Mar 25, 2022 05:48 PM
https://undark.org/2022/03/24/universiti...cientists/
EXCERPTS: The long-term job outlook for a freshly minted science Ph.D. can be pretty grim. After devoting more than a half decade to becoming an independent researcher in the field of their passion, after sacrificing opportunities for better pay and work-life balance, and after writing papers and presenting at who-knows-how-many conferences, graduate students may emerge from the ivory tower only to find that there are no jobs that allow them to do the thing they’ve been training to do.
In 2020, colleges and universities throughout the United States awarded more than 42,000 Ph.D. diplomas for scientists and engineers. In many respects, that’s fantastic news; it represents a giant leap from the fewer than 6,000 degrees awarded in 1958. We have more scientists and engineers than ever before. In a society that thrives on highly skilled workers and that celebrates and respects those workers, many young people are heeding the call to enter the science, technology, engineering, and math disciplines.
Many universities and colleges do not publish data on the long-term career outcomes of graduate students the way they do for undergraduate students. Why are they ignoring their advanced students? Perhaps it is because if they were to print the realities on their brochures, fewer graduate students would enroll in their programs.
Nevertheless, we can track the progress of the nation’s Ph.D. holders via independent surveys. [...] The NCSES survey indicated that nearly a third of doctoral scientists and engineers in the U.S. are not employed as scientists or engineers. If the goal of graduate programs is to create highly trained scientists, then these programs are oversupplying the workforce by the hundreds of thousands.
Keep in mind that a graduate student’s life isn’t easy. In a 2019 survey of more than 6,000 graduate students, three-quarters of graduate students reported working more than 40 hours a week, one-third say they sought help for anxiety and depression due to their school experience, and nearly 40 percent reported dissatisfaction with their work-life balance. Still, more than half expressed interest in pursuing a long-term academic career. That’s a lot of blood, sweat, and tears devoted to a career that may not come to fruition.
All this raises the question: What exactly are science and engineering graduate programs for? Are they training grounds for future research scientists? Are they a fun way for students to develop highly valuable skills that they then translate to non-academic and non-science careers? Or are they research-generating factories where senior scientists can exploit cheap labor?
As an astrophysicist who has spent years communicating science and watching scores of young students get excited by the prospects of a career in science, I think we need to critically examine the way we approach science graduate education. Presumably, the goal of Ph.D. programs is to train independent scientists, but many of those students will not actually become scientists — either in academia or in industry... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: The long-term job outlook for a freshly minted science Ph.D. can be pretty grim. After devoting more than a half decade to becoming an independent researcher in the field of their passion, after sacrificing opportunities for better pay and work-life balance, and after writing papers and presenting at who-knows-how-many conferences, graduate students may emerge from the ivory tower only to find that there are no jobs that allow them to do the thing they’ve been training to do.
In 2020, colleges and universities throughout the United States awarded more than 42,000 Ph.D. diplomas for scientists and engineers. In many respects, that’s fantastic news; it represents a giant leap from the fewer than 6,000 degrees awarded in 1958. We have more scientists and engineers than ever before. In a society that thrives on highly skilled workers and that celebrates and respects those workers, many young people are heeding the call to enter the science, technology, engineering, and math disciplines.
Many universities and colleges do not publish data on the long-term career outcomes of graduate students the way they do for undergraduate students. Why are they ignoring their advanced students? Perhaps it is because if they were to print the realities on their brochures, fewer graduate students would enroll in their programs.
Nevertheless, we can track the progress of the nation’s Ph.D. holders via independent surveys. [...] The NCSES survey indicated that nearly a third of doctoral scientists and engineers in the U.S. are not employed as scientists or engineers. If the goal of graduate programs is to create highly trained scientists, then these programs are oversupplying the workforce by the hundreds of thousands.
Keep in mind that a graduate student’s life isn’t easy. In a 2019 survey of more than 6,000 graduate students, three-quarters of graduate students reported working more than 40 hours a week, one-third say they sought help for anxiety and depression due to their school experience, and nearly 40 percent reported dissatisfaction with their work-life balance. Still, more than half expressed interest in pursuing a long-term academic career. That’s a lot of blood, sweat, and tears devoted to a career that may not come to fruition.
All this raises the question: What exactly are science and engineering graduate programs for? Are they training grounds for future research scientists? Are they a fun way for students to develop highly valuable skills that they then translate to non-academic and non-science careers? Or are they research-generating factories where senior scientists can exploit cheap labor?
As an astrophysicist who has spent years communicating science and watching scores of young students get excited by the prospects of a career in science, I think we need to critically examine the way we approach science graduate education. Presumably, the goal of Ph.D. programs is to train independent scientists, but many of those students will not actually become scientists — either in academia or in industry... (MORE - missing details)