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Professor Katz's piece is highly flawed. From the article: "What can be done? The first thing for any young person (which means anyone who does not have a perma

Professor Katz's piece is highly flawed. From the article: "What can be done? The first thing for any young person (which means anyone who does not have a permanent job in science) to do is to pursue another career. This will spare you the misery of disappointed expectations. Young Americans have generally woken up to the bad prospects and absence of a reasonable middle class career path in science and are deserting it. If you haven't yet, then join them. Leave graduate school to people from India and China, for whom the prospects at home are even worse. I have known more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a Ph.D. in physics than by drugs." Two issues: I'm not up-to-date about opportunities in India, but I can certainly say that the remark about prospects in China are outdated for Chinese citizens. Secondly, the remark, "I have known more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a Ph.D. in physics than by drugs," is more indicative of the professor living in a bubble, instead of a serious assertion that a physics PhD is worse than a drug addiction. With a PhD in physics, one could work for an investment bank; the government (e.g. NIST in the United States); the space industry; the private sector (e.g. optics, quantum computing); national security; and many other fields. Katz's article reads as out-of-touch and unimaginative [edit: though thanks for sharing for the discussion]. The false premise is that the only opportunity you can get with a physics PhD is the opportunity to pursue a tenured professorship, which takes many years at low pay, and if you don't get a professorship, the only backup plan is computer programming.

valarauko 5y ago
As an Indian working as a biology postdoc, I can't speak to the experiences for people in physics, but at least in biology at this level Americans don't seem very interested. At my midsize institute that's got a reasonable reputation, I would be hard pressed to name a single American postdoc. Almost all the PhD students are American, and almost none of the postdocs. Chinese & Indians alone account for probably 60-70% of the postdocs, and they are the ones who stick around the longest (probably due to the extremely high bar both these nationalities face in terms of getting work visas). Speaking to the American PhDs the most common refrain I hear is an unwillingness to accept a postdoc salary for a couple of years (currently around ~ $55K) - when industry jobs are relatively easy to get for American nationals, and come with double the salary.
b215826 5y ago
> I'm not up-to-date about opportunities in India, but I can certainly say that the remark about prospects in China are outdated for Chinese citizens. After spending around 5 years in a mid-ranked American university, I have to admit that the quality of physics PhDs from top Indian institutions (IISc, TIFR, etc.) is at least an order of magnitude better -- they publish more papers in better journals, meet with their advisers more often, etc. (Of course, the best American universities still produce some of the best work in the world, but again, they are only responsible for a small fraction of the total PhDs.) Indian academia isn't centered around obtaining research grants, so most theoretical physicists are still free to pursue hard problems that interest them. This also means that Indians who return to their country with a PhD from a mid-ranked American university with a thesis in a low-effort area will find it hard to get a job. And the Indian tech sector isn't particularly keen on hiring PhDs (who would anyway be overqualified for most jobs in the Indian tech industry). So yeah, Prof. Katz's analysis is still spot on for Indians doing a PhD in theoretical physics. > With a PhD in physics, one could work for an investment bank; the government (e.g. NIST in the United States); the space industry; the private sector (e.g. optics, quantum computing); national security; and many other fields. Sure, but most students enter graduate school with the hopes of becoming a professor at a university, not work as as investment banker. Jobs at NIST and in the space industry (and most federal labs) are often limited to US citizens because of security clearance issues. Also, these jobs are extremely limited in number (compared to say, data science jobs). > The false premise is that the only opportunity you can get with a physics PhD is the opportunity to pursue a tenured professorship, which takes many years at low pay, and if you don't get a professorship, the only backup plan is computer programming. Most physics PhDs I know who left academia are now working as data scientists. "Data science" wasn't a thing in 1999 when Prof. Katz wrote this essay, but at the same time it is not so different from a physicist becoming a computer programmer in the 1990s.

valarauko 5y ago

As an Indian working as a biology postdoc, I can't speak to the experiences for people in physics, but at least in biology at this level Americans don't seem very interested. At my midsize institute that's got a reasonable reputation, I would be hard pressed to name a single American postdoc. Almost all the PhD students are American, and almost none of the postdocs. Chinese & Indians alone account for probably 60-70% of the postdocs, and they are the ones who stick around the longest (probably due to the extremely high bar both these nationalities face in terms of getting work visas). Speaking to the American PhDs the most common refrain I hear is an unwillingness to accept a postdoc salary for a couple of years (currently around ~ $55K) - when industry jobs are relatively easy to get for American nationals, and come with double the salary.

b215826 5y ago

> I'm not up-to-date about opportunities in India, but I can certainly say that the remark about prospects in China are outdated for Chinese citizens. After spending around 5 years in a mid-ranked American university, I have to admit that the quality of physics PhDs from top Indian institutions (IISc, TIFR, etc.) is at least an order of magnitude better -- they publish more papers in better journals, meet with their advisers more often, etc. (Of course, the best American universities still produce some of the best work in the world, but again, they are only responsible for a small fraction of the total PhDs.) Indian academia isn't centered around obtaining research grants, so most theoretical physicists are still free to pursue hard problems that interest them. This also means that Indians who return to their country with a PhD from a mid-ranked American university with a thesis in a low-effort area will find it hard to get a job. And the Indian tech sector isn't particularly keen on hiring PhDs (who would anyway be overqualified for most jobs in the Indian tech industry). So yeah, Prof. Katz's analysis is still spot on for Indians doing a PhD in theoretical physics. > With a PhD in physics, one could work for an investment bank; the government (e.g. NIST in the United States); the space industry; the private sector (e.g. optics, quantum computing); national security; and many other fields. Sure, but most students enter graduate school with the hopes of becoming a professor at a university, not work as as investment banker. Jobs at NIST and in the space industry (and most federal labs) are often limited to US citizens because of security clearance issues. Also, these jobs are extremely limited in number (compared to say, data science jobs). > The false premise is that the only opportunity you can get with a physics PhD is the opportunity to pursue a tenured professorship, which takes many years at low pay, and if you don't get a professorship, the only backup plan is computer programming. Most physics PhDs I know who left academia are now working as data scientists. "Data science" wasn't a thing in 1999 when Prof. Katz wrote this essay, but at the same time it is not so different from a physicist becoming a computer programmer in the 1990s.