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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

#91

Post by XorNot »

hyperbovine wrote: post #46

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…

I equate success with a job. No scratch that: at this point I'd settle for a damn interview.

I have a Masters in Chemistry, my girlfriend has a PhD in Chemistry. Neither of us, for the past year, have come remotely close to gaining employment that uses those skills (in Australia).

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

#92

Post by LunaSea »

Stubb wrote: post #82
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.…

Another option, at least in the United States if you're a citizen, is to do contract work for the Department of Defense. Step 1: Acquire STEM Ph.D. Step 2: Get a job with a DoD contractor. Step 3: Profit! A short look at job options in academia disabused me of pursuing that option. Working twice as hard for half the pay? No thanks.

I think you forgot:

Step 1.5: Drop ethics.

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

#93

Post by [deleted] »

toby wrote: post #90
michaelochurch wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm honest about what I am. I don't live to screw people over, in the way that management consultants do. (They invented the stack-ranking practices that destroyed a great number of technology companies, and that are directly responsible for the Enron calamity.) I'm also not trying to maximize my Niceness Score. The world is on fire and I'm not afraid if other people get soaked in the process of saving the damn thing…

I'm an engineer, and I have several friends who are or were management consultants. None of the ones I met "lived to screw people over".

[deleted]

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

#94

Post by roel_v »

michaelochurch wrote: post #19
nextos wrote: post #15

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.

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…

I was reading your post, about halfway through I started thinking 'hey this reads like a post by...' glances up at username 'oh look, it actually is' skips rest of post.

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

#95

Post by meritt »

roel_v wrote: post #94
michaelochurch wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I was reading your post, about halfway through I started thinking 'hey this reads like a post by...' glances up at username 'oh look, it actually is' skips rest of post .

What's the background on why we should ignore michaelochurch?

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

#96

Post by WalterBright »

protonfish wrote: post #85
WalterBright wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

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 th…

> 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.

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

#97

Post by nostrademons »

michaelochurch wrote: post #75
smeyer wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure you're a great guy and just coming across negatively in this one comment, but you sound less pleasant than the vast majority of McKinsey people I've ever met. It's a bit odd in a comment complaining about consulting douchebags.

I'm honest about what I am. I don't live to screw people over, in the way that management consultants do. (They invented the stack-ranking practices that destroyed a great number of technology companies, and that are directly responsible for the Enron calamity.) I'm also not trying to maximize my Niceness Score. The world is on fire and I'm not afraid if other people get soaked in the process of saving the damn thing…

None of the management consultants I know live to screw people over either.

It's worth noting, however, that many of them also believe that the world is on fire and they're not afraid if other people get soaked in the process of saving the damn thing. It's just that their solutions - like stack ranking, restructurings, org structures, etc. - tend to soak engineers like you, while your solutions - like open allocation or programmer's unions - tend to soak managers and consultants like them.

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

#98

Post by ArkyBeagle »

shard972 wrote: post #86
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 why is the US pushing STEM so much?

Basically, because technocracy.

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

#99

Post by shard972 »

XorNot wrote: post #91
hyperbovine wrote: post #46

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…

I equate success with a job. No scratch that: at this point I'd settle for a damn interview. I have a Masters in Chemistry, my girlfriend has a PhD in Chemistry. Neither of us, for the past year, have come remotely close to gaining employment that uses those skills (in Australia).

Really? Wow.

As an Australian who didn't go to university, I had the warnings growing up that getting a piece of paper doesn't guarantee you a job but I didn't know things were that hard for someone holding a masters.

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

#100

Post by tritri »

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.…

> at my school, SJSU, there are several math professors from Stanford and Princeton teaching there

You were bashing on schools like, "USC, UCSC, UCSB, UC Davis, UCI, UCR, and, god, I must be missing some. Oh yeah, UC San Diego." and calling the mediocre? HA!

You go to SJSU and are calling those UC's mediocre?? I don't know how you got to the top of HN, but you need a HUGE perspective change dude...

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