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Labor Market
This weeks Economist has an article subtitled, "Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time" (subscription required). Many of the items reported are familiar for those who read phds.org, but a few new things stood out:
PhD production is growing rapidly outside the US. This means possibly additional opportunities in overseas universities, but greater competition for filling them.:
Between 1998 and 2006 the number of doctorates handed out in all OECD countries grew by 40%, compared with 22% for America. PhD production sped up most dramatically in Mexico, Portugal, Italy and Slovakia. Even Japan, where the number of young people is shrinking, churned out about 46% more PhDs.
This statistic was particularly striking:
the production of PhDs has far outstripped demand for university lecturers. In a recent book, Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, an academic and a journalist, report that America produced more than 100,000 doctoral degrees between 2005 and 2009. In the same period there were just 16,000 new professorships.
I'm puzzled by their PhD production numbers - 100,000 sounds pretty low to me - but the 6-to-1 ratio of PhDs to professorships sounds similar to what I've heard for the fraction of life sciences postdocs that ever get tenure track positions. Indeed, from Richard Freeman:
There is a glut of postdocs too. Dr Freeman concluded from pre-2000 data that if American faculty jobs in the life sciences were increasing at 5% a year, just 20% of students would land one.
PhDs outside of academia often end up doing things not closely related to their studies, so their advanced degrees don't buy them much additional earning power:
A study in the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management by Bernard Casey shows that British men with a bachelor’s degree earn 14% more than those who could have gone to university but chose not to. The earnings premium for a PhD is 26%. But the premium for a master’s degree, which can be accomplished in as little as one year, is almost as high, at 23%. In some subjects the premium for a PhD vanishes entirely. PhDs in maths and computing, social sciences and languages earn no more than those with master’s degrees. The premium for a PhD is actually smaller than for a master’s degree in engineering and technology, architecture and education.
The suggested remedies are standard fare: better training in transferable skills and better metrics.
One interesting concrete realization of the training improvements is the UK's New Route PhD (trademarked!).
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.
I contacted Chris Matgouranis, the student who generated the "5,000 janitors with PhDs" figure cited in Richard Vedder's Chronicle piece. He helpfully pointed me to 2 Bureau of Labor Statistics sources.
The first, here, gives the distribution of educational attainment in various professions.
The second, here, gives the number of people in each profession.
Alas, the BLS has chosen not to provide exactly the same categories for each, so I'll have to write a script to merge the two.
For now, though, I've put both sets of data into a Google spreadsheet here.
Overall, 3.8% of the over 25 workforce has PhDs. If you sort the occupations by % with PhDs (or professional degrees), things aren't too surprising for the top occupations - doctors, lawyers, scientists, educators.
A few surprises pop out: 4.9% of tax preparers have PhDs as do 4.7% of funeral directors. 1.5% of umpires and tour guides. 1.1% of "amusement and recreation attendants" (carnies?), 0.2% of butchers. Talk about alternative careers!
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.
SUNY Albany is cutting its programs in French, Italian, classics, Russian, and theater, reports Stanley Fish in his NY Times column today. So not only are departments not hiring in the humanities, it looks like tenured faculty might actually be laid off - something that's possible if universities are in dire economic straits.
Fish's proposed remedy:
The only thing that might fly — and I’m hardly optimistic — is politics, by which I mean the political efforts of senior academic administrators to explain and defend the core enterprise to those constituencies — legislatures, boards of trustees, alumni, parents and others — that have either let bad educational things happen or have actively connived in them.
And when I say “explain,” I should add aggressively explain — taking the bull by the horns, rejecting the demand (always a loser) to economically justify the liberal arts, refusing to allow myths (about lazy, pampered faculty who work two hours a week and undermine religion and the American way) to go unchallenged, and if necessary flagging the pretensions and hypocrisy of men and women who want to exercise control over higher education in the absence of any real knowledge of the matters on which they so confidently pronounce.
Bottom line: it's essential that academics be able to communicate what they do effectively. And not just those in fields on the chopping block - the huge role of government funding in the sciences makes it essential to keep the public informed about the fruits of their investments. So be sure to go to those communication skills trainings.
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 report, to be released in the fall, is expected to show another decline for 2009, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported this month.
Think about that: fewer than all 1/3 of professors are tenured or tenure-track. And that's all professors. Given the much higher prevalence of tenure 30 years ago, that probably means that the tenure rate is considerably higher for older faculty members and much lower for new faculty members. Differences in attrition rates (untenured people are less likely to persist, I would think) likely further skew things.
If we assume that tenure/tenure-track rates for the faculty overall have fallen by about 1% per year and that rates for new faculty have also fallen by 1% per year, then from a back of the envelope calculation with some simplifying assumptions, one finds that tenure/tenure-track rates for new faculty are now closer to 15%. Wow.
A good recap of science's perennial labor oversupply problems:
It’s not insufficient schooling or a shortage of scientists. It’s a lack of job opportunities. Americans need the reasonable hope that spending their youth preparing to do science will provide a satisfactory career.
The author, Beryl Lieff Benderly, has done a lot of writing for Science Careers magazine, so she may be a familiar voice.
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 faculty openings all over the world, the schools see U.S. doctorates as prestigious and useful in recruiting students as they build their reputations.
The article is mostly about people in the humanities and social sciences, but I have been seeing some of these universities advertising for S&E faculty over at jobs.phds.org. Some grim statistics:
Hiring in English and foreign-language departments fell more than 20% this year at U.S. universities compared with a year ago, according to the Modern Language Association. Similarly, job postings of the American Political Science Association were down by 14% from 2007-08, and many universities didn't fill positions they initially advertised due to budget constraints.
Ouch! It's not like those markets were booming to begin with.
Back in the late 1980's, people were predicting that all sorts of scientists would be needed to fill the shoes of the big cohort of scientists and engineers hired in Sputnik-fueled buildup of the late 1960's. (A quick Google search shows the meme to be alive and well) Researchers tend not to retire early - why give up a cushy tenured faculty gig? - but these folks are now in their 70's, so sooner or later it's going to happen. So lots of faculty positions should be opening up, right?
Not so fast. I came across these projections of the number of 18-year-olds in the US (based on census data) in economist Andrew Samwick's blog. The key point: the number of 18-year-olds peaked this year. We're in for a substantial decline in the 18-year-old population over the next 8 years or so, and we won't get back to 2008 levels again until 2025.
College enrollment levels are driven at least in part by the number of 18 year olds in the population. So unless enrollment rates increase substantially in the near future (and they could) or educational immigration increases, colleges may not need to do any significant new hiring to replace those retiring faculty members, at least for another decade or two.
Oops.
On the plus side, lower demand for scientists from the academic sector should help allay the concerns expressed by various government research labs about future hiring.
View archives for December 2010.
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