
Employment rates for STEM Ph.D.s are down or stagnant across the board - luu
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
======
mililani
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.

~~~
fsk
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.

~~~
raverbashing
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.

~~~
adrianN
Number theory is an extremely broad field in itself. I'm pretty sure most of
it is completely irrelevant to the NSA. If you do a PhD in any theoretical
field you'll almost never find a job outside of academia that uses any of your
work.

------
HarryHirsch
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.

~~~
WalterBright
> 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.

~~~
protonfish
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.

~~~
WalterBright
My post is not the conventional wisdom, hence I expect the downvotes. But hear
me out.

I said investors, not an individual. There are a lot of professional investors
who full time investigate a company, in fact Wall Street is full of them. Do I
really believe that you (or I) am better informed about a company's future
prospects? Why do you believe you are smarter than they are?

Consider (again) Amazon. Why does it have such a high P/E? That is hardly
evidence of short term thinking. Why did Microsoft, for the last 10 years,
have increasing profits and a shrinking P/E? I submit that investors were
pricing the stock based on their estimation of the long term value of the
stock.

A CEO once told me he was organizing his company around short term results,
because "that's what Wall Street wants". The stock cratered shortly
afterwards. He fooled nobody but himself.

Let's put it this way. Give us a list of stocks you believe are overvalued
because foolish investors have bid the price up because of long term sacrifice
for short term results. Eventually, the chickens must come to roost and the
stock must collapse. So I must ask, have you shorted those stocks? Are you
willing to bet your own money on being smarter than Wall Street?

~~~
protonfish
You open by claiming that you are being downvoted because you are such a free-
thinking maverick that you lost the popularity contest with the stodgy
conservatives at HN instead being due to any shortcomings in your argument.
That's adorable.

Your second paragraph sticks with the same nonsense as your previous post i.e.
investors are smarter than us so they have to be right.

Now you try some new stuff so thanks for that. You made a good example of
Amazon but since I already claimed that strong CEOs can resist short-term
investor pressures and Bezos clearly falls into this category I invalidated
this argument before you even wrote it down. It makes me think you aren't
really paying attention.

I am not sure what point you are trying to make with the next paragraph but
whatever it is there is not enough information there to draw any sort of
conclusion. Stocks tank for many reasons including bad luck so one tale of a
data point isn't useful.

Your last paragraph is well done. Unlike your other points it took a little
thought to deduce why it is incorrect. I do believe there are many overvalued
stocks but I am not going to short them. Bubbles can live a very, very long
time and shorting them is a bet on when the bubble will pop, not on how big
the bubble is, and I claim no special insight or information on the exact time
any particular ponzi pyramid will inevitably implode.

Much improved: 2/10 (earned in the last paragraph only.)

~~~
WalterBright
> CEOs can resist short-term investor pressures and Bezos clearly falls into
> this category

Amazon's P/E is currently 503. The P/E for the S&P 500 is around 19. The
"investor pressures" are strongly supporting Bezos.

I'm one of them. I'm long on AMZN, with my own money on the line, and it's
done well for me. I plan on staying pat.

Whether I'm right or wrong about AMZN's future is irrelevant - what is
relevant is that a high P/E is a sure sign of investors betting on the long
term future of a company, and not being obsessed with the next quarter. The
CEO doesn't set the P/E, the investors do.

------
hyperbovine
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.

~~~
math0ne
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.

~~~
tensor
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!

------
beambot
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](http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_chart_001.htm)

~~~
_delirium
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
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.

------
nextos
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.

~~~
michaelochurch
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.

~~~
erikpukinskis
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.

~~~
michaelochurch
_But people who just want a job "in the industry", whether it is journalism or
academics, are going to have a bad time_

Don't look down on those "just want a job" people. When you don't have an
income, the need to get one consumes you. Working "for passion" is a luxury of
trust-fund kids and people who pulled off their exits before the Valley became
a scam.

The idea that it's dishonorable to work for money is classism. Most people
have no other choice.

 _But more and more research will happen outside of the Academy, because
research is useful._

Sadly, we see the opposite trend. Research inside and outside of academia is
melting down. Companies use the results of R&D (open-source software is an R&D
effort) and buy "innovation" out of a rigged R&D-ish system (the VC-funded
Valley) but no one is paying for it, which means that very little of quality
is being built at scale.

Something will bring it back, but it will probably start outside of the US. It
will probably involve competition at an international level. I'd love to see
it take a friendly form: an all-information-shared (the objective being
prestige, not dominance over others) 21st-century moon-shot race between North
America, Europe, and Asia on curing cancer. Sadly, history shows that it's
just as likely to involve war, because humans are perilously stupid.

Until that happens, I feel like technical excellence is such a nonpriority in
this country that it shouldn't surprise _anyone_ that Stanford threw its
weight behind Clinkle and Snapchat.

The prestige competition between universities may have had that effect at one
time, but now they compete on stupid shit like pampering rich douchebags,
overpaying top administrators, and funding idiotic startups like Clinkle as a
way of selling "the experience" (your kid might be made founder of the next
Snapchat!)

~~~
nextos
I might come a bit late to the party, but I should say not all hope is lost
yet. I think there's a lot of inefficiency in the labour market. I'm currently
in a really good university doing research, and all the software engineers &
computer scientists hired in many labs I know tend to be quite awful, with
some exceptions.

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

~~~
Sanddancer
Add this to your adblock plus ruleset:

slate.com###article_rollup

------
raverbashing
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.

~~~
Thriptic
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.

~~~
jnbiche
>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.

~~~
Thriptic
We use finite element analysis suites in our lab such as Ansys for simulation,
and the licenses run into the thousands of dollars per year.

~~~
jnbiche
Thanks, I was just curious what kinds of modeling software ran upwards of
$1000.

------
pessimizer
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
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](http://web.mit.edu/facts/alum.html)

------
onetimeusename
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.

~~~
nagrom
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
> 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.

~~~
smeyer
>What for? I dunno, many places, the football team, padding the endowment,
building new B-school buildings, hiring an army of mid-level administrators.

Are there really schools where the B-school is a net cost center rather than
profit center? I thought it was more standard for the business school to be
subsidizing other parts of the university.

------
iak8god
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...](http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/articles/business/moneybox/2014/07/140710_%24BOX_Physics.jpg.CROP.original-
original.jpg)

~~~
yen223
Speculation: Dot-com boom, followed by the dot-com crash affected everyone,
including academia.

~~~
ArkyBeagle
Especially related to optical networking.

------
tdicola
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?

~~~
lutorm
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.)

------
seanflyon
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.

------
infocollector
Readers of this thread: [http://we.tl/30KSRwmF0R](http://we.tl/30KSRwmF0R) \-
any comments on this talk?

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

