I've merged the two BLS data sets mentioned in the previous post and have added the merged set as the third sheet in the Google spreadsheet - there are links at the bottom of the spreadsheet to the different sheets. (The whole merge took about 20 lines of python, a language that every science and engineering graduate student should have a basic knowledge of. Seriously - go learn it.)

In addition to the 5,000 PhD janitors, I'm seeing:

• 27,000 PhDs in retail sales (more than the number of biological sciences professors)
• 9,500 PhD waiters (more than the number of physics professors)
• 4,600 PhD hairdressers (seriously?)
• 3,300 PhD truck drivers (more than the number of epidemiologists)

Pick your favorite.

I'm sure that the BLS counts are not as accurate for PhDs than for people at other levels of education, since there are far fewer PhDs. Even so, I would be surprised if the numbers were dramatically off. The big take-away for me is that PhDs are working in all sorts of jobs, not just in rarefied academic / industry research jobs. So it's really important to acquire in graduate school not just a narrow knowledge of the details of one's specialty, but also some general purpose skills that will help in whatever position one ends up in. Not, of course, that you will end up as a waiter.

The BLS numbers lump together people with PhDs and people with MD's, JD's, etc. In the fourth sheet in the spreadsheet, I deleted occupations that require a "First professional degree". I created a new column that contained a flag, 1 for postsecondary educators (i.e. professors), and 0 for other jobs. I used that flag to sum the number of PhDs in all occupations as well as just the people in academic jobs. After some summing, we find that the BLS is reporting 2.3 million PhDs in categorized occupations in the workforce, of which 600,000 are in postsecondary educator roles. Bottom line: 26% of PhDs are in traditional, academic roles. Definitely something to consider when thinking about graduate training.