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

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

#3

Post by 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.

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

#4

Post by 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.

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

#6

Post by 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.

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

#7

Post by asdfologist »

pessimizer wrote: post #4

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/financi…

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

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

#9

Post by _delirium »

beambot wrote: post #8

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

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).

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

#10

Post by kjdbakjdab »

pessimizer wrote: post #4

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/financi…

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

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