I always thought that a PHd was a necessary but not sufficient condition to obtaining a tenured professorship. Perhaps the marketing of PHd programs since when I went to school in the 80s, has changed cause I never heard that if you got a PHd, worked a few years as Postdoc student, your tenure was assured. I always thought becoming a tenure professor was competitive. Albeit less competitive for hard sciences, engineering and math where industry actually hired PHd than say liberal arts.
I’ve never met a PHd in math or science that wasn’t really intelligent about statistics. I would think that data about the number of faculty position opening vs PHd supply would be readily available and pretty easy to figure out.
When I worked in Silicon Vally I called stock options lottery tickets. Unlike Powerball tickets which can be purchased by anyone, the number of stock options you got was heavily dependent on your education, skill, hard work, and risk taking. However, once you earned your options the probability of having them worth a lot was primarily a factor of luck. I and many of friends got lucky, but I know a ton of folks who were smarter, and worked harder who never made a dime with stock options.
A PHd is a lottery ticket into a particular type of lifestyle. The ability to do work/research on something that you are passionate about rather than having your work focus dictated by someone else. I suspect that for many people this is very desirable. There are other way of obtain this level of freedom. You can extremely rich so can fund your SETI, Vaccine, space project etc. Or you can start your own company do applied research which is what we are seeing in the biosciences.
Not only is PHd is a requirement to become a professor which is the only way to do pure research, but if is very very helpful if you want to start a company and do applied research. If you enjoy learning for its own sake, I seems me that a PHd is the best credential. If you more interested money probably not. For such a desirable opportunity, I would hope the supply of PHd would far exceed the demand. What should we do differently?
I agree with JeffL’s critique, but it doesn’t go far enough. The problem isn’t merely the idea that all PhD candidates want academic jobs, it’s the idea that those who’ve paid their dues are somehow owed jobs. Inherent within this suggestion is the idea that any one scientist’s work has the same value as another’s. And this is clearly not the case, not on any level.
Hell, I know of at least one professor – a full, tenured professor, mind you – who essentially gained this position by publishing like mad, no matter how small the new piece of info was. Once he finally got tenured, the journals effectively blacklisted him – “OK, you’ve got your tenure, now do some real work before you take up our pub space again.” Granted, this is Computer Science which is less of a science than most social sciences, so one may argue that this is not really relevant to this discussion because academic behavior in other fields don’t necessarily translate to those for the real, hard sciences and I’ll probably have to go “uhm, herr” and scratch my head and hope JeffL or someone chimes in and says something intelligent.
Anyway. Point is… I think the value system that says “all who put in the work shall have jobs!” is completely bogus and perverse and wrong and nonsense.
Setting down what/how/where/when and even why isn’t a problem. I particularly loathe all the introductory preamble to writing journal articles, wherein you are effectively obligated to prove to people that your research is very important in a field by citing other big names in the field, what they should have done but didn’t (or couldn’t) and what you’ve now done. I find it very tedious, but it tends to be very standard in the journals I publish in. The ostensible purpose is to provide sufficient background for the interested reader to understand the context of your work, but realistically it does no such thing in this day and age. At best, if you’re good at it, it produces a string of references that you can chase back to try and figure out how the current article fits in to others. And it is useful for this purpose (again, if done well; very often it’s not done well at all). But it’s still tedious.
Writing out techniques, observations, all of the actual science (and deductive reasoning) is nowhere near as frustrating to me. So when I mentioned “not writing” I was being glib with the fact that generally most industrial positions don’t push for or require formal journal articles and the godawful introduction. It’s generally pretty clear what the context is for work done in a specialized field, and maintaining that information for in-business research context strips away the necessity of trying to track down tangentially related research to prove you’ve done sufficient due-diligence to justify the work you’ve done.
Or, as is the case with the aforementioned CS prof, the introduction serves as a tool to make something that really isn’t notable at all seem that way.
I’d say that it would be highly wrong for universities to lure people into lengthy and expensive PhD programs, followed by years of underpaid post-doc work, if the pool of jobs for people at the end of the process was far smaller than the number of people seeking those jobs.
To the best of my knowledge, however, that describes liberal arts education, not scientists.
What - you mean to say that this revolutionary new method that I’ve devised that increases the speed of parsing XML documents by 5% every time the moon is blue won’t save the world as we know it? Fie on you.
That aside, when I worked at the AT&T Research Labs in New Jersey, I found it rather interesting to observe how such a large proportion of the people working there (as scientists) were non-US citizens. Heh - I suspect the number of Indians alone probably outnumbered the US citizens. I’ve often wondered what would happen if the US economic crisis deepens and all of those really brilliant scientists decided to return to India, Germany, and all the other places that they hail from.
How can a system that subsists on so many foreign scientists be producing too many?
Supply exceeds demand. The supply includes foreign scientists which lowers the demand for domestic scientists. The excess supply causes lower salaries and causes many scientists to be out of work or take jobs outside of their field. It is in the best interests of those using the scientists for their to be an excess supply of the type of people they want to hire as that drives down salaries and increases retention of those already in their employ.
Once the public understands what is going on, less and less domestic people want to go into these fields. As less people go into these fields you have employers testifying in congress that we need to import even more people at lower than industry salary standards into these fields. “America must suck because we are not educating more of Field X.” We can’t have the supply equalize against the demand because that would give too much power to the worker.
That’s kind of the problem in a nutshell, as I see it.
While the current system may be very efficient economically, it tends to knock Americans off the academic science career ladder, which may in the long run hurt the country.
I suppose my experience just seems to indicate it is the other way around. Scientists are paid poorly, which leads to few people seeing the benefit of doing Ph.D., which leads to too few domestic candidates for the positions, which leads to the positions being filled by foreigners. Having a Ph.D. is no guarantee of a larger paycheck afterwards in the industry either.
That’s based on my experience of course (which is primarily European), but I recall vividly how one of my fellow students did the math of lifetime earnings involved with taking a Computer Science degree. The conclusion was very definitely that taking a Ph.D. was a stupid, stupid decision from an economic point of view. Of course, that was in the late 90s - the dot-com bust brought a lot of people running back to academia again, heh. I doubt the equation has changed much, though.
I would draw the parallel to teaching, which is another vastly underappreciated vocation (i.e. in financial terms).
The problem with that thought process relating to the topic is that a Ph.D. chemist who came here from, say, India, is not paid a substandard wage relative to an American. I’ve hired a lot of Ph.D.s in several companies, and if the degree and skill set is the same, the pay is the same. This isn’t picking lettuce.
Actually, that’s not an argument against that thought process. It’s not that imported labor is working for lower prices, it’s that imported labor is skewing the supply part of the supply/demand equation. If you remove the imported labor, scientists get scarcer and thus get paid more. Once they are paid more, more domestic scientists will crop up.
Ah, OK. Although I’m not sure the market forces in this area are that sophisticated. I am “them” - the guy running the technical functions of a company, and I know a lot of my peers (more “them”) and we just aren’t that clever and manipulative. We don’t have any plans or programs to “keep the workers down” and manipulate the supply/demand via proactive salary planning. Also, in almost 30 years of hiring scientists, I’ve never been in a situation where we felt here was a glut of great scientists out there on the market - my entire career, when we found a really good scientist, we fought to hire him/her. Even today, with this economy, there are more good scientists in the market than in normal years, due to layoffs, but they usually aren’t the cream of the crop.
I.e. - don’t go looking for conspiracies here, we ain’t that smart. ;)
Supply/demand for labor in particular fields adjusts over a much longer term, which is why quicker fixes like importing labor are often popular. If left purely to supply and demand, I think the theory that would be kids in high school/college who are pondering career paths will be attracted to being scientists if scientist looks like a job that pays well. So if imported labor is removed, the upswing in people entering the field doesn’t show up for 5 years minimum and the upswing in experienced scientists doesn’t show up for 15-20 years.
Supply and demand interacts with careers and employment so oddly and inefficiently that it’s one area I don’t mind seeing the market very heavily regulated.
I don’t think it’s a conspiracy thing so much as it is an honest question:
Is it detrimental if more of the scientist workforce switches from domestic to foreign scientists? The argument being made is that the influx of foreign scientists, coupled with the structure of the system is devaluing the traditionally high value of scientists (in general), leading to a cascade effect. Effectively, a PhD degree is becoming commoditized.
Now in terms of industry and societal production, that’s a great thing (even if it sucks for the scientists) if the quality is keeping its traditional growth curve. It’s bad if the quality growth curve is flattening (or, worse, declining).
Any feelings on whether or not, in general, the quality of candidates you see across all origins and backgrounds is constant, or are there societal differences that you think play a role? (The latter seems to be the case where I work, but it’s hard to correct for differences in the educational institution I attended for PhD and the one I’m at now, which is probably just as important of a factor.)
You know, over the decades of doing this, I have made some observations, but I rarely share them because, quite frankly, I fear that it will sound racist. I suppose the mere fact that one states generalisms based on origins is inherently racist. But it is also fallacious to ignore them. For example, certainly some years ago, putting a Japanese Ph.D. under a female manager was not an effective approach. Similarly, I have had problems in the past with an Indian Ph.D. who was from the higher caste in India, who was assigned to work for a manager who was from the lower caste in India - major problems. Just a couple of examples.
In terms of intellect, research capabilities, etc.: a lot of scientists from China tended to think in much more linear processes than European and Americans. I had a good friend, Ph.D., who is from mainland China tell me that this was something he also observed, and he said it was based on the primary - high school education system in China as well as just a cultural thought process.
That said, overall when I am recruiting (as I am right now) I can say that I don’t choose based on preconceptions because the nature of people at the Ph.D. level in the hard physical sciences is such that variation abounds.
This has essentially been my observation. The students here tend to be good at following directions, but often have to be told to look at things that, to me, seem “obviously related”. In my mind, that makes them poorer as scientists, since most of the truly cool stuff in science is found when you get odd answers and make semi-intuitive leaps to understand what’s going on.
That said, overall when I am recruiting (as I am right now) I can say that I don’t choose based on preconceptions because the nature of people at the Ph.D. level in the hard physical sciences is such that variation abounds.
Tell me more about this recruitment… ;)
Seriously though, I think trying to generalize to “all of X are Y” is folly. I do wonder if pushing the influx of trained scientists in America toward foreign students (especially as it seems to be dominated by Chinese and Indian researchers, at least in my field (which is also your field, so feel free to comment there)) is a bit of disservice to American science in general. It seems to me this was one of the questions raised by the original article which touched off this discussion.
I think the problem has a far simpler explanation than that: Science demands the best and brightest, and foreigners outnumber Americans. Europe has double our population, India triple and China quadruple. So simply by looking at the law of averages – and without even taking into account Africa or South America or other parts of Asia – you’re going to have only one domestic guy scientist for every ten at best. Why do they come here? Because the USA still has more high-quality research universities than anywhere else. And by having them come here, it perpetuates the cycle; it keeps the universities good, and thus continuing to make them attractive to the rest of the world’s best.
Bringing in the rest of the world’s brightest and best is a GOOD thing … for America! national anthem plays, flag displays on background
And if they go into industry – particularly US industry – as their “backup plan,” for those who can’t get academic jobs… is that really a loss?
Yes, but then you’ve lowered the overall quality of your labor pool by eliminating 90% of it. What’s more, you’ve lowered the overall intelligence of your population by cutting off immigration from the world’s best and brightest.
Not if there’s a notable quality difference between the rest of the world’s brightest and best, and the local brightest and best who end up displaced as a result. If you’re filling a position with a foreign scientist who’s every bit as capable, no big deal. If you’re filling positions with a foreign scientist who’s the best you can find, because interest in domestic scientists has declined significantly, it’s probably important.
