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

Remember that someone who would rather have a regular job but works one day a week at TGI Chillibees counts as employed for statistical purposes.

From anecdotal experience the underemployment rate is high - there are plenty of people that would like to have a full-time job but are making do as adjuncts.

The adjunct cancer has spread to places that you thought were immune. Look at Vassar College, it's a respectable place. In the Chemistry Department there are ten tenure-track professors, one full-time lecturer, and five adjuncts. Villanova, another respectable institution, is looking to fill three adjunct positions to teach graduate level courses. They do it because they can. There are sufficient pharmco refugee candidates around Philly and Boston from the last round of mergers and acquisitions for the model to work.

Back in the early 2000's organic chemistry PhDs were in very high demand. Salaries went from ~$70K/yr to start to over $100K/yr by 2005 or so.

Since 2005 two things have happened: (1) as mentioned above, a lot of off-shoring of basic research has happened, particularly to China and India (not saying this is good or bad) and (2) a shift by the biotech industry away from small molecule drugs to biologic drugs (antibodies and other proteins).

The result is that organic chemistry PhDs have been hit pretty hard while PhDs with knowledge areas that support biologic drug development have done pretty well.

http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/articles/business/mon...

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.