Journals: USA, others need to re-tool their science programs

The system of awarding science Ph.D.s needs to be either reformed or shut down, a provocative series of pieces in one of the world's pre-eminent scientific journals says this week.

According to the multipart series in the journal Nature, the world is awash in Ph.D.s, most of them being awarded after years of study and tens of thousands of dollars to scholars who will never find work in academia, the traditional goal for Doctors of Philosophy.

"In some countries, including the United States and Japan, people who have trained at great length and expense to be researchers confront a dwindling number of academic jobs and an industrial sector unable to take up the slack," the cover article says.

Of people who received Ph.D.s in the biological sciences five to six years ago, only 13% have tenure-track positions leading to a professorship, says Paula Stephan, who studies the economics of science at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

All together, 10% are working part time or out of the labor force entirely, 33% are in academic positions that don't lead to a professorship positions, 22% are in industry and 20% are at community colleges or working in government or non-profit jobs, she says.

That 33% of Ph.D.s in non tenure-track positions is especially troubling, she says. It used to be that "post-docs," post doctoral research positions in a professor's lab, were a steppingstone to one's own lab and professorship. But now one-third of Ph.D.s are permanently stuck "basically working as research assistants." They have no job security and salaries start at $39,000 a year. "That's appalling: You could get that with a bachelor of science degree," Stephan says.

It's not necessarily the education that needs to change, but how the endpoint is presented, says Maresi Nerad, director of the Center for Innovation and Research in Graduate Education at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Even the way anything but being a professor is termed is a problem, she says. People refer to "alternative careers," which just screams "It's not the real thing, the real thing is becoming a professor,' " she says. The presumption is that if they don't become a professor, "something isn't right with them." But that track hasn't really existed for the majority for a long time.

In fact, her studies have found that about half of the science Ph.D.s end up working outside of academia in industry, government or at not-for-profits, and they're very happy and actually make more money and have more autonomy.

The glut tracks back to predictions in the 1980s that an impending wave of professor retirements and rising college enrollment would require a hoard of new Ph.D.s. This didn't prove to be true, but Ph.D.-track students flooded universities and then couldn't find jobs.

One reason the overproduction of Ph.D.s hasn't been dealt with is the economic incentives built into Ph.D. programs in science. Universities rely on graduate students and post-docs, Stephan says. "There are tremendous incentives for academic departments to grow their Ph.D. programs because it's a cheap, temporary workforce."

The future for Ph.D.s isn't all grim — if you happen to live in China or India. There the economies are growing fast enough to use "all the Ph.D.s they can crank out, and more," the lead article says. However, Nature notes, many graduates of all but the top-tier universities in those countries are of low quality.

One country that's done a good job of re-tooling its science programs is Germany, which began redesigning doctoral education in the 1990s. There, Ph.D. training is "marketed as an advanced training not only for academia — a career path pursued by the best of the best — but also for the wider workforce," in Nature's words.

The answer, several prominent scientists writing in the journal say, is not to give up on science education but to broaden it.

"We need to consider producing fewer Ph.D.s or we need to be very straightforward with Ph.D. candidates and really educate them to what their job prospects are," Stephan says.

Or as Mark Taylor, author of Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities, says, Ph.D. education "creates only a cruel fantasy of future employment that promotes the self-interest of faculty members at the expense of students."