, 3 min read
A must read paper in the Chronicle
A must read paper in the Chronicle Is There a Science Crisis? Maybe Not. The paper is about the oversupply of graduate students in science which is brought upon by universities who have a vested interest in producing more and more science Ph.D.s but don’t necessarily need to adjust to the job market.
It brings back memories. At the end of the eighties, they were predicting a severe shortage of science Ph.D. As it turns out, it was totally false and the paper documents very well the fact that life after a science Ph.D. has gotten tremendously worse and that there are clearly an ever increasing number of science Ph.D.s with fewer and fewer jobs.
The truth is that universities are being irresponsible (and so are professors). Training highly specialized students who know how to solve one type of technical problems has no value for society. Whatever you do, train students to have a wide range of skills. This means that we need to reduce drastically the number of science Ph.D.s and focus on well-rounded students.
I’m convinced governments will soon wake-up and stop listening to universities. They’ll be forced soon to look at the numbers and figure out that generously paying universities to produce more science Ph.D.s is a waste of tax payer money.
Some beautiful quotes:
An editorial in Science this year argued: “We’ve arranged to produce more knowledge workers than we can employ, creating a labor-excess economy that keeps labor costs down and productivity high. Maybe we keep doing this because in our heart of hearts, we really prefer it this way.”
Mr. Freeman, like other economists, looks to dollars to make sense of the trends among graduate students. “They’re not studying science,” he says, “because they look and say, ‘Do I want to be a postdoc paid $35,000 or $40,000 at age 35, with extreme uncertainty working in somebody else’s lab, and maybe getting credit for my work and maybe not getting full credit? Or would I rather be an M.B.A. and making $150,000 and hiring Ph.D.’s?'”
With wages stagnant and too few jobs for engineers, adding to the work force will only make those careers less attractive, says one of the authors, George F. McClure, a retired aerospace engineer who studies employment issues for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. “The problem is that everybody has focused on the supply side, and very few have focused on the demand side,” he says. “People in colleges and universities are concerned with maintaining the pipeline and throughput.”
In a case study, Ms. Stephan, the Georgia State economist, has analyzed the growth of the bioinformatics field, generally regarded as one of the hottest areas in science. The number of degree programs blossomed from 21 in 1999 to 74 in 2003. “There’s been a tremendous increase in the number of students in these programs,” she says. But, she adds, “we also track job announcements in bioinformatics, and they’ve been declining.” She sees parallels to other leading fields. “Everybody is talking right now that there’ll be lots and lots of jobs in nanotechnology,” she says. “I’ve not seen a convincing case that that is happening, or that it will happen.”