An Academic Perspective: Explaining the Current Glut of Life Sciences PhDs
For the past several years, I have been trying to convince anyone who would listen that the reason for the dismal job prospects for most PhD-trained scientists is a simple supply and demand issue. To wit, there are too many PhDs and too few jobs for them!
While I intuitively understood that this was the case, nobody had ever substantiated the veracity of the claim and consequently I was beginning to think I was wrong. Imagine my joy after reading William Deresiewicz’s piece in this month’s edition of the The Nation magazine. In an article entitled “Faulty Towers: The Crisis in Higher Education,” Deresiewicz elegantly and aptly sums up the situation facing today’s newly minted PhDs:
"At Yale, we were overjoyed if half our graduating students found positions. That’s right—half........You’d think departments would respond to the Somme-like conditions they’re sending out their newly minted PhDs to face by cutting down the size of their graduate programs. If demand drops, supply should drop to meet it. In fact, many departments are doing the opposite, the job market be damned. More important is maintaining the flow of labor to their domestic sweatshops, the pipeline of graduate students who staff discussion sections and teach introductory and service courses like freshman composition and first-year calculus. (Professors also need dissertations to direct, or how would they justify their own existence?)
Further, he asserts:
“......the PhD glut works well for departments at both ends, since it gives them the whip hand when it comes to hiring new professors. Graduate programs occupy a highly unusual, and advantageous, market position: they are both the producers and the consumers of academic labor, but as producers, they have no financial stake in whether their product “sells”—that is, whether their graduates get jobs. Yes, a program’s prestige is related, in part, to its placement rate, but only in relative terms. In a normal industry, if no firm sells more than half of what it produces, then either everyone goes out of business or the industry consolidates. But in academia, if no one does better than 50 percent, then 50 percent is great. Programs have every incentive to keep prices low by maintaining the oversupply.”
Finally he concludes with an eye-opening but sadly accurate observation:
“How professors square their Jekyll-and-Hyde roles in the process—devoted teachers of individual students, co-managers of a system that exploits them as a group—I do not know. Denial, no doubt, along with the rationale that this is just the way it is, so what can you do?”
I am glad that somebody else perceives the problem the way that I do. At least, I now know that I am on the right track! Do any BioJobBlog readers have any suggestions, ideas or insights into how to fix this obviously broken system?
Let me know!
Until next time...
Good Luck and Good Job Hunting!!!!!!
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directly or indirectly, may have an effect on your career trajectory. Managing difficult co-workers is essential if you want to learn how to adroitly deal with workplace politics. I came across a 