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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

#31

Post by HarryHirsch »

WalterBright wrote: post #22
HarryHirsch wrote: post #6

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…

> 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 st…

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.

We see this play out right now. Facebook and Google offer faster return on investment than Merck and Pfizer, and that's why stock prices are where they are.

But when you shut down a research facility you instantly lose decades of institutional knowledge, something that you can't buy for all the money in the world. At some point society has to ask what it wants: more targeted advertising, or antibiotics that actually work.

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

#32

Post by 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.

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

#35

Post by onetimeusename »

mililani wrote: post #26

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.…

So did you end up getting the phd anyways? In your experience, did you feel the departments' agendas placed importance on the field or were they more interested in career aspirations or money? My personal experience is that mathematics comes second to research grants and ensuring prestige. I do want to hear from other people though since that was just my own.

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

#36

Post by tdaltonc »

onetimeusename wrote: post #32

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.

Something like monasteries of mathematicians. Like the Concents in Anathem.

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

#37

Post by onetimeusename »

tdaltonc wrote: post #36
onetimeusename wrote: post #32

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.

Something like monasteries of mathematicians. Like the Concents in Anathem.

Exactly.

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

#38

Post by nagrom »

onetimeusename wrote: post #32

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.

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.

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

#39

Post by rm445 »

onetimeusename wrote: post #32

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.

I'm not saying you're wrong but it seems incredibly difficult. The problem is, how do you choose who to fund to go and do maths, how on earth you'd track their progress if any, and how do you achieve a return on your investment - even if 'you' means a sovereign nation and you have very general and long-term goals. If you can come up with something distinct from a university mathematics department to achieve this, it would be an achievement. I think we should count ourselves lucky that these departments have come to exist, and they provide such unreasonably useful output.

It might well be possible to use modern communications to distribute the work, improve efficiency and reduce overheads, basically turn all the world's maths departments into one big one - but I bet you still need something like the PhD thesis and viva.

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

#40

Post by Bahamut »

mililani wrote: post #26

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.…

I was once a PhD student of math at UIUC - after some pains with job searching, I eventually landed in software engineering after teaching myself a lot. Graduate school fulfilled a special challenge for me, proving to myself that I had one of the brightest minds out there.

It turned out there were plenty of others smarter than me, but I held my own, which was enough for me. From what I can tell, smart PhD holders and/or dropouts (which I fall under the latter) can fall in many fields. My brother (a PhD graduate from Johns Hopkins in Chemistry) has been recruited for HR and data scientist positions. I have also been recruited for data scientist positions, especially once I proved my excellence in software engineering. I have also been recruited for sales positions in the past.

There are still some organizations/companies out there that recognize the value of pure intelligence over specialty. In some ways, I also look more favorably if someone shows great indicators of this when I am hiring.

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