Why are there so few physics majors?

daveyrocket

Note that the post I was quoting was listing a variety of jobs for physics majors as support for a claim of versatility of physicists. Anyone with *any* education can become a stay-at-home mom or dad. So it doesn't say anything about the versatility of a physicist.

lisab

I was a stay-home mom for a while after I got my BS. Turns out to be a pretty good preparation for mommyhood, based on how my daughter turned out .

atyy

http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...-jobs-enticing
http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...grees-stack-up

There's a shortage of scientists because scientists don't get paid enough?

OK, we know the market can be quite stupid, but does this make sense?

ParticleGrl

No, if there were an actual shortage salaries would be rising on their own. They are not. All my PhD friends want industry jobs doing science, and they can't get them. All data says glut, not shortage. Also, keep in mind that companies have been complaining about shortages for literally decades, and yet real salaries have been mostly stagnant.. If there were shortages, companies would be hiring undergrads to fill necessary spots. They'd be actively recruiting anyone who could be trained. None of this is happening. The only companies that recruited in my undergrad physics department were finance companies.

To my knowledge, there is no data to support a general under supply of scientists and tons of data to suggest the opposite.. So why do companies complain?

I suspect part of the problem must be a fairly broken hiring system. Another part might be that companies are over constraining their hiring- they don't want to train anyone so they are looking for specific qualification sets. The cynic in me thinks that companies complain about shortages just so we keep funneling money into grad programs, train more scientists than jobs, and keep salaries lower.Further, the bad career prospects might push talented students away, so lie to them about their prospects.

twofish-quant

Or biology, or economics, or law.

-Dragoon-

I'm only a first year student, but here's my experience.

Just after first semester, about 1/3 of those in my class (physics majors) switched to either engineering, business, or computer science. From the few I've talked to, they told me said they did their research and found that a physics degree is a very bad degree in terms of job prospects without graduate school. It is very hard to justify spending hours upon hours in a library practising problems (if you aren't a genius) only to come out 4 years later with terrible job prospects. At least the engineering students who went through a similar workload have multiple job offers before they graduate.

What's worse is professors and department career counsellors with their own agendas that try to "debunk the myth" and parrot the statement that "physics degrees are the most versatile". Fortunately, I have a professor who cares for his students and won't hide the facts about a physics degree. Also, talking to any HR employee who's company isn't affiliated will gladly tell any physics student that physics majors would never be hired to fill engineering and technical positions at their firm. Crafted computer programs will screen out those resumes that do not contain an engineering or computer science degree depending on the position.

twofish-quant

I think another problem is the "second Einstein effect." One cool thing about physics is that one brilliant scientist can change the world, which means that you don't need that many scientists. Once Albert Einstein comes up with general relativity, what's the "second Einstein" supposed to do?

There are maybe a few hundred active high energy particle theorists. Let's suppose you triple the number of theorists. Does it mean that you discover quantum gravity any faster? No. Once you have a few dozen theorists, adding more doesn't help much.

It's interesting that the areas that *aren't* subject to the second Einstein effect are those that hire. For example, waiters and janitors. It doesn't matter how brilliant a waiter or janitor you are, if you have X customers or X toilets, you have to hire Y people. Computational stuff tends to be more immune to this problem. If you have a ton of code, it has to be debugged.

I don't think it plays much of a role in graduate programs, because companies just don't think that far ahead. It does play a major role in immigration debates. However that was 2006. No one in the US complains about a labor glut, and immigration is something of a non-issue now, because most skilled Chinese and Indian nationals are "going home" where companies are hiring. The Chinese government is just pumping vast amounts of money into high technology industries, and demand for Ph.D.'s is strong. I think that India is doing something similar.

Unfortunately, those jobs are closed to new graduates who are not Chinese nationals as the PRC will only issue a work visa if you have three years of experience.

One thing that is scary is that I'm actually considering voting for Newt Gingrich because he is suggesting that the US do the same thing.

atyy

But it would be nice to have more physicists - I don't think Einstein as a "lone genius" was so crucial - ok, maybe he got GR 20 years ahead of his time - but Nordstrom, not Einstein, did in fact produce the first relativistic theory of gravity, and following his route would have lead to gravity as spin 2, which is classically equivalent to GR in harmonic coordinates. I think many more far reaching revolutions like quantum mechanics and the Bell Labs stuff were produced by communities rather than individuals (ok, they were geniuses, but ordinary ones). Would it work if we could somehow train them not to expect jobs in physics, so that it's normal to do business or engineering classes and internships during a physics undergrad or PhD? At the very least having the man in the street be a PhD-level physicist would make them less susceptible to being fleeced by academics ("my subject is so hard - only a genius can do it").

ParticleGrl

The question I'm trying to get at isn't "why aren't there more particle theorists", it seems somewhat obvious to me that producing physics that many physicists find overly esoteric is probably not ever going to be a high demand occupation.

But, when engineering companies need someone to do thermodynamics analysis, etc why not higher a particle theorist? Sure, the particle theorist hasn't done thermo research, but they had to pass a qualifying exam, so they have at least a masters level understanding of thermodynamics, and they can learn quickly. If we were really in a shortage- someone with the high level training and broad background of particle theorist could easily slide into some sort of R&D position at an engineering or tech company.

Yes, we absolutely should tell undergrad physics majors that they aren't going to get a job in physics. Its the truth! We should also tell them that not having an engineering degree can be a career detriment in fields that care about PE licensure. We should point out all the reasons that physics is a bad choice, and if they still want to do it, good for them. Misleading people about the nature of the career path you are advocating for them is tremendously unethical, should we even have to consider whether or not we should be honest about job prospects? When a freshman at UT reads the numbers you posted earlier, they are trusting their department to properly advise them, and the department is failing horribly. Looking back at the poor information I was given hurts a lot, because people I honestly thought cared about me, and about my career cared more about their department's enrollment.

With your man on the street/phd question you are hinting at a pet issue of mine- we train lots of scientists, but the average person is basically innumerate and scientifically illiterate. The solution is not to make everyone a phd physicists, its to increase the education level of everyone else. Our system is great at sorting out people who want to be scientists and truly terrible at teaching everyone else even the smallest bit of science.

chiro

You need to look at this from an employers view:

They need to hire someone that can do the job at hand. If someone out there already has the skills to do a job and can work with other staff, it doesn't make sense to hire someone else that 'could' do the job but 'hasn't'.

Also one thing about particular roles is the specifics: engineers work with 'specifics' more than many scientists do. On top of this their training is more suitable to their role.

To add to this, imagine if you had a lot of non-specialists trying to create something that is both new and comprehensive (it could be a new product, infrastructure whatever). By having generalists you don't get things done in the manner that you do when you have a specialist. Having lots and lots of specialists means that not only can things get done far more quickly, but that in quicker time things get done in a far more comprehensive environment.

I could not imagine for the life of me in the modern age and especially with the kinds of projects that are worked on this day in age (in terms of complexity and required resources) that the situation would ever change.

twofish-quant

But we are still taking about relatively small communities. Maybe a thousand people or so.

Also, once someone has figured it out, there isn't any new work to be done on the old theory. If you build a car, then in a few years, it's going to wear out, so someone has to build a new one. Theories don't "wear out" so once you've figured out GR, it's not necessary for someone to refigure it out.

I get worried about internships because here there really *is* a conspiracy to create cheap labor (i.e. I've been in meetings where people decided to start an internship program to get people to work cheap). One thing that worries about "internships" is that pretty soon "interns" become the "real workers" and if a company can get all the work done via interns, they will. (Hey!!!! Post-docs!!!!)

One thing about internships is that there is a bit of dishonesty if you tell people that they are working cheap for a great job in the future, and that job doesn't come. In that case the system gets really nasty because you have real workers that are disposable.

One bit of denial in academia (and I'm harsher toward academia, because academics are supposed to think about this) is that people pretend that adjuncts, graduate students, and post-docs aren't "real workers" when in fact they are. One problem is that I think it hurts scholarship.

The US graduates 1000 physics Ph.D.'s a year. There are 30 million people in the US labor market. If we were able to boost 1000 physics Ph.d.'s to even 10000, that would require so much change that my head spins.

Also, I don't think that you have to worry about people being fleeced by academics. Most people in the US strongly distrust academics, and being seen as "intellectual" is a sure way of losing an election. In some ways having lots of academics may make the situation worse, since academics tend to blind themselves to the problems in academia.

One way of thinking about it is that you have a basic science course that is taught either by an overworked graduate student or an adjunct that barely makes enough money to avoid being on food stamps, and that's supposed to look *attractive*????

ParticleGrl

What I was trying to get at was what a shortage of scientists/engineers would look like. If there is a shortage that means that there ISN'T someone out there already trained- so you go with the generalist and train them for the specifics.

It also means that the "selling point" we use to get people into physics is a problem- if no one wants a broad background, being a generalist is a kiss of death.

This model only works if you have no shortage of labor (and works best in a glut). For every new project, you'll need a different mix of specialists, so you'll constantly have to churn workers, which is a slow and time intensive process if there is a labor shortage.

If there is a labor shortage, you are much better off hiring smart generalists and letting them move from project to project because its easier than constantly finding different specialists.

The fact that businesses operate the way they do just further indicates there is no shortage of workers- so why do companies say there is?

twofish-quant

Because he is looking at ten other resumes of people he can hire without taking any risks or doing anything creative. Now, if you are in a booming market, then the people aren't there and you have to do something creative. During the dot-com boom, people were hiring web developers with anyone that had a pulse.

Exactly. We don't have a labor shortage. I was lucky enough to graduate when there really was a labor shortage, so I know what one looks like. The other thing is that manufacturing in the US has been generally shrinking which means that the demand for engineers has gone down.

I think that that's already done. However, it's a deeper problem, because right now there aren't any job prospects for physics majors. There aren't any real job prospects for anyone. One thing about physics, is that the lies and misstatements have been less egregious than for things like law school, so this is a general problem with academia and not just with physics.

I think I got screwed over less than you, because some of the important people in my life were much more honest about the future. Sometimes, honestly involves saying "I don't know what is going to happen, and you'll be on your own." Also, people in my life have been generally supportive.

One reason I thought the NSF numbers were bogus was that the "body language" from the people that I knew suggested that they didn't believe them. You hear someone talk about the wonderful future job openings in physics, and the people I knew sort of shrugged and didn't act as if they believed them. Part of it was that the MIT physics department got hit really hard in the 1970's and in 1990 the end of the cold war was bringing a lot of defense cuts.

I think in the end, one thing that I do believe is that the important people really did care about me. I left MIT mad as hell about the place, but it's occurred to me that if I had left a "satisfied customer" then my education would have been sub-standard.

Chomsky is right. There really is a power elite that runs the world, and one thing that I got the sense at MIT was that I wasn't been groomed to "have a career in physics". In a real sense, I was being trained to "run the world as part of the power elite." So the people that ran the physics department at MIT don't care about departmental enrollments. They care about maintaining the power of MIT and the United States, and at some point the people that run the world would "hand the keys of the world" over to me and my classmates.

One weird thing is that since I'm no longer in a great deal of pain and agony, it's a little hard for me to go back to remember why I was in pain.

But then again maybe the person on the street is smarter than us suckers.

You ask people why they should learn science and engineering, and the standard answer is that you'll make more money and have a better career, and then the person looks at the adjunct that is teaching their kids and says "yeah, right......."

So let's suppose we are honest, learning science and engineering *won't* make you more money, and it could really mess up your life. At that point, the person on the street looks less stupid, and we are the suckers.

chiro

I'm not saying it can be done or that it isn't useful, I'm just trying to put it from an employers viewpoint. If an employer doesn't really know that you could train someone with X background quickly and that they would be able to Y things that would be good them, then its not surprising that X doesn't get hired.

Also twofish has written posts about HR in relation to his field (quant finance/coding for finance) and has outlined the issues of when some HR people (think external hiring companies) don't understand how skills translate or even understand what certain skillsets are at all.

If you can convince an employer then by all means do so, but based on some of the stories here on PF (and abroad) it seems that for many of these cases, employers aren't convinced.

That's a really good question.

There might be some truth in it and it might be completely misrepresented.

For example in Australia there are huge shortages in engineering fields of "highly skilled" engineers but for some of those same fields there are enough graduate engineers. Now to get someone to the "highly skilled" stage you need to invest quite a bit of time doing further training to get to that point.

So in terms of people saying "we need more engineers", they might be misrepresenting themselves by not saying "highly skilled engineers in field X with Y project background".

Then again they might not be saying for those reasons and it could be some other reason like a political statement.

ParticleGrl

The thing thats really frustrating is that the bogus idea that we have a shortage makes the job search harder! For several non-technical jobs, the opening question is "how do I know you won't jump ship for the first job in physics that comes along?" If potential employers think scientists are in high demand, they are going to be skeptical that the science phd is going to stay, and thats fewer job offers for people trying to leave the field.

To me, the lie isn't even that physics will make you money. To me the lie is more insidious- its the idea that studying physics will get you a job doing physics! Phds and postdocs are sold as basically physics apprenticeships.

I'm not suggesting the person on the street is stupid because they didn't actively study science. I'm suggesting that being able to think rationally about numbers/basic concepts in science is a more useful skill to teach to the average person than highschool level physics.

Remembering that gravitational potential energy is mgh is useless for most of humanity. Understanding how we know that vaccines don't cause autism is tremendously useful. Our k-12 system should focus on the latter, not the former.

Right now, your highschool system seems to filter out the top x% capable of performing well, and it teaches them enough to succeed in college science courses. It teaches everyone else practically nothing. How many people's only memory of highschool science is that they hated it? We have the wrong focus- we paradoxically train too many scientists and have a largely scientifically illiterate populace.

atyy

Well, I suspect the communities could be much larger. I think the biggest revolution in recent years (computing and the internet) was driven by huge communities. I also suspect we should also count the whole GPS community and its users for getting GR understood well enough that it's in undergraduate textbooks. True, not all of them had PhDs, but I tend to think that progress in science is largely societal - if we had no Einstein, we'd still have GR by now. Also, there can be huge advances on old, "well-understood" stuff - like Gabor and holography which only needed classical Maxwell's equations, or Poincare's work on the stability of the solar system which produced the qualitative theory of differential equations and was a forerunner of chaos.

That's interesting. At least in the US, shouldn't a labour law prevent this (the same way one isn't supposed to pay a foreigner less than an American)?

Well, I don't mean fleeced in that way. Musicians are mostly poor, but the great musicians are respected for their creativity. Scientists are thought of in the same way too, but I suspect overly so. Both music and science reflect their societies, but while GR would be the same no matter its discoverer, there is only one Schubert now and forever.

A possible counter is that the prevalence of high standard of amateur music-making has gone up tremendously over the years. But that's in the spirit of the point I'm searching for - we don't really need more scientific Bachs or Schuberts to advance science - once we had Newton, everything else could just be attributed to society. In 300 years, every school kid will learn quantum field theory, let's get there faster.

Now having said that, I'm confused whether physics PhDs should be paid well or not. Is a physics PhD like a conservatory graduate or an engineering graduate? Both are highly skilled. The former generally expects to have a really hard time getting jobs, the latter is generally reasonably paid.

(Yeah, yeah, we all know you astro guys got Brian May.)

twofish-quant

One reason that there are so many physics Ph.D.'s working in finance is that the Ph.D. has already been sold. If a headhunter or HR in an investment bank sees a resume with physics Ph.D., they have no idea what the physics Ph.D. actually does, but since they know that physics Ph.D.'s are already hired, they'll forward the resume rather than dump it.

If you are in another industry where the gatekeeper doesn't see the value of a physics Ph.D., then you are screwed. If you are looking for a job, you are not in a position to convince them of your value, because you won't even be allowed to talk to the gatekeeper.

This is an area in which university departments and professional societies could be useful. They could go to industry groups and try to *sell* physics Ph.D.'s. This is something that MBA schools and AACSB does, and this sets up the groundwork before you arrive at the interview door. If you show up at the HR department of a major company, you won't be allowed in, but if Stephen Hawking shows up, they'll talk with him, and selling Ph.D.'s isn't that much different than convincing Congress to fund science.