This past winter, I attended a public thesis defense of a Dartmouth biology PhD candidate. Following the defense's successful completion, I asked the new doctor which institution she'd be off to next. To my surprise, she replied that she would not be joining academia. Rather, she was hoping to join a research patent law firm and take night classes to earn a law degree. When I prodded further, she replied that there were limited opportunities in the United States for a freshly-minted PhD, and rather than trudging along for years in postdoctoral positions while grasping for chances at tenure, going into law or industry would allow her to reap immediate pecuniary benefits from her degree. Other members of the same lab from first-year graduate students to weathered post-docs all seemed to agree with this bleak forecast of the academic job market.
As an aspiring physician-scientist, this revelation surprised me. After all, just last year, President Barack Obama and scientific industries challenged undergraduate institutions to produce 10,000 more engineers a year and 100,000 new teachers with majors in STEM science, technology, engineering and math. And for years, politicians and educators alike have lamented the United States' poor performance in the Program for International Student Assessment, which evaluates the reading skills, mathematics ability and scientific literacy of 15-year-old students from over 60 political entities in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The New York Times published an article last November, "Why Science Majors Change Their Minds (It's Just So Darn Hard)," stressing the rationales and implications behind the high attrition rates of STEM undergraduate majors. All of the above seemed to function on this underlying premise: Without a steady feed of qualified experts in STEM, how will the United States compete in the break-neck competition within the international knowledge-based economy?
Unfortunately, the truth is more complicated than meets the eye. Despite calls for more STEM experts, the United States has few positions in which to place them. According to a 2011 article in Nature magazine, there was an almost 40 percent increase in the number of science doctorates earned each year between 1998 and 2008 to around 34,000 in countries that are members of the OECD, and the numbers show no sign of declining. This increase in the rate of science doctorates awarded despite only modest growth in tenured positions means an overall decline in the proportion of science PhDs who gain tenured academic positions. Furthermore, in the current economic slump, pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies have been slow to hire qualified PhD applicants, and with tighter budgets and a growing number of scientists, grant success rates at the National Institute of Health funding agency dropped to lowest ever 18 percent in 2011, a 3 percent dip from 2010.
Facing challenges on all of these fronts, many postdoctoral students have little choice but to leave academia and take on jobs that do not require a PhD, despite unreasonable demands from politicians to pursue the sciences. In order to better the status of current and future science PhDs, revamping the path toward a PhD may be necessary. This would mean that individual degree-granting programs must voluntarily agree to place a cap or a control on the number of PhDs generated, as well as emphasize quality over quantity in the various graduate programs all over the nation. However, such restrictive measures may ultimately dampen the wide variety of scientific output and prove to be a disservice for academia. If the United States wishes to retain its status as the international research powerhouse, it must substantiate its demands and provide roles and jobs for post-doctorates to fulfill their research functions, primarily by increasing research funding and by prodding more private science companies many of which do receive government grants to hire.
What is certain is that, unless something is done to control the future output of PhDs or increase demand for PhD-holding scientists, students still committed to pursuing academia myself included will likely face unfavorable odds in the near future. Current students considering a job in academia or research ought be aware of the limited job prospects and plan accordingly.
