the experience" (your kid might be made founder of the next Snapchat!)
Look, I don't know the guy - apparently he worked for Google for a (very) short time, had a semi-public falling out with a bunch of people there, and since then got into a couple of nasty flamewars with Google'ers (and others, from what I can tell) here and elsewhere. I don't care one way or the other really, to me (and to many regulars here, methinks) he's like one of those street preachers wearing 'repent now' and 'the devil is amongst us' buttons; a part of the urban scenery that is best not engaged with, lest you'll spend the rest of your day going back-and-forth in an 'argument' that can't be 'won' (even for the most lenient definition of 'won').
But if I'm mistaking the GP for somebody else, my apologies.
But I don't. Instead, I'm studying Haskell. On a Sunday night. Including all the random stuff I read just because I'm passionate about technology, I probably work 70 hours per week. (Much of that's self-directed and career-oriented; working more than 30-40 without a career payoff is a chump's game.)
Why is this? Why do I side with the team (technologists, as opposed to douchebags) that seems to be losing? Because I think the good guys are going to win, and that actual technical knowledge is going to become an important asset again. It might be 10 or 20 years from now, but I think it will happen.
It's worth noting, however, that many of them also believe that the world is on fire and they're not afraid if other people get soaked in the process of saving the damn thing. It's just that their solutions - like stack ranking, restructurings, org structures, etc. - tend to soak engineers like you, while your solutions - like open allocation or programmer's unions - tend to soak managers and consultants like them.
Spot on! The reason for the angst is that typically management and consultants call the shots and the software developers are ignored.
It is incredibly frustrating when your company pulls in consultants, who have spent all of a week studying up on your company and industry, after ignoring staff who have been pointing out the key problems for months.
Anyways, the solution isn't to complain. It's to become CEO, or management, or wherever the decision-making power rests, and then listen better than average executive does. This is behind the "software is eating the world" thesis and many of the fortunes that have been made in the last 20 years; the extreme cluelessness of decision-makers has created a number of exploitable market opportunities that you can attack with persistence and better information.
I strongly support the michaelochurch's of the industry because if we actually saw the kind of changes they speak of on a large scale we would be decades ahead technologically and the vast majority of people would be better off.
However, people who complain "in the small" and do nothing about it are perpetuating the existing system.
E.g. If you know key decisions are made outside of and before meetings then work within that system to get what you want.
Or if people get hired based on who they know then spend a little bit of time each month networking. The number of chumps I know who complain about this but never network is insane.
Or if you have expert knowledge of a critical legacy system then make sure you are compensated appropriately. $500k/year is nothing compared to the cost of replacing you in the short term (4-5 years). Or you could leverage your expertise into a decent management role.
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- You can deepen your studies and study the state of the art of a given area
- You can work in some area with all the support needed (equipment, etc)
- Networking
However, what's happening is:
- The latest journals are a click away
- A lot of experiments can be done in a computer setting nowadays
- Evolution in some areas do not depend anymore on experimentation, and/or the cost for it has gone down.
- Things are getting more complex and interdependent. To build the first integrated circuit you needed to know less about heat transfers and EM interference than today.
Hence, I believe even the Ph.D. model is getting challenged, as specialists in a very narrow thing won't take things very far as they once did.
I also don't understand why your fourth point means that specialization is not necessary. Isn't it the opposite--that generalists with shallow knowledge of many fields no longer suffice? People must specialize because the level of complexity in newer technology is extremely high, and to get anywhere it is necessary to focus on a small but very detailed slice of the pie.
The only really valid point is that information formerly available in journals is now available online. But I cannot say that I have seen a noticeable uptick in research being done by non-Ph.D.s despite this widespread availability, so I think it's at least premature to conclude that you can develop the same level of expertise as an autodidact.
Depends on the field. Even in natural sciences, there are several research areas not related directly with experimentation.
I would say that, for a lot of areas, we have the bases covered, but what's needed are better tools to understand it.
Protein folding is one area. The physics are ok, what we don't know is how to make it work for several atoms at once.
Data transmission is another. The real changes behind 4G, 802.11N, etc, is not a better radio transmitter only, but better channel estimation, error correction and use of diversity.
"I also don't understand why your fourth point means that specialization is not necessary"
It is necessary, but not sufficient. If you only focus on one area but don't know how to interface with the necessary surroundings you won't get anywhere.
" so I think it's at least premature to conclude that you can develop the same level of expertise as an autodidact."
The application of new discoveries and techniques is important as well, and several companies and individuals are doing important work in this area. (Go, Rust, several machine learning libraries, etc)
The barriers of entry to having information available are the lowest they've ever been and thus traditional models are being eaten by ad-hoc methods. And that is fine, requires reorientation though.
An individual outside of academia would be unable to purchase supplies due to supplier restrictions, would lack access to journals without piracy, would have no access to expensive required analytical equipment, and would be unable to front the costs associated with regulatory compliance in a lab setting.
While it's true that progress can be made from a simulation stand point, licenses to these software packages are enormously expensive. Without a university appointment or a well established track record, no one is going to be willing to share clinical data with you. Moreover, without any ability to validate the findings from your simulations in a lab / clinical setting, any results would be of questionable value.
Most importantly, it would be extremely difficult for an individual not associated with a university or industry lab to publish their results in a top tier journal.
Can you specify which software you're referring to? For many life science sub-disciplines, there are an increasing number of either open source or low-cost competitors.
Higher education will get out of the reach of most people again, like it used to be.
edit: I think specific marketing/financial/information services oriented programming/engineering jobs will survive well during this period. Other sciences are going to have to rely on stock fads, bubbles and scams to get any investment.
edit2: It's sad that we're wasting our best performers and best minds like this. You can't have growth if you produce superior minds and squander their potential for making new discoveries or coming up with innovative designs or methods. China is run by engineers - just saying.
-insanely inflated valuations for startups that offer trivial services and no revenue
-a behemoth financial services industry that makes money off of money, while offering little tangible value
-businesses flocking to easy, safe investments that create little value
-devaluation of the labor that creates value
That may exist as a culture in Open Source, but does not exist in Mathematics without universities - and I don't know how you make it exist for research that is hard (impossible?) to commercialise.
To do solid research requires a lot of time. Even if you don't need any expensive facilities, you still need a home and to eat, etc. If the government decided to fund maths PhDs directly, they'd need a ready-made corpus of people who could decide who gets funding. They'd need people who have published and who have proved that they know what they're talking about. These people would likely gather in central organisations where they could supervise their charges and collaborate on further publications to prove their bona fides. They may even teach lower level courses to bring in some extra money and share their administrative costs with similar worthies in other subjects...
You can rail against the cost, the prestige, and the lack of faculty positions all you like. Until your proposed solution is more than "do it at home and put it on the internet!", nothing will change.
Government research grants already fund maths PhDs and this process (a corpus of people who decide who gets funding) is how NSF, DARPA, IARPA, etc hand out grant money.
One problem is that the university takes a 60% cut off the the top of government grant awards. What for? I dunno, many places, the football team, padding the endowment, building new B-school buildings, hiring an army of mid-level administrators. It certainly isn't to pay for researcher (professor and postdoc) salaries, they are paid from other grants, again, from the government. It isn't to help with the grant award process, professors (and their students) write all their own grants.
The Academic tradition is alive, but the University has become a bloated beast siphoning life from the researchers and the government. What was a support infrastructure has a life of its own. It needs to be stopped.
Are there really schools where the B-school is a net cost center rather than profit center? I thought it was more standard for the business school to be subsidizing other parts of the university.
It might well be possible to use modern communications to distribute the work, improve efficiency and reduce overheads, basically turn all the world's maths departments into one big one - but I bet you still need something like the PhD thesis and viva.
Given these, I don't see why an organization can't get together and simply agree to communicate, work together, somehow find a way to minimally provide access to journals for its members and dutifully train new students and grant them degrees. A Phd may or may not be optimal, perhaps something less stringent. A lot of people I know personally didn't get in to the field because they wanted to get rich, some sacrifice may be required but at least there is no denying a sort of "volunteerism" in mathematics.
Academia should now be considered a conglomerate of business corporations, dedicated primarily to increasing profits and income and cutting costs.
Like other corps there's a trend towards increasing perceptions of value by marketing mediocre products and experiences to death, rather than providing actual social value with products and relationships that are truly inspiringly awesome.
So I don't think the current model is sustainable. It won't collapse next week, but I'd be surprised if we're still here twenty years from now.
As for PhDs - in my own area of interest the tenured people are pretty mediocre (believe me - I've worked through their papers) and most of the innovation and invention happens in industry.
So, there's no obvious benefit to spending the money. As it happens I earn enough to do research part time - no special resources needed in this field - and I'm getting a lot of satisfaction from making my own way for my own reasons.
Vague
> the poor job prospects
Relative to whom?
> the cost
If you're paying a dime to do a PhD you're doing it wrong — I get paid an ok amount and my fees are covered.
> the obsession with prestige
Not sure what you mean by this.
poor job prospects-> Did you read the article? How many tenure track positions do you think there are for someone who researches pure math?
cost-> are you paid as much as you could if you worked in industry? Are all costs monetary?
obsession with prestige -> Credentials are certainly something that people value in any field. Rankings are kept of the various departments. Of course people think about prestige, but should they? I do not believe people should worry about their own or their school's rank but simply do math if they like it but of course those thoughts occur.
Yes I did read the article. So you're equating "job prospects" with "chance of being a tenured professor in a specific field", more usually it means the opportunity to enter a well-paying or otherwise respectable career of any type.
Costs, sure I imagine I would earn more as a technician in industry with an MSc but if you're driven by immediate-term financial gain I'd agree a PhD is not for you.
Prestige, at PhD level it matters less about the institution than your specific advisor. Also I'd argue science is ahead of most careers in being a meritocracy, the quality of your publications should count for more than your institute's ranking. Should people care about the level of research of their institute as judged by an independent group of peers, probably yes.
I am equating those things under this context, if the majority of PhD grads are not becoming professors, I would like it if they "released" more of them sooner with something like your 3yr degree.
I think I can somewhat quantify prestige if you look at where some CS professors got their PhD[1]. I do think science is meritocratic but that doesn't mean all scientists are or statistics like these mean that all scientists won't experience self doubt or even get in to pissing contests with others about credentials. That sort of attitude really detracts from the altruistic community effort I imagine.
Can I ask where you are studying? I have genuine curiosity about the Euro grad schools.
[1]http://cs.brown.edu/people/alexpap/faculty_dataset.html
edit: I should add that in no way am I saying these results prove prestige has influence or that things aren't meritocratic. But can you envision how someone might look at this and interpret it so it reinforces stereotypes or misconceptions? Spots for grad students shouldn't be zero-sum.
full disclaimer: I went to a university with a top 5 program in my field and I don't think there is a very large difference in research from these universities over time.
edit2: Another clarification, it shouldn't be that someone says "oh I didn't get in to XYZ U, I am a failure" nor should it be "oh I got in to XYZ U, I am superior". It should be, simply, "I got in to grad school, now I will study and perform research." The former attitudes are things I have encountered and find it distasteful.
I agree wrt differences between similarly ranked institutions. I'd say similarly that the variance within groups at a top 5 school is greater than the variance between groups when compared with slightly lower ranking institutes.
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Remember that someone who would rather have a regular job but works one day a week at TGI Chillibees counts as employed for statistical purposes.
From anecdotal experience the underemployment rate is high - there are plenty of people that would like to have a full-time job but are making do as adjuncts.
The adjunct cancer has spread to places that you thought were immune. Look at Vassar College, it's a respectable place. In the Chemistry Department there are ten tenure-track professors, one full-time lecturer, and five adjuncts. Villanova, another respectable institution, is looking to fill three adjunct positions to teach graduate level courses. They do it because they can. There are sufficient pharmco refugee candidates around Philly and Boston from the last round of mergers and acquisitions for the model to work.
http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/articles/business/mon...
I got my physics PhD in the late 90's. Anecdotally during that time period, morale about employment was pretty low. As I recall a handful of activist students got the American Physical Society to acknowledge the issue. Physics Today was starting to print articles about non-academic employment, though mostly speculative.
Possibly as a result, I saw what seemed like a real push among physics students to pursue industry options, including programming. Many of us were good programmers. My thesis project ran on thousands of lines of code that I wrote for hardware that I designed. And those years seemed pretty good for engineering employment.
My impression is that interest in joining the post doc cadre evaporated, and students with any sort of engineering ability grabbed whatever industry jobs they could get.
It looks like it's the 2001 data point that has a higher value. I'm not sure what happened in 2001, and without knowing if academic or industry jobs are responsible it's hard to guess, but it would be interesting to see if there was a corresponding uptick in funding for physics research grants at that time.
Unless job demand is driven by exponential growth (like physics during the Cold War), it's simple math to conclude that every professor can graduate one Ph.D. student during his entire career for the job situation to be sustainable. Most probably graduate an order of magnitude more than that. (This of course ignores non-academic jobs and the question whether getting a Ph.D. is a good investment for such jobs.)