Is the Job Market Getting *WORSE* for PhDs?

[Astro_Dude]

A lot of my friends in defense have been telling me that programs have either been cut harshly or been told they're on the same operating budget. Seeing as defense seems to be one of the largest areas we go into, this is very unsettling. Private companies seem to be about the same as far as success rates.

It seems that somehow, things are actually getting worse for us, and no one who has the power to do anything about it gives a ****.

 

[jbunniii]

It could get a lot worse after November, assuming you're in the US. If the congressional budget-cutting committee doesn't reach a consensus plan or if congress fails to enact it, then this will trigger substantial automatic cuts to defense - I believe on the order of $500 billion, but I'm not sure over how many years that will be spread. This outcome seems not unlikely considering the polarized situation in Washington.

 

[Sheets]

I only graduated four years ago but it does seem to me the job situation is getting worse in some of the traditional avenues of employment for physics PhD's: defense, national labs, and academia.

I don't have any numbers to back me up but I see three reasons in my field jobs are drying up: state budgets seem to be uniformly awful which means fewer faculty jobs right now, facilities in my field are shutting down and the academic jobs associated with those facilities have gone away, some cutbacks at the national labs/defense.

So I feel pretty bad for some of the postdocs and graduate students I work with and hope my pessimism isn't an actual reflection of reality.

 

[twofish-quant]

I'm extremely pessimistic about the US job market for Ph.D.'s in the short term.

Right now, the only real advice I can give is to prepare for things to get really bad for the next few years, and then do whatever you can to make sure that the bad spell lasts for only a few years.

 

[phinds]

The US job market is getting worse for EVERYBODY, not just anyone specialty but what are you going to do, study to be a shoe salesman? There are no guarantees in any field so you might as well be unemployed for a while in a field you love.

 

[Nylex]

It seems absolute crap for people here in the UK, too.

 

[Astro_Dude]

I don't have several years to give...

 

[FAlonso]

Has there been time when job market grew too much for PhDs ?

 

[twofish-quant]

Has there been time when job market grew too much for PhDs ?

A rather brief period between 1957 and 1965.

 

[daveyrocket]

The US job market is getting worse for EVERYBODY, not just anyone specialty but what are you going to do, study to be a shoe salesman? There are no guarantees in any field so you might as well be unemployed for a while in a field you love.

So, how do you pay rent when that's the case?

Is the job market getting worse for everyone equally? How can we tell if it's getting worse are a higher or lower rate for PhD's than everyone else?

 

[twofish-quant]

So, how do you pay rent when that's the case?

You get whatever job you can, and in some extreme cases, you move in with your parents.

Is the job market getting worse for everyone equally?

I don't think so. Something that people have mentioned and seems to be accurate is that this recession is hitting mid-level and entry-level jobs particularly hard.

How can we tell if it's getting worse are a higher or lower rate for PhD's than everyone else?

Ask around.

 

[c03rcion]

You get whatever job you can, and in some extreme cases, you move in with your parents.



I don't think so. Something that people have mentioned and seems to be accurate is that this recession is hitting mid-level and entry-level jobs particularly hard.

If its hitting entry-level and mid-level jobs , what ISN'T getting hit hard?

As long as the United States government has a vested interest in sticking its nose in other countries affairs, there will always be demand for scientists and technicians in the defense industry, or what Eisenhower referred to as the military industrial complex. And given the historical trends of US Foreign Policy, I see no reason why the US government will cease its continued meddling in other countries affairs for the foreseeable future. So while the recession is hitting everyone pretty hard, and even lowly entry level positions provided by temp/hiring agencies that offer contract/temporary terms of employment with no benefits, there is still a need to find ways to kill people more efficiently and in ways so as to minimize harm to American military personnel. And to be honest, given the rate at which schools are churning out PhDs, I don't think there are near enough jobs for PhDs especially when you are competing with people here on H1B visas. If I were to advise anyone I would say stay away from PhD programs and Law School, especially Law School.

Google the documentary WHY WE FIGHT and you will understand that our way of conducting ourselves globally has become so routine that no one even bothers to protest questionable military action.

 

[Pyrrhus]

Good advice here is to be FLEXIBLE. Have you consider jobs outside your field?

 

[Nylex]

Good advice here is to be FLEXIBLE. Have you consider jobs outside your field?

This certainly isn't helping me. I've applied for quite a few postdoc positions now, most of which have been outside my own field. A lot of the time, I don't even get an interview and the places suggest they've had more qualified applicants. I've applied for jobs outside academia, too, where I've got some (i.e. not a large amount) relevant experience. They too end up saying the same thing: they want people with more experience. What then are you supposed to do?

 

[twofish-quant]

If its hitting entry-level and mid-level jobs , what ISN'T getting hit hard?

Low level jobs and jobs for experienced people are getting hit less hard.

And given the historical trends of US Foreign Policy, I see no reason why the US government will cease its continued meddling in other countries affairs for the foreseeable future.

I do.

Bin Laden is dead. The US is trying to get out of Iran and Afghanistan as quickly as possible. You could imagine a cold war with China, but getting hostile with someone that you owe money to is not a good way of boosting the economy. The neo-conservatives have self-destructed, and there is a strong hint of isolationism among the Tea Party.

Also, I find it interesting to talk with British and French people about this. When you talk with Americans, you get the attitude that "the US should and will be on top forever." When I talk to people from Britain and France, the attitude seems to be "we got sick of our empires and trust me eventually you will get sick and tired of yours."

And to be honest, given the rate at which schools are churning out PhDs, I don't think there are near enough jobs for PhDs especially when you are competing with people here on H1B visas.

You really aren't. One of the consequences of the bad economy in the US is that every Chinese or Indian Ph.d. that I know has got plane tickets home. One problem that the US has is that since it is the world's most powerful country, people can be shockingly unfamiliar with what is going on in the rest of the world.

In China, the recession ended two years ago. If you have a physics Ph.D. you can get a job that pays a competitive international salary, and the standard of living in the major cities is more or less the same as the US. I hear things are similar in India.

Google the documentary WHY WE FIGHT and you will understand that our way of conducting ourselves globally has become so routine that no one even bothers to protest questionable military action.

Different era. We won that one. Also Bin-Laden is dead.

The way that the empires ended in Britain and to some degree France was not through protest but through exhaustion, and I'm seeing the same thing happen with the US.

 

[Vanadium 50]

Please confine discussions of Politics and World Affairs to that section. Thank you.

 

[daveyrocket]

Good advice here is to be FLEXIBLE. Have you consider jobs outside your field?

Those are the only kinds of jobs I'm considering.

 

[Pyrrhus]

Are there conferences or job fairs/career expos you could go to? One of the most underrated and important skills of being a graduate student is to NETWORK. I've connected in several conferences with many prospective employers, and I've been offered jobs or internships or promises to follow up. Conferences are not just to talk about research.

 

[twofish-quant]

Are there conferences or job fairs/career expos you could go to? One of the most underrated and important skills of being a graduate student is to NETWORK.

Also one thing about networking is that you have to realize that 99% of the people that you shake hands with are not going to lead to direct employment, and one of the things that I skills I had to learn was not to get my hopes up, and to not get too depressed.

One thing that you can get which is extremely useful by networking is information. For example, if you have a peer group and all of them are getting jobs and you aren't, then that means that you are doing something wrong. If you have a peer group and none of them are getting decent jobs, then that may mean that you are doing everything right and it's just that things suck.

The psychological difficulty of "how not to go crazy while being unemployed" is something that doesn't get talked enough about, and it's extremely important. One thing that helped me a lot was "negative thinking." Telling myself that life stinks actually made it easier for me to go out and keep doing interviews and moving ahead.

Something else that helped was thinking of an interview as a "show." I'm feeling rotten, depressed, anger, and miserable, but when I go into the interview room, I'm playing the role of "Dr. Ideal Job Seeker". I'll put on the smile and positive attitude like I put on the suit, go in and give a great acting job.

I've connected in several conferences with many prospective employers, and I've been offered jobs or internships or promises to follow up.

I've done the same thing, but one problem is that you often need to spend money to get to a conference, and that's hard to do if you are unemployed.

 

[Astro_Dude]

Good advice here is to be FLEXIBLE. Have you consider jobs outside your field?

I do not wish to sound ungrateful for the advice, but I have literally applied to over 400 jobs, and have gotten past first round screening maybe 3 or 4 times. The long of the short of it is most industries are (pick one or more):

-Lying about job opportunities, and job postings are just to save face.
-Have no interest in hiring anyone mildly outside of EXACTLY what they post.
-Have no motive to do anything but sit on their hand for months at a time in every step of a hiring process.
-Unable to do a whole lot because they don't even know their future budget.
-Are able to be EXTREMELY selective, because of the market.

 

[Astro_Dude]

Personally, I'm extremely worried that by the time the job market is opened up again, I'll be too far removed from scientific coding and the like to be able to be hired. Basically, they'll tell me to get lost and my whole life to date will be a waste because of things completely beyond my control. I *want* to work, I *want* to do things that use my skills, but without anyone taking a chance on me, I'm going to have gaps in the resume that people will start to question.

I have work right now that's only mildly related. It doesn't involve any of the skills that people seem to like about me.

So this is a story that we should all be concerned about. Basically there is going to be a lost generation of PhDs and skilled people that no one cares about. Do yourselves a favor and delay your own graduation if you can.

 

[ParticleGrl]

So this is a story that we should all be concerned about. Basically there is going to be a lost generation of PhDs and skilled people that no one cares about. Do yourselves a favor and delay your own graduation if you can.

Dude- this isn't new in science. The first time it happened in the 70s, some scientists were concerned about a generation of lost researchers. Now, its the norm. Have you contacted your advisors former students? I'd be willing to be most of them aren't doing anything that uses any of the skills they developed during their phd outside of vague nonsense like "scientific problem solving." And they graduated into a much better market! Guess what, I use scientific problems solving every day in my bartending job.

Science burns human capital. You've been used, it happened, time to get over it. I was used to. The system sucks- the professors don't care about the pyramid of students that they need to get tenure, and they know they need a new generation of suckers so they keep pretending that science is a decent career choice. As it turns out "there is always industry" is just another rotten carrot they used to keep you motivated.

Now, throw yourself into your new job, do it well, and use it as a stepping stone into a career that has some middle class opportunities.

 

[twofish-quant]

Personally, I'm extremely worried that by the time the job market is opened up again, I'll be too far removed from scientific coding and the like to be able to be hired.

I wouldn't be too worried about it. Either at some point in your career there will be something else like the dot-com boom in which they will be taking random people off the street to do whatever, or there won't. If there isn't then there isn't.

Something that helps me a lot is to try to not worry about things that I don't have control over. I may be doomed. If I'm doomed, then I'm doomed and I'll try to do the best with the hand that I have.

I *want* to do things that use my skills, but without anyone taking a chance on me, I'm going to have gaps in the resume that people will start to question.

I graduated in a bad economy and I had to work at this random, silly, stupid job because I had no other options is a perfectly good response to this.

 

[twofish-quant]

I'd be willing to be most of them aren't doing anything that uses any of the skills they developed during their phd outside of vague nonsense like "scientific problem solving." And they graduated into a much better market! Guess what, I use scientific problems solving every day in my bartending job.

One weird part is that when I was looking for work, having people give me advice about how to get work made me feel worse, because it was bad enough to be out of work. It's worse when you feel guilty about having done or not done something. It curiously helped me a lot for someone to tell me that I was totally [in trouble], because at that point, I started feeling good about myself.

 

[phinds]

I graduated in a bad economy and I had to work at this random, silly, stupid job because I had no other options is a perfectly good response to this.

Well, yes it is, but NOT expressed in those terms. Trashing ANY job to a prospective employer is a terrible idea.

FAR more intelligent is something like, well, I got to show an employer in a very different kind of job that I am a willing and intelligent worker and that I will apply myself to whatever the organization needs.

 

[twofish-quant]

Well, yes it is, but NOT expressed in those terms. Trashing ANY job to a prospective employer is a terrible idea.

Yup. Mastering the art of "interview speak" is a skill. There are industry standard "code words" for saying "my previous boss was an idiot" and part of learning to do well in interviews is mastering this weird language.

There's actually a business reason why "corporate-speak" exists, and that's one skill that you need in any large bureaucracy is emotional control. You need to convince the employer that no matter how angry or upset you are, that you can still function as a corporate cog. So part of it is to go through the day smiling, and then once you leave the office, you go to the gym and the start beating the crap out of a punching bag. It's really important to do this because you end up in high stress situations in which you are really upset at someone else, and they are really upset at you, and in those situations, you have to be rather nice to each other in order to avoid getting into a screaming match.

One thing that helps me a lot in business situations into imagine putting on a mask when I go to work or to an interview. Once you know the people around you, you can drop a bit of the mask to them (and they'll do like-wise), but if you are dealing with strangers, you don't know what you can get away with so you just talk in this weird language.

 

[twofish-quant]

Something else that helps with networking with close friends is that even if you don't get any job leads, you can keep yourself from going insane. When you are at the interview table, you have to put on the "interview mask", but one thing that's really helpful in talking to close friends that are in the same situation is that you can take off the mask and let each other know what you really are feeling.

One big problem with Ph.D. graduates is that since looking for industrial work is supposely a bad thing, you don't get these "sanity-preserving networks."

 

[MrNerd]

More PhDs means more tuition income to universities. More income means more research. More research means more discoveries. More discoveries means more prestige. More prestige means more applications. More applications means more PhDs. And so the cycle continues.

I assume this is what happens, at least. If you want to change behavior, you have to think in terms of economics. Why do people churn out more PhDs than necessary? Because there is only more benefits to them without a cost. The only cost I can think of would be making it harder for them to find a job if they got fired, and if they're already reputable enough, that's eliminated already. The best way to change this would be to either reduce the "goods" (benefits) and increase the "bads" (costs). A law limiting the number of PhDs, for example would be a bad to someone trying to churn out as many as possible. A stupid and unfair law, but nonetheless, it would at least do something.

However, I do admit this sucks. Not only does it make it harder for me to get a job, it makes it less special to have a PhD. But at least you have more educated people to talk to. But this is useless to me, since I probably won't even be able to get a job at the Patent Office like Einstein managed to do.

 

[twofish-quant]

More PhDs means more tuition income to universities. More income means more research. More research means more discoveries. More discoveries means more prestige. More prestige means more applications. More applications means more PhDs. And so the cycle continues.

Always remember that institutions do things for their own reasons which may or may not be congruent to yours.

Also that's not quite the cycle for physics Ph.D.'s. The other thing is that physics Ph.D.'s don't bring in much in the way of tuition. It's mostly a matter of grant money which ultimately comes from the US federal government.

What happens is this Malthusian system in which one prof produces several Ph.D.'s which become profs. The system very quickly saturates to eat up the available funding. The curious thing is that we hit saturation in 1970, before most of the current crop of Ph.D.'s was born.

One interesting thing is that despite the talk of a massive glut of Ph.D.'s, there really aren't that many. This means that it's easy to lose track of them. One thing that I'd really like to do is to talk to someone that was in the "first lost generation of physics Ph.D.'s" to find out how their life turned out, but it feels a lot like looking for bigfoot.

Why do people churn out more PhDs than necessary?

I don't think that's the question. The question is why can't society make better use of the Ph.D.'s that do get churned out.

As far as what started this. All of this started in the 1950's when the United States was in a life and death struggle with the Soviet Union. The idea was that if the US underproduced physics Ph.D.'s then we'd all be waving red flags and speaking Russian. If the US overproduced physics Ph.D.'s then it might be bad for people looking for jobs, but we'd still have enough people to build toasters and H-bombs.

Also the number of physics Ph.D.'s has been more or less constant since 1965.

A law limiting the number of PhDs, for example would be a bad to someone trying to churn out as many as possible. A stupid and unfair law, but nonetheless, it would at least do something.

It's not hard to limit physics Ph.D.'s, just cut federal funding. The problem is that without Ph.D. students, you'll then have to fire tenured faculty. Also, I think it would be *BAD* *BAD* *BAD* thing for society to reduce the number of physics Ph.D.'s.

One thing that I believe is that society is better off with more educated people, and if we live in a world where that is not true then society is screwed up and we need to change that. The other thing is that even if I never get another chance to study astrophysics full time again, I'll be happy dying knowing that I was able to do it once in my life, and I'd get really annoyed if someone doesn't give me the opportunity to do that.

It's really important to let people going into graduate school know what life looks like at the other end, but if I knew what I know now, I'd still be really interested in getting my Ph.D. I regret nothing about getting my Ph.D. The one big regret that I have is that I felt bad after I got my Ph.D.

But this is useless to me, since I probably won't even be able to get a job at the Patent Office like Einstein managed to do.

Reading Einstein's biography is interesting. One thing that made it possible for him to do what he did was that he had a government 9-5 job, and he had a horrendously turbulent personal life.

 

[MrNerd]

To be honest, I kind of just made up the cycle there. I thought about it for a couple minutes, and then I thought of it. I suppose I did forget to consider that money is not the only "good" in society.

About the Einstein's turbulent life part, I can kind of relate. It's believed he may have Asperger's Syndrome, like me. I'm not bringing this up to say how bad it is or how awesome it is. I'm just pointing out a similarity between me and him that may have made it for difficult to get a job. I've never even had a job(Yes, I have applied, but it's like an application black hole, it seems. Nothing comes out of it), and I'm 18! I graduated 7th in my class, but all the knowledge in the world is useless if you can't socialize with people to use the knowledge. In my case, I don't yet have the advanced knowledge that overrides being a complete weirdo. Yet I don't have the people skills to get a job now. The only entry jobs that would be appropriate for a normal person my age probably don't take much brain activity, thus social skills can be more valuable. So I can understand(I think) how he felt in being rejected everywhere. I'm also pretty sure he got the patent office job from a friend, so he got rather lucky.

And noone(it seems) really cares if the smart people don't have jobs. It seems that they only care about the majority of idiots(I'm not trying to be rude, but I do try to give them some credit. However, I'm constantly surprised by the idiocy around me. A group of students in my homeroom class in high school didn't even know where the Battle of Midway was! And it was a junior/senior homeroom, so the class should have already been taken.). There's probably some attempts to get them jobs. But I never hear about them on tv or in magazines or anywhere else. It seems like it's just stop NAFTA and Chinese trade or whatever, and all the banker are evil in other cases. I doubt even communism(which I truly despise, not because it's anti-American or whatever like in the 50's, but because it seems like it treats the able as slaves of the unable) would care enough to do anything, unless it involves super H bombs that teleport to their destination or something.

 

[twofish-quant]

I'm just pointing out a similarity between me and him that may have made it for difficult to get a job.

One thing about Einstein is that he had no particular problem in getting a job, and as far as physics goes he was a social butterfly. Physics is a very bad field to go into if you have difficulty with social skills, since you find yourself interacting with people constantly. Science is an extremely social activity.

Mathematics seems to be different, but that's something I don't know much about.

I'm also pretty sure he got the patent office job from a friend, so he got rather lucky.

Something that you have to be careful about biographies is guessing. You get into this bad circle in which you guess facts based on your preconceptions, but then you use to assumed facts to to reinforce your preconceptions.

And noone(it seems) really cares if the smart people don't have jobs.

You have to look out for yourself. Also part of the game is to figure out how to make people care.

It seems that they only care about the majority of idiots(I'm not trying to be rude, but I do try to give them some credit. However, I'm constantly surprised by the idiocy around me. A group of students in my homeroom class in high school didn't even know where the Battle of Midway was!

Something that you have to realize is that people may be smarter than you in certain ways. If someone has better social or political skills than you, that's a form of intelligence that you have to learn to respect and learn from.

I'm nice to idiots, being one myself.

 

[twofish-quant]

While we were talking about jobs for Ph.D.'s. I found this article about "celebrity tutors" in Hong Kong. It would be really nice if the environment in the US was changed so that physics Ph.D.'s started being seen as rock stars...

http://www.slate.com/id/2302695/

Here's the home page for one of the "glamour tutors."

http://www.modern.edu.hk/teacher-Dr-Vic-Chan.phtml

http://www.modern.edu.hk/MO_summer_course_landing_2011-Dr_Vic_Chan_v4.phtml

 

[MrNerd]

Maybe I should just stop digging myself deeper into the hole(or whatever the expression is).

At least I did learn something, though. That's the whole point of science, after all. I can deal with social interactions. I'm not like Cavendish, who was just bizarrely shy(I made sure to check this on wikipedia this time!). I can get along with others most of the time. So it shouldn't be the biggest problem in the world.

Hopefully, though, the market will eventually improve for PhDs.