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 gr... read more

I'm sure everyone knows that a PhD by itself is not a ticket to a great job. Just to drive the point home, some data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (via Gizmodo and the Chronicle) reveals that there are 5,000 janitors in the US with PhDs. I'm trying to get some more numbers on PhDs in other low skill jobs. read more

The *Times* has a discussion about tenure in today's paper. Nothing really stands out in the discussion pieces, but one thing in the introduction did surprise me: > In 1975, 57 percent of all college professors had tenure or were on a tenure track. In 2007, that number had fallen to 31 percent, and a new federal... read more

What Helps New Ph.D.s Land Jobs in Academia? A Passport says an article in today's Wall Street Journal. > While hiring freezes and budgets cuts pervade U.S. higher education, universities in Asia and the Middle East are hungry for candidates, often amid a dearth of native applicants. Although most advertise their... read more

I have been paying a fair amount of attention to the NIH meltdown because of the time I spent up at NBER, but not a whole lot to current goings on in the physical sciences. This interesting graph from the AIP tells me that there are some problems there, too. The percentage of new physics PhDs going into potentiall... read more

Nature has been running some good stories this past month on the mess at the NIH. Universities and the money fix, by Brian C. Martinson, points out what I think is the central problem: > Largely because of the structure of the funding flows between the NIH and the universities, there are few checks in the syst... read more

There's an intriguing article in yesterday's Times about a new theory about the factors that gave rise to the Industrial Revolution in England. For centuries, England's citizens lived on the brink of starvation. Although innovations would periodically increase agricultural productivity, greater access to food ... read more

Immigration policy has been in the news lately, but the talk has been almost entirely about low-skill workers. Buried in the recent Senate compromise immigration bill, though, are some provisions that will affect scientists and engineers. There hasn't been much talk about the high-skill worker side of the bill, ... read more

The increase in graduate students discussed earlier in the week just came a step closer to reality: the House and Senate just passed a set of bills that will steer a big chunk of funding toward new graduate fellowships, among other things. I assume there will be some negotiation in conference over the final form, b... read more

Prolific commenter Bob has submitted a guest post - interesting stuff! There has been some discussion on this blog about whether we are producing too many PhDs, given the size of the job market. Some have stated that Congress is not likely to get involved with the issue of PhD production. That is currently not tr... read more

We've seen the effects of the NIH budget doubling on the grad student population. What about postdocs? The NSF publishes an annual headcount of postdocs in academic institutions, and sure enough, the number of postdocs went up over the budget doubling period, 1998-2003. However, once you dig into the numbers a ... read more

Think of an R01 application as a lottery ticket. The cost of the ticket is the effort required to prepare the application. The expected payoff is the product of the average amount of an award and the probability of receiving one. During the first few years of the NIH budget doubling, the amount of an award went u... read more