SciAm asks "Does the U.S. Produce Too Many Scientists?"

Does the U.S. Produce Too Many Scientists?

American science education lags behind that of many other nations, right? So why does it produce so many talented young researchers who cannot find a job in their chosen field of study?

Headline of a lengthy online article at Scientific American.

I've reproduced my comment (slightly edited to fix some minor grammatical errors) below:

A poor title for the article. A better one would be "Are there enough scientific careers for scientists in the US?"

Within astrophysics there certainly is a massive demographic imbalance between the number of talented and committed PhD students continuing in academia as postdocs and soft-money researchers, and the number of tenured and tenure-equivalent jobs. Everyone knows this, at least when they're doing the PhD. They just make the mistake of thinking that if they're talented and love research that they'll get the job they're qualified for.

The problem is not that there is a career pyramid with significant losses of personal at each level compared to the old days of a few postdoc positions that fed directly into a similar number of tenured positions.

The problems are that (a) progression or success is more lottery than meritocracy (for a number of annoying reasons, but shear numbers of job candidates is one), and (b) there is no real career track for those who aren't lucky enough to land a classic tenure-track job.

University administrations and tenured faculty have little inclination to change this: the postdocs do much of the research, and are expendable as they're easily replaceable (by similarly talented and eager applicants). Soft money scientists bring in large amounts of overhead to the Universities, and even if many leave when their patience or grants run out their ranks are always easily filled by former postdocs desperate to carry on doing what they love.

And that "dskan" commenter - what alternate Universe did they come from?

You can't trust grades, and can't trust letters of recommendation, so what can you trust?

There is an hidden disadvantage for students here. A-B-C-D-F grades have become nearly useless as entry gauges for many professions (the article emphasizes nursing and education). That means that employers have to lean more and more on other indicators. Letters of recommendation are more inflated than grades, so they don't help. That brings us to tangible things like internships, standardized test scores, and interviews.

Oh and intangibles. Like nepotism.

From John Hawk's paleoanthropology weblog, discussing grade inflation.

Personally this paragraph hits home for two reasons:

1. Having both written and read Astronomy job-related letters of recommendation I certainly think there is a huge variance in their accuracy and honesty, yet they seem to be given greater weight than objective publication records and citation counts. Possibly a majority are semi-accurate, but there is a sizable minority that are hyped out of all resemblance to reality (some I have read you might are laughable or must be jokes, except the joke is on the rest of us when those candidates get the nice jobs). The sad fact of the matter is that given that the number of higher level astro jobs available is always smaller than the number of qualified applicants such inflated letters of recommendation do often appear to work... at least in the cases where I have read seemingly hyped letters of recommendation for a candidate, and later investigate their papers and follow their career progression.
   
2. Having just had to look into what my high school grades were for the first time in almost twenty years I was very annoyed to also find that GCSE's and A-levels (this was the UK) have suffered monotonic grade inflation for approximately the last 30 years. What were pretty damn good grades for the time now seem average. And its not just that schools are better at teaching to slowly varying exams (or that students are smarter - hah!)... they're now giving out C grades in GCSE science if get only 18% of the questions right and A* grades if you get 51%.
   

[GPA grade inflation graph from Harold Marcuse (UC Santa Barbara)]

Soft money

I'm looking forward to seeing what the NAS Astro2010 Decadal Survey's "state of the profession" has to say regarding soft money and career tracks in Astronomy, but I see via DrugMonkey that the Director of the NIH (yes, that Francis Collins) is muttering about soft money, Universities and career tracks in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription only).

Papers: Quality Versus Quantity

Amusing SMBC comic. Because we all suspect our competitors think this way...

How (not) to reform the University system

"End the University as we know it" implores Mark Taylor in a NYT Op-Ed, wherein he, chair of the Religion Department at Columbia, suggests that Universities should abolish traditional departments and only consider multi-disciplinary short-term projects (he generously suggests renewals based on evaluation every seven years) that have "practical" use.

If you've just choked on your coffee at a call by a religious studies scholar for Universities to focus only on practical problems you're not alone. For a moment I thought this was an April Fools day joke, but sadly it is not. Note that Taylor is not advocating getting rid of himself, for

These vexing practical problems cannot be adequately addressed without also considering important philosophical, religious and ethical issues. After all, beliefs shape practices as much as practices shape beliefs.

Seeing as we're only allowed to consider "practical" research I look forward to seeing religious studies' aid in producing improved anti-HIV drugs, a cure for cancer, improved climate models and practical nuclear fusion.

Now there are one or two truths within the Op-Ed. There are problems with the way graduate students are used, and whether their apprenticeships adequately or fairly serve their long-term career interests (at least, in astrophysics we seem to think there are such problems, see e.g. see Williams et al, arXiv:0904.2571 [ps, pdf, other], but see below). But its hard to imagine a set solutions, less practical, less realistic or more myopic than those Taylor proposes.

When Taylor resigns his tenure, convinces all of his colleagues to do the same, reorganizes (nay, completely dissolves) the organization structure of his department while still producing a number practical solutions to World problems by following his suggested pseudo-libertarian course of action, then we might consider evaluating whether we should implement some of his reforms or not.

Go read the editorial to see exactly what he is proposing.

[Updated: 3:40pm. Michael Bérubé points out this response by Marc Bousquet. Interestingly Bousquet argues that the "Universities produce more grad students than they can employ" is a myth, at least if you sent them all to teaching colleges. That may be true, but it is a somewhat disingenuous counter argument as not everyone wants a pure teaching position - many people enter academia because they want to do a fair bit of research. There is more to his rebuttal than just that, so go read it too.]