Employment rates for STEM Ph.D.s are down or stagnant across the board

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2014/07/employment_rates_for_stem_ph_d_s_it_s_a_stagnant_job_market_for_young_scientists.html

by luu • 12 years ago

120 111 12 years ago

slate.com

raverbashing4• 12 years ago

Ph.D. allowed for some things:

- 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.

Jweb_Guru• 12 years ago

I think this is a very simplistic view that only holds for a very few areas of study. The idea that computer simulation is an adequate substitute for scientific experimentation in the majority of the sciences is puzzling to me. Not that models don't help, but there's still far too much we either don't know how to model, or don't have the computational power to model (or we have both, but it would be more expensive than just testing it in a lab).

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.

raverbashing4• 12 years ago

"The idea that computer simulation is an adequate substitute for scientific experimentation in the majority of the sciences is puzzling to me"

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)

Thriptic2• 12 years ago

It is basically impossible to do life sciences research outside of an academic or industry lab, and almost no academic lab will take on someone who is not a student or post-doc.

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.

raverbashing4• 12 years ago

Oh I don't disagree with you, life sciences are an area where things will still work as you described for a long time.

jnbiche2• 12 years ago

While it's true that progress can be made from a simulation stand point, licenses to these software packages are enormously expensive.

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.

pessimizer• 12 years ago

That's because the financial services sector sucks all of the air out of the room. Look forward to dismal growth for the next two generations as universities and the people who pay for people to go to universities start to raise entrance standards and prices in order to cut down on the supply.

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.

asdfologist• 12 years ago

What does the finance sector have to do with any of this? At MIT, for example, only 2% of PhDs go into finance:

http://web.mit.edu/facts/alum.html

kjdbakjdab• 12 years ago

It seems like our conception of money has been damaged to a point where it's increasingly just a fictitious construct, rather than a means of transmitting value. Basically, money is now arbitrary number whose only purpose is to obtain an even larger arbitrary number at a later date. The way we treat currency is more and more decoupled from reality, and that's a pretty dangerous phenomenon. What's the evidence for this?

-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

HarryHirsch2• 12 years ago

A big employer for chemistry PhDs that no one in the West has heard of is Wuxi Pharmatech, a contract research outfit in Shanghai. They do everything, synthesis, discovery, lead optimization, clinical testing, process development, formulation, the whole pipeline. Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies stateside have turned into IP brokerages, if you think you have a promising target you buy a startup that has a compound for that and hand it off to your offshore contract firm.

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.

refurb2• 12 years ago

This is a great point, employment stats are not the same across all PhDs.

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.

purringmeow• 12 years ago

That kind of offshoring is definitely bad, IMO. We aren't talking about outsourced PHP web development sweatshops, but incredibly high-tech research. As one poster below mentioned, you are losing institutional knowledge & traditions. That has to have a negative long term effect on your economy.

WalterBright3• 12 years ago

the short time horizon Wall Street demands

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.

aquadrop• 12 years ago

If short term companies will kill their long term competitors in short term, i.e. now, long term may never come and global trend won't care about the future. Isn't that a danger?

HarryHirsch2• 12 years ago

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.

protonfish3• 12 years ago

Few comments have made me want to downvote as much as this one. I still have another hundred or so points to go until I am allowed so I'll have to settle for explaining to you how much I disagree.

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.

beambot• 12 years ago

I've seen other stats that suggest PhDs (particularly in STEM) actually have the lowest unemployment rates (around 2.2%) compared to any other cohort arranged by degree attained: http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_chart_001.htm

_delirium• 12 years ago

Yeah, the article is a bit misleading in its focus on "employment rates". It's using employment rates on the day of graduation, i.e. people who have an offer lined up before graduating. People who graduate and then interview, starting sometime later, aren't counted as "employed" in these numbers. Ultimately almost all STEM PhDs do end up with a job within a year or so, as the article later acknowledges. Later in the article they quote the unemployment rate for STEM-doctoral holders as ~2%, as you found.

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).

rlanday• 12 years ago

The fact that Ph.D. holders have the lowest unemployment rate is not at all surprising, given that these people have all undergone extensive selection to be smart and hard-working. This would still be the case even if holding a Ph.D. were completely useless, so it’s not really clear how much the unemployment rate is decreased by actually holding the degree.

azakai• 12 years ago

The article mentions that 2% figure.

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).

tdicola• 12 years ago

I feel like there's more to this story than what the article and charts show. For example, what's the total number of PhD students over time? Has there been an increase in PhD students relative to demand so that naturally there will be less PhD graduates without immediate employment?

lutorm2• 12 years ago

Well, if by "demand" you mean tenure-track faculty jobs, there's a plot in the article of that. The answer, which as far as I know is applicable across all fields, is that the number of PhD graduates have risen dramatically while the amount of tenure-track jobs are flatlined or even dropping.

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.)

nextos2• 12 years ago

In some areas like biotech, a PhD is almost a union card to work in large corporations doing R&D. Without it, sadly, you won't be taken seriously.

michaelochurch5• 12 years ago

Ph.D. bigotry is an artifact of the bad job market, which has just been getting worse for the past 30 years.

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.

erikpukinskis2• 12 years ago

I agree, Academia is in decline. Sort of. It's in decline the way journalism is in decline, which is to say: there's more of it than ever, and the people who are Getting It Done are thriving in new, 21st century institutions. But people who just want a job "in the industry", whether it is journalism or academics, are going to have a bad time as vast swaths of "the industry" crumble in response to competition that actually embraces the new value system the internet is forcing on all industries.

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.

Estragon• 12 years ago

How are you making that bet?

roel_v2• 12 years ago

I was reading your post, about halfway through I started thinking 'hey this reads like a post by...' glances up at username 'oh look, it actually is' skips rest of post.

epistasis• 12 years ago

I'm not entirely sure why this is a bad thing. In lab science, the PhD process gives experience that isn't easily available in other situations.

iak8god• 12 years ago

Does anyone know what happened in Physics in the early 2000s? The number "Employed" spikes from ~30% to ~40% in a very short time span and then falls rapidly to ~20:

http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/articles/business/mon...

lutorm2• 12 years ago

I wish they would draw those graphs in a more honest way. Now it looks like there's a very high time resolution when in fact there's one data point per year and they've done some spline fitting to them...

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.

analog31• 12 years ago

I'd like to see those as absolute numbers, and preferably un-smoothed. The corresponding "dip" seems to be in post-docs.

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.

yen223• 12 years ago

Speculation: Dot-com boom, followed by the dot-com crash affected everyone, including academia.

ArkyBeagle2• 12 years ago

Especially related to optical networking.

mililani5• 12 years ago

Has anyone ever looked at how large some of these graduate STEM departments are by the number of students? When I decided to go back to grad school for maths, I realized that doing a Ph.D. would probably be fruitless. How did I determine this? I went to UC Berkeley, Stanford and UCLA, arguably the best math departments in the country based on the NRC rankings and AMS rankings, and counted up their graduate students. There were over 300 students. THREE HUNDRED. Three hundred brilliant minds with brilliant credentials with at least 300 other hundred brilliant competitors. That's not including the grad students at the other more mediocre schools in California like USC, UCSC, UCSB, UC Davis, UCI, UCR, and, god, I must be missing some. Oh yeah, UC San Diego. I was wondering, then, where are all these brilliant students going to go? Surely, there is not enough openings in academia, even at lower ranked institutions, for these guys. I went and checked for job openings in academia for math tenure tracked appts, and yes, there were only 10 jobs out there at the time. I then started piecing together things I saw in my own life's journey: brilliant mathematicians and scientists teaching and researching at second or third tier research universities. A lot teaching at teaching colleges (at my school, SJSU, there are several math professors from Stanford and Princeton teaching there).

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.

onetimeusename6• 12 years ago

So did you end up getting the phd anyways? In your experience, did you feel the departments' agendas placed importance on the field or were they more interested in career aspirations or money? My personal experience is that mathematics comes second to research grants and ensuring prestige. I do want to hear from other people though since that was just my own.

mililani5• 12 years ago

No, I'm actually starting grad school next month. But, I decided against a PhD and will just do a masters in math with a concentration in statistics. My ultimate goal was to teach at the community colleges anyways. I really don't want to do research for the rest of my life.

Bahamut• 12 years ago

I was once a PhD student of math at UIUC - after some pains with job searching, I eventually landed in software engineering after teaching myself a lot. Graduate school fulfilled a special challenge for me, proving to myself that I had one of the brightest minds out there.

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.

chestervonwinch• 12 years ago

From what I've gathered, this has been the job outlook for academic positions for some time across most areas (not strictly STEM), hasn't it? The prospects for STEM phds in industry appears better (or at least as someone pursuing a math phd with plans to go into industry, I must tell myself that). I'm interested in what decision you made.

mililani5• 12 years ago

Yes to academia. Academia is hard to break into, and from what I gather from talking to a lot of math professors, it seems to have been this way since the 50's.

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.

fsk• 12 years ago

I was going for a PhD in Math and dropped out for pretty much the same reason. The field was so specialized that nobody really understands anyone else's research, which makes it mostly not-merit-based (politics) who gets hired where. Also, it really wasn't fun. I figured it would be easier to work as programmer and study Math (or other things) in my spare time.

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.

raverbashing4• 12 years ago

Yeah, there are a lot of possible divisions and specializations in Math it's not even funny. Most of them unintelligible to "mere mortals".

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.

mililani5• 12 years ago

I've seen permanent adjuncts / post-docs. There was a guy at my old school who was there as a post doc. He did his PhD at UC Berkeley. I can't believe that he has been jumping around to different institutions as a post doc or lecturer for over 10 years. It's quite sad. My friend did his Ph.D at University of Oregon. It took him 6 years to finish it. Then he spent 2 years as a post doc at University of Toronto. He finally got a job back home at a small 4 year college. I guess he's doing what he set out to do: be a university math professor. But, I believe him being from Hawaii helped him land that gig. They prefer locals who want to go back home before considering others.

nraynaud2• 12 years ago

As an outsider I'm a bit frightened. I my (mostly estranged) cousin is a Maths researcher (from wikipedia it looks like he's at UCLA now). Once I was talking to a PhD student friend about him, and actually he had used my cousin's work in his field.

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.

math0ne2• 12 years ago

The PHD in academia has never been about getting good a good job or getting value out of your time though it's about pursuing personal knowledge and projects. If you don't find any value in that than a PHD will not and never has been a good proposition.

Dewie• 12 years ago

I realized that doing a Ph.D. would probably be fruitless. How did I determine this?

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?

nsainsbury• 12 years ago

Over on /r/math you hear this sentiment a lot from maths postgrads.

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.

mililani5• 12 years ago

Yeah, I'm also on r/math. The saddest thing to see is the periodic repost of jobs for math degrees. It really is sad to see, and it reminds me of why I was often depressed as an undergrad. It's hard enough that the courses are challenging, but wondering what all this hard work would lead made it even more depressing.

Stubb2• 12 years ago

Another option, at least in the United States if you're a citizen, is to do contract work for the Department of Defense.

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.

LunaSea• 12 years ago

I think you forgot:

Step 1.5: Drop ethics.

shard9722• 12 years ago

So why is the US pushing STEM so much?

ArkyBeagle2• 12 years ago

Basically, because technocracy.

tritri• 12 years ago

at my school, SJSU, there are several math professors from Stanford and Princeton teaching there

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...

bellerocky• 12 years ago

Oh hey it's another claustrophobic fixed header covering up content. Horrible.

Sanddancer• 12 years ago

Add this to your adblock plus ruleset:

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onetimeusename6• 12 years ago

I would really like to see an alternative to going to grad school for a Ph.D. spring up for people who want to do research, particularly in math which doesn't require expensive labs. The overhead, the poor job prospects, the cost, the obsession with prestige all need to go.

tdaltonc• 12 years ago

Something like monasteries of mathematicians. Like the Concents in Anathem.

onetimeusename6• 12 years ago

Exactly.

nagrom• 12 years ago

A PhD in math does, however, require a motivated and interested supervisor. A supervisor who can tach you how to write papers, how to get them published, to tell you where you are wasting your time and to help you over the humps that may otherwise stop you. It needs a supervisor who can introduce you to others in the field, even if they live in other countries or on other continents!

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.

munin• 12 years ago

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.

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.

rm445• 12 years ago

I'm not saying you're wrong but it seems incredibly difficult. The problem is, how do you choose who to fund to go and do maths, how on earth you'd track their progress if any, and how do you achieve a return on your investment - even if 'you' means a sovereign nation and you have very general and long-term goals. If you can come up with something distinct from a university mathematics department to achieve this, it would be an achievement. I think we should count ourselves lucky that these departments have come to exist, and they provide such unreasonably useful output.

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.

onetimeusename6• 12 years ago

I think what surprises me is the discrepancy between reading about mathematicians who worked with younger students out of seemingly altruistic motives (Kolmogorov and Erdos come to mind) and then a contemporary math department that might only accept 1% of applicants out of a pool of qualified people because of perhaps funding concerns or some interest in maintaining exclusivity. On top of that, there is a long history of mathematicians who worked on problems without any monetary compensation and perhaps without being associated with any university. Decartes and Fermat were both lawyers and even recently Yitang Zhang didn't seem to be paid to do research, and I don't count adjunct lecturer as a paid research job.

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.

jebus9893• 12 years ago

The overhead,

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.

onetimeusename6• 12 years ago

overhead -> time taken and requirements to write and defend a thesis, in addition to teaching and writing papers with advisor. rhetorical question, is having a phd the only way to prove without a doubt that you are an expert in a field and know how to do research?

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.

infocollector• 12 years ago

Readers of this thread: http://we.tl/30KSRwmF0R - any comments on this talk?

hyperbovine3• 12 years ago

The economist types who ceaselessly churn out these doom-and-gloom articles about the PhD job market just kill me. Almost every single one unblinkingly equates success with salary. In my field postdocs pay 2-3x what you make as a grad student, while still giving you almost total flexibility to work on the things that interest you, with very little oversight. To a certain subset of people, this is far more attractive than making $150k figuring out how to make people click on ads, or some multiple of that selling your soul to a hedge fund.

math0ne2• 12 years ago

I like the point you are trying to make, but you go a little off the deep end there at the end. There's nothing wrong with pursuing money.

hyperbovine3• 12 years ago

Sorry, I did not mean to give offense, but the presumption that there's something wrong with not pursuing money is both a) irksome and b) at the root of a large number of ills in our society.

nraynaud2• 12 years ago

Actually yes.

tensor• 12 years ago

But neither is the pursuit of money any sort of notable goal. It's sort of like, "oh, well, get in line behind the other hoards of people who also want to be rich."

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!

mechanical_fish• 12 years ago

Do postdocs ever end in your field, or can you build an entire forty-year career out of a succession of three-year postdoctoral appointments?

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.)

hueving• 12 years ago

That's a cute strawman of what people in the industry do. It's similar to saying that all post-docs do is resubmit the same paper to conferences/journals for an entire year until one barely accepts it, at which point they are so disgusted with their own work that they hate to even talk about it.

kaitai• 12 years ago

I love having postdocs too, but what after that? I run out of postdocs. At some point people are going to stop considering you for math postdocs because you've been out of the PhD too long. And while it's great to make 40-50K and think about math all the time, the cost in stability of moving a family around every two years is ridiculous and unsustainable. Ok, now you've moved your family around for 6 years or done the long-distance thing and no one will hire you for a postdoc anymore and no one will hire you for a faculty job. What then? Perma-adjuncthood. Now you get to go back to 30k a year and still have no job security, and less time for research. So what was the point of that sacrifice?

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.

DaveWalk2• 12 years ago

In my field (life sciences), postdocs get paid about 40% more than grad students, and are required to pay into their benefits as they become official "employees" and not students. This, at least initially, puts them back close to the graduate salary.

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.

hyperbovine3• 12 years ago

It may not surprise you to learn that I don't spend all that much time worrying over my "career path", or "earning potential", or lose any sleep whatsoever over what some hiring manager or recruiter makes of me. Despite this, money and employment has never even remotely been a problem. My broader point is that obsessing over these career metrics subscribes to a very narrow worldview of what constitutes success, and there are a great many people in this world who exist outside this paradigm who lead rich and fulfilling lives. You certainly don't get any such notions from articles like this one.

protonfish3• 12 years ago

I discovered while working as a research assistant that the post docs made about the same amount as I did and less than the secretaries (they had a union.) During my child support hearing the lady at friend of the court gave me the best unintentional advice I ever received while explaining why I had to pay my ex-wife more than I could possible afford on my salary. She said "You are making much less than someone of your skills and experience should."

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.

kazagistar• 12 years ago

explaining why I had to pay my ex-wife more than I could possible afford on my salary
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.

XorNot• 12 years ago

I equate success with a job. No scratch that: at this point I'd settle for a damn interview.

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).

shard9722• 12 years ago

Really? Wow.

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.

seanflyon• 12 years ago

It is worth noting that employment in Eng and CS is up about 5 percentage points from 2010 to 2012 (the last 2 years for which the article has data). Not a huge gain, but I would not consider a 5 percentage points increase (10% increase) to be stagnation.

findjashua• 12 years ago

I was under the impression that Wall St loves Physics PhDs for quant roles. Is that not true?

Employment rates for STEM Ph.D.s are down or stagnant across the board

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