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The article fails to compare Computer Science PhD's who are in high demand and job openings for them far exceed the supply of CS PhD grads.



According to the American Physical Society the same is true for Physics PhDs. Sure we're tiny relative to the life sciences, but we've got 4% unemployment one year after graduation (data from 2010, 2012 isn't available yet).

http://www.aip.org/statistics/trends/reports/phdinitial.pdf

I'm extremely wary of this guy's data part of which come from his "own calculations". Bleh.


That's a big point that should be mentioned. The problem is getting a PhD in a field that no one is interested in paying you for leaves you with only academia as an option (I know multiple PhD's who realized towards the end that they don't want to go into academia).


I am extremely skeptical of this . . .

Of course, there are plenty of job openings that ask for PhDs, but most of the work does not truly require a PhD. Those jobs are filtering out the vast majority of capable candidates while targeting people who have already shown that they would prefer a different sort of work by doing the PhD in the first place. Is it a surprise that they can't fill the position?

Does that mean that CS PhDs can easily get jobs? Perhaps.

Does it mean they can easily get interesting jobs? I am more doubtful.

Does it mean that producing more PhDs is necessary or even useful? I doubt it.


I agree. Here are some CS stats http://logos.cs.uic.edu/recruit/csstatistics.htm




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