The postdoc. phenomenon (or its equivalent in the humanities, the perpetual adjunct) that we saw spreading into biology then seems pretty firmly entrenched across just about all academic disciplines now. Graduate schools are cranking them out at far above replacement rate, faster than academia can absorb them, and apparently faster than industry can make use of them.
"It's not uncommon to have a disconnect like this in higher education, in which people are both concerned about the difficult career prospects being faced by recent Ph.D. graduates and concerned there aren't enough Ph.D. students," said Michael Teitelbaum, of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.Ahhh, but we made the connection. Schools need a large pool of (low-paid) grad students, adjuncts, and postdocs to handle a lot of the low-level work around the department – someone's gotta teach the labs, run the greenhouses, run the mundane experiments, and the schools can't very well afford to have the full-time faculty doing it. But the little buggers keep graduating, or dropping out, or getting real jobs, and so the pool must be constantly replenished with fresh blood. The unfortunate side effect is a growing population of newly-hatched Ph.D.'s, clutching their bound diplomas*, desperately yeeping at their faculty advisors and acquaintances, hoping for some morsel of relevant employment to be jammed down their throats.
The ideas, he said, "often don't get connected. It's puzzling."
In fields like history, recent numbers show the market improving, and there will be more jobs as baby boomers retire.They were peddling that particular lie when I was an undergrad. There's always a Wave of Retirements, Just Around The Corner, Really, This Time We Mean It, but it doesn't really matter, considering the size of the waiting pool of applicants.
Groups such as the Business Roundtable have grabbed headlines with urgent warnings about the need to ramp up production of American scientists. In fact, Teitelbaum testified to Congress last year, there is no evidence of a shortage of scientists and engineers — particularly on the Ph.D. track.I think the shortage the Roundtable is talking about is the shortage of scientists and engineers willing to work full-time for $20,000. But perhaps I am being too hard on them.
*I occasionally thought about having a copy of mine reduced to business card size, so I could stick it in my wallet, and at the appropriate point in some barroom argument I could whip it out and say, "Well, I have a Ph.D. in science, and I think...." but I never got around to it.
Any thoughts of going on in my undergrad major, History, vaporized when a visiting (i.e., itinerant) professor told me how he was one of 600 History Ph.Ds competing for 3 tenured positions. This was around 1980 or so. It was yet another nudge for me towards the glamorous public accounting profession.
Posted by: Joe Kristan on January 21, 2008 09:07 AM
We've had postdocs in my field since Hector was a pup. Well, at least since WWII or so.
I get very bitter and nasty when the subject of the scientist "shortage" comes up.
It would be one thing if you could take your PhD and do something else useful with it, but employers just look at you as if you'd asked if being a serial killer was going to harm your chances of getting that job at the day care center.
In Physics Today there was once an article about the job crunch in which a fellow who did something fluid-flow related tried to get a job at a company that designed marine toilets (i.e., toilets for boats). The company president was dismissive of the idea of hiring a physics PhD for that work. "I don't want him designing toilets for the 21st century!" he was quoted as saying. This was in the late '90s. I hope they're bankrupt now. (Mind you, I might've been equally skeptical about the usefulness of a PhD in the job, but at least I'd have known where I was in the century.)
I think one of my diplomas did come with a little laminated card for showing to prospective employers (which no doubt would have been impressive). But I think it was my high school diploma (real impressive).
Posted by: Angie Schultz on January 21, 2008 09:40 AM
English was one of the worst fields when I was in graduate school -- and probably still is. I have long thought that, if English professorships were open to competitive bidding, some poor saps would pay to have the positions.
I recall asking a professor in another field way back when how the English faculty could justify having graduate students (however convenient they might be for grading papers, et cetera). He told me that they just didn't think about it.
I'm not generally fond of such spectacles, but I sometimes think I would enjoy seeing a legislative committee grill department heads on this scandal. "Professor Blowhard, how many of the two hundred graduate students you department has turned out have received academic jobs?"
Posted by: Jim Miller on January 21, 2008 08:23 PM
Angie-
It can be tough, that's for sure. I've been very fortunate since then to encounter a few future bosses who considered the degree a plus, even though it had nothing to do with what I eventually got hired for.
Posted by: David Fleck on January 26, 2008 12:23 PM