I am someone doing post-doctoral research, looking for an academic position and working in a university environment. I've seen students come in to the universit

I am someone doing post-doctoral research, looking for an academic position and working in a university environment. I've seen students come in to the university at undergraduate level, students come into the post-graduate program and leave with PhDs. I've also worked in high schools, helping educate kids about physics, and taken students from high schools into the university for 'work-experience' placements. It strikes me that Nature's second idea is what is actually happening right now; people are getting PhDs and leaving to do anything else (mostly banking and medical physics in my field). It's part of an overall trend: our undergraduate syllabus needs to cover a lot of the stuff I was taught in high school 15 years ago. Our post-graduates come into our research group with an expectation of spoon-feeding. Our PhD students have the kind of 'awakening' experiences that were maybe associated with a good undergraduate program back in the 60s and 70s. As more people come into education, the experience (but not necessarily the knowledge) is watered down and so a post-graduate degree is necessary to turn out the kind of well-rounded, hard-working, self-starting individual that might have been found exiting an undergraduate program 40 years ago. Thus a post-doctoral research position becomes essential if one wants to find an academic position - very, very few people get a permanent position without doing at least one post-doc. This may be a good trade-off for the greater numbers with a better education, but it seems that society's expectations are still to catch up.