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Forget having their careers destroyed. The fact is that most people who graduate with a PhD will not have an academic career on the tenure track, and it's real

Forget having their careers destroyed. The fact is that most people who graduate with a PhD will not have an academic career on the tenure track, and it's really easy to see why once you pay attention to what's going on. The thing is that academia is not a growing field anymore. So, if a professor graduates more than one student, they're feeding a glut of candidates who will be competing for one job at some point. For instance, in the field of engineering as a whole, 7.8 students graduate with PhDs per professor over the length of an average academic career [0]. In environmental engineering, that number is a whopping 19.0! (Also from [0]). As a graduate student, once you realize the field isn't growing, you can actually see the phenomenon at work. Just look around in all your classes. That same handful of people you see in most of your courses, especially those leading into your intended specialty, those people are probably your competition. Now multiply that by every university in the country that teaches in your specialty. You very quickly come to the conclusion that you'll probably have to wait for someone to either retire or die before you get an academic position, and that's actually 100% the truth. --- [0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4309283/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4309283/

ModernMech 5y ago
It's true that it's hard to get an academic job, but it's not true in all industries. In CS for example we've been hiring constantly for years and our searches are often not successful. Moreover not everyone who graduates with a Ph.D. wants on the tenure track, and universities are increasingly creating non tenure roles to meet this demand. I'm not on tenure track and I don't think I'm missing much compared to my TT counterparts. I don't even want tenure, it's not at all what it's cracked up to be. Your citation also leaves a lot to be desired. From your link: > Nowadays, less than 17% of new PhDs in science, engineering and health-related fields find tenure-track positions within 3 years after graduation Two of the things we ask during hiring are: - "How is your research agenda different from your advisor's." - "What funding agency will you target for your first grant proposal and what research will that be based on?" Most newly minted PhDs cannot answer those questions satisfactorily. It sometimes can take 2-3 years doing a postdoc to be able to find a suitable research agenda that is sufficiently differentiated from your advisor's. Moreover: > We recognize that in using a simple model, several parameters that are not part of our analysis may pose limitations (Ghaffarzadegan et al., 2011). One consideration is that many engineering doctorates are not interested in academic positions and may not even compete for tenure-track positions in academia. Another consideration is that some engineering graduates are foreign citizens who take academic positions outside of the USA.3 Another factor is inter-field hiring. Engineering doctorates might obtain positions in other fields such as science or business, which would also diminish the gap. Okay, so they discount people who don't want to work in academia, and also foreign students who won't work in America. I'm sorry but what? Foreign students who won't be working in America after they graduate are most of our students. Probably 70% of our grad students right now (and the situation can't be much different at MIT). It's pretty hard to take this paper seriously when they just handwave all that away and say "but in the steady state..." And then the grand conclusion of the article is to throw up their hands and say (paraphrasing) "there's probably nothing we can do about this so we just have to be more forthright with students about their prospects." Okay then... I'm not saying it's not hard to get an academic job, but at the same time the measure shouldn't be academic tenure track jobs. There are lots of non-TT positions across the country at top research universities, SLACs, and community colleges.

ModernMech 5y ago

It's true that it's hard to get an academic job, but it's not true in all industries. In CS for example we've been hiring constantly for years and our searches are often not successful. Moreover not everyone who graduates with a Ph.D. wants on the tenure track, and universities are increasingly creating non tenure roles to meet this demand. I'm not on tenure track and I don't think I'm missing much compared to my TT counterparts. I don't even want tenure, it's not at all what it's cracked up to be. Your citation also leaves a lot to be desired. From your link: > Nowadays, less than 17% of new PhDs in science, engineering and health-related fields find tenure-track positions within 3 years after graduation Two of the things we ask during hiring are: - "How is your research agenda different from your advisor's." - "What funding agency will you target for your first grant proposal and what research will that be based on?" Most newly minted PhDs cannot answer those questions satisfactorily. It sometimes can take 2-3 years doing a postdoc to be able to find a suitable research agenda that is sufficiently differentiated from your advisor's. Moreover: > We recognize that in using a simple model, several parameters that are not part of our analysis may pose limitations (Ghaffarzadegan et al., 2011). One consideration is that many engineering doctorates are not interested in academic positions and may not even compete for tenure-track positions in academia. Another consideration is that some engineering graduates are foreign citizens who take academic positions outside of the USA.3 Another factor is inter-field hiring. Engineering doctorates might obtain positions in other fields such as science or business, which would also diminish the gap. Okay, so they discount people who don't want to work in academia, and also foreign students who won't work in America. I'm sorry but what? Foreign students who won't be working in America after they graduate are most of our students. Probably 70% of our grad students right now (and the situation can't be much different at MIT). It's pretty hard to take this paper seriously when they just handwave all that away and say "but in the steady state..." And then the grand conclusion of the article is to throw up their hands and say (paraphrasing) "there's probably nothing we can do about this so we just have to be more forthright with students about their prospects." Okay then... I'm not saying it's not hard to get an academic job, but at the same time the measure shouldn't be academic tenure track jobs. There are lots of non-TT positions across the country at top research universities, SLACs, and community colleges.