06.15.16
Get a good education, yeah right
About a month ago the New York Times ran a bit on the utility of a Ph.D. in the hard sciences.
Excerpt:
“In a study published Thursday in Science magazine, researchers tried to figure out why so many Ph.D. students choose to do post-docs given the relatively low odds of landing a full-time faculty position, which is traditionally the end goal of such work.”
This was true twenty five years ago. After my Ph.D. at Lehigh I did a post-doc at the Penn State School of Medicine in Hershey for three years and bailed. It had become obvious the “academies” were generating a glut of scientists, paricularly if you spent any time reading the want ads in, well, Science and/or Chemical & Engineering News magazines.
This harsh truth was and is in sharp contrast to the common belief, one carried by the media about once a week, that the country has a serious shortage of “STEM” workers. STEM being the stupid acronym/jargon for scientists, engineers and mathematicians.
There’s no shortage. Never has been.
Part of the push into post-docing was done by established science faculty at research schools. It wasn’t just the choice of recent doctorates.
Tenured research faculty liked the cheap labor. You could qualify for foodstamps on a post-doc wage although you were never told that by the hiring institution. Post-docs took little from grant monies, the rest of which could be spent on materials, equipment and whatever overhead the university imposed.
I walked after three years but I knew people who spent more time in post-doc hell than they did earning their degree.
When you are done with your post-doc in America, now you can be an adjunct, teaching college classes for $1,500/session, poverty wages. Which was also the idea behind creating a glut of Ph.Ds. Cheap labor for the teaching of the underclassmen, now also stuck in a rip-off system where when finished they’re manacled by terrible debt.
Of course they know this at Science magazine. It’s just that it would be impolitic to state it. The heirarchy of big science in the United States no more wants to acknowledge its faults than anyone else.