Employment Trends in Biomedical Sciences
Ginny C just pointed me to a recent FASEB presentation that summarizes recent trends in the life sciences labor market. It's great that they have done this, since I suspect a lot of people don't know the big picture, and FASEB has a very broad reach. Give it a read.
There is a great deal of overlap with Paula Stephan's findings and a few other things that Peter and I have discussed here.
A few things that struck me in the slides:
I knew that numbers of women have been increasing rapidly in the life sciences, but the graphs in the presentation are still pretty striking. Ditto for the number of postdocs on temporary visas.
Success rates for NIH fellowship applications have been falling almost as fast as for R01s. They're down from ~45% in 2001 to ~27% in 2006.
NIH spending on students as a percent of the total budget is down from ~4.3% in 1985 to ~2.7% in 2006
Foreign PhD recipients are increasingly staying in the US
The fraction of all US biomedical PhDs who are tenured or in tenure-track positions is steadily decreasing. ~46% in 1981 to ~28% in 2006
Almost all the new positions created during the NIH doubling period were MDs in clinical departments
Hiring of PhDs by med schools has pretty much ground to a halt in the last couple of years.
Average GRE Quantitative scores are surprisingly low for life sciences folks: 529 for health sciences and 606 for biological sciences applicants (out of 990 total). I have always wondered if part of the reason the labor market for life scientists is so much worse than for physical scientists and engineers is that quantitative skills give the latter folks more options.
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on Thu, Aug 23, 12:08PM
Almost all the new positions created during the NIH doubling period were MDs in clinical departments
Which slide are you getting that from? #45? If so, that seems to be med schools only, not universities, unless I'm misunderstanding.
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on Thu, Aug 23, 02:08PM
Yes, I missed the medical schools only label. However, I still think it's true:
Take a look at slide #33 in Paula Stephan's presentation. For biomedical PhDs, most of the growth in academic positions from 1999-2003 was in medical schools, not in non-medical schools. From eyeballing the graph, it looks like maybe 4,000 new med school positions and maybe 1,000 new non med school positions. Compare that to the ~9,000 new MDs in clinical programs over the same time period (the raw data for #45 in the FASEB presentation is available at http://www.aamc.org/data/facultyroster/reports.htm)
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