So Many Grad Students

Economists and others who track the job market raise a heretical question: Is the United States educating too many scientists and engineers? The surprising answer coming from some quarters is an emphatic yes.

An article published this spring in Today's Engineer stated, "Many practicing engineers disagree with the recommendation to increase the number of U.S. citizens pursuing science and engineering studies and careers."

With wages stagnant and too few jobs for engineers, adding to the work force will only make those careers less attractive, says one of the authors, George F. McClure, a retired aerospace engineer who studies employment issues for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. "The problem is that everybody has focused on the supply side, and very few have focused on the demand side," he says. "People in colleges and universities are concerned with maintaining the pipeline and throughput."

In a case study, Ms. Stephan, the Georgia State economist, has analyzed the growth of the bioinformatics field, generally regarded as one of the hottest areas in science. The number of degree programs blossomed from 21 in 1999 to 74 in 2003.

"There's been a tremendous increase in the number of students in these programs," she says. But, she adds, "we also track job announcements in bioinformatics, and they've been declining."

She sees parallels to other leading fields. "Everybody is talking right now that there'll be lots and lots of jobs in nanotechnology," she says. "I've not seen a convincing case that that is happening, or that it will happen."

[I considered entering both bioinformatics and nanotechnology before concluding they had too few job opportunities.]

Yet graduate schools have an incentive to train ever-increasing numbers of students and postdoctoral fellows because they perform the work on research grants that bring money into universities, Ms. Stephan says. "Academe has a big vested interest here."

Even the National Academy of Sciences, one of the cornerstones of the establishment, has acknowledged the conflicts of interest involved in this issue. "These forecasts of undersupply that did not materialize have led policy makers for graduate training and research support to be highly skeptical of any forecasts and to worry about the self-interest of the forecasters," concluded the academy in a 2000 report.

Harvard's Mr. Freeman argues that academe and the government need to revamp the system. Students and postdocs, especially from foreign countries, make up a corps of "cheap labor," he says. "It runs the system, and it runs it very efficiently, in terms of the taxpayer." He advocates increasing wages for graduate students and postdocs in order to make careers in science and engineering more attractive to domestic students.

Mr. Washington, chair of the National Science Board, agrees that universities could be doing a disservice to graduate students. "There's some kind of personal responsibility that professors and departments should have," he says. "They do have a responsibility to ask the question: Are they generating too many students? Or are they are generating students who haven't got the skills to apply for the jobs that are out there?"

He and others are urging universities to change the way they educate doctoral students. Jobs in academe are scarce, says Mr. Washington, and as graduate students in science grow ever more specialized, the trend does not prepare them well for the job market.

"If someone has a good combination of skills and did a Ph.D. or master's," he says, "they can probably have a much easier time finding a job in industry or government, whereas someone who is a real narrow specialist can't get a job unless they get a job in an academic department. Even then they're not the ideal teacher, because they'll just be creating clones of themselves."

Here's an exciting career opportunity you won't see in the classified ads. For the first six to 10 years, it pays less than $20,000 and demands superhuman levels of commitment in a Dickensian environment. Forget about marriage, a mortgage, or even Thanksgiving dinners, as the focus of your entire life narrows to the production, to exacting specifications, of a 300-page document less than a dozen people will read. Then it's time for advancement: Apply to 50 far-flung, undesirable locations, with a 30 to 40 percent chance of being offered any position at all. You may end up living 100 miles from your spouse and commuting to three different work locations a week. You may end up $50,000 in debt, with no health insurance, feeding your kids with food stamps. If you are the luckiest out of every five entrants, you may win the profession's ultimate prize: A comfortable middle-class job, for the rest of your life, with summers off.

Welcome to the world of the humanities Ph.D. student, 2004, where promises mean little and revolt is in the air.